February 3, 2012 scottcjones 0Comment

Do you know what it’s like to stand in the middle of a packed gymnasium on a frigid February night in Upstate New York wearing a wisp of spandex, a jockstrap that’s a size too small for you, and some protective headgear? To have everyone you know–your parents, the girl you secretly have a crush on, your homeroom teacher–call out your name in unison?

Because I do.

This was no longer merely about me wrestling against some other guy. If I won, if I could find a way to beat my opponent, I would be making history. Because if I won, it would be the first time our school had defeated a Canastota team in 20 long years, and Garth Brooks would have no choice but to write a follow-up to his “Legend of Little Falls” hit single. A few months earlier, a rumor circulated through our locker room that the Canastota team ate handfuls of sand before their matches. Our team was stunned into silence by this rumor. “Those guys are f***ing insane,” someone whispered. “What does sand even do to a person?” another teammate asked. Which, I agreed, was a completely valid question. But if I won, if I could put my team over the top, the myth of the “onion pickers” as being a pack of unbeatable, sand-eating wrestling savants would be banished once and for all. I pictured myself staggering from the mat after my match, battered and bruised but victorious, saying either, “He was only a man, guys. He was only a man,” or, “All the sand in the world couldn’t have saved him tonight.”

None of that happened, of course. I lost the match. I let the team and the school down. No, I didn’t hyperventilate, or fill my singlet with poop. I did do something that, in some ways, was far worse: I went out there and just sort of flopped around until time ran out.

I was lethargic. My heart wasn’t in it. The gym around me was screaming for bloody murder, but I had no bloody murder to dole out that night. My opponent got on my back and I could not for the life of me figure out a way to get him off of me. It must have been the most boring wrestling match–one man riding around on the other man’s back like a turtle–that those poor people have ever seen.

In the final moments, someone in the bleachers did something that I’ve never forgotten. A man shouted, “WAKE UP, JONES.” Thirty years later, I’ll be running errands, or waiting in line at the bank, or sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, and that voice, out of nowhere, will still call out to me. “WAKE UP,” it says.

I’m fairly certain that I could have beaten that guy that night. You know what? He wasn’t so great. He really was, after all, just a man. He was like me: filled with terror and weakness. His palm was sweating when I shook his hand before the match. The truth is this: my performance that night was a kind of resignation letter to the wrestling team. Here’s what my performance said: “Dear Wrestling Team, I am tired of being your token forfeit collector. I am tired of sitting around strange high schools all day during wrestling tournaments, waiting for the rest of my far more talented teammates to lose so that I can finally go home. And I’m tired of being a hero. I thought I might enjoy it. And it was fun for a little while. I really thought that I could handle it. But when you pull me out of the bleachers on what is supposed to be a night off for me and tell me that I have to change out of my street clothes because it is time for me to make history? And you do this, not on short notice, but on no notice? I don’t operate that way. So, I’m moving on. As my parting gift, please accept this lethargic performance. Yours truly, Scott.”

In the end, this was the “hero’s” journey of my wrestling career: a fall (the hyperventilating era), followed by another even greater fall, followed by embarrassment and abject shame, followed by a small rise (Little Falls), followed by more embarrassment, shame, disappointment, and a final fall that was so precipitous that, in some very small ways, I might still be recovering from it.

No, I never got a stranded cat down from a tree or saved anyone from a burning building. But I once did something that the people in my community considered to be heroic. I was a bona fide local hero once, if only for a few short days.

Level 4-2. OK, people, here are the broad strokes: we’ve got three conveyer belts, each with a pellet-spitting plant located at the very end, stacked three high to the level’s ceiling. I step onto the first conveyer belt at the very bottom of the screen. I need to move left, towards the pellet-spitter, but the conveyer belt has other ideas and tries to push me right. Progress along the belt is slow. When a pellet heads my way–they move in slow motion, spinning end over end, so they’re easy to see coming–I jump at the right moment and clear it. These pellet-jump moments happen three, maybe four times along this first belt.

There are some low-hanging Donkey Kong Junior-style vines directly above me, but I don’t notice them until I jump over a pellet and inadvertently cling to a vine. Ha, ha! Look at me up here! Using the vines! Whee! I use the vines to climb up to the second conveyer belt. This belt also works against me, pushing me to the left when I need to travel right. I have a few more pellet-jump moments, followed by plenty of what feels like running in place, Mario’s fat little legs churning as fast as they possibly can. I’m running, running, running, etc. At the end of the conveyer belt, I notice that there are vines here as well, and I use them to reach the third and final conveyer belt in this three-tiered conveyer belt tower.

The key is on a raised platform up here. Jumping up to the platform puts me in the path of the pellet-spitter on the left side of the screen. Keeping an eye on the pellet-spitter, I grab the key, then jump back down to the conveyer belt.

As I make my way towards the exit door on the far left, key in hand, little legs churning again, I must pass directly beneath one of those monolithic stones that I’ve seen in previous levels. At the last minute, the stone suddenly falls to the conveyer belt with a tremendous thud: PTOOM. This was a trap, of course, designed to crush me and the key. However, the trap did not work. Why? Two reasons: 1. because of luck (if I’d only been a few more inches to the right, it would have been lights-out), and 2. partly because, after 34 levels of the game, I’m developing some good Donkey Kong instincts. It was almost as if I felt that trap before it triggered, and that feeling is what kept me out of harm’s way.

I jump onto the stone, then over it. I put the key into the locked door, and level 4-2, one of the game’s more unremarkable levels, is finished.

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