Pinned Down

By Michael Chin

Fall 1996, Ben wrestled a girl for the first time. The biggest tournament of his amateur wrestling career, and his opponent in the finals was Helen Dobb. Ninety-nine pounds, she wrestled up at 106—a weight Ben starved himself to get down to, the lowest weight class. She couldn’t have been five feet tall, which was to her benefit for stocking muscle on her compact frame. 

Helen came at Ben quickly, swinging her body around to catch him by the waist in a tight squeeze from behind. She lifted him and sent him crashing face first to the mat, then tucked her arms under his into double chicken wing position, throttling him. He was helpless, scrambling beneath her, gasping for oxygen.

Ben felt humiliated. Her lead on points from that first round might be insurmountable unless he could pin her, but he already dreaded a second round in which she controlled the action again.

Helen kept up the pressure, didn’t fall for Ben’s half-hearted attempts to play dead then explode free. Seconds left in the first round, she clasped her hands, cradling his neck in one arm, his knee pit in the other, and rolled his helpless body into a pin.

Days later, Coach insisted on showing Ben the video tape to highlight the beautiful pin Helen had executed. The VCR remote failed. Coach smacked it against the palm of his hand to try and get it working right, the footage kept rolling, straight through to Ben embarrassed, exhausted, and, yes, crying. He watched this version of himself cover his face with his left hand while he shook Helen’s with his right.
That was the day he quit wrestling.

#

Four months later, Ben found himself wrestling Christian—a stranger—on the beach at night. Ben came upon the crowd, which he’d come to learn consisted of wrestlers, football players, and their less athletic friends, grappling in the sand. He’d thought it was a fight at first, from the hooting and hollering, the headlock this fat guy had this thinner, taller guy in, as the taller guy’s long legs kicked up sand, an exercise in futility.

Christian was part of this crew. Sand in his hair, he called out Ben. Ben didn’t know Christian’s name in the moment, only that this boy about his height and weight pointed at him, said he looked like a wrestler, and challenged him to step into the circle. Ben had loosely maintained a wrestler’s fitness since he quit his high school team and felt momentarily flattered someone would notice. 

“No thanks,” he said. “I don’t wrestle anymore.”

“Anymore?” The word itself was innocuous, but Christian repeated it with the cadence of a joke about Ben’s mother. “Once a wrestler, always a wrestler. Get down here.” Then, when Ben still hesitated, Christian went on, “What’ve you got to lose?”

It was true Ben didn’t have a lot to do on a spring break beach vacation two hours from home. He’d left the timeshare with his sister Jessie, but she’d promptly ditched him once she got to the boardwalk to try out her fake ID. He’d had misgivings about letting her go alone, but then Jessie had always been able to handle herself, besides which he didn’t have a fake ID and didn’t like the idea of hanging out outside a bar or trying to sneak in through some backdoor. So, he was alone on the beach amid a pack of strangers who’d started egging him on.
Ben had stopped wrestling, but could still handle himself against somebody who hadn’t grappled on any serious level. There was a quiet confidence the sport had lent him, knowing he could defend himself. 

Christian stuck out a hand and introduced himself before they started. From there, he caught Ben off guard. He clearly had training and went straight to shoot Ben’s legs. Ben was a step ahead with a measured leap back into a sprawl before he collapsed on Christian in a front face lock.

Christian spun out from under Ben in a risky transition that left his back down, vulnerable to a pin, but Ben was too rusty to catch him. Soon, their arms were knotted, hands to the backs of each other’s necks, foreheads pressed tight against each other. Ben registered the smells of barbecue sauce and sunscreen on him.

Christian knotted his thighs around Ben in a takeover he should’ve seen coming, but he’d gotten to it a split second before Ben might have taken control.

To the crowd of teenagers on the beach, it must have been obvious Christian was the better wrestler whether he pinned Ben or not. Still, Ben fought like hell to keep his shoulder up. Even if only he knew the difference. Even if all he did was deny this other boy satisfaction.

Both Ben and Christian sweated. The air was humid. Christian’s board shorts and tank top were better suited to bodies straining against one another, and Ben could feel his t-shirt grow heavy, the denim of his jeans sinking into his legs. Still, he fought with everything he had, frantic. Christian wasn’t breathing nearly as hard.

Ben wasn’t sure when Christian let him go, only that one moment he’d pressed his full body weight down on Ben’s torso, the next he knelt beside him, a hand laid flat on Ben’s 
heaving chest. 

“You’re OK,” Christian said over and over and over. The crowd was silent. Ben was crying again.

Christian led Ben away from the crowd after their wrestling match and bought him a root beer from one of the kitschy tourist shops on the boardwalk. They wound up talking for hours, and Ben relayed the story of the girl who’d pinned him. “I’ve still got baggage.” He shrugged and mentioned how he kept thinking he saw Helen in crowds—at school, at the mall, on the beach—haunting him.  

They exchanged AOL Instant Messenger screennames. Christian came to Shermantown a lot in those months to follow, especially after summer rolled around.

#

Ben had his own jalopy but didn’t trust it not to break down over long distances. He loved the feeling of riding in Christian’s car, a beat-up Chevy Impala with a droptop. They moved fast—Christian explained that the speedometer didn’t work right, so he went with the flow of traffic, or else made his best guesses on the open road. Christian played Dave Matthews through his Discman, wired into the car via the tape deck. During the extended, woodwind opening of a live version of “Say Goodbye,” Ben told him how much he liked his taste in music.

“You’ve gotta hear Dispatch,” Christian said. He wrestled a CD binder from the backseat and steered with one hand while he flipped through its four-disc pages. It was only after the next CD was in, the CD binder returned to the back, that it occurred to Ben to offer to help.

Ben did like Dispatch, and OAR on their next drive, and even Phish—the kind of jam band music he’d dismissed as boring before, but that felt perfect riding shotgun with Christian on dark roads, far enough out of Shermantown he didn’t expect to see anyone else he knew.

One night, they got caught in a rainstorm. They tried to get the top up on the car, but it was jammed. The two of them climbed out and worked together from opposite sides to try to force it up, but everything was slippery, and Ben didn’t really know what he was grasping for. Finally, Christian yelled, “Forget it! Get back in the car!” They drove to the nearest shelter, which turned out to be a twenty-four-hour grocery, where they parked and ran inside, slipping and sliding across the tile floor. The cashier, a middle-aged woman with glasses, glared at them from above an Us Weekly with a young actress who Ben momentarily mistook for Helen Dobb on the cover. He still thought he saw her regularly. The cashier turned back to her magazine, and Christian snagged a shopping basket. Their sneakers squeaked as they laughed at themselves.

It was Christian who picked up the bag of red grapes in the produce section and started eating them as they rounded the next aisle. Ben worried about hidden cameras and about how sanitary it was to eat fruit without rinsing off dirt and pesticides first.

But Christian didn’t worry. He held out the bag wordlessly, eyes scanning the shelves, and this time Ben plucked off two big, juicy ones. The skin was smooth against his tongue, the insides sweeter than he expected.

“When my brothers and I were really little, before my dad got steadier work contracting, he’d bring us to the grocery store and get one of those ready-to-eat rotisserie chickens from the front,” Christian said.

They came upon a shelf of beach towels in the clearance aisle, out of season. Ben took the lead this time. He ripped loose the scrap of cardboard packaging and draped one towel over Christian’s rain-soaked shoulders, then pulled another one free for himself. 

“We’d walk around and around the store and he’d tear off hunks of chicken for us.” Christian worked the towel into his ear. “We’d make a meal of it, then he’d stash the carcass someplace.”

Ben couldn’t help feeling Christian had shared something profound about growing up poor and the intimacies of doing illicit things with family. He wanted to share something half as interesting, but all he could think about was food, too. “My dad was always so particular about what I ate, even before I started wrestling. He’s like that with my sister, too, but she’s always been skinny so he doesn’t get on her as much.” His father had wanted Ben to be a star athlete. It didn’t have to be wrestling—he knew Dad preferred basketball, actually—but that was the sport Ben had taken to. “I remember us eating Christmas cookies once. I don’t know how many I’d had. I reached for another, and Dad said, ‘Do you want to look like somebody who ate six cookies in a sitting, or like somebody who had the restraint to stop himself after two?’”
	
They stopped in the magazine aisle next. Ben leafed through an issue of Rolling Stone, and Christian chose Time, before the cashier interrupted them, clearing her throat in exaggerated fashion. Her voice came out in a smoker’s rasp. “Are you going to buy anything?”

A big drop of water fell from Ben’s hair, splattering on the glossy pages in front of him. He formulated some retort, like, had she paid for the magazine she read when they came in? Something that would prove him not only clever, but rebellious.

But Christian took a hold of his hand, lacing their fingers together, and ran straight past the cashier, all the way back to the front of the store. Ben nearly lost his footing, damp sneakers sliding in a puddle they’d made when they came in from the rain. Whether it was luck or sheer forward momentum, he didn’t fall. They got out the door, across the parking lot, back onto the drenched leather seats of the car. 
The engine was running, headlights on, and Christian peeled out. They howled laughter into the night sky before Ben realized no one was chasing them or that it wasn’t raining anymore. 

#

When Ben went to Christian’s high school for Prom, it wasn’t a surprise to hear the principal announce Christian was Prom King. Ben didn’t know much about the school’s social scene, but he knew Christian. That night, Ben observed firsthand how easily he got along with the football players, the theater kids, the artsy couple that had strung together thrift-store garb for the occasion. Christian was the king of his school. 
He walked up to the little stage with his hands in his pockets, perfectly at ease.

“He is so sexy.” Phoebe grasped Ben’s arm from behind. “You’re so lucky.”

Officially, Phoebe was Ben’s prom date, and Julia was there with Christian. Christian had explained that the school never banned same-sex couples from Prom, but he wasn’t interested in making things political. It’d be easiest to register Ben as a guest if he posed as a girl’s boyfriend.

Ben thought the explanation sounded defensive, if not duplicitous. He never would have accepted it coming from anyone but Christian—that he wasn’t ashamed, hiding a secret from his friends at school. But at the dance, Christian held hands with Ben to lead him onto the dance floor. The two of them danced close and Phoebe and Julia lingered near, giggling as they danced, bodies an inch apart, inside each other’s instep, in a way that didn’t so much suggest they were attracted to each other as they knew they were attractive and might perform sexiness. Case in point, no chaperone said a word to Ben and Christian when they slow danced together, but they twice told the girls to tone it down.

But Ben wasn’t about to tell the girls to tone it down when they commented on Christian. All eyes, all ears were on stage. The class adviser—a teacher Ben placed around fifty, with bad bangs and a dress with thick shoulder pads—and the class president, a freckly girl whose chestnut-brown hair that had tumbled free from whatever style she’d started the dance with—worked together to crown the king and queen. Their motions seemed overly shared, like they couldn’t agree on who’d do what. They each took one side of the prom queen’s tiara and put it on her head. They each took one side of the king’s crown, too, red velvet set in a gold frame. Christian made a show of curtsying low so they could reach his head and the crowd laughed. Everyone laughed with Christian. It was one of his gifts.

And Christian danced with the queen, a slender girl with curly red hair and a strapless coral dress. It would be easy enough to mistake them for a real couple. He whispered in her ear and she laughed, the sound lost in the sweeping strings of a radio ballad, soft and saccharine.

Christian lifted the Prom Queen’s hand high to give her a twirl, into a dip, earning polite applause from the crowd. On the last chorus, he lifted her in the air, arms hugged tight around her waist, and spun fast and free, the skirt of her dress orbiting Christian’s form in the middle, sequins shimmering into a phosphorescent blur. The whole world might have revolved around Christian in that moment.

Christian set her down easy and held her until he was sure she had her footing. He locked eyes with Ben for an instant and winked.

#

That summer, Ben and Christian spent a lot of time in the car—basically anytime at all when Ben wasn’t working or his mom didn’t insist on taking him shopping for clothes or a desk lamp or a laundry basket or extra-long, twin-sized sheets that would cover his mattress in the dorm—all the things he’d need when he left for college. 

He and Christian went everywhere and nowhere within a couple-hour radius of one of their homes. They stopped at an apple orchard one day. A museum dedicated to washing machines on another. A small waterfall. Mostly they drove, talking and talking with interludes of music Christian had picked out.

One afternoon, they found themselves at a highway rest stop—just a gravel parking lot, four gas pumps, and a little convenience store.

Helen Dobb was there.

Ben didn’t think she recognized him. Afterall, he was just one in a series of boys she’d pinned. But he’d never been more intimate with a woman’s body than when he struggled beneath hers. He recognized her by her strawberry blond hair; her height; the shape of her calf muscles, left bare by her denim skirt—most of all, the way she carried herself. 

She was with an older guy Ben took to be her boyfriend. He was tall, lanky, an arm over her as they made their way toward the store.

“It’s her.” Ben walked ahead of Christian, closer and closer to the pair, until he was right on top of them. It registered somewhere in his mind—Christian calling after him, Christian asking what was going on, Christian telling him to stop as he put both hands on the boyfriend’s shoulders to peel him away from Helen. Ben moved the guy with ease. He wasn’t a wrestler, Ben decided immediately.

“What the fuck?” Helen asked. There may have been a little fear in her voice. Certainly surprise. But mostly anger.

Ben was on her. He shot her legs and got her on her back. She turned onto her stomach immediately, a wrestler’s instinct, but also swung an arm back and grabbed a headlock. He slipped her grip.

The boyfriend screamed. When Ben turned to look, he found Christian had chicken-winged him, not tight enough to really hurt the guy, just subdue him. Christian understood his part. Sometimes Ben needed talking down. Sometimes Ben needed encouragement. And sometimes Ben just needed someone to hold down somebody’s boyfriend long enough for him to get back his pin, get back his life. Christian understood this.

An instant of distraction, looking at Christian and the boyfriend. Helen was back on her feet and punched Ben hard enough across the cheek for his mouth to spray blood on the gravel below.

Maybe the blood caught her off guard. Maybe she thought the punch had subdued him—for all she knew, this random assailant who wanted to steal her purse—or maybe she meant to free her boyfriend from Christian’s grasp rather than continue the fight. Whatever the case, Ben caught her by surprise this time, tackling her mid-section, sending her crashing down again. Gravel dug into Ben’s knees as he dropped into a straddle, before he laid his body flat over hers, chest to chest. For a glorious instant, he saw tears forming in her eye as he pinned her. He’d won.

Helen didn’t stay down long, but it wasn’t clear how much of a fight she meant to put up. Everything happened in a flurry of her struggling and Christian locking his arms around Ben’s torso to pull him to his feet and yelling “Come on!” as he steered him back toward the Impala.  Inside, Benn flipped down the visor and stole a look in the mirror at himself, cheek already darkening into a bruise, the red line of a scratch over his eyebrow, hair spiked and mashed, caked with white gravel. He half-expected Helen to give chase, but when he looked back from the passenger seat, the engine roaring to life, he saw her knelt on the ground, her boyfriend standing at her side with an arm back over her shoulders. Ben watched them in his side-view mirror as Christian backed out. They shrunk by the second until he couldn’t distinguish them all, until Christian turned toward the road and pulled away.