Wherever I Wind Up (7 page)

The rest of the night is a blur, but I smile a lot and feel light, comforted by the knowledge that I have a perpetual Companion who loves me and wants to be with me, secrets and all.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE WOLF OF GREEN HILLS

P
eople around town like to poke fun at MBA and its blueblood heritage. Our nickname is Big Red but kids from other schools are more apt to call us Momma’s Boy Academy or the MBA Silver Spoons. I don’t get worked up about it; thankfully, I left my fighting days back at Wright Middle School. What’s a bigger issue for me is demerits. You get demerits if your shirttail is out or you are late for class or you miss an assignment. When a teacher spots an infraction, he or she calls you on it and you are demerited on the spot. I rack up demerits the way Mariano Rivera racks up saves. I lead the school in them, getting fifty of them in one year alone, most of them because of my unruly shirttail.

Every demerit earns you a half hour in Saturday school. My weekends get pretty tied up.

Discipline is not my greatest strength as a student, either, especially in English. I don’t like to be bothered with punctuation or spelling or to get hung up on subjects and predicates, which explains why I routinely get papers handed back to me that are halfway to Hades with red. I care about stories. I love telling stories, but the fine points of grammar bore me. I am the king of sentence fragments. Dangling participles. Run-on sentences. Sentences that slither snakelike and are overly ambitious and try to do too much and are sometimes excruciatingly overwritten and almost always leave the reader gasping for air, waiting breathlessly for the verbosity to end and the period to arrive.

Miss Brewer is trying to rein me in. She is one of my English teachers, a petite woman with short brown hair, and one of the few instructors I have who thinks I have some ability with language and is willing to look beyond my grammatical train wrecks. She has a calm voice that is as flowing as the long skirts she likes to wear, and a gentle, nurturing way about her, always encouraging students to take on new challenges as writers. She asks me to stay after class one day.

R.A., there’s a region-wide poetry contest coming up and I’d love to see you enter it. I think you have a gift and it would be nice if you would share it.

Thanks, Miss Brewer, but I have written a total of about four poems in my life. I don’t want to embarrass myself.

Oh, trust me, you won’t. You have an original mind and an appreciation of language. Being creative is all about taking risks, anyway. Why not do it?

I grudgingly agree to write a couple of poems, and Miss Brewer submits them to the competition, which is called St. Cecilia Fine Arts Assembly. One of the poems is in traditional iambic pentameter and the other a haiku. I actually enjoy writing them, but I don’t tell her that.

A few weeks later, we gather in the auditorium and the results are announced. The master of ceremonies says: And the winner of the St. Cecilia Fine Arts Assembly poetry contest is . . . R. A. Dickey.

There must be some mistake. Was I the only one entered? I am flabbergasted as I walk up to the stage and shake the emcee’s hand and get a certificate, much more sheepish than proud. Miss Brewer, who is thrilled, tells me later I won the competition for the haiku. It reads this way:

Lifelike buttercups

Sway in graceful unison

With the midnight breeze

More than even writing or poetry, my greatest creative outlet at MBA is art. For years, I study under an inspiring teacher named Rosie Paschall, who is the wife of the headmaster, and whose singular gift is the way she can tug art out of her students—even students who are reluctant or scared or overly self-critical. She makes it safe and makes it stimulating, whether you’re composing pottery or working with oil on canvas. As a senior advanced-placement art student, I want to do something extra meaningful before I leave Rosie’s art room for the last time.

I have an idea for my last work, and I hope you’ll like it, I tell her.

I’m sure if you put your creative soul into it the way you always do, I am going to love it, she says.

I spend a month working on the piece, a charcoal on large canvas. It shows a young boy eating an ice cream cone as he leans against a barn door, the picture of innocence. Behind him is a large face, an adult face, looking menacing and intent on evil, with its vacant eyes and angry mouth.

Rosie loves it. I never talk about where the idea came from.

TOMMY OWEN
doesn’t go in for the nurturing that Rosie and Miss Brewer do, but what do you expect? He’s a football coach. Everybody in the school knows him as Coach Owen, even in the classroom, where he teaches history, his principal subject being World War II—something he knows because he lived it, serving as a navigator on a B-24 Liberator. Coach Owen teaches me about the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s propaganda machine and the Normandy invasion, and then after 3:00 p.m. we head out to the football field, where the lessons switch to post patterns and play-action passes. I am the quarterback, and he has a lot to teach me. Coach Owen isanoriginal tough guy. His body is as taut as a cable, his voice deep and raspy, straight out of central casting for drill sergeants, though he doesn’t use it much when he’s really angry; he much prefers to just bore a hole through you with his stare.

Of all the things Coach Owen loathes on the football field, lack of discipline and mental mistakes top the list. I accomplish both in a single play against Hillwood High School, dropping back to pass at their twenty-five-yard line one Friday night as Hillwood rushes everybody but Davy Crockett, the blitz coming from everywhere. I start to scramble, retreating and dodging and retreating some more, channeling my inner Favre. I am all the way back at midfield, trying to keep the play alive, when I hear Coach Owen hollering, “Throw it out of bounds!” I keep scrambling and he keeps hollering, but I finally see an opening and start going forward, running left. At the forty-yard line, I see a receiver, Mark Fuqua, in the clear near the end zone. I throw the ball against my body, all the way across the field, a semi-wobbly ball that isn’t pretty but gets there.

Mark grabs it and scores the game-winning touchdown, and we all start celebrating and jumping around. When I get to the sideline, Coach Owen grabs my face mask and snaps my head straight. His face is an inch or two away from the bars of my helmet. The glare is on.

When I tell you to throw the ball out of bounds, son, you throw the ball out of bounds, he says.

Coach Owen teaches me a ton about discipline, and helps me grow up by not going in for hand-holding. We beat a tough team from inner-city Nashville, Pearl-Cohn Comprehensive High School, one time, and we are walking back across the campus to our bus. I have my helmet off and I’m not far from Eric Crawford, our fullback, when all of a sudden we are pounced on, a gang of kids ambushing us. Eric gets slugged in the side of the face and falls hard. Just as I get ready to help him, I feel something smash into the back of my head. I go down to a knee and look behind me and see the assailants running away. On the ground next to me is their weapon of choice, a brown bottle that somehow did not break on impact with my skull.

The coaches hurry us up and we get on the bus without further incident. As we pull away, Coach Owen walks back to my seat and gives me the glare again.

That’s why you always keep your helmet on, he says, and then he turns and goes back to the front of the bus.

WHILE I’M LEARNING
to navigate my way (and keep my shirttail tucked in) at MBA, my mother is graduating from Miller Lite to vodka. Her drinking is getting worse, her denial starting to crack. I hear it in her voice when I talk to her, and I sense her guilt too. Once I walked out, it all began to pile up for her, like cars in a NASCAR wreck. She thinks she has failed as a mother, beating herself up for all the ways she has let my sister and me down, starting with the times she hauled us with her to Joe’s Village Inn and Amber III. My mom is in acute pain, and the time-honored way to medicate pain in her family is to drink.

I am so occupied with sports and my new life that, honestly, I do not pay much attention to my mother’s problems. I talk to her every week or two, and that’s enough. The more I immerse myself in MBA’s athletic culture, the more it appeals to me, because it insulates me from everything else: my mother’s increasing alcohol problem and my father’s increasing aloofness problem. I trust baseball and I trust football and basketball; I trust my ability to play them and I trust that the games and competition will follow a proscribed order, even if you don’t know who’s going to win. I do not have the same trust in my own mother and father. My relationship with my mother has become more and more distant. My father is becoming a man I don’t understand. I think he comes to my football games, but I’m not sure, because I never see him afterwards. I don’t get to ask him what he thinks about how I played, or what advice he has, or get to celebrate with him. I don’t even know where he is. While most of my friends meet with their parents and go out for dinner or dessert, I am a tagalong.

Sports, on the other hand, are much more reliable. They never check out. There’s always another game, another season.

Game days and game nights are the best times of my life.

The ball fields and gyms of Montgomery Bell Academy become my sanctuary.

On her way home from work one day, my mother asks God to lift her compulsion to drink. She happens to be going by a liquor store at the time and the car almost feels as if it’s turning itself, making a hard left turn into the store parking lot. My mother doesn’t understand. She says a prayer for her compulsion to lift and in the next instant it as if Satan is all but hijacking her and demanding that she go into the liquor store.

Isn’t it supposed to go the other way? Isn’t the idea to
stop
drinking?

She buys a fifth of vodka and heads for home. She gathers her stuff and walks up to the house, already thinking about how good it will be to be in her blue recliner with a Bloody Mary alongside her. As she fumbles in her purse for her keys, the bag with the vodka slips from her grip and smashes on the porch, twenty-five ounces of Smirnoff trickling into the bushes. She watches the rivulet of spirits and smells the alcohol and feels a deep sense of relief.

In His own time and His own way, God answers my mother’s prayer.

Broken and distraught, my mother cries out for help. She knows she can’t continue on the course she’s on and is finding the courage to get off it. She calls me.

Robert, I have to go away for a while, she says.

What do you mean?

I need to get help. I’ve got to work on me and make some changes in my life.

The help is coming from a rehabilitation facility called Cumberland Heights, on the Cumberland River, west of Nashville. The treatment program lasts for thirty days. My mother is fifteen days in and I keep coming up with excuses why I can’t go see her. My guilt finally gets the better of me and I show up one afternoon. I drive through a stone entry gate and see vast expanses of land and white split-rail fences. Wisps of fog hang over the surrounding hills. It looks as if my mother is getting her treatment at a horse farm.

I walk into the main building and I feel my anxiety build. I am afraid and resentful. I do not want to be there. I do not want to see my mother in a rehab. I want her to get the help she needs and get better, but I am apprehensive about the whole visit, a feeling that is only heightened when I sign in and get a whiff of that unmistakable antiseptic smell of a hospital. I wonder where my mom is, and whether she’s going to be escorted out by two guys in white jackets who won’t let her handle anything sharp.

I wait in a large room with clusters of tables and chairs and ashtrays every three feet, all of them spilling over with cigarette butts. After a few minutes, my mother walks out with an orderly. She is wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. She looks good. Her eyes are clear. We go for a walk around a pond, and she talks about how great the program is, how she is facing hard truths about her own family background and learning to accept her powerlessness over alcohol and to own her behavior. She is praying to receive God’s strength and mercy. I don’t fully grasp the concept of alcoholism being a disease or the challenges of recovery, but I see a difference in my mother already, after just a couple of weeks. I see someone who doesn’t seem so beaten down by life anymore, who wants to find a different way. I know what she’s doing is hard work, and as sad as it makes me that she has to be in there, I’m proud that she has the guts to do that work.

What will she be like when she gets out? Will she really change her life? Will she be someone I can fully trust again? I don’t know. I hug her and tell her I love her, hopeful that she seems to be getting better and proud of her courage to go right at her problem. As I drive out of the stone gate, my guard is a little bit lower than it was when I drove in.

LATE ONE FRIDAY NIGHT
in my junior year, after a Big Red victory, we go to our usual postgame hangout, Dalts Classic American Grill, for good food and high-quality milk shakes (I go for chocolate). When we finish, it’s almost eleven o’clock. We have practice in the morning. My dad’s house is twenty minutes away, across town.

I don’t feel like making the trip, knowing I have to be back at school first thing. Often I crash with friends who live right in Green Hills, kids like David Fitzgerald or Tiger Harris or Mike Anderson, my catcher in baseball, but I feel funny asking them if I can stay over again. I don’t want to wear out my welcome. I also don’t want to go home tonight. It’s a strong feeling. Home doesn’t feel like home. It’s where my father and Susan live, but it’s not a place I feel connected to. When I walk up the steps and open the door, I am not happy to be there. I don’t feel that I’ve reached a place of refuge and safety. I’ve just reached a place, four walls and a roof. I’m not saying it’s their fault. Maybe it’s mine. It just doesn’t feel that it’s where I belong.