Trust Fall

Tales from My Old School

I don’t like to control. I like to influence. That drives a lot of other old white dudes batty. They’re convinced that, without their command, the world is hurtling through space at a million miles an hour, bent on certain destruction.

To be precise, the world rotates at roughly 1,000 miles per hour, orbits the Sun at roughly 67,000 miles per hour, and orbits the Milky Way at 514,000 miles per hour. Taken together, the Earth flies through the universe, completely indifferent to old white dudes at over one million miles per hour, so technically, these men aren’t wrong, but they still don’t get to control shit. You have to trust the process.

That’s so hard for me. Trusting the process means trusting your place among your peers, and I don’t like to get that close to my peers.

“Leadership training” or “Leadership seminars” used to be a big thing. Kappa Alpha has a thing called the “National Leadership Institute” every two years, where young men meet at some Southern City to get really wasted and try to develop their leadership skills.

One element of these “leadership lessons” was a thing called a Trust Fall. The idea is that the other members of the class stand behind one member, who closes his eyes, crosses his hands over his chest, and falls backward, like an old tree, and you have to trust the others to catch you. I suppose the lesson is that your fraternity brothers aren’t assholes. I’m not sure why they were doing this at a KA function. Most of us, including me, were assholes.

The guy running it was clearly a reformed hippie. There’s been a lot of those in my life. I was born around the same time they were learning to smoke pot and hate the draft. He loved the college experience, so he became part of the student life administration at some school in Miami, Ohio, where he eventually rose to Dean of Students. Our Dean of Students was a man named Stuart Good who had the wisdom of Jacob. He replaced a guy named Jack Woodward, who did the same thing, but sometimes lied about training the squirrels who lived on campus. So did TW Lewis. As to who originally thought of the idea of training the squirrels, well, you’ll have to ask the squirrels.

So it got to be my turn. Why must I always have a turn? The old dude with a salt-and-pepper beard said, “Boyd! Do you trust your brothers?”

Well, now, that’s the crucial question, isn’t it? At this point in my life, I didn’t know it, but there were only about fourteen months left in my reign as the strongest person in Mississippi.

Going to Millsaps, my last two years in high school had been plagued by joint injuries. It turns out that steroids weaken soft tissues in joints, enlarge your heart, and fucks your liver beyond reason. It can give you really bad acne and make your pecker pointless. I didn’t get those two, so I figured I was on the good side. Still…

Coming to Millsaps, I met Harper Davis, the legendary Millsaps Football coach, in his office. Every boy at Millsaps did an impression of Harper Davis, and his number two, Tommy Ranager, including Tommy’s two boys. I try not to use the word “institution” to describe too many people, but these guys were jointly and individually an institution at the Small, Mississippi, Methodist, School for the liberal arts.

I told Coach Davis that I could hear the clock ticking on my career in strength sports. It was getting louder every day. I thought that maybe, if I didn’t play football, I could extend it a little bit. Football is pretty rough on the knees, and I’d already had two surgeries.

The last surgery I had, they switched me from St. Andrews to Jackson Academy, thinking I’d get along better with my superiors. Joke’s on them. My grandmother spent six months of every year in Atlanta with my aunt Jo. Rather than go up and down stairs to my bedroom, Momma had me sleep in Nanny’s room.

JO Manning did the surgery with a crazy new thing called an “arthroscope.” Jimmy Manning was one of the most influential physicians in Mississippi. His orthopedic clinic is now “Mississippi Sports Medicine.” JO was so progressive and successful that when Andre the Giant had his hip replaced, he came to Jackson, Mississippi, to have it done. In his office, JO had a plaque featuring two stainless-steel hip replacement joints. One was the normal, large-sized hip replacement joint. The second was the custom-made hip replacement joint he designed and had built specifically for Andre the Giant. He ordered three. One to go in, one to hold for when the giant needed the other hip replaced, and a third to hang on his wall. It looked like an adult hip replacement joint, and the “normal” joint looked like it belonged to a small child.

Confined to bed rest for a few days before I began physical therapy at Jackson’s first physical therapy clinic, two girls from Woodland Hills came to see me. I didn’t know them really that well, but one I knew because her dad was a very important architect, and he worked with my Daddy quite a lot. Daddy built a lot of shit, so he needed an architect. He also needed to maintain relationships with commercial architects because part of the “open office” concept means the contract furniture dealer (us) gets in on the ground floor of facility design. It was a very mid-century concept of space utilization, and they were two very mid-century guys.

I’ve never been able to tell if a girl likes me. I assume they don’t. That usually works out. I did think it was strange that these girls, whom I didn’t know that well, would come to see me with cookies. I did notice that one sat in the chair, and one sat on the side of the bed, and kept touching my arm. Oh yeah, she forgot to wear a brassiere. Don’t ask how I know. Teenage boys become experts in the foundation garments of teenage girls.

Oblivious to whether a girl might like me or not, I ignored it. Six months later, another girl from Woodland Hills said, “You have to be my boyfriend.” The last time someone said that to me, Katie died. Like Katie, this new girlfriend was mostly a telephone romance, even though she lived in town. Most weekends, I still spent doing things I oughtn’t with my friends while Betty Wright monitored her police scanner radio to make sure Charles and I didn’t get arrested, which we didn’t. I’m not entirely sure how we didn’t. There were close calls.

Like my Katie, this girl’s father decided he needed to see the next world. Sequestered in my girlfriend’s bedroom, on the evening of Thanksgiving Day, I heard a “BANG!” through the slightly open bedroom door. I knew what that meant. I could smell it.

In Coach Davis’s office, I said how much I admired him and how much I would work to support his program, but I just didn’t think I should play for him so I could lift weights competitively a little longer. Please don’t take it personally. Pondering the question, Coach Davis said, “Boyd, you aint gotta wear them damn bikini pants do ya?”

“No, sir, that’s bodybuilding. It’s very different.” I said.

“That’s good. A man ought not wear bikini pants.” There are a bunch of old dudes who can read that, hearing Coach Davis’s voice in their head.

One year, Coach Davis decided that the Majors should have girl managers because Alabama had them. One of the girls he picked was my baby sister, the one who was born with a tail. I don’t think he realized she’d spend the rest of her life as a surrogate mother and occasional nursemaid for these boys, now old men, some even older than me, if there is such a thing.

I always try to give my stories a structure, and I try to make that structure invisible to the reader. This story is built like Russian nesting dolls. Story, within story, within story. There’s a point, but I won’t beat you over the head with it.

Back at the National Leadership Institute, this salt-and-pepper bearded KA said, “Boyd! Do you trust your brothers?” Almost like an evangelical preacher.

I said, “You’ve been nice to me, so I’ll be honest with you. It doesn’t matter if I trust my brothers, because I trust my ability to survive a fall like that without injury if they decide not to catch me.”

The other boys laughed. Random dean from some random college somewhere decided I was an asshole. He was probably right. I told the truth, though, as big as I was, I could take a fall like that, no problem. Heck, back on campus, I had a reputation for falling out of trees. Trees are notoriously untrustworthy.

Children with communication problems have trouble forming relationships. Children who survive witnessing suicides have trouble forming relationships. Middle children have trouble forming relationships because nobody got time for them. Big, ugly boys, despite what those girls from Woodland Hills thought, have trouble forming relationships. For most of my life, I simply chose not to.

The people closest to me have been closest to me for quite a long time. One, Brent, was my master before he was my friend, or was he? It all happened about the same time. Working together, I realized “You’re a hard ass. I like people who can be a hard ass about art.” That’s true. Most art teachers try to coddle you and soothe your artistic quirks like a gentle mother. Brent said, “Fuck that! We have a deadline, goddamnit!” You’d be surprised how effective that can be. Explaining the work to you with tears in his eyes is all the codling and nursing an artist needs—Brent is somebody who understands the work itself and helps you understand it too. That’s huge. It changes lives. It changed mine.

For me, relationships are like a ship moored to a pier. We’re separate, but we’re joined by a heavy manilla line. Pulled close, rubber fenders, sometimes old tires, keep the pier’s roughness from gouging my hull. A plank goes between the pier and my vessel, and people can walk on it to and from.

In the past, when relationships failed, as they always did, I would cast off in the night and sail into open waters, as far away from the pier as I could get. I’d spend months at sea, sometimes more than a year, before trying to come ashore again.

One year, I found a small island, surrounded by rough breakers, with a quiet cove, and there I anchored for most of the Little Bird’s young life. I was alone, but I was safe.

What I’ve learned, which took me quite a long time to learn, is that I still often feel like I need to cast off. That’s just a condition of my heart. I don’t have to head for the open ocean, though. I can stay within the bay, maybe even within the harbor, or close outside, and return to the pier when I feel better, or when the pier feels better about me.

I can survive a backward fall. I’ve survived much, much worse. That wasn’t the point, though, was it? He wanted to teach me to trust my friends. As I always did, I resisted. I’m listening now, though.