Grand Slam

K. Jackson
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

Our cook/dishkeep at Fisher Street is a large, boxy woman with a bulbous nose on a bulldog’s face. Her long, straight steel wool-colored hair is often up and in a mess, and her voice is low and guttural. She has a lowrider truck embedded with subwoofers, and we have a thing now where I lunge at her and she lunges back like we’re both really tough and we’re about to fight. She loves that. Her name is Donna and I love her, but it reminds me of this time in college, first year, when there was this girl in my dorm named Alison who was soon to be a track star and participated in the decathlon for the university.

Alison was from Chicago, so when she said the word “decathlon” is sounded like “deKIAthlon.” Big deal, Alison, you’re foreign, we get it. She lived in my dorm, at the other end of my hall, and she talked a big tough talk. Besides her game of serious shoulders and triceps that popped out like they were in the Swiss Army, Alison looked like a pretty normal person I guess, which is why one day when she challenged my authority by saying, “K, what sports did you play in high school?” I had to ask, “What?!?”

We figured out that she and I had played some of the same sports, and because she was so good she was still playing, and because her lats were so big it looked like she was wearing angel wings, I felt a little small. It also could have had to do with the fact that I had decided not to do anything in college at all besides eat baked ziti and drink some pretty awful beers all day long. Whatever it was, I was feeling pretty terrible about myself, and knowing I had endured the beat down training of having a brother in my life, I said to Alison as we were standing in the lounge/hallway outside my room, “Come on, then!” It just wasn’t possible for her to be stronger than me; I’d beat all the guys in my 7th grade class in arm wrestling, and I knew I was really awesome. I didn’t pledge a sorority but I should have joined a frat, you see. Alison looked at me like a feeding bull, full of shit but unamused. “Oh, you think you can take me down,” she spat at me from 20 feet away. “Bring it,” I retorted back.

And then she brought it. I ducked low to lower my center of gravity but there she was, her arm on my neck, her shin in my stomach, and then I know at one point we looked like a neutron from far away, then, within 10 seconds, bang! My skull on the thin layer of carpet lining the concrete floor.

Oh no, I died and I can still hear! No, no. I lay there, defeated. It couldn’t be. I was always so strong, so strong. And Reese. He had failed me, too. My head was throbbing, I couldn’t understand what had happened. I had come to college to exercise my brains, not my abs, and what was I going to do now that she had killed them?

Alison interrupted my grievances with her extended hand. She picked me up off the floor, my head still feeling like someone had axed through a pomegranate. “Hey, I’m sorry,” she said, nasal and unapologetic. Or so I felt. She felt bad, went back to her room and I went downstairs to get some ice.

I think of Donna. She hardly has anything to do with ice at Fisher Street, but I think of her anyway. I feel pretty good about myself, having a friend like Donna on my side. In fact, I feel pretty good about having anybody I can call a friend on my side. Yes, Alison cracked my head on the floor like a cantaloupe, holding a dinner party for death, but it was Alison’s hand in turn extending to me through the light, and I took it.

I may have small brains inside this peanut head of mine, broken blonde hair thrown up and back, so that I end up looking like a bald person with ramen noodles sticking out of the sides of my head, but I can lunge at my friends. And my friends can lunge back.

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