Grappler — Samuel Clementine
Small, fat fingers, wrapped around the gnarled limbs of a crab apple tree turn red then white when you hang from them. The weight of my small body being held up, just barely, by the tree and I felt myself bounce slightly in the hot Missouri air. I was sweating hard even then, but after days of climbing the small tree, my eyes would adjust to the sting of perspiration and my fingers learn to go numb before the pain of the rough bark forces me to release. I’ve known that feeling before in one way or another ever since. I would lose my grip and fall, feet first, into the grass below, my body twisted in fear or limp in exhaustion, but I would try to climb it all day. Even on days that I would make it to the top I would try again. The crab apple tree was nothing to fear or hate, but an opponent. My mother saw me some days, when she was up, and would watch from the screen door of the trailer as I’d try to climb that little tree. She’d watch me and from time to time the muscles in her arm would jump to grip the handle of the door the way my forearm would jump to grab the crabapple tree. She’d wince as if the bark on the handle would stick her and she’d turn away with that same pained look in her eyes. Three weeks after my fifth Thanksgiving on this earth, she turned away crying.
When I was finally able to climb the tree five times in a row without stopping, my mother informed me that my sister and I would be living with our father for the foreseeable future. I was either never told why or the years have taken it from me. Two days later I lived with my father in a halfway house in Springfield, Illinois. The trailer I lived with my mother and sister at the time gave me direct access to the tree, but now I had no friends and no opponents. Just long, cold walks with my father and groups of kids I didn’t know that seemed to be a constantly rotating cast of people that would be there one day and gone the next. I was never privy to the things that put my father in prison, but years later my mother would only tell me, “Your dad likes to fight.” When he couldn't pay rent he would refuse to leave wherever it was he was living and he would be removed by the cops. He was abusive and bad tempered and often cruel. When I lived with him he kept his nose clean and tried to teach me about God. I didn’t particularly like the pastor nor did I like the songs, but I remember feeling that I owed somebody something the whole time I was there.
We’d walk, sometimes for hours, from friend’s houses to soup kitchens to shelters to the halfway house. I was too large to be carried, but when it was late and bitterly cold he’d carry me as far as his arms could handle it. After some time the cold wind and the ache in my feet would numb just like my hands on the crabapple tree. The hostile cold would cut through my father and I like a knife and it took quick feet and tactics to make sure we didn’t freeze or starve. When my grandparents would send toys I would have to give the bulk away. My father never told me why he did this, but I can only guess it was to prepare me for the losses I can see coming. He didn’t want me to react to pressure, but to prepare my heart accordingly. About a year after I arrived in Springfield, my father left my sister and I with a woman named Mary he had met at a bus stop a week earlier. He said he’d be back the next day with a car, but two days passed. She, understandably, panicked and called the police and asked me if I knew anyone to call. I called the only number I knew, my grandmother, and the last thing I saw him doing was struggling with a cop to reach us as we were put into my grandparent’s car.
I would live for the rest of my childhood with my mother’s parents. They were in their mid fifties when they adopted my sister and I. We are the third generation in my family to have been raised by them, but the only black children they’ve ever raised. This began a losing battle in my home. My great-grandfather was a golden glove boxer when he was my age, but when he had children he put the gloves down and put his hands to raising a family. His offspring, five girls and one boy, are the people who raised me for much of my adolescence. Each of them would, in earnest and sometimes subconsciously, show me how they dealt with the abuses they suffered as poor kids in a hard home. Uncle Jimmy wrestled and boxed and drank to numb himself. The sisters, my aunts, work themselves relentlessly because working meant not being home and money meant never having to come back. It was a family of tacticians and fighters, but we only ever fought each other.
I would wrestle, as my father did, and in it I found an outlet and an art. The control I gained over my body and my breathing made nights when I would go home to an imploding home seem easier to deal with. I could stay for a few hours after school and I would focus on defeating a single opponent. I had nowhere to be, but on the mat. My fat fingers would grip my opponents, turning red then white, as their weight would shift and I’d send them flying to the ground. I could grapple with a single opponent and it was never to hurt them, but to learn. We could teach each other about our strengths and weaknesses only by grappling with each other. I would only wrestle for one year, but these lessons would remain with me. Grappling is fighting someone while holding on to them. As grapplers, it is our duty to hold onto our opponents.
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Samuel Clementine works as a UPS package handler and does theatre throughout the Midwest.