A Stretch
A short long story.
I knew this kid in school named Billy. One of those gangly types, he was; too long for this world. The other kids would pull on his arms like a Stretch Armstrong doll. One time they pulled so hard his arms never went back to normal, left him looking like one of those gibbons you see at the zoo. Only this wasn’t a zoo, it was just a school, even if the kids behaved more like animals.
After the surgery, Billy started rock climbing. His extra long arms combined with the titanium brackets they had to weld onto him gave Billy some kind of super upper-body strength. He could reach halfway up the climbing wall with his feet still on the ground. Some of the other kids’ parents complained, but there’s nothing in the rulebook against having really long or really strong limbs or both. At least there wasn’t before Billy came on the scene. Maybe they’ve updated the rulebook since, I don’t know.
Billy started winning competitions. County level at first, but pretty soon he broke through on the national circuit. Turns out rock climbing is like an actual sport and not just something people do to like survive on mountains. There are umpires and special shoes and everything. It’s a bit like running, only up.
The kids stopped picking on him so much once they’d seen him climb. Watching Billy heave himself up a wall was like reading a great poem. One of those new type poems that don’t make you feel embarrassed about liking flowers and clouds.
Those same kids who used to yank on his arms and legs every lunchtime formed something like a Billy fan club. I was a member myself for a while there. We travelled all over the country following Billy around on his climbing meets. Spent three weeks cramped up in a van one summer, like seven or eight of us. Our folks were glad to be shot of us for a while, I think—Billy was a good kid from a good home, but the rest of us were trouble.
At a meet one time, this weaselly kid named Samuel or Gregory, something snotty like that, switches out Billy’s chalk for flour. Billy gets all the way to the top and suddenly loses his grip. Sweat mixed with flour makes something like a batter, or a dough maybe. Whatever it is it ain’t exactly conducive to climbing. Indoor rock climbing is all about grip. Outdoor too, probably.
So Billy’s up there maybe forty or fifty feet off the ground and his hand slips. Slides right over the hold. And he falls. Of course there’s safety ropes, all the protective gear you’d expect them to have at a high-level climbing competition, but that gear is designed for regular-armed kids, and our Billy ain’t exactly regular.
So Billy’s falling off the wall and the safety ropes take up the slack and catch him. But poor Billy’s arms are so long and they’re flailing out in front of him or more like below him and they just sort of crumple up before the ropes can do their thing. And now his forearms are snapped up real bad and they’ve pushed up through his elbows and escaped out the other side. It’s an ugly thing to see.
Us Billy fans are sitting there in the crowd, mouths wide open, not believing what we’re seeing. Billy’s dangling there in his harness screaming. One of the umpires throws up on himself. It’s carnage.
Billy gets out the hospital about a week later. Arms way shorter than even before the whole Stretch Armstrong experiment. Turns out the doctors have had to fuse the bones in his forearms to the bones in his upper arms. So now he looks something like a penguin. And about all he can do with his new five-fingered fins is flip you the bird, which he does often on account of the anger.
Once the wounds are healed he tries climbing again, but the results are probably pretty obvious. He has neither the reach nor the grip to compete at any level of indoor rock climbing. No matter how hard a person tries, there’s just no climbing a rock wall with two mangled flippers. Can’t be done. One of those fundamental limits of biology and gravity and other science type shit.
The fan club folds soon after. We’re thankful for that one amazing summer we had, I guess. We sell the van and split the money seven or eight ways but it turns out the van belongs to one of the other members’ dads and we end up having to give the money back.
We graduated the next summer. All of us except Billy, that is. He pretty much disappeared into himself after the whole climbing disaster. Erica Reynolds said he picked up a gig at the local zoo scraping out sea-lion dung. Said she’d seen him with a dung scraping utensil wedged between his chin and his flippers. Erica also told everyone she was pregnant in seventh grade, though. A group of girls found her stuffing rolled up toilet paper under her shirt about six months into the ruse and nobody talked to her for like two years after that.
Mrs. Masterson, the Catholic sex-ed teacher, caught Billy smoking a joint in the crawlspace behind the climbing wall towards the end of senior year. Our school had a zero tolerance policy when it came to drugs, so there was no way back for the guy. I felt bad for him. We all did. He got fucked up at a party one time and asked me and the other fan club members to stretch him out again. Really begged us. We tried to help our old buddy, but the best we could do was dislocate one of his shoulders. No dice. Billy had a ton of metal in his arms by that point and we figured it was that preventing his bones from stretching like they did before. I know now you can’t force yourself into any kind of shape other than what you were meant to be. You can’t grow on command.
There was a reunion a couple years back. Class of ’96. All the old fan club kids were there. It was beautiful. We drank beers and told stories about that summer in the van.
One of the guys told us he had three months to live. Colon cancer. Just a young guy as well. He had gone on to like a church school after graduation—wherever it is they train people to believe in God. The back of his vehicle was plastered in stickers and slogans, shit like “Christ hates commies” and “The Lord is my chariot, my Hummer is my horse”. Claimed he wasn’t scared to die because he knew Jesus would provide for his family after he was gone. I guess it’s not socialism if it’s the big man giving hand outs.
Billy never showed that night. Word got around to us he might be living in a dumpster behind the zoo. Someone said his mom had been eaten by a killer whale there and Billy had kind of dropped out big time after that. There was even talk of hard drugs, but I never did believe that because, not to be crude about it, but how exactly would he go about injecting himself? It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, just mechanically like.
Me and the rest of the fan club minus the kid who was dying borrowed a case of beer from the reunion party and headed down to the zoo. Not one of us could bear to think of Billy all strung out and washed up or vice-versa, so we made a plan to rescue him. I forget the exact details now but I think my job was to coax him out of the dumpster with a tin of tuna fish and a couple of the other guys were supposed to pin him down. Then I think we were planning to drop him off at the hospital or a detox facility or whatever; help him shape up.
There was no trace of him when we got to the zoo. A dumpster was chained up against a huge wall that I think backed on to the marine enclosure, bit no signs of life.
There were these weird bumps all the way up the wall though, we noticed. One kid swore they were makeshift holds, but I think he was seeing what he wanted to see. We drank another beer and toasted to Billy, wherever he was. Then we said our goodbyes. I haven’t heard from those guys since. I saw the religious kid’s obituary in the paper a couple months later, though. Jesus knows what happened to his family.
My kid had his tenth birthday last weekend. He asked us to take him and his little pals to the zoo. The kid likes dolphins and killer whales, all kinds of sea creatures. Says they remind him of dogs, but they’re better than dogs because they live in the sea.
So we pull up at the zoo and I open the van and out pours a school of like six or seven kids. And they’re all laughing and my wife tells me one of them is a pretty good junior pole vaulter and I say I hate to think what kind of abuse that kid has been getting at school.
My kid makes straight for the aquarium section and we all run along after him. We get there and a trainer is throwing mackerel to a pod of seals. I tell the trainer it’s my kid’s birthday and she asks if he wants to feed the seals. Of course my kid says yes. So he starts hurling these fish and the seals are honking and doing all kinds of tricks, except for this one seal who’s just sort of hunched over in the corner. I tell my kid to throw him a pity fish and this depressed-looking seal shuffles forward. It looks right at me and then sort of bows its head. It takes the fish and it shuffles back to the corner and I tell my kid it’s about time to move on.