Trophy Son(4)

“Okay,” I said.

“Great,” said Dad. “Total annihilation.”

Panos looked from Dad back to me. Panos would have liked to be a better tennis player and therefore get some admiration from Dad, even attention. But he knew that’s not how it worked around here. He was mostly relieved that Dad’s focus wasn’t on him. He also felt guilty that he’d abandoned me to Dad’s obsessive behavior. Panos had plenty of his own stuff to work out for a young kid, always sipping on a cocktail of jealousy, relief and guilt.

Panos said, “Dad, why do you make him go do that stuff? It’s sick.”

“Shut up, Panos. You’re not a competitor. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.” Then Dad went upstairs.

Panos and I exchanged looks. I appreciated his effort to help, though now I felt guilty that Dad lashed at him for trying to help me. That sort of thing happened all the time. Every family has its dysfunction. This was the Stratis form of it.

Panos said, “Want to get out of here? Go see a movie?”

Panos was three years older and a senior at the high school where I would be if I were still in school. He was lucky to be there. When I was in the seventh grade I played a coed softball game for fun. Dad had made it clear I was never to play anything but tennis, but this was just a one-time goofy thing with the girls. I turned my ankle rounding first base. When Dad got the call he drove right to school and went to the middle school athletic director. Dad shouted at the guy and when the guy made the mistake of shouting back, Dad put him in the wall. It turned into a big deal at the time but the school didn’t mess with me or Panos. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll take a quick shower and change.”

Twelve steps to the second floor. Turn right and it was three steps more to my bedroom door. There were sixty-two and one-third tiles on the floor of the shower stall if you include all the tiles that I approximated were cut either in half or in thirds to fit the space of the stall. I showered for one hundred seconds unless it was right after a match in which case I showered for five hundred seconds. I counted this in my head and I counted a perfect second. I tested myself against a clock almost every day.

I noticed the smallest shit everywhere I went. A little piece of garbage, a car in a parking lot with headlights on, all the words on all the signs, how many steps it was from anywhere to anywhere else. But if I ever got interrupted, it didn’t matter. I didn’t need to have the count. I didn’t need to see everything around me, I was just observing. Looking for new information.

It’s funny to think of now. I had all the OCD symptoms but I wasn’t OCD then and I’m not today. I practiced OCD just to fill a void.

When I look back at these teenage years, it’s one thing to do rote recounting of events and another to penetrate to the contemporaneous emotions. I was a stressed-out, anxious kid and only with the benefit of hindsight can I link the stress to the source.

I could never make the link then. At the time I just figured I was OCD, and that actually stressed me out too. But the real problem was that I just had no stimulation. At least no stimulation I wanted. No birthday parties, no dates with girls to be nervous and excited about, no new experiences. I ate, slept, played tennis and rested for more tennis. When I rested I didn’t want to think about tennis but had nothing else to think about so I counted and noticed things around me. My brain had to do something and that was all the material it had to work with.

Panos knew it was better to slip out. Let Dad think Panos was studying and I was resting. He’d hear the car start but by that time it would be too late. We could be down the road and pretend we didn’t hear our cell phones ring.

These were the oasis moments of my teenage years and worthwhile even if Dad was pissed when we got home. Panos and I jogged to the car with stomach muscles clenched and barely breathing. Panos drove a Porsche 911 that cost Dad less than my tennis travel each year so it was a way to balance things out between the kids. We laughed when we got on the street, turned the radio way up and I looked at the front lawns of other people’s lives.





CHAPTER

3

Dad landscaped the perimeter of our tennis court with dense, twelve-foot-high hedges so that we couldn’t see the neighbors or even our own house when playing. There was a path of flagstones leading from our house through two acres of lawn down a slope to the court. Forty-three flagstones. I would step past the double overhead hedges to the court that held back the outside world so that I felt like I was boarding a ship at sea.

“Forehands down the line,” he said and he angled the ball machine toward my deuce court. On this particular day I was nine years old. Still early in my training with Dad, still figuring out my limits. It was more than ninety degrees in August. Dad liked to train at the hottest time of day to condition me for adversity.

The machine pumped balls to me in three-second intervals. I hit fifty while he would retrieve them and dump them back in the machine to maintain a never-ending inventory of practice balls.

“Cross court,” he yelled, and I adjusted to pull my forehands across my body for fifty more balls.

We did backhands down the line, then cross court, then he changed the setting on the machine so that it would oscillate like a fan and move me around.

I could feel the direct sun going through layers of skin like I was being microwaved, but worse and closer was the heat radiating up from our baked hard court. I had drenched my clothes with sweat, my temples were pounding and my feet inside my sneakers were the hottest of all. I could feel the unnatural temperature. “Water break,” I said, my voice high, far from pubescent.