RISKS

RISKS

The boy couldn’t care less what his father was watching on the television, but he had made up his mind that today he was going to sit next to him on the sofa anyhow and sit there talking with him and watch whatever he was watching for a while or until things got ugly.  He couldn’t remember the last time he sat with his father on the sofa and watched TV. It had to be a long time ago. He doesn’t like his father at all and doesn’t call him dad. He calls him by his first name, Arnold. The boy’s name is Curtis, and he’s only twelve years old. Still, he was a bold and fearless twelve-year-old and had been through some scrapes with the old man, even pushed him a few times, and cussed him out, calling him ‘asshole’- so how long they sat on the sofa together before getting into a fight was anybody’s guess.

The boy thought he was a lousy dad, easily getting pissed off about one thing or another from morning until night, and never opened himself up to talk about things that bothered him the way his mom did. He’d just get mad with a fire in his eyes that warded off anyone near him. Maybe today it would be different. Today the old fart might be at peace long enough to tell the boy something about his own childhood or about the war or give him a few dollars to bike over to his friend Jimmy’s and hang out or just sit and watch and talk on the sofa and the boy might find out what makes the mean bastard tick.

Arnold had started watching a Sunday afternoon rerun of a program originally aired as a Saturday afternoon World-Wide Sports Special on CBS called “The World’s Greatest Stuntman - Evel Knievel”. The moderator had a hokey exuberance in his voice, the boy immediately hated, and after the nature of the stunt was described, he concluded rather quickly that this program was going to be one stupid piece of crap. But he didn’t care. He wanted to watch a while with his father.

When the boy sat, he had made sure there was some distance on the sofa between them and tightened himself up against the opposite arm of the sofa, in case his father got mad at him and would try to grab him. It wasn’t beyond the boy, though, to fight back. “You’re a deadbeat lousy father!” he once screamed at his father and pushed him and caught him off guard so that the old man fell to the ground. His father may have been old, a month shy of sixty-two, but his barrel-chested body still had some power of its own, and he got up and grabbed Curtis by the throat and whipped a wild open-handed slap across his face, leaving a big red hand impression on the boy’s cheek for a few days.

Now, they sat calmly watching while Mr. Knievel was being lowered by a crane into the compact seat of his super-sized motorcycle for a stupendous attempt to jump over the Snake River Canyon. This was an absolutely suicidal endeavor, thought the boy. The distance from the launch to the landing was, according to the moderator, 1,600 feet. “Never before in the history of stunts”, the moderator said, “has a jump this long ever been tried, much less successful”. The boy saw that his father sat on the edge of his seat, fascinated and animated, totally enjoying the spectacle as things got underway and a band behind the launch site played some polka music in the background.

His father’s reactions confirmed for the boy that sitting on the sofa today and watching TV together might reveal some things about his old man’s emotional DNA and, if talked about, might dull the strife in the house. There were no guarantees, though, that his father would open up and talk about things. Still, though, for the boy, that was a risk worth taking. His interest heightened a moment later after his father squirmed around on the sofa and got amped up to a strange and unfamiliar level of enthusiasm about this crappy stunt on television that’ll end in the dumb stuntman’s death. Was it for the thrill? Did it give the old man a boner? Was pops an idiot? There was no doubt in the boy’s mind Mr. Knievel was going to crash into the orange-ish rock on the other side of the gorge and splatter like a bug. He figured his father agreed about this. So what gives? Why the excitement?

“He’s gonna die. He’ll crash and burn. This is really stupid, ” the boy said.

“I don’t know, son. Let’s watch and see,” his father responded without taking his eyes off the television.

The network cameras panned the crowd of about two thousand people at the launch site, and seeing this, the boy shook his head in despair. “This is preposterous. A total bunch of losers.” To his mind, the crowd should be but wasn’t alarmed or wringing their hands with anxiety flush across their homely faces. They were madly animated and cheering on the stuntman, getting him all pumped up, thrusting their fists into the air, and shouting “Go Evel, Go! Go Evel, Go!”

Meanwhile, his father turned a crooked grin into a big, broad smile and stood up for a moment, jabbed at the air with his fist, then sat again on the edge of the seat, and moments later repeated this action, this time making a fist with both hands and jabbing the air like a boxer, possibly imagining himself in the middle of the roaring crowd. He sat again and watched the Wheaties and Marlboro commercials with near-equal enjoyment.

“Why do you think he’s doing this, Dad?” the boy asked, deciding to use that word he thought it was too endearing to ever and never, ever use, but the situation called for it.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” His father was zeroed in on the television, not visibly annoyed by his son’s constant questioning, but clearly not reflective enough to give him a straightforward and thorough answer.

The boy had assumed he was going to get a different answer, something like: this tickles me to death. Obviously, the entertainment value of the program made a lot of sense and was probably the reason why CBS aired it again as a rerun, although there are a lot more reruns Curtis would happily watch. Millions of Americans were probably watching along with him and his father. To his thinking, Americans love to watch other people do stupid and dangerous things and live out adventures they themselves are too scared to undertake, or stunts like this make them appreciate their own comfort zones or feel better about themselves. There was a moronic thrill to it, that much the boy was certain about, especially if it might end with someone dying a bloody death. It had a national depravity to it, akin to what adults call patriotism; corny and disingenuous, something with resale value without a risk.

The boy had never heard of this stuntman with the strange name but was convinced, no matter how often he’d done stupid stuff like this, he wasn’t going to pull off this stunt and in a few minutes from now a few humble and hard-working medics would earn a decent amount of overtime to toss his body parts on a gurney.

The moderator began describing the kind of motorcycle Mr. Knievel was going to be riding in his attempt to jump across the canyon when all of a sudden Mr. Knievel opened the throttle of the powerful engine and made a thundering noise, so it was impossible to hear what the moderator guy was saying.

“I didn’t hear what he said about the motorcycle?” the boy said. He brushed aside his floppy bangs that hung down across his eyebrows, nearly hiding his blue eyes. His jeans were ripped in two places. One of the rips at the knee he did himself to be ‘cool,’ he said, and his t-shirt was a week beyond filthy with a mark of something brownish hanging out around the neckline. His left sock had a hole in it at the big toe.

“Evel Knievel’s going to jettison over the canyon on a Suncycle X-1 superheated motorcycle. He built it himself,” his father explained. This amount of detailed information surprised the boy. At this moment the boy noticed a half-empty bottle of brandy on the side-table next to the arm of the sofa and a shot glass beside it.

“How do you know about his engine?”

“I don’t know how I know, but I just know. I must have read it somewhere or heard it from somebody. Maybe I heard it down at Sloothies Tavern. I don’t know. I can’t remember.” He was lying, thought the boy. He knows more about this stunt guy than he’s telling him.

“You’ve watched this guy do stunts before, haven’t you, Dad?” the boy asked.

“Maybe I have. Maybe I haven’t. What’s it to you?” his father replied with a terseness, like he was on edge all of a sudden. The tension in his tone raised the stakes, made the length of their conversation on the sofa undetermined; a risk of an argument surfaced, or possibly worse, the old man might just shut down, stop talking and eerily turn silent, drink his brandy and shrivel away and brood the way he always does, the big mean sop that is. This was the risk the boy took, but today he felt it was worth it, and it only heightened his desire to remain on the sofa at least until the end of the rerun.

When Mr Knievel revved the throttle more often, longer and louder, it got the crowd of Patriotic Americans of all ages, as the moderator described them, excited and high-fiving while their small children ran recklessly near the very edge of the gorge that dropped for hundreds of feet, ending on the banks of the wildly gushing Snake River.

“This is madness,” he said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you think so? Stupid. Insane. Maybe I’m just a kid, but I know a dupe when I see a dupe, and this stuntman is duping everyone. He’s not really going to jump, is he?”

“I don’t know. Who knows? Don’t be so quick to judge, son.” His father poured a shot of brandy and gulped it down. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

“C’mon. This is stupid,” the boy pressed him, running out of adjectives except ‘stupid’.

A strange delight remained aglow in his father’s eyes, and the wide grin remained across his face. Maybe he wasn’t even watching but was all this while thinking about something entirely different, thought the boy as he studied his father’s whiskered red face. Is it possible he wasn’t even watching, but deeply daydreaming, and slightly watching? The boy stirred on the sofa, drew closer, curious, intently looking into his father’s face, looking for some kind of tell-tale sign or symptom. Is the old bastard no longer normal? Was dementia setting in?

A few seconds later, his father poured another shot and gulped it down and wiped his lips with the back of his hand again. The boy instantly and instinctively concluded this was the reason for his empty gaze, the stupid grin on his face; he was drunk. That’s what this is, not a reveal, or a poke into his emotional DNA, although his present behavior was worth noting for research's sake. But no, no, Arnold was not a deep man.

As fast as a commercial came and went, the boy was about to dismiss his father, consider him a lost vagabond, down and out without rhyme or reason. Saliva drooled onto his father’s T-shirt. His cheeks were red as blood and the loose skin under his chin was greasy. He had a big nose that sometimes the boy wanted to punch just for the hell of it because he was a mean and lousy dad.

Curtis didn’t outright hate Arnold, but his anger and resentment toward him were more than lukewarm. The boy’s mother had once confided to him, “He’s not at peace with himself”, to which the boy intuitively replied, “He’s not at peace with anyone.”

Over the years, his mother had more to say about the topic of her husband’s behavior, and putting his mother’s words together, the boy came to understand things better: that his father was an ornery and easily provoked man, other times an eerily quiet, sullen, and scary person without words, as if he lost his mind, after he returned from Vietnam. “The war messed him up, Curt,” his mother told him. Those dark mood swings were accompanied by alcohol and abusive behavior, and she started sleeping with the boy’s little sister in her bedroom. “Your father can be a monster.”

Throughout the following long moments, and they were indeed long moments with all the preliminary gimmicks and build-up before Mr. Knievel’s stunt of the century literally took off, and despite his original cynical reluctance to watch the program, it was turning into a lesson about American ‘patriots’ watching unrewarding shenanigans unfold, so the boy remained stoic and content on the sofa with his father hoping to figure things out before he got completely shit-faced and matters turned ugly. His mind drew him to think the war was playing out in this program.

“Do you think this stuntman is happy to be doing something like this?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know. I’m gonna guess it’s for lots of money. C’mon, let’s get this show on the road!” he shouted at the TV and stood momentarily, perturbed, scowling, and when he sat back down he took another shot of brandy. Now the bottle had maybe one shot left.

“Yup, I agree with you, Dad. I wonder how much money?” the boy asked.

“I don’t know how much, but I bet it’s more than I make in a year, maybe two years.”

The father was right about that. He hardly worked for over two years, and especially on consecutive days after he got his government disability check. Once he got the check cashed, he stocked the cupboard with several bottles of brandy, his favorite brand of booze, and started drinking in the morning and drank pretty much into the night, turning those days into wasted pieces of his life.

“He’s not going to make it,” the boy repeated. “This is suicide.”

“You ever see anyone commit suicide, son?” his father asked.

“You know I haven’t. Have you, dad?”

“No. But I’ve seen men and women get killed. Right next to me, too.”

“ I know about that. In Vietnam. During that war. Mom told me.”

“This is kinda like going to battle, son,” his father said, beginning to touch on something inside him the boy had been hoping for. “Look at all the red, white and blue on Knievel’s motorcycle and the red, white and blue bunting around the launching ramp and the red, white and blue paint on his motorcycle. For what? This country? Patriotism? Bahooey! This is exactly the way my buddies were shipped back home from Vietnam. In a black box wrapped in a red, white and blue flag. It’s all bullshit, son. Inside the casket, their bodies were wrapped up like fish in newspaper. Some of them came back in pieces. Does anyone care? Anyone except their closest family remember them? Not on your life, son.”

Things got tense. His father raised his voice. He was getting riled up. Maybe there was a lot on his mind. If the boy didn’t know any better, and being only eleven he wasn’t sure about anything, he had to believe that his father came back from Vietnam a troubled man, maybe like the war itself, a defeated man. He was angry and hated everyone and everything. He’d only been married to his mom a year before being shipped out. He probably hated having a family, just wanted to be alone and suffer. He came back, not a defeated man, but a dead one.

“Americans enjoy this. It’s all about the risk, son. We celebrate tragedy. Going to war or jumping the Snake River Canyon. The odds of defying your own death. There isn’t a greater challenge than this, is there? Succeed or die!” His father poured the last of the brandy into the shot glass without turning his head; instinctively, he grabbed the bottle and shot glass and poured the last drop without spilling, his eyes fixed on the television and the imminent stunt.

The boy gave a lot of thought to what his father just said. He didn’t know anything about the Army or war and certainly nothing about jumping a canyon on a motorcycle. But taking risks he knew about. He would often steal candy bars or apples from the grocery store. It was a risk. Not like the war or this stupid stunt, but he took a risk of getting caught each time, and if he were ever caught, oh boy would Arnold beat the crap out of him. Thoughts of taking risks raised more questions. Why do we go to war against people we don’t even know, only to die? Why seek attention doing a stunt in front of people who don’t care about you, if it’s going to kill you?

“I wouldn’t do anything like this if it meant I was risking my life,” the boy said.

“You’re still a kid. When you turn eighteen we’ll talk about it again.”

“I’m sorry, Dad, but I ain’t gonna join the fucking Army as you did.”

“Hey! Watch your language,” his father scowled, spit flying out with his words.

“We go to war, and a lot of us don’t come back. The enemy dies. We die. Shit happens. Wars are the armpits of world history,” his father philosophized, surprising the boy. He’d never heard his father give an opinion. He only complained about everyone and everything.

“You came back,” the boy said.

“Have I?” his father said, giving him a hard stare, his eyes deep and darkened. The boy sat up on the arm of the sofa, the furthest from his father he could get and still be on the sofa, anticipating a bad mood swing.

The boy wasn’t sure if that last remark was a theoretical comment or how he really felt about his life. Should he continue sitting and watching this junk on TV with his father or bike over to Jimmy’s and play video games? With his father drunk, he wasn’t going to ask him for any money, and the last thing the boy wanted to do on this nice day was hang out inside with a drunk getting all mopey and introspective or worse, argumentative, and into a fight.

“He’s not even going to get off the ground,” the boy laughed. “Why do those idiot parents have their little kids there? The guy’s gonna crash and burn right in front of them. Dumb fucking American parents!” the boy said.

“Hey. I said watch your language. Jesus Christ, you’re only eleven years old.”

“Don’t you think there’s something wrong with the parents? They’re acting pretty dumb. You wouldn’t do that, would you, Dad?”

“I don’t know. I never had the chance to take you to an event like this. I might have taken you.”

“You would have taken me? I don’t think I would have liked it. Now I definitely know I wouldn’t have liked it or gone. I would have run away before going. This whole thing is actually funny. Don’t you think? He’s gonna crash and die, and so what? Another thrill for the viewing public.” The boy laughed again.

The reasons for why it’s important for young boys to want to know what’s between their father’s ears or in their hearts vary. Some boys want to know this stuff in order to get something over on their old man; play him for a fool. Manipulate him. Other teenage boys might have a twist of revenge in their soul. Maybe the father was abusive or violent and hit their mom or the kids. They reach the point where they’ve had enough and want to do something about it– either learn from his flaws or beat him up. Yet, there are some boys who mature faster, leave puberty behind, and show sincerity in establishing links between them. Those are the empathetic, serious lads who only want to strengthen the bond between Father and Son; find a mutual, loving comfort zone.

The launching ramp led up to the chasm where the world ended for purposes of this event. To make the drama more dramatic, Mr Knievel struggled with his compact seat on his Suncycle 1 rocket-powered superheated motorcycle for a long time and looked stuck. The boy noticed this, and it only added to his dreadful forecast, “This guy is absolutely a goner!”

The moderator explained to the audience a second time that the distance across the chasm was 1600 feet and that no one in history had ever tried to jump such a distance. “ Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Knievel will have to be going at least 200 miles per hour when he reaches the end of the 180 foot ramp in order to maximize his take off and success”. You could hear a few oohs and aahs. Then he added, “Don’t worry. He has a parachute in case, in the unlikely event, he comes up short of the other side.”

“Like the parachute’s really gonna help, ” the boy smirked. “You hear how this idiot announcer said that, so nonchalantly- ‘in case he comes up short on the other side’. Duh! Splatter on the other side or splatter on the banks of the Snake River. Both are terminal.”

“I don’t know, son. Let’s see,” his father said. At this point, he was slurring his words.

Unaware that he’d got up, the boy found himself standing in the middle of the room, close to the television. The atmosphere at the launch site was getting intense, and the world was about to watch the greatest stuntman in the world do his thing. What was he risking? Was it enough to thrill the millions of viewers, the boy, and his father? The boy didn’t know why he had gotten up and stood so close to the television, and when he turned around, he also had no idea why his father had a pained look on his face.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the moderator announced. “Are you ready for the world’s greatest stuntman, the famous, the one and only, Evil Knievel! You’re watching history being made, folks. Now join me. Let’s begin the countdown to send-off! 10, 9, 8 ....” they counted down.

“I think about dying sometimes, son,” his father said. “Sometimes I wish I already had.”

“I hope you don’t go soon, dad,” the boy said, disinterested in the topic. He couldn’t decide if he should sit back down or remain standing in the middle of the room. Was his father drunk enough to start a fight? It’s better he stays on his feet and has some distance, just in case. He’s got a strange look on his face.

“My buddies died in the war. I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know why I didn’t die.”

“It wasn’t your time, dad,” the boy said.

“You never know, son. When it’s your turn...nuttin you can do about it.” He stood. He appeared angry and gave the boy that hard dark stare again, and for a moment the boy thought they were going to get into a fight, and wrestle right there in front of the television. “I ...” his father started to say something when, all of a sudden, he hollered, “Ahhh, fuck!” and grabbed his chest and turned pale as a bone with a crooked grimace that got the boy scared. He fell face-first back down on the sofa.

“Dad! What’s the matter? What’s happening?” the boy said, panicked and kneeling beside him by the sofa.

Arnold squirmed around and tried to turn over but didn’t have the strength. “Ahh!” He could only groan into the cushion. His left hand gripped his shirt and pulled on it, ripping off some buttons. He said something indecipherable. A small stuffed bear lay under his stomach on the sofa, likely forgotten there by the boy’s little sister. His father managed to pull it out from under him and squeezed it tightly he ripped the head off.. The boy broke down, sobbing.

“Something’s going terribly wrong,” the moderator announced. “Ladies and gentlemen, Evil Knievel’s parachute has opened. It’s opened too early. He is only halfway across the gorge, and now he’s dropping like a wounded eagle into the dangerous Snake River. We can see huge boulders poking out of the Snake River,” the moderator announced to the shrills, the oohs and aahs of the delighted American fans, relishing the possibility of tragedy.

Curtis turned to see the parachute descending inside the gorge, drifting from one side to the other. He quickly turned back to his father, whose chest was not heaving. “Breathe, Dad. Please. Breathe!” He called out for his mother, but no reply.

He ran out of the room to find her and met her at the back door. She carried in a basket of clean clothes from the clothesline out back. She dropped the basket, and together they rushed back into the living room. Father was lying face up, arm hanging off the sofa, the headless stuffed bear on the floor, just out of reach of his limp fingers. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t breathing.

“Breathe Godammit!” the boy cried, pumping on his chest. His mother stood over them, numb and immovable, wringing her hands, tears running down her cheek.

It was too late. The boy stopped pumping on his father’s chest and closed his father’s eyes and began bawling, his head on his father’s chest. His mother picked up the phone and called 911 and then Arnold’s brother.

“I asked him to quit drinking,” she said to the boy. “He didn’t drink before going off to that war. I asked him to stop drinking. I reminded him the war is over.”

Mr Knievel was falling fast and defenseless deeper into the gorge, closer to the wild Snake River. “He’s in trouble,” the moderator said. The cameras were able to catch most of the falling stuntman descending rapidly. Luckily for him, the wind picked up and blew his parachute in an easterly direction, and Mr Knievel banged into the side of the canyon without getting killed and dropped on the soft bank of the river. He was quickly rescued with only a broken nose. It wasn’t serious, and he could breathe normally again in about a month.