Lou Mathews
Pinball
In the south rim of the Grand Canyon, where the national park boundary ends and Hualapai territory begins, there is an unmarked road. The road ends at a dry riverbed, and there signs warn this is tribal land and trespassers may be shot. Beyond this, if you are brave enough to venture, lies some of the most hostile terrain in Arizona. Huge rows of what look like glacial boulders are spaced by half-mile sand washes, with no vegetation, no green, then more stone piles.
After that the obstacles become more serious and more obviously manufactured. A row of channeled berms funnels any hiker toward fencing that was once electrified, and then toward guard towers that are no longer manned.
Beyond this, the Grander Canyon commences. The one no one wants to talk about.
I only had two fights in high school. The first was with a friend, John Schroyer. We were just messing around and then John got serious and tried to take me down. He outweighed me by fifty pounds, but I come from a family of five boys and wrestling was life. I kicked John’s ankle and turned him. His weight toppled him, and an arm bar and knee followed. John tapped and got up, wary, watching my hands. The word went out.
The only other was Vic Caruso, junior year.
Caruso was what you would call an arrogant prick, the kind that thrives in high school. He was tall, and in high school height is often mistaken for character or intelligence. Good-looking in a Goombah way. He checked all the available boxes. His family was rich, from pharmacies and investment real estate throughout Eagle Rock and Highland Park. He drove a customized ’57 Chevy and his younger sister, Gloria, was a beauty, legendary by Catholic boys’ standards.
There were two rumors about Vic. He skipped school a lot during horse racing season and won big bucks at Santa Anita with inside tips provided by a connected uncle. There was no way to know if this was true. Caruso was the source. He did have money. He did skip school.
The second rumor was verifiable. He liked to wear his sister’s underwear. At least we assumed they were his sister’s. A pair of shiny panties, black, hung from a hook in his gym locker. Asked, he said he preferred the smooth feel of satin.
Caruso and I shared a drafting class. We weren’t future architects. Drafting was a time-filler for the bozos who weren’t going to college, provided by a school that couldn’t afford to provide anything useful, like a carpentry or welding class.
Our teacher, the wispy, barely mustachioed Mr. Ford, who was learning drafting about a week ahead of us, did not command the attention or affection of his troops. Whenever he turned his back, chaos erupted.
Caruso, a desk behind me on this day, was amusing himself by pelting me with rolled balls of the masking tape provided to hold down our drafting paper.
I finally told him to knock it off. Caruso started to swell. “Did you say knock it off, Mudhead?”
Mudhead was his version of my name, Madrid. Larry Madrid to Caruso was Hairy Mudhead.
He stood up holding his T-square like a club. The inevitability, the logic of what next, came into focus. Caruso, 6'3" (we did learn something from drafting class), 195–205 pounds vs. Madrid, 5'8" 145–50 pounds.
Caruso, with all the dramatic flair of a Three Stooges episode, perched the T-square on his shoulder. “Go ahead, Mudhead. Knock it off.”
I remember reaching. I remember his first move, the classic kick to the balls. The next thing I remembered was the aftermath, Caruso howling on the floor, clutching his broken nose, bright blood covering his face like a bandana. They told me that before they pulled me off I had my knee on his throat, pressing, watching, unblinking—everyone remembered the steadiness of that stare, as Caruso’s heels drummed the floor.
What I learned that day was that I was a rarity—a genuine Berserker. I learned the signs and portents over the years. Always it began with what I thought of as a wash of blood filming my eyes. Seeing red, the Vikings called it.
I got to explain all this to Father Hanlon, the principal at St. Patrick’s. Hanlon was an Irish gnome, hard and gnarled as a cudgel. He listened to me intently and meted out two weeks of detention, to be served in his office. For those two weeks I learned to make tea and copies, to unpack supplies and file under his watch. I have no idea what punishment he gave Caruso. He didn’t seem to have any interest in him.
Caruso never returned to St. Patrick’s. He transferred to Eagle Rock High. I thought I saw him one night, with his glamorous sister, at a Saint Dominic’s Catholic Youth mixer, but when I looked again, Gloria was there, surrounded by suitors, but Vic was not.
I hadn’t been in Highland Park for nearly twenty years. I was back for a funeral. We were burying Father Hanlon, the man who had recognized who and what I was and nudged me down my inclined path.
There are pinball games like that, where you think you can control the ball and know where it will go, but once you learn the game, you learn which particular bumpers will always bounce you to the preordained slot.
Father Hanlon’s bumper was a Marine Corps recruiter, Master Sergeant George Oberon, who made sure I was assigned a very particular Drill Instructor at Camp Pendleton, who bumped me on to special advanced training at Quantico.
My instructors at Quantico were the first to explain to me my talent. The basic weaponry and hand-fighting courses were bedrock. What happened, when it kicked in—and that happened more and more reliably—was not entirely measurable. They could only say that my reflex and reaction times were no longer measurable by human analytics. “Not off the charts,” one explained. “There are no charts.”
I no longer had to be provoked by anger. I might question my orders, but once I had accepted them, I would go into the mode. The only thing that remained unchanged was the narcosis, the blackout. When I came to, I would be surrounded by the strewn bodies of my classmates, sometimes an instructor. By the second month, there were no volunteers. In fact there was no longer a class. Just me and the opponents they were able to recruit. The Gunnies seemed to particularly enjoy humiliating Green Berets and Navy Seals.
It was good to be back in the ’hood. I cruised my old stomping grounds, the Avenues. Near York and Avenue 48 there was a cozy, freshly painted motel, backed onto a schoolyard where kids were playing.
The sign clinched it, a stately vertical green neon:
No
Reservations
Motel
The genial approach continued beyond the parking lot. Buddhist prayer wheels whirled on either side of a statue of Saint Joseph, the one saint, with his virgin wife and problem kid, that everyone agrees on. A Moroccan prayer rug was on the porch to the side of the front door, which had two mezuzahs on the frame, one curled brass, the other ivory with silver characters.
A bell tinkled as I opened the door. Standing behind the counter, as if he’d been waiting for me, was Vic Caruso. He was still tall, still handsome, but trimmer and his words came unbidden, calm. He smiled at me, then the smile went a little quizzical but stayed.
He pointed, “Did you used to go to Saint Patrick’s? Larry Madrid?”
Larry Madrid was not the name I went by now. My three-initial owners baptized me with a new name every assignment, but this was a special circumstance. “Yeah,” I said. “Did you go to school there?”
He smiled again and held out a hand, “Vic Caruso. I guess you don’t remember me.”
I had wanted to spare him, but the memories didn’t seem to bother him. “Did you have a sister named Gloria?”
He laughed. “Everyone remembers Gloria. She’s still beautiful. Has three kids. She was the first woman member of the Knights of Columbus, and now that our dad is retired, she’s in charge of all the family businesses.”
“Including this one?”
“Including this one. Four acres here. When the time is right, she’ll sell or build on it. You really don’t remember breaking my nose in Mr. Ford’s drafting class?”
I didn’t say anything. Vic nodded. “I saw you once after that, at a Saint Dominic’s mixer. Someone pointed you out to Gloria as the guy who beat up her big brother. She took one look and said, ‘That little guy?’ I was so embarrassed that I ran off.”
He closed his eyes, pressed his arched fingers on the counter and rocked slightly. It was an oddly meditative moment. His eyes opened. “I think that was the last time I was embarrassed. You may not understand this, but I believe you changed my life.”
He reached behind him for the key rack and lifted one from its hook, handed it to me. “No need to check in. This one’s on me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m just here for one night.”
“Espresso, cappuccino, and cannoli after four in the sun porch. Complimentary breakfast in the morning with homemade baklava. We have our own honey.”
Vic was still smiling but he suddenly looked very tired, a look I know well, the price of memory which is why I don’t have one.
“And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to feed some chickens. The kids like to watch and help.” He went out the back door, followed by a pair of elderly tabbies who had been sleeping on the brocade sofa behind him. The coop was next to the school fence where children were gathering.
I stowed my duffle. The room was unexpected: red oak floors, newly refinished, but with wide slats favored in the nineteenth century, and what seemed to be custom-made furniture. Everything was dovetailed, dowelled, or mortised and tenoned. I don’t think there was a screw in the place except what the tenants provided.
I toured the grounds. It was a lot larger than it looked from the front. The school yard was on the east, the Sparkletts factory to the west, but the property ran deeper than those two, all the way to where the hill started. There was a fish pond stocked with koi, a big fenced garden with both vegetables and flowers, which explained the fresh bouquet in my room, a woodshop gleaming with drill presses, joiners, and lathes that explained the furniture, and in one corner, close to the hill, behind a canvas screened fence, two stacks of bee hives.
I only saw Vic once after that, after coffee and cannoli, which were excellent. He was on a patch of grass behind the office washing a car. It was the same custom ’57 Chevy—a sleek Bel Air, black with gold trim and American Racing mags.
“I know that car,” I said.
He finished coiling the hose and wrung out a chamois. “Yep,” Vic said. “Besides Gloria, this is the other reason people remember me. My last remaining bauble.”
The funeral was a curious mix of Church and State, elderly priests and nuns and obvious military, though none wore uniforms.
Master Sergeant Oberon was there. He recited his usual greeting, “And how is the lone survivor?”
“Lonely,” I said. It was our ritual. “Time for a home-cooked meal?”
“On my way to the airport.” I was headed to somewhere near Libya, to further shrink my soul.
“Vaya con Dios,” Master Sergeant Oberon said, and I finished the recitation, “Any odd god around.”
The Hualapai name for the Grand Canyon, loosely translated, was Mountain Upside-Down. They had no name for the other canyon. It was only the place that could not be named, much like the ancient Germans who were so terrified by their ruling predator, the giant bears that preyed on them, that they had no name for bears.
I got to see the place because it was my finishing school. The reason was never explained to me. Maybe there wasn’t one. A generation earlier they might have pumped me full of lysergic acid, and watched.
I was told I was going to a strange place. It was deep, but nobody knew how deep. Electrical equipment stopped working below a certain point. The camera drones vanished. The cable on the bathysphere they sent down snapped just below the seven mile mark. They knew it was deeper than the Mariana Trench but that was all they knew.
There were five of us, including four of my instructors. I was tethered to them by a thousand pound test rope. We all wore face shields, but theirs went black at their stop point and mine stayed clear. They wore electrical collars, I did not.
There were four ringed posts, set in concrete, a quarter-mile from the rim. My instructors tied off there, routed my ropes through the rings and paid them out as I walked forward, fighting the wind. I was the modern Odysseus, chained to the mast so he could hear the Sirens but not die. Best case scenario.
As I approached the edge, the ropes tautened, marked off, as I knew by the measured split-shot we had clamped on the night before. 1,318 feet. I had to strain to make the last two feet. The wind was howling at me, and as I looked down for the first time, I started howling back.
At the bottom were what looked like clouds, moving, as though the place had its own atmosphere. Lights chased through the clouds. There was a bellowing roar that echoed up to me, a summons.
The pull was irresistible, a thousand times stronger than the ocean at night. I wanted to be down there. I tried to leap, and as I left the ground the four ropes tightened and began hauling me back, howling and snatching at the wind to pull myself forward, back to the edge.
The next day, after the sedatives had worn off, they asked me what I had seen. I wouldn’t or couldn’t tell them. It was my last act of disobedience.
I understood something had changed in me. The manufacturer may not fully understand what the manufacturing process may do or not do to the product and how that will affect the shelf-life of the product, particularly when the product is volatile and necessarily short-lived, but they are always grateful for success within the warranty period. There had been no Tilt. No End of Game. I now simply listened to orders and obeyed. No doubts. No questions.
On the plane, after the funeral, eight miles high, I thought about Vic Caruso. It is as they say, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. I was the abyss that Caruso stared into. The experience propelled us down different paths. Libya was not going to be a Kindergarten chicken coop. Different paths but we shared a bond. Neither of us had blinked.