At Least They're Committed

Today it happened when I was doing lat pulls in the sad-ass but functional little gym we have on campus. Left side, seventh through ninth ribs caught on fire. The cartiledge severed again.

Forrest Calvert.

It doesn’t happen much anymore, but for years I wasn’t even able to laugh hard, let alone do a series of lateral pull-downs, let alone push ups. It burns like crazy: to where it takes my breath away.

Thanks Forrest. Another fabulous college memento.

I lived in a beautiful old house with bleached sinks, ancient wall paper, century-old doors with etched glass, and hardwood floors. It had been renovated into apartments. I lived on the bottom floor to the left, Forrest was up the stairs and to the right.

The house had a magnificent front porch that looked across to the guys’ dorms where my boyfriend, a baseball player, slept. My friends and I would sit outside on fall afternoons and rock back in our porch chairs and wait for people we knew to walk by and wave and come up and bullshit with us for awhile.

Forrest, who was at least 10 years older, would walk up the steps to the porch and join us . . . kind of. He’d stand and stare and we’d say “Hi Forrest” and he’d pass us a skeletal grin and his eyes would squint through thick glasses and he’d readjust his comb-over and he’d just stand there. Eventually he’d go inside.

On this night, the baseball players were out of town on a road trip. The dorm and the street were empty so I was kicking back inside my apartment. There was a knock on the door. I opened it a crack. The hallway was dark and the light from inside my apartment reflected off his glasses and something he had in his hands. Something he shoved in my direction. “I baked you cookies,” Forrest said.

It wasn’t right and I knew it at the time. I tensed but opened the door slightly, he slid in to my living room, somehow, like a snake, dropping the plate of cookies into my hands.

Forrest took six steps to his right and planted himself in an overstuffed, timeworn chair under the apartment’s front window. I placed the cookies on the table between us and sat on the sofa that ran parallel to the door.

I was in trouble. “Eat a cookie!” Forrest insisted. Christ! I wondered what he’d put in them! But, still, I took a bite and lavished on him about how wonderful they were, apologizing that I was on a strict diet and couldn’t eat any more.

He made small talk and I searched the room for possible weapons and escape routes. His voice was droning in my head but I was thinking “Well, if he comes at me this way, I’ll be able to get to the door, but if he comes around the other way I’ll have to get past him . . . ”

There was a dead grasshopper on the throw rug in the very center of the room: about 5 inches in length, pasty green and perfectly formed, as if it had tipped over just then and died. I remember because it was the biggest one I’d ever seen and I was quite certain it wasn’t there before Forrest had slid his way in and I wondered whether the grasshopper was some form of voodoo symbol or cult ritual.

And then he jumped — no not the grasshopper, Forrest. He sprang over to the couch where I was sitting, shoved his face in close to mine and started preaching about the devil, Satanism, the Dallas Cowboys, why people won’t talk about sex,  and God. I leapt away from him, maybe a little too far because it landed me farther from the door, from my escape, than I had intended.

“Forrest, you have to go!” I choked. But of course he didn’t go. He moved around the coffee table to his right, surprisingly, not blocking the door as I bolted toward it. He grabbed me from behind and I wrested away, frantically fingering the crystal and brass door knob. He pulled me back as I twisted the knob. When the door flew open it flung both of us back and he momentarily lost his grip, regaining his balance only enough to wrap his bony fingers around my left arm. I hurled my weight forward, reaching out with my right arm, leaving claw marks in the door jam — and that’s when it tore. Forrest, ripping at my left arm, trying in vain to pull me away from the door, away from the hall and safety; me, with my right, fighting for my life, my sanity, my chastidy, whatever it was that he was trying to take from me. Fire exploded in my chest shooting up my neck and into my skull. I gasped. Maybe it was pain, but it really felt more like red, seering flames. Still does.

I twisted my left arm into an unnatural position and Forrest wasn’t able to hold on. I screamed and was free, throwing my weight against the front door of the house and spilling out into the middle of the quiet, dead, empty street. I stood quaking beneath where one of the street lights shone brightest. Forrest stepped out onto the porch, freaked.

“Go home Forrest, go home!” I cried.

“I’m sorry! I was just! I just wanted to be close to you . . . ” he was talking and I was hearing but I just needed him to go away. Eventually, he went inside.

After several minutes, I slunk back into my apartment. Shut and locked the door. Kicked the dead grasshopper under the couch. Curled up in fetal position under all the covers on my bed. Called my parents and started to sob.

My dad wasn’t home. Mom frantically told me to call my college advisor, Ray, right away. I hung up, called Ray, he called two of my female classmates to come over as soon as they could and headed over himself. As soon as I hung up, the phone rang again. Dad had gotten home. All energy of hell, of wrath, of vengeance that could be unleashed into the night was loosed by my father. “You call the police NOW!” he bellowed. “You get a restraining order NOW!!! You tell the police to tell him if he comes near you, if he so much as crosses your path he will be dead NOW!!!!!”

I did what my dad said, though I’m not sure I ever completely followed through on the restraining order. I didn’t have to. When the baseball team got back, when my boyfriend and his friends found out what happened, I was never wanting for company. Should I have even dared to set out walking to class by myself, I was immediately flanked by two or three guys who, without so much as a word about why, were looking out for me.

Forrest dropped out soon after. It turns out he’d been in and out of mental institutions most of his adult life. I pitied him and felt slightly guilty for the harrassment he endured when word of this “misunderstanding” echoed through the halls at Trinidad State. It’s survival of the fittest, though, ya know?

And it still burns.