After gym class that day, I asked Mr. J to show me his new watch. He told me he liked to run and that this watch helped him keep track of his pace and his time. Personally I thought that was a waste of a perfectly good watch and a pretty dumb reason to have such a fabulous watch. But he assured me that most people used Ironman watches for that purpose. I just couldn’t figure that one out. I didn’t go into any details about my “super” plans for the watch, but I did tell him that I wanted to buy one soon and how much was it? He told me it was somewhere in the ballpark of sixty bucks and my heart sank.
You see, sixty bucks might as well be a thousand bucks to a kid growing up in a single-wide trailer with dog pee stains all over the carpet. At the time my family was on food stamps and money was so tight that we were all choking—mom and dad and me and Rich. There was no excess spending. Except, of course, cigarettes and candy bars, our addictions. I had some money saved up in my bedroom; money from the few times I’d actually been able to draw an allowance for my chores [mostly I worked pro-bono] or for some of the odd jobs I did for Grandpa from time to time.
I should have known that you’d have to pay for such an incredible piece of machinery. I should have known, but I just couldn’t imagine a world without an Ironman watch on my wrist. But I’m going to skip ahead a bit and reveal a bit about the “end” of this story. As I’m sitting here right now in a coffeeshop on the square in Petersburg, Illinois, back from my Richmond life, back from my college life, sitting here writing this story for some reason, I can say that I’ve never owned an Ironman watch. I never managed to put myself in an Ironman watch. I’m 28 years old and still there’s a pang of loss at never having obtained that prized watch. I think I’m turning out okay, but who knows where I’d be today if I’d managed to have that watch!? Putting out forest fires or selling drugs or riding the misty blue seas on a bigfreightship or maybe running errands for some hotshot in Washington, D.C. or even floating gently over this little blue marble in a big puffy astronaut suit? Probably none of these things.
But like all unrequited loves, my love was strong and swelling, growing every minute and every day that I couldn’t get my wrist into the strap of an Ironman watch. My love was STRONG, but not just for the watch. For what it represented. At that point in my life, I exercised very little control over things. I’d hear my parents at the dinner table murmuring words through the thick evening air--
overdue
AFFORD
COLLECTIONS [in red]
LATE PAYMENT
maxed maxed maxed late. . . can’t make it?
groceries credit cards
tired--while I sat on the kitchen linoleum playing Dukes of Hazzard with some hand-me-down Matchbox cars and an old box-elder bug. What I sought in my life was control. For all of us. Our lives always seemed to be spinning down the toilet of life uncontrollably. All I wanted was to exercise some small measure of control. To control something [anything] in the world. Like so many unrequited loves, mine was an obsession spurned on by a strong desire to make my life more complete and stable and secure and wonderful.
One thing I learned during childhood growing up in my family is that you should always keep your passions to yourself. As much as possible, keep them locked up inside tight, especially where parents or grandparents are involved. I’ll explain. My grandpa was always buying me little things and throwing them at me. Cheap junk. Plastic toys. Dime toys. Plastic army men. I mean the cheapest crap you can imagine. One day while we were in Springfield shopping, I told him I wanted an Ironman.
“A what?” he asked.
“A watch. It’s a watch, Grandpa. Called an Ironman.”
“You have a watch,” he groaned. My Grandpa was big on buying anything cheap and crappy, and anything that he thought he was getting a deal on. You could sell him a bag of turds if he thought he was getting it for 50% off the retail price. That’s the type of man he was. But when it came to practical things [arguably an Ironman was/was not practical; it seemed practical to me] like watches, shoes, televisions, etc., he took a practical [cheap] approach, always looking for, what he thought were deals. And he never saw the point in getting a second one of something you already had.
“But this is different. A different kind of watch. It does all sorts of neat stuff. Mr. J has one at school.”
“What’s it do?” he asked. “Other than tell time, what’s it do?”
I thought it over. I could feel myself sinking, losing traction. I couldn’t slip and lose it already. “You can time things, you know, how long things take.”
He kind of smiled. He had a wonderful “kind-of” smile. It was both there and not there at the same time. “How much does an Ironman [he pronounced it Arnman] watch cost?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. If I told him now, he’d never give it another thought. He’d never spend sixtyish dollars on a watch, unless maybe I had him there and he could see how badly I wanted it and we were already there so there was no point in leaving empty-handed and he had the money. We didn’t, but he did. But he barely ever spent sixtyish dollars on any individual items that weren’t televisions or automobiles. My thought was, Drag this horse to water, and he’ll drink. He’ll drink.
So that day we left Sam’s Club and headed for K-Mart. On the way, he asked, “What do you want this watch for? What are you going to time with it?”
This is where I really started to go wrong. Fatally wrong. I knew I couldn’t go with an impassioned story about my newfound love affair with time and timing things, little things like how long it takes to walk to school, or how long it takes to eat a bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal. With my people that kind of “out of the way” thinking would wind you up with a “talking to” and then for awhile you’d be under supervision while you slowly resorted to the passive status quo. In my family, it’s always been passive over passion. Never show you love. Never. I couldn’t risk such an exposure there with Grandpa. So, I thought back to my conversation with Mr. J that day in the gym. And, I offered his simple, logical, well-thought-out plan. “Running,” I said. “I want to time myself running.” [This lie was one of the biggest mistakes of my childhood, as you will soon read.]
“Running?” Grandpa said, a look of confusion on his face.
“Yeah, I don’t know how fast I can run [boy I was really working him, mouth running while mind was dancing ahead and clearing the path—BASEBALL—finally came to me]. Baseball’s coming up and I want to get faster for baseball. Get more doubles and triples maybe.” That was a good one. I was laying it on thick.
His face lit up. “Yeah. Yeah. Never hurts to be faster at runnin’ them ol’ bases. We’ll look at this watch, I guess and see what we can do.” He nodded, proudly.
At the K-Mart watch counter, we sauntered up together, me bubbling just under the surface with furious joycitement and Grandpa with his full money clip. His money clip was always full. For awhile when I was a wee little boy he’d told me that it filled itself up when you took money out and put it back in your pocket. Well, I believed him because it always had so many bills in it how was one to tell? It always looked full. A K-Mart attendant came over to see if we needed any help. She was a gentle, older lady, permed grey curls and a peaceful smile. Intense, watchful eyes.
Grandpa piped up. “He wants to see a watch.”
“Wellwhichone?”
He nudged me, “Which one, Johnny [he pronounces it Jaw-knee]. Show her.”
I pointed to the men’s Ironman wristwatch, and said, “The Ironman.” I swear, at that moment, trumpets blared, a chorus of angels sang in reverie, the sky opened up to heaven, and a bluelight special got underway in HOUSEHOLD.
She merely smiled and keyed open the case from the back. Grabbed the watch and lifted it out and up to me, display case and all. I smiled big as I took careful receipt of that watch. My cheeks were about to tear at the strain of that smile. I worked the big watch carefully from the grey plastic display case and slipped it onto my wrist.
“It’s too big,” Grandpa said, purveyor of obvious knowledge that he was. It was too big. Far too big. Even I could see that. It hung like a hammerhead on my littleboy left wrist, strapped as tightly as it would. The watch that had looked so right on Mr. J’s manarm looked so out of place on mine. It looked like I was lugging around a television on my wrist. But I didn’t care one lick. Not one single lick.
“It’s fine Grandpa. I’ll grow into it this way.”
“Huff,” he laughed as he did so often when you contradicted him. “Well, how much is it?” This was the important question, the truly necessary question for his approval. He wouldn’t care if I was dragging around a watch the size of a Cadillac if he thought he was getting a deal.
I scanned the little grey display for a price, hoping that by my sheer stalling the price would be reduced down into his range. Suddenly, the helpful K-Mart clerk—“That particular watch is, I believe, $65.” My Grandpa nearly passed out. He helped it off of me and back on the little grey display. He apologized all the while for being a waste of time. It was all over. In a poof. Just like that.
To add insult to injury, I had to endure these two old-timers lecturing me about how unreasonable young people are today and how no one needs a watch that expensive. They made sure to lecture me good and long on saving and spending and finding “deals,” a lesson they had apparently both learned when they were “about my age.” Couldn’t they see that I’d just had a dream plucked from my heart?
Finally, the old clerk told Grandpa that they had some “more reasonable” stopwatches on the other side of the display case. So, instead of an Ironman, I wound up with a five dollar, gawdy red-and-yellow stopwatch that could be hung around your neck on a bright red lanyard. I thought it was ridiculous. But in the interest of my experiments in time, I relented to a compromise.
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