A Rock To Tie A String Around

When I was in eighth grade, my track coach put me on shotput. To comprehend the true absurdity of this decision, you would had to have seen me in eighth grade – I hadn’t quite broken 5’0 yet, I was just teetering on 4’11, and I weighed somewhere around eighty-five, maybe ninety pounds. My hair was permed in an attempt to look like Jennifer Gray ala Dirty Dancing, the result was definitely more Beaker than Baby, and, I had giant metal braces on my teeth. I was hawt, and overwhelmingly unathletic.

The coach had literally tried me on every, single event and having failed to find anything I could do, decided on shotput. Looking back I can see his logic. He couldn’t kick me off the team, and most of our competitors didn’t even have a female shotput, so the event was usually ceded to me without my ever having to lift that impossibly heavy metal ball off the track field. On the few occasions that I was faced with competing, he would pull me off the event, citing some kind of fake injury. I think he was just being preemptive, predicting the ensuing injury if I had ever had to throw a ball that was about half my body weight.

I can’t put this event in a book. Why? No one would ever believe it. You don’t believe me now do you? I don’t blame you. You’re saying to yourself, why didn’t he just make you run, or better yet, cut you from the team altogether? I don’t know. I can guess though that it had something to do with the fact that my run moves mostly at the same pace as my walk, except with slightly more knee. But, that’s really just a guess, I’ll never know.

That’s the problem with the truth, it often sounds so improbable that it makes lousy fiction. I frequently read blogs written by book and magazine editors and they all echo the same sentiment. Writers who rely on their truthiness to move their fiction come off looking like amateurs. Their insistence ‘but it’s the truth!’ doesn’t make it any more readable.

‘Mommy Dearest’ is a good example of this. I have no doubt that Christina Crawford had a crap time of it, beyond crap time. Joan Crawford was a crazy person with a capital C. I have also never known anyone who could keep a straight face all the way through that movie. I find myself wondering if the wire hangers and chopping down of the rose garden in the middle of the night was a child’s exaggeration of events. If in reality the wire hanger scene went something like this:

Joan Crawford: “Hey, Christina, honey, can you try to pick up your clothes? Your closet is a mess!”

Christina Darling: “Whatever Mom, you suck.”

Joan Crawford: “Is that any way to speak to you mother? Oh man, what did I tell you about the wire hangers? Can you try to use the wooden ones on your nice dresses from now on?”

Christina Darling: “You better be nice or I’ll write a hugely exaggerated version of this scene in a scathing tell-all memoir in a few years.”

Joan Crawford: “Where did you learn the word ‘scathing’? You’re only eight years old?”

As a child, my mom used to threaten that she was going to get us these matching outfits...now that's scary.

Something like that anyway. Of course, it probably did really happen and I’ll now start getting hate mail from Christina Crawford fans…. My point is this: no one wants to hear the truth, no one will believe it. There’s nothing more frustrating then telling a totally true story and having people call you a liar. We call you a liar because we can’t believe how horrible, funny, and/or witty you were in that moment. It would make our lives look downright drab.

Sometimes the truth doesn’t stick because it makes no damn sense. Like the time back in sixth grade when I was the only kid cut from the volleyball team. Somewhere around fifty kids tried out, I was the only one they cut. They wouldn’t even let me be Watergirl #2. The school counselor called me into her office everyday for a month to talk about my feelings, so I could tell her if I was disappointed, rejected, bitter, cynical. To be honest, I was none of those things, I was relieved.

I didn’t really want to play volleyball, volleyball terrifies me to this day. I can totally see why they cut me from the team, why I was the only one who got cut from the team. I was also the only one who ran screaming from the ball every time it got within a five-foot radius of me.
Still though, it doesn’t make any damn sense why they would cut just one kid and not even allow me the self-confidence boosting sense of joiner-inner that serving water and clean towels to my forty-eight other teammates would have brought me. I know it had to have been a point of discussion among the coach and teachers, how else did I get on the school counselor’s radar? Why were my teachers so darn nice to me for the rest of the year? Why? I’ll never know.

What I do know is that scene will never make it into a book. Too bad really, guess I’ll have to go make something up.