And I’m not hard to look at. Mr. Simet says I look like Tiger Woods on steroids, so I get plenty of chances to socialize. For every girl whose parents are terrified of a muddied gene pool, there’s a girl who would use me as a threat to do just that. And there are plenty of girls who don’t care one way or the other.
The truly unique thing about me isn’t my racial heritage, or my brain or my size or my athletic abilities. Momma Glenda didn’t leave me with much to remember her by, but she certainly left me with the all-time moniker. A lot of kids whose parents grew up in the hippie generation have names like Autumn or Somber or Twilight or Destiny. Who knows what their parents were smoking to name them after seasons or moods or times of day, but good old Glenda went them one better, naming me in her “spiritual” period. She may have been a little too “spiritual” on mood-altering funstuff to imagine my first day in kindergarten.
“Tell everyone your first name when your turn comes,” Mrs. Herrick said, nodding to the pencil-necked, tow-headed kid next to me. The kid said, “Roger.”
I said, “The.”
“Excuse me?”
“The.” She should have said, “Tell everyone what people call you.”
The other kids giggled. My fists clenched, blood rushing into my head.
Mrs. Herrick said, “Uh, do you have a middle name?”
“Tao,” I said, pronouncing it correctly as “Dow.”
“Your name is The Tao? What kind of name is that?”
I shrugged. “Mine.”
To her credit, Mrs. Herrick glanced at her class roster to see if I was telling the truth and moved on, but as you might guess, that wasn’t the end of it.
“It’s a book,” I told Sue Eldridge and Ronnie Blackburn later, my back against the jackets hanging on hooks at the rear of the room. I was as yet unaware it is also an entire philosophy.
“Why did your mother give you the same name as a book?” Sue asked.
“Just did.” I wanted to explain that my real mother, Abby, didn’t do that; that it was my buy-O mother, but I hadn’t been real successful articulating that in the past.
Ronnie laughed and turned to the rest of the class, who were pulling on their coats for recess. “His mom gave him the same name as a book!” he yelled to them. Then a light clicked above his head. “Hey,” he said, “me, too. My mom gave me the same name as a book, too. I’m Curious George!” He squealed in delight, falling to the floor between giggles, scratching under his arms like an ape.
Suddenly he was struggling to push my knee off his chest.
“Stop!” Mrs. Herrick yelled, but I punched Ronnie Blackburn in the nose anyway. It was the beginning of a series of unplanned three-day vacations that would dot my educational career like chicken pox.
But there’s worse news about my handle, and if you’ve been paying attention, you know what it is: My health dictates the health of the nation’s economy.
“How’s your son doing, Mr. Jones!”
“The Tao’s up today, sir.”
“That’s good news. Try to keep him happy.”
Think I don’t get carried away with those? To avoid confusion, and raucous laughter whenever my name is mentioned, I’m called T. J.
It’s over now. I’m at the end of the summer following my senior year in high school; I have my diploma in a lockbox and the advantage of hindsight. But I want to tell it without that advantage-tell it as it unfolded-Mr. Simet says any story is only true in the moment.
My father always said there are no coincidences; that when two seemingly related events occur, they are related and should be treated that way. My father had very good reasons to try to understand how the universe works, which I’m sure I’ll get into later.
The seemingly related things that I believe kick this story off happen on the second day of school. Coaches have tried to get me to turn out for sports since junior high. Sometimes they’re insistent and sometimes downright nasty, accusing me of lacking the high school equivalent of patriotism, even to the point of calling me a traitor. But I’ve always eluded them. I’ll play basketball three or four hours nonstop on open gym night, and I’ve always taken a couple of guys to Hoopfest in Spokane, which is the largest three-on-three street-basketball tournament in the country, and my team has won its division every time. I think I could have been a pretty fair football player; I’m sure not afraid to take a hit or to put a good lick on a guy, but something inside me recoils at being told what to do, and that doesn’t sit well with most coaches, who are paid to do exactly that. I don’t blame them; I know it’s me. But the better you know yourself, the better chance you have of staying clear of trouble, and I’m pretty sure I’d never have lasted a full season of football with Coach Benson or basketball with Coach Roundtree. At one point or another in the heat of a game, Benson and Roundtree retreat to the time-tested and highly grating tool of public humiliation as a motivator, and that particular tool brings me back in your face faster than a yo-yo on a bungee cord, at which time I immediately suspend the notion of giving a shit.
So why was I considering joining a swim team that didn’t exist before this year when I haven’t been competitive in the water since fourteen, except for trying to beat Dad into the shower every morning? It’s Simet. He catches me after third-period English and says, “Jones, didn’t you used to be a pretty good swimmer?”
“I’m still a pretty good swimmer,” I say. “Wanna try me?” Simet and I enjoy a longstanding rivalry wherein one of us challenges the other to some athletic contest. We handicap it based on our abilities (he lies like a student with a term paper due to get an advantage) and then make a friendly wager, say my English grade against some unsavory task he needs done, like stirring his compost heap when the temperature rises above eighty, or washing and waxing his Humvee, which looks better dirty.
He says, “I want to try you, but not against me.”
“Who?”
“Someone different every week.”
Visions of age-group swimming pop up: permanently chlorinated hair and eyes, clogged sinuses, ear infections. “This has a familiar ring.”
“What do you think?”
“That you generally give me less information than I need to make an informed decision.”
He gathers his books and nods toward the parking lot. “Hop into my babe-mobile and I’ll buy you a milk shake. Maybe a pizza. We’ll talk.”
I follow him down the hall. “Make it a steak. Something is sick and wrong here.”
“Let’s hope it takes you a while to figure out what it is.”
At Solomon’s Pizza, Simet tells me that Mr. Morgan, the principal, asked him to replace Mr. Packenbush as assistant wrestling coach, who’s resigning due to reasons of health. In a burst of panic, Simet told Morgan he’s been trying to get a swimming team going, since Cutter is one of only three high schools in the conference without one.
I say, “Morgan, of course, pointed out that we don’t have a pool.”
“Way ahead of him,” he says back. “I told him I could get free workout time at All Night Fitness, which I’m praying will actually be true.”
“The pool at All Night is twenty yards,” I remind him, “with an underwater ledge at the shallow end that will give you a subdural hematoma if you flip your turn.” A subdural hematoma is what happens to your brain if you get whacked on the head hard enough to bounce it off the inside of your skull. I hear that term a lot when my mom is trying a child-abuse case.