When school was finally out, I escaped the building as quickly and quietly as possible and walked home. I used to run home, but then I realized running draws people’s attention more than walking. People who like to pull up alongside you in their diesel powered pickups and yell, “Run, Forest, run!” and gun it so that it blows a big cloud of black smoke at you and they tear away laughing. Or they cruise by in their daddy’s shiny black convertible and throw half an Arby’s roast beef sandwich with way too much Horsey Sauce on it at you and it gets all over in your hair. Not that that’s happened to me…recently.
Anyway, walking kept up my camouflage better. So I walked home despite how much I wanted to run, ditched my books, and hopped a bus into Ogden. My dad doesn’t get home until 6:00 or 7:00 each night, so to “keep me out of trouble” I talked him into getting me a membership at the climbing gym in town. I love rock climbing. Not that I’d ever climbed a real rock before. Just the fake climbing walls that are meant to mimic the real thing. I have to admit, I hadn’t been doing it for very long. Only about a year or so.
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| My son making his daddy proud at The Front. This is the climbing gym that served as inspiration for the one in my book. |
The first time I climbed one was at the Weber County Fair. The local climbing gym, The Ogden Climbing Center or OCC as we called it, had a portable wall they set up to promote their gym. It was ten bucks to climb it, but if you made it to the top and rang a bell, you could have your money back. My dad looked up at it and said, “That doesn’t look so hard.”
I looked at the bald, middle-aged guy with a goatee who was trying to climb it. He was grunting and sweating in the sun while his family cheered him on from below. He swatted for a hold, but as he caught it one foot popped off. He growled and then swore as his kids yelled for him to hang on. The muscles of his arms and shoulders bulged under his black “Harley-Davidson” tee shirt. He struggled to get his foot back onto a hold causing deep, hollow booms each time he kicked blindly at the wall.
“Looks pretty tough to me,” I said through a bite of a churro.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” my dad said without looking away from the wall. “He’s making it harder than it is. Look, why doesn’t he grab that hold on his left and put his foot on the great big hold by his right knee?”
The man’s wife or girlfriend or whatever she was must have heard my dad because she turned to him and sneered, “If you think it’s so easy, why don’t you try it, shorty?”
I felt a surge of anger at the comment about my dad’s height, but he didn’t even flinch. My dad was like some kind of tiny Zen master. Nothing could touch him. I’d never once seen him grow angry at people’s rude comments. He was always calm and in control. “You know, I’d really like to,” he smiled at her, “but unfortunately I’m out of commission.” He held up his right hand. It had a bandage wrapped around it from where he’d burned it a few days earlier while cooking a pot of spaghetti. It had caused quite an impressive series of blisters across the pads of all four of his fingers. Climbing was definitely out of the question for him unless he wanted to smear puss and blood all over the holds.
“Well isn’t that convenient?” she said.
There was another loud grunt followed by more swearing and we all looked back up just in time to see the man fall. The rope went taunt at the harness around his waist and he was lowered to the ground shaking his head.
“This is a total rip-off! That’s impossible,” he said as his feet hit the ground.
The guy running the wall started unbuckling him from the harness and said, “No it’s not. I’ve had at least half a dozen people make it to the top today.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Can I try it, Dad?” what must have been the bald man’s son asked. He looked to be around nine or ten and was almost as tall as me.
“What? No way! If I can’t do it, there’s no way you can. This whole thing’s a scam. No one can do it.”
The man working the wall frowned. “I’ll climb it for you right now if you want. If I don’t make it, I’ll give you your money back.”
“Sure you can,” the bald man said, “You probably know some trick or something. That’s how you scam people out of their money.”
“Sir, that’s simply not true. It’s quite possible for any halfway decent climber to make it to the top of this wall. We’re not scamming anyone.” His voice sounded strained and he talked through his teeth like he was trying to bite back what he really wanted to say.
“Alright,” the bald man’s wife/girlfriend said, “if this isn’t a scam, then have this kid do it.” She turned and pointed a long finger with a fake pink nail straight at me. I looked at my dad for some help, but he was still staring up at the wall as if studying his next move in a chess game.
“Uhh, I don’t think—“
The bald man said, “Yeah, I’ll tell you what, if this scrawny kid here makes it to the top, we’ll pay you another ten bucks. If he falls, you give us our money back and admit this is a scam.” He squinted at me. “What are you, like ten or eleven?”
For a moment, I considered lying and telling him that I was eleven. Then he wouldn’t think there was anything abnormal about me. I’ve been known to do that sometimes. Plus, it occasionally got me into movies for a discount. Unfortunately, my dad was standing right there, so lying wasn’t an option. “I’m fifteen,” I mumbled.
“What?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure if he really didn’t hear me or if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I said I’m fifteen.” Then I waited for what was sure to come: the up and down look, the laughter, and the ridicule.
Baldy didn’t disappoint. Sure enough, he gave me the look, burst out laughing, and said,
“Like father like son, huh? What are you guys a family of midgets or something?” He turned back to the man running the wall. “Well, do we have a deal?”
The guy working the wall looked me in the eye, then looked down at my shoes for some reason, shrugged, and said, “Deal. Come on young man.”
“What? I don’t know how to climb. Dad?”
Everyone turned and looked at my dad. At first, I wondered if he even heard what was going on, but after a long moment he turned from the wall and said, “Why not? You’ll do fine. If you make it to the top, I’ll buy you dinner.”
“If you make it to the top,” said the man working the wall, “I’ll buy you both dinner.”
“That’s right,” said the bald man with a dirty looking smile. “Give it a shot.”
“I don’t think so,” I said backing up.
“Don’t be silly,” my dad said in his usual calm Zen master voice, “get up there and give it a go.” He grabbed what was left of my churro out of my hand and gave me a gentle push forward.
“I don’t really want to, Dad.” That wasn’t entirely true. I would have enjoyed trying to climb the wall, just not with all the pressure and these people watching. As I mentioned before, I spend almost all my time trying to go unnoticed and here I was being pushed into being a spectacle in front of the whole fair. All kinds of warning lights, developed from years of being bullied and made fun of, started flashing in my mind.
“You’ll do fine,” my dad said.
I started to object again, but I saw something beneath the calm surface of my dad’s expression. He raised his eyebrows just a little. He was trying to communicate something through his eyes. There was a kind of cool intensity in them and I suddenly realized that the rude comments of baldy and his wife/girlfriend had not gone unfelt. He nodded toward the wall and it was as if he said right out loud, "Get up there and prove to these brutes that you can do this."
I'll post part five tomorrow.
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