Most Improved Breaststroke

Among the most dangerous of creatures are the grizzly bear and the freshman roommate.

Graham and I were close for a good three semesters, right up until he put me in the hospital.

People say things like, “man, if you had just ended up with a different roommate, none of this would have happened.”

I’ve learned to quit whining and accept responsibility for my part in everything. There were signs. I’m like that guy in the documentary who lived with the grizzly bears and then one day they ate him.

•

We were paired by lottery our freshman year of college. Graham didn’t show up until three days after classes had started. I was close to a breakdown from sheer loneliness by then, watching the other guys act out the typical rituals of new dormmate bonding.

When he finally arrived, all he had was a duffle bag strapped over his shoulder and a huge cardboard box in his arms. It wouldn’t fit through the door.

“Private Graham Blankenbeckley,” he said, fingertips to his right temple. The room filled to the corners with his cologne. “Reporting for duty, Captain.” He was shorter than me, and a little pudgy but with muscle underneath. His hair was buzzed with a pointy widow’s peak. The line of his vision was aimed just past me in his best imitation of a cadet avoiding eye contact with his drill sergeant.

“Marty Hardwick,” I said. “At ease, soldier. Good to meet you.”

“Don’t get up, Cappy. I’ll just lug all this in myself.”

I jumped to help him, charmed already by his weird confidence and less than subtle sarcasm. Because of its size, we were forced to open the giant box out in the hall and transport its contents into the room piecemeal. He had a hotplate and a desk lamp in the box, but most of its flimsy volume was filled with trophies. He carried them in, two at a time, and spaced them out on the shelf running along his side of the room.

“Wow,” I said as he was straightening up the display, largest trophies in the middle, smaller ones tapering out to the ends. There were little golden statuettes of men swinging bowling balls and tennis rackets, baseball bats and shot-puts, gripping footballs with one arm outstretched in a Heisman pose. “Looks like you’re good at a shit ton of things.”

“Yeah.” He chuckled and dropped onto his bunk. “I’m a generational talent.”

•

We took to being friends like you might with a coworker or other acquaintances of proximity. We were the same age, from roughly the same backgrounds, living in the same room. Spontaneous friendship is largely unavoidable. At nineteen, I hardly knew a thing about myself, let alone the world. Graham spoke as though he possessed greater insights about life and whatever, and I was too clueless to tell if he was bullshitting.

While he did some studying, it was mostly late at night in a sort of manic binge—cramming notes into his eyeballs, pouring Mountain Dew down his throat, headphones pumping Metallica and Slayer straight into his adrenalized amygdala.

He was late into a session in the middle of one night when he took a break and snuck down the hall to the showers. Assuming I would still be asleep, he came back in with just a towel around his waist and I realized that it must have been the first time I’d seen him without a shirt.

“What’s up with the scar,” I asked, squinting against the hall light. A wide, shiny, pink line ran down his sternum, little suture dots paired up in rows along either side. “Get that in a knife fight or something?”

He didn’t speak for a moment. I wasn’t sure if my voice was too quiet or if he had possibly come in angry for some shower-related reason.

“I was born with a heart defect and had to have my chest cracked open when I was six months old,” he finally said as he dug through a drawer for clean clothes.

“Holy shit. I had no idea. Sorry, man. That’s crazy.”

“It’s cool,” he said. “They stuck an extra heart in there before closing me up. That’s why I have the passion of two men inside me.”

“Uh, come again?”

“Wait. That doesn’t—none of that sounds right.”

We let laughter dispel the awkwardness for a time, but things were never quite the same between us after that.

•

There was a tiny refrigerator in our room. It hummed and rattled all hours and barely kept the few items it could contain cold. Graham would forgo food storage, choosing to eat drive through Taco Bell and Wendy’s so as to reserve the fridge for beer exclusively.

I had only been drunk once before freshman year started, having choked down four and a half wine coolers with some neighborhood friends on summer break. That hangover had been enough to deter much further experimentation. Gradually, Graham coaxed me into sampling some craft beers and taking shots from pint-sized liquor bottles that he would bring back from trips home on long weekends. It was usually a good time, but I was a lightweight next to him.

On several occasions, Graham drank everything in the room, then stomped down the hallway knocking on doors and sniffing out any booze the other guys had stashed, collecting it through either bargaining or belligerence.

Most often the latter.

Some nights, after a good binge, he would stare me down, a look on his face like he had found me out, had seen through my act and was not going to fall for it anymore.

“Got my eye on you, Cappy. You don’t want to fuck with me. You understand?”

“Yeah, man. Let’s just get some sleep. I’ve got class at eight.”

I could still make out his shape in the dark, sitting on the edge of the bed, lips wet and moving while I tried to calm my racing heart and churning guts.

•

I had walked to the Greenery Pub alone the night I met Selena. It was nice to just sip on a beer and have my thoughts to myself, but I wasn’t exactly bothered when she leaned on the bar next to me to order her drink. She asked me where to find the best food for a late night meal.

“The Burrito Buggy,” I told her. “It’s always there at the top of the hill. Can’t miss it. Just follow the line of drunks.”

She laughed and her teeth were even and white, like they were fresh from the factory.

Ten minutes later, her number was in my pocket and she was out the door. I had hardly any time to savor the victory before hot, yeasty breath was in my ear.

“El Capitan! I put quarters on the pool table. Let’s go.”

Graham was a mediocre shot when sober, a state of consciousness he’d abandoned hours earlier that night. We had our asses handed to us twice and then almost got kicked out when he grabbed one of the guys by the neck and tried to slam his head into the green felt of the table.

I pulled him into a booth in the back and made him sit down.

“Chill the fuck out, G. Drink some water for a change. You’re going to get us arrested.”

He sat quietly, his body expanding and contracting, small eyes scanning the place.

I started watching one of the big TVs on the wall. The Bulls were down by three in the last quarter when Graham stood up smoothly and walked away from me, determination in his forward-leaning gate.

At first, I assumed that he either needed to piss or puke and was headed for the bathroom. He moved along a wall of windows, behind most of the patrons who were oriented toward the screens and the game. There were several trophies sitting in the deep window boxes and he grabbed the largest—a three tiered monster topped with a golden man aiming a golden dart—then turned around and walked right out the door.

By the time I closed my tab and got outside, he was long gone. He wasn’t in the room when I got back.

I considered going out to look for him when the glitter of fool’s gold stopped me. I stood there in our little dorm cell, my desk lamp twisted upward to illuminate his wall. Slowly, I inspected one trophy after another on the long shelf. None of them appeared to have a name engraved on their plaques. He had apparently been careful to steal only those with inscriptions vague enough to pawn off as his own.

2017 Intramural Tennis League Champion

1^st Place Kettering Spelling Bee

New Boston High School Free-Throw Contest Winner

Near the end of the row, one of the smaller statues stood on a marble base that read Kimmy Collins—Most Improved Breaststroke.

•

It turned out that Graham had slunk back home to Cleveland for the weekend. Selena and I went to a hockey game, got ice cream, and shared our first bashful kiss like it was a middle school dance. When I got back Sunday evening, ready to study for my exam in abnormal psychology, Graham was lying on his bed underneath all those symbols of stolen valor, the enormous dart trophy now claiming the center spot on the shelf.

“Dude,” I started, falling into my office chair and pivoting toward him. “What the fuck?”

“Martin, whatever do you mean?” He remained prone, examining the popcorn ceiling.

“I mean, first of all, I watched you steal that from the Greenery the other night,” I said, motioning toward the display. “And second, none of these others seem to be yours either. Unless your real name is Kimmy Collins.”

He grinned widely, amused by my indignation.

“So it’s all just a joke to you?” I asked.

“Really,” he said, sitting up to face me, “why do you even care?”

“Because. These are lies. Other people earned these, but you’re trying to take the credit. You don’t deserve them.”

There was still some humor in his eyes, but it was fading. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law, Cappy.”

“Great. Just another joke.”

“Okay. You want to be serious? This world doesn’t give a shit about you or me or anyone else. You get the cards you’re born with and whether you fold or call or bluff, it’s on you to play them the best you can. Anyone who doesn’t is a chump and deserves to lose their chips.”

All trace of his smile was gone.

“All you got are poker analogies? Spoken like a true sociopath,” I said.

“Ha!” His laugh was cold—more anger now than jest. “You learn that on a flash card? Listen, Cap, I earned these trophies because I took them and no one could stop me. You see? That is the universe we live in. Rules and laws and expectations are just things that one guy made up and convinced another guy to buy into. Fucking wolves don’t care if you called dibs on a dead rabbit. They take what they can get and live or die. Life tried to kick me in the nuts right out of the gate. I got born with a bum heart and then got to grow up with a brother who is six-foot-three and a fucking all-star. Right? You don’t hear me bitching. Do you?”

“No.” I was mad at him, sorry for him, and a little afraid of him. It was hard to know what to say.

“You’re a friend,” he went on. “We’re cool. But you haven’t lived my life so don’t sit over there and judge me. You can either hang or you can stay the fuck out of my way.” He stretched on his bunk and closed his eyes.

I grabbed my coat and spent the next hour walking around campus. I thought about requesting a different roommate, or changing schools, or dropping out and going to work for my dad. But all those options felt like running away.

And I didn’t want to run away.

We steered clear of each other for a while. It was too cold to go out to the bars, and midterms kept us both wrapped up in reading and studying. I spent a lot of time at the library around the corner. Once exams were over, we started to run around more. Keeping things superficial worked best and we had fun most of the time. Selena began to join us on occasion and in the spring, we signed up for a trivia league as a three-person team.

The Quizzly Bears.

I should have been more concerned when I dropped by her dorm one day and found Graham there, claiming to have brought her a book on Bayesian statistics that he hadn’t needed since last quarter.

Three nights later she was sobbing for half an hour before she could manage to speak. He had seen her out, found that she had no ride to her building and refused to let her walk from the bars. The gentlemanly gestures ended there. In the car he had lunged. Groped. She used the phrase ‘tongue down my throat’.”

When she’d pushed him off and offered a piece of her mind, he barked some line about signals. That she knew what she was doing. She didn’t need to worry though, he reassured. He wasn’t going to tell me what she had done.

Just another golden statuette stolen for his shelf.

•

“Marty, you’ve got to kick that guy’s ass. I’m serious. You want me to help?”

My friends talked a big game, but none of them had ever even been in a fight.

It’s not like I wasn’t mad. But my anger was laced with confusion which took some of the fire out of things. Ultimately, I couldn’t muster up a full-fledged hatred.

I just wanted to know why.

I planned my approach. For hours I paced and thought and even took notes. What arguments could he present in his defense? I wanted to be ready for them, to have the verbal counterblow prepared before he even saw it coming.

“She was throwing herself at me, dude.”

“Clearly she’s having a mental health crisis and is hallucinating.”

“Said if I didn’t get her some coke she would make up a story about us hooking up.”

It wouldn’t matter what he said, I had a response ready for everything.

When I finally tracked Graham down, I got five words out and he punched me in the side of the head.

A bone in his hand was broken by my skull, so I had that to hang onto.

I was wearing glasses when he hit me and a small shard of plastic scratched my eyeball, which later became infected. Three rounds of antibiotics failed and eventually things got so bad that the eye had to be removed. So now I’ll never be an astronaut.

Why would he do something so awful?

There was no answer. None that would be satisfying anyway.

When people ask about my eye, I tell them I lost it to a northern metaphorical grizzly. Record size. Only man to have ever lived to tell the tale.

Do I hate that bear? Dream of tracking it through a mountain pass to bring it down in a bloody revenge?

No. I do my best to stay clear of bears, no matter how friendly they may seem. And it’s been a helpful lesson. In the arena of friendships over my life, I feel like I’ve generally won.

It’s just too bad they don’t hand out trophies for that.

•