The Hotel New Hampshire (20 page)

“She’s doing a good job,” Father said.

“But she’s
living
in her dayroom,” Mother said.

“What’s a dayroom?” Egg asked. It seemed everyone wanted to know that.

Franny and I listened to Ronda Ray’s room on the intercom for hours, but it would be weeks before
we
learned what a dayroom was. At midmornings we would switch on Ronda’s room and Franny would say, after listening to the breathing for a while, “Asleep.” Or sometimes: “Smoking a cigarette.”

Late at night, Franny and I would listen and I would say, “Perhaps she’s reading.”

“Are you kidding?” Franny would say.

Bored, we would listen to the other rooms, one at a time, or all together. Checking out Max Urick’s static, over which we could—occasionally—hear Max’s radio. Checking the stockpots in Mrs. Urick’s basement kitchen. We knew that 3F was Iowa Bob, and we would tune in the sound of his barbells every once in a while—often interrupting him with our own comments, like: “Come on, Grandpa, a little quicker! Let’s really snap those babies up—you’re slowing down.”

“You damn kids!” Bob would grunt; or at other times he would slap two iron weights together, right next to the speaker-receiver box, so that Franny and I would jump and hold our ringing ears. “Ha!” Coach Bob would cry. “Got you little buggers
that
time, didn’t I?”

“Lunatic in 3F,” Franny would broadcast on the intercom. “Lock your doors. Lunatic in 3F.”

“Ha!” Iowa Bob would grunt—over the bench presses, over the push-ups, the sit-ups, the one-arm curls. “This hotel is
for
lunatics!”

It was Iowa Bob who encouraged me to lift weights. What happened to Franny had somehow inspired me to make myself stronger. By Thanksgiving I was running six miles a day, although the cross-country course at Dairy was only two and a quarter miles. Bob put me on a heavy dose of bananas and milk and oranges. “And pasta, rice, fish, lots of greens, hot cereal, and ice cream,” the old coach told me. I lifted twice a day; and in addition to my six miles, I ran wind sprints every morning in Elliot Park.

At first, I just put on weight.

“Lay off the bananas,” Father said.

“And the ice cream,” said Mother.

“No, no,” said Iowa Bob. “Muscles take a little time.”

“Muscles?” Father said. “He’s fat.”

“You look like a cherub, dear,” Mother told me.

“You look like a teddy bear,” Franny told me.

“Just keep eating,” said Iowa Bob. “With all the lifting and running, you’re going to see a change in no time.”

“Before he
explodes
?” Franny said.

I was going on fifteen, as they say; between Halloween and Christmas I gained twenty pounds; I weighed 170, but I was still only five feet six inches tall.

“Man,” Junior Jones told me, “if we painted you black and white, and put circles around your eyes, you’d look like a
panda
.”

“One day soon,” said Iowa Bob, “you’re going to drop twenty pounds and you’ll be hard all over.”

Franny gave an exaggerated shiver and kicked me under the table. “Hard all over!” she cried.

“It’s gross,” Frank said. “All of it. The weight lifting, the bananas, the panting up and down the stairs.” In the mornings when it rained, I refused to run wind sprints in Elliot Park; I sprinted up and down the stairs of the Hotel New Hampshire, instead.

Max Urick said he was going to throw grenades down the stairwell. And on a very rainy morning, Ronda Ray stopped me on the second-floor landing; she was wearing one of her nightgowns and looking especially sleepy. “Let me tell you, it’s like listening to lovers go at it in the room next to mine,” she said. Her dayroom was nearest the stairwell. She liked to call me John-O. “I don’t mind the sound of the feet, John-O,” she told me. “It’s the breathing that gets me,” she said. “I don’t know if you’re dying or trying to come, but it curls my hair, let me tell you.”

“Don’t listen to any of them,” said Iowa Bob. “You’re the first member of this family who’s taken a proper interest in his body. You’ve got to
get
obsessed and
stay
obsessed,” Bob told me. “And we have to beef you up before we can strip you down.”

Thus it was, and so it is: I owe my body to Iowa Bob—an obsession that has never left me—and bananas.

It would be a while before those extra twenty pounds came off, but they would come off, and they have stayed off ever since. I weigh 150 pounds, all the time.

And I would be seventeen before I finally grew another two inches, and stopped for life. That’s me: five feet eight inches tall and 150 pounds. And hard all over.

In a little while I will be forty, but even now, when I work out, I remember the Christmas season of 1956. Now they have such fancy weight machines; there’s no more sliding the weights on the bar, and forgetting to tighten the screws and having the weights slide together and mash your fingers, or fall off the end of the bar on your toes. But no matter how modern the gymnasium, or the equipment, it only takes a little light lifting to bring back Iowa Bob’s room—good old 3F, and the worn oriental rug where his weights were, the rug Sorrow used to sleep on: after weight lifting on that rug, Bob and I would be covered with the dead dog’s hair. And after I’ve been pushing the weight for a while, and that long-lasting, luxurious ache starts creeping over me, I can bring to mind every scruffy person and every stain on the canvas that dotted the horsehair mats in the weight room of the Dairy School gym, where we would always be waiting for Junior Jones to finish
his
turn. Jones took all the weights in the room and put them on one barbell, and we would stand there with our empty bars, waiting and waiting. In his days with the Cleveland Browns, Junior Jones weighed 285 and could bench-press 550. He was not
that
strong when he was at the Dairy School, but he was already strong enough to suggest to me a proper goal for the bench press.

“What you weigh?” he’d ask me. “Do you even know?” And when I’d tell him what I weighed, he’d shake his head and say, “Okay, double it.” And when I’d doubled it—and had put 300 pounds or so on the barbell—he’d say, “Okay, down on the mat, on your back.” There were no benches for doing bench presses at the Dairy School, so I’d lie down on the mat on my back and Junior Jones would pick up the 300-pound barbell and place it gently across my throat—there was just enough room so that the bar depressed my Adam’s apple only slightly. I gripped the bar in both hands and I felt my elbows sink down into the mat. “Now lift it over your head,” said Junior Jones, and he’d walk out of the weight room, to get a drink of water, or go take his shower, and I’d lie there under the barbell—trapped. Nothing happened when I tried to lift 300 pounds. Other, bigger people would come into the weight room and see me lying there, under the 300 pounds, and they’d respectfully ask me, “Uh, you gonna be through with that, after a while?”

“Yeah, just resting,” I’d say, puffing up like a toad. And they’d go away and come back later.

Junior Jones would always come back later, too.

“How’s it going?” he’d ask. He’d take off twenty pounds, then fifty, then one hundred.

“Try that,” he’d keep saying; he kept going away, and coming back, until I could extricate myself from under the barbell.

And all 150 pounds of me has never bench-pressed 300 pounds, of course, although twice in my life I have done 215, and I believe that doubling my own weight is not impossible. I can get in a marvelous trance under all that weight.

Sometimes, when I’m really pumping, I can see the Black Arm of the Law moving through the trees, humming their tune, and sometimes I can recall the smell of the fifth floor of the dorm where Junior Jones lived—that hot, jungle nightclub in the sky—and when I run, about the third mile, or the fourth, or sometimes not until the sixth, my own lungs remember, vividly, the feeling of keeping up with Harold Swallow. And the sight of a slash of Franny’s hair, fallen across her open mouth—no sound coming from her—as Lenny Metz knelt on her arms and pinched her head between his heavy, running-back’s thighs. And Chester Pulaski on top of her: an automaton. I sometimes can duplicate his rhythm, exactly, when I am counting out the push-ups (“seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven”). Or the sit-ups (“one hundred and twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-two, one hundred and twenty-three”).

Iowa Bob simply introduced me to the equipment; Junior Jones added his advice, and his own marvelous example; Father had already taught me how to run—and Harold Swallow, how to run harder. The technique and routine—and even Coach Bob’s diet were easy. The hard part, for most people, is the discipline. As Coach Bob said, you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. But for me, this was also easy. Because I did it all for Franny. I’m not complaining, but it was all for Franny—and she knew it.

“Listen, kid,” she told me—from Halloween to Christmas, 1956—“you’re going to throw up if you don’t stop eating bananas. And if you don’t stop eating oranges, you’re going to have a vitamin overdose. What the hell are you pushing so hard for? You’ll never be as fast as Harold Swallow. You’ll never be as big as Junior Jones.

“Kid, I can read you like a book,” Franny told me. “No way is it going to happen
again
, you know. And if it does—and you actually
are
strong enough to save me—what makes you think you’ll even
be
there? If it happens again, I’ll be someplace far away from you—and I’ll hope you never know about it, anyway. I promise.”

But Franny took the purpose of my workouts too literally. I wanted strength, stamina, and speed—or I desired their illusions. I never wanted to feel, again, the helplessness of another Halloween.

There was still the evidence of a mangled pumpkin or two—one at the curb of Pine Street and Elliot Park, and another that had been thrown from the bleachers and burst upon the cinder track around the football field—when Dairy hosted Exeter for the last game of Iowa Bob’s winning season. Halloween was still in the air, although Chipper Dove, Lenny Metz, and Chester Pulaski were gone.

The second-string backfield appeared under the influence of a spell: they did everything in slow motion. They ran to the holes that Junior Jones had opened, after the holes had closed; they lobbed passes into the sky, and the passes took forever to come down. Waiting for one such pass, Harold Swallow was knocked unconscious and Iowa Bob wouldn’t let him play the rest of the long day.

“Somebody rang your bell, Harold,” Coach Bob told the speedster.

“I ain’t got no bell,” Harold Swallow complained. “Who rang?” he asked. “What somebody?”

At the half, Exeter led 24-0. Junior Jones, playing both offense and defense, had been involved in a dozen tackles; he caused three fumbles and recovered two; but the second-string Dairy backfield had coughed up the ball three times, and two looping passes had been intercepted. In the second half, Coach Bob started Junior Jones at a running-back position, and Jones made three consecutive first downs before the Exeter defense adjusted. The adjustment was simply recognizing that as long as Junior Jones was
in
the backfield, he would carry the ball. So Iowa Bob put Junior back in the line, where he had more fun, and Dairy’s only score, which came late in the fourth quarter, was properly credited to Jones. He broke into the Exeter backfield and took the ball away from an Exeter running back and ran into the Exeter end zone with it—and with two or three Exeter players clinging to him. The extra point was wide to the left and the final score was Exeter 45, Dairy 6.

Franny missed Junior’s touchdown: she had come to the game only because of him, and she had gone back to being a cheerleader for the Exeter game only to yell her lungs out for Junior Jones. But Franny got involved in an altercation with another cheerleader, and Mother had to take her home. The other cheerleader was Chipper Dove’s hiding place, Mindy Mitchell.

“Cock tease,” Mindy Mitchell called my sister.

“Dumb cunt,” Franny said, and whacked Mindy with her cheerleader’s megaphone. It was made of cardboard, and it looked like a large shit-brown ice cream cone with a death-gray
D
for Dairy painted on it. “
D
is for Death,” Franny always said.

“Smack in the boobs,” another cheerleader told me. “Franny hit Mindy Mitchell with the megaphone smack in the boobs.”

Of course I told Junior Jones, after the game, why Franny wasn’t there to walk with him back to the gym.

“What a good girl she is!” Junior said. “You tell her, won’t you?”

And of course I did. Franny had taken
another
bath and was all dressed up to help Ronda Ray wait on tables; she was in a pretty good mood. Despite the rather landslide conclusion to Iowa Bob’s winning season, nearly everyone seemed in a good mood. It was opening night at the Hotel New Hampshire!

Mrs. Urick had outdone herself at plainness-but-goodness; even Max was wearing a white shirt and tie, and Father was absolutely beaming behind the bar—the bottles winking in the mirror, under his fast-moving elbows and over his shoulders, were like a sunrise Father had always believed was coming.

There were eleven couples and seven singles for overnight guests, and a divorced man from Texas had come all the way to see his son play against Exeter; the kid had gone out of the game in the first quarter with a sprained ankle, but even the Texan was in a good mood. Compared to him, the couples and the singles seemed a little shy—not knowing each other, just having children at the Dairy School in common—but after the kids went back to their dorms, the Texan got everyone talking to each other in the restaurant and bar. “Isn’t it
great
having kids?” he asked. “God, it’s something how they all grow up, isn’t it?” Everyone agreed. The Texan said, “Why don’t you all pull your chairs over here to my table and have a drink on me!” And Mother stood anxiously in the kitchen doorway, with Mrs. Urick and Max, and Father stood poised but confident behind the bar; Frank ran out of the room; Franny held my hand and we held our breath; Iowa Bob looked as if he were suppressing an enormous sneeze. And one by one the couples and the singles got up from where they were sitting and attempted to pull their chairs over to the Texan’s table.