The Tiger Retires

By Kristen Miller

I think everyone has at least one thing they do compulsively. Some drink. Some gamble. Some clean. Me, my compulsion is to perform. Whoever I’m around, I’ve got to put on a performance for them, give them who they want. Some might say that makes me fake, but I’m always being me, just funnier or more interesting. At least for most of my audiences. Not for Harry, though.

When I hang out with Harry now, I’m putting on a show for him, too, but I’m not being me. Not even me being funny or interesting. Instead, I’m being that guy I was in high school. I leave behind all the education and maturity and five years of experiences because I feel like my possessing those things while he basically gave up his opportunity to have them is an insult to him.

I’m always playing a character for someone, and when I’m around him, my character is eighteen-year-old Sean.

I’m on my way to his apartment in downtown St. Paul, driving my year-old Honda Civic through streets that seemed like busy city streets until I had Chicago’s to compare them to. What was he going to think of my new car? I felt like driving it was like showing off or something, even though I knew it wasn’t. I’m a poor graduate student, and now even poorer for the car payments, but last year my 1985 Chevy Impala, the one I had to save two thousand dollars for with a part time job at a grocery store when I was sixteen, it died. I had to get a car, and it made sense to get a new one. To make matters worse, he’d told me that his car was broken down and he was waiting on his next paycheck to get it fixed. I was going to feel like a prick driving us around in the Civic tonight.

My family doesn’t really do the holiday thing, or the whole family thing either, for that matter, so I don’t come back home very much. My two older sisters could give a fuck about me. The older one, who used to be my favorite, actually told me that once. I’m pretty sure my mom shares their sentiments, and I know for a fact that my dad does, as indicated by the four times I’ve seen him since I was five. Truth is, I guess I feel about the same toward all of them. I’ve never been given reason to feel anything toward any of them but indifference. My sisters and I all left as soon as we graduated high school. Once we were all gone, Mom got remarried. Any contact between any of us since has been obligatory occasions like weddings and the occasional holiday.

I could have gone the rest of my life without coming back to Minnesota, but here I am.

I’ve been to Harry’s apartment only twice, and I’ve only seen him half a dozen times since he had to drop out of Michigan. That was two months into our freshman year. His ex-girlfriend Amy called him up one day in October, his birthday, in fact, to tell him that she was pregnant, but he didn’t need to worry about it because she was going to get an abortion. Why the hell she called him to tell him this is beyond me. It would have been better for him if he had never known. Maybe that’s why. She wanted to torture him, to get back at him for breaking up with her. He hung up the phone and paced around for, like, an hour, and then called her back and said that if she would have the kid, he would come back and take it and take care of it. She wouldn’t even have to see it again if she didn’t want. Two days later, he was packed up and on his way back to Minnesota to find a job and start saving up money for what would turn out to be his son.

It’s his birthday again today. Five years ago, exactly, his life changed forever. Maybe that was part of the reason for my not making a big deal of it. Birthday nineteen got ruined with the news from Amy, so it seemed to me he would probably make negative associations with the date. For birthdays twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three, a card from me in the mail and a phone call seemed sufficient. My girlfriend Alanna and I were grocery shopping when I remembered to pick up a card last week, and she asked me why I didn’t just go see him. October fifth was on a Saturday this year, so it wouldn’t interfere with school at all. I can’t explain to her the whole guilt thing, and found myself nodding in agreement that it was a good idea. An hour later I was back at my apartment calling him up and telling him I would see him in four days.

I parked across the street from his apartment building on Grand Avenue. For a few seconds, I just sat in the car and looked out my window at the building. It’s pretty nice, actually, an old brick building with cement steps leading up to the front door and balconies on the second and third floors. The balconies don’t belong to the apartments, though. It’s not that nice. They’re just extensions of the hallways between apartments. Still, it’s definitely nicer than my apartment. A nicer place to raise a kid, too.

I got out of the car and walked across the street. It was really pleasant out, sunny and not too cold yet. Two weeks from now, it was probably going to be thirty degrees colder and snowing. I’m glad Harry’s birthday isn’t in January. No amount of guilt trip from Alanna would have gotten me here then. It’s cold enough in Chicago.

A little face was peering out of the left hand window on the second floor as I crossed the street. I raised a hand in a wave, and the face disappeared, replaced by rustling curtains.

I walked in the front door and climbed the wooden stairs to the second floor. As I came to the top, the door to Harry’s apartment was opening. The same little face peered around the doorframe.

“Hi,” I said.

He looked at me like I might look at, say, Nicole Kidman, had I ever the chance to meet her. I didn’t know four year olds looked at anyone like that, except for maybe the guy playing Santa at the mall.

“You’re the tiger,” he said.

“I’m Sean,” I corrected.

“You’re the tiger in Dad’s pictures,” he said back.

A large hand rested itself on top of the kid’s head of brown hair and Harry stepped out into the hall behind him.

“Sean was the school mascot, Max,” Harry corrected.

So that’s what he meant.

“Mascot,” Max repeated. “I couldn’t remember the right word.”

Harry pushed Max into the apartment and gestured for me to follow. “I told him you were coming to visit and he wanted to know who you were, so I showed him the picture from the football game where you were in the mascot costume with the head off. Then he had to see all the pictures of you from the yearbooks and stuff. He’s been bouncing around the house the last few days, all excited about meeting the tiger.”

“When I’m in high school, I’m going to be the mascot, too,” Max said earnestly. He stood beside Harry with his hands behind his back, looking up at me with his huge blue eyes. I haven’t been around four year olds very much, but he seemed pretty grown up.

“You don’t want to play football like your dad?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Dad says you get hurt playing football too easy. He says his knees are like grandpa’s. I’m going to be the mascot instead and play soccer like you. Dad says that’s a smarter idea.”

“Maybe it is. Girls go more for the football players than the mascot, though.”

I realized how that sounded and decided to shut up for awhile.

Harry put his hand on Max’s head again. It was pretty weird. I’d never seen him act like a dad. “My mom was supposed to come get him, but she isn’t going to be able to make it, so we’re going to have to take him to my parents’ house.”

Forgetting my resolve seconds earlier not to speak, I responded, “That’s fine. I haven’t seen your parents in, like, four years.” What was left unsaid was that I hadn’t seen him in almost two.

Damn it.

Max was still standing there with his hands behind his back, looking solemnly at us both. When neither Harry nor I spoke for a few seconds, but more looked down at our feet or over at Max, the kid spoke up, like he knew it was the right time to talk.

“You know my grandma and grandpa?” he asked me.

God bless him. “Sure do. I’ve known them since I was just a few years older than you. They were like my parents, I was over there so much.”

“What about your parents? Didn’t you see them?”

“I just lived with my mom. I didn’t know my dad.”

“Like I don’t know my mom,” he said emotionlessly.

I knew this was a bad idea.

“Ready to go?” Harry said at last.

Harry didn’t make an issue of the car. When he saw it, he simply said, “The Impala must have died. I was wondering how much longer it would hold on.”

Max was totally fascinated by me. As we drove to his grandparents’ house in Bloomington, he asked me endless questions. Was I in college still? What was I learning about? Did I still play soccer? Was I still a mascot?

I didn’t need to be a mascot any more. I needed it in high school so I could do all the crazy stuff but do it inside the tiger costume. Hardly anyone knew it was me in there, so it was like being free to do anything I wanted. But I was kind of shy. When I wasn’t in the costume, I always had to hold back. I thought of crazy things to do, but had to get Harry to do them either with me or for me. When Harry left Michigan, I didn’t have him as my partner in crime. I had to get out the performance compulsion on my own. It took awhile, but now it comes naturally. How could I let him know that I didn’t need him for that any more?

“Hey,” I said to Harry, but really more as a show for Max. “Do you remember the Santa and Rudolph thing?”

Harry grinned.

“What was the Santa and Rudolph thing?” Max asked from the back seat. He leaned forward attentively.

“One of Sean’s goofy ideas.”

“One of my brilliant ideas,” I corrected. “When we were in high school, one Christmas I took us to Wal Mart and bought a Santa hat for your dad and reindeer antlers and a red nose for me and a whole bunch of candy canes. Then we went out into the parking lot and tied me to the front of a buggy and your dad got in and then I pulled him around in that buggy for a couple hours, all over the parking lot, going up to people while they were getting in their cars and handing them candy canes and telling them Merry Christmas.”

Max sat back in the seat again, giggling hysterically.

“The store manager got upset,” Harry said. “He came out and made us leave.”

“I never understood that,” I said. “We were making people laugh, but no one seemed mad at all until that guy. He was probably just upset we didn’t invite him to be an elf.”

Max was howling with laughter by now. Even Harry was chuckling a little bit. It was good to see. We used to spend so much of out time in hysterics, and being around him didn’t seem right without at least a little laughter.

“Can we do that this Christmas?” Max asked once he had a handle on the giggles. “I’d be a good elf.”

Harry’s laughter trailed off, too.

“Maybe if I come around this Christmas we can give it a try,” I said. But I didn’t really see that happening.

Going in to say hi to Harry’s parents was every bit as awkward as I had imagined. His dad Jack came in to greet us in the foyer, and he gave me a firm handshake before he picked up Max for a hug.

“How have you been, Sean?” he asked. “We’ve really missed having you around. What have you been up to?”

“Oh, you know. Just getting through school and stuff.”

“You’re at the University of Chicago now? Graduate school?”

I nodded. “History. Working on my Masters.”

“What you planning to do?”

I shrugged. “Teach, I guess. I’m trying to decide if I want to go for a PhD or not. I’m not really sure if I want to.” Actually, I was pretty much positive that was what I wanted to do, but I just didn’t feel like I should say so.

“I bet your mom’s really proud.”

I shrugged again. Apparently he’d forgotten about how I could spend as much as a week with them back in high school and not get one phone call from her wondering where I was. “I guess. I don’t talk to her all that much. I haven’t seen her since Christmas. She came down to see me.”

“You’re going to go by and see her before you go back, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. I didn’t really tell her I was coming.”

Jack seemed perplexed. He set down Max. “Aunt Jenna’s in the kitchen making some cookies for you, buddy. I bet they’re about done. Want to go see about them?”

Max’s face broke into a grin and he took off running down the hall.

“What you guys going to do tonight?” he asked us.

“You know, typical birthday stuff. Go eat dinner, drink some beer, play some pool. Relive our younger days,” I said back with a grin.

“That’s the Sean I remember. You guys go get into trouble or something. Have some fun.”

Jack is such a cool dad.

He looked seriously at Harry. “Go do something irresponsible. You deserve to do that every once in awhile.”

It made me wonder what he was doing with his time. I didn’t know he knew how not to get in trouble.

And it made me wonder like I had so many times before, what the conversation had been like when he came and told them that Amy was pregnant and he was dropping out of school to work, and that he was going to raise the kid himself. If I had shared that type of news with my mom, there would have been a lot of cussing and telling me how stupid, how big a screw-up I was. But since neither one of us ever really gave a shit about the other, there was no damage to be done to the relationship.

Because Harry had always had a pretty good relationship with his parents, he did have a lot to lose. And until this moment, when I saw the way Jack was looking at Harry, I’d always imagined this irreparable damage had been done five years ago and that they would always have some trace of anger in their eyes when they looked at him now, for throwing away all he had going for him, the intelligence and ambition and ability. All I saw in Jack’s eyes now was love, and perhaps even a bit of respect. Not at all what I had been expecting.

“I’ll be back to get Max before twelve,” Harry told Jack.

“Nonsense. Your mom and I love it when he spends the night. Stay out. Till you run out of places that are open. That’s an order.”

Harry rolled his eyes like you would when your dad gives you the nod-nod-wink-wink before you head out with your date for your senior prom.

“Go,” Jack said.

“Bye, Max,” Harry yelled back toward the kitchen.

“Bye, Dad,” Max yelled back. “Bye, Mr. Sean.”

“Stop by tomorrow if you can, Sean,” Jack said. “Lilly’s going to be real disappointed she missed you.”

“I’ll try.”

It was hard to make conversation when we ate dinner. I didn’t really know what to say. Asking him about what he’s been up to seemed wrong. I basically knew that part. I didn’t want to tell him about me, either. So for the most part we stuck to neutral things like movies and sports, but it all seemed forced. There was no way to win.

The only new thing I found out about him was that he was going to school now, part time, University of Minnesota. He was working on a degree in elementary education. He was doing this along with his job, one of those fun computer data entry jobs at an insurance company. I had already known about the job.

Elementary education?

I didn’t ask why.

The only time I didn’t feel weird was when I got us talking about this fight we got in a few weeks before we left for Michigan. This guy Tanner had been hitting on Harry’s girlfriend Amy every time Harry was out of sight, and I got pissed off and called him out on it. Called Amy out on it, too, actually. I really hated her, even before that night. It was one of those stupid high school things, us shouting at each other and cussing each other out. Tanner was acting all superior. He was even bigger than Harry so that meant he was huge compared to me, and he also had his buddy Rob backing him up. And Amy wagging her finger at me and telling me to mind my own fucking business.

This was one of those many times that I wished that there was no stupid rule about hitting girls. They want equal rights, then they should be able to be punched out just the same as a guy when they talk shit.

Harry came back from the bathroom, I explained what was going on, and shouting escalated to shoving. Then punching, with Amy standing there screaming at Harry, at Harry, to stop. Then Tanner sitting there on the ground with a bloody nose from being punched by Harry and Rob doubled over from being punched a couple good times in the stomach by me. Then Amy kneeling by Tanner, nursing his nose that was probably broken and telling Harry and me that we were barbaric.

Needless to say, that was the source of the Harry-Amy breakup. And since she had something going with Tanner, he’d done DNA tests to make sure that the kid was his. Clearly, it had turned out it was. And you couldn’t deny it looking at Max, either. Spitting image of Harry.

It was quite a look on Harry’s face once we were done reliving that evening five years ago. Just like with the Santa and Rudolph story, he looked nostalgic. I guess it was like he was remembering happier days.

After dinner we went to a bar. We’d split a pitcher of beer at the restaurant, which was about halfway to my normal quitting point. But I felt like he would expect me to drink a lot. My normal quitting point wasn’t going to be the quitting point tonight.

When we first got to the bar, one over near the river and the Xcel Energy Center where the Wild play their hockey games, it was still pretty early. Hardly anyone was there yet, so the pool table wasn’t very busy. We got to play every couple games.

I’ve gotten to be pretty good at pool in the last few years. I play a lot. After my first turn in our first game, when I almost ran the table in my one turn after the other guy broke, Harry looked at me with a fair amount of surprise.

“That was a good run. You must have gotten pretty good.”

I shrugged. “That was a lucky run. I’m pretty inconsistent, actually. Make a beautiful shot one turn, botch an incredibly easy one the next.”

After that, I made sure I didn’t do anything too impressive. If I had a decent run, maybe three or four shots in a row, I made sure to miss one after that. It didn’t seem fair. And missing shots got easier, the more alcohol I got in me.

At least in the bar, it was pretty loud. I didn’t have to try to think of things to talk about. He couldn’t have heard me anyway.

I was going to get through this night, and then go back to Chicago and stop worrying and feeling guilty. Harry seemed as uncomfortable as me, so I probably wouldn’t be obligated to make this trip next October.

Some guy went and grabbed our quarters as I was making my way back through the crowd from the restroom. It was about one. We’d gone through four pitchers of beer. I’d been doing most of the drinking. I should have slowed down, but the more I drank, the less guilty I felt.

There were, like ten sets of quarters down on the table. We’d been waiting for about an hour and a half for our game to come up. I knew I had put ours down on the sixth slot, and those are the ones that this guy was currently kneeling down to put in the slot.

“Hey, man,” I said, stopping right beside him. “Those are our quarters. It’s our game.”

The guy looked up at me, totally annoyed. Then he stood up. He had at least a foot and fifty pounds on me, which made him about Harry’s size. His black hair was long and he had a scruffy beard and mustache. He looked like the type who probably had a Harley-Davidson tattoo on his arm. I was tempted to ask him if my hunch was correct.

“Those are my quarters, kid. You’ll just have to wait.”

“No, I distinctly remember putting my quarters down right there on the six. Those are the ones you just put in.”

“Well, kiddo, you should have been paying attention, because all the quarters got moved up about half an hour ago to make room for more.”

“Then that means I got skipped. So this is still our game.”

“Sorry, kid. You miss your game and it’s your problem.”

“You really need to stop calling me kid, dude.”

The guy’s pool partner, a blond version of him who was a little closer to my size, came and stood beside him. I was just about to tell him to forget it, but then Harry finally made it over and stood next to me.

“What’s going on?” Harry asked.

“This guy is trying to use our quarters.”

“They aren’t your quarters. I told you, they all got moved up. You missed your game like three games ago.”

“Even if that is the case, we should get to play now, because we got skipped.”

I had no idea why I was doing this. When I get in this situation back with my friends in Chicago, or before when I was in Ann Arbor, I never let it go this far. I would have taken that moment when I was given the opportunity to back down.

But now we were working it like we used to. I was the mouth and he was the muscle. Usually it was enough that he was standing next to me. Every once in awhile, there was actually a fight. That was back in high school, but I didn’t see any reason why it should be different now. He was even bigger and my tongue was even sharper.

“Look, kid, if you’re going to be a brat, just take the damn quarters and play the game,” Mr. Harley-Davidson poster boy said to me. He held his hand out and dropped the quarters on the floor.

Once again, a choice. I had what I wanted. The guy had backed down. But I couldn’t let it go.

“What gives you the right to be so fucking superior?” I found myself asking him.

The man just looked at me.

“You think because genetics has made you bigger than me and you have chosen to look like a damn grizzly bear in a leather jacket, this becomes a situation where you’re going to let me play when it was my turn anyway?” I took a step closer to him.

“Sean,” Harry said.

“I think you should pick up those quarters,” I said.

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking about.

The man pointed down at the quarters. He looked up at me and raised his eyebrows. The pointing finger curled back down to complete the fist, and the fist swung at my face. Pain started with my nose and blasted outward across my face, causing my eyes to tear up and then close. My hands instinctively went up to catch the blood that came pouring out of my nose.

I could feel Harry push past me, and the sounds of a few more punches being thrown. Just as I was starting to open up my eyes, someone knocked into me and I got shoved to the ground. I put my left hand down to help push myself back up to my feet and kept the right one up to my nose to catch the blood.

The battle continued beside me. I watched a blurred version of it through involuntary tears.

Harry gave the blond one a shove backward, toward me, and before I had a chance to move it, the guy, with his heavy black boots, had stepped down onto my left hand. I felt something crunch inside it. It made me think of stepping on spilled potato chips on the kitchen floor.

“Shit!” I screamed out at the top of my lungs.

I picked my left hand up and cradled it in my right. Both hands were covered in blood from my nose. My left hand was crunched up potato chips still inside the bag.

Someone grabbed me by the collar of my leather jacket. I thought at first it was going to be the blond guy who had just fallen on top of me, or a bouncer, but it was Harry. He was pulling me toward the door. The very bouncers who I’d thought a second ago were draggin me to my feet, they were heading toward us.

“Sorry, sorry,” Harry called out at them. “We’re leaving. Sorry.”

What was this? Harry leaving a fight? Apologizing?

Once we were outside, he sort of slung me by the collar away from him. I sheltered my hand against me and tried not to fall.

“What the hell was that?” he asked me. “You were, like, trying to get that guy to hit you.”

“That’s… that’s what we used to do. That was our thing, remember?” I only realized now how pathetic it sounded.

“When we were eighteen that was our thing. I didn’t have anything to lose when I was eighteen.”

I kicked the thing closest to me, the brick wall that was the side of the building. “Mother fucker!” I yelled.

“What’s wrong with your hand?” he asked.

“It’s broken. The blond guy stepped on it.”

Harry closed his eyes and sighed. “Shit. All right. Let’s go back to your car and I’ll take you to the emergency room.”

We started walking back toward the car. We didn’t talk.

This was such a bad idea. I’m going to let Alanna have it when I get back. I can’t be like I was in high school. That’s too immature. But I can’t be who I am now, because then it seems like I’m bragging.

I caught a glimpse of his face in one of the street lights. He had a cut on his cheekbone.

“You okay?”

“What?”

“Your face. You’re bleeding some.”

He reached his hand up and touched the place and brought away fingers with a little bit of blood on them.

“Damn it.”

“It’s not that bad,” I said.

“Well, Max will notice. He notices everything. I don’t want to have to explain it to him.”

“Tell him you fell.”

“I don’t lie to him.”

“This might be a good time to start.”

“No.”

We walked some more. I could see my Civic about a hundred yards ahead.

“What does your girlfriend think about you getting into fights all the time?” he asked me.

“I don’t, really. I don’t think I’ve been in anything more than a shoving match in probably four years. I guess you can probably tell that from the quality of my fighting. Let the guy punch me in the face, get knocked down, let some guy step on my hand and break it.”

“Then why the hell did you decide to make tonight the night you try to regain your habit?”

Now that he was asking me to explain it, the reason sounded stupid.

“Well, I’m pretty drunk.”

“You haven’t had that much. Not too much more than me.”

“It’s been awhile since I drank this much.”

“So you choose tonight to drink more than usual and get in the first fight you’ve been in in four years? Why?”

“I don’t know.” We were at the car now. I awkwardly fished the keys out of my left pocket with my right hand and tossed them to him. At least the blood on my hand was somewhat dry now, so I didn’t hand him bloody keys. He unlocked the car and we both got in.

“I guess I felt like I owed it to you to be like I was before.”

Harry sat there silently for a few seconds before starting the car. I thought he was going to say something, but he just started the car. We were halfway to the emergency room when I realized that if anything was going to be said, it would have to be from me. Harry was the quiet one, and he can do the silent treatment like a pro.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know how I was supposed to be. I ruined your birthday because of it, and I’m sorry.”

He still was quiet for awhile. I was starting to think I, big surprise, hadn’t said the right thing, but he finally spoke.

“Do I have a sign on me that says, ‘Fragile - Handle With Care’?”

I looked down at my hand, a useless, throbbing mess of stiffly curled fingers and drying blood. “No. You don’t. You’re the toughest mother fucker I’ve ever known.”

“Then don’t treat me like I do. Okay?”

I nodded.

“I don’t regret how my life is. I don’t need you to regret it for me.”

He didn’t talk again until we were sitting down in the waiting room at the emergency room, three ice packs between us, him holding his up to his cheekbone where he was not only going to have a decent sized cut, but also a pretty big bruise, and me resting my aching, swelling hand left hand on top of one and using my right hand to hold the other on my nose.

With the ice pack still covering my nose and making my voice sound funny, I asked him, “So why elementary education?”

Harry, that guy I went to high school with, who’d always wanted to be a lawyer, was now a dad who turned out to really like kids. It never occurred to me he would actually enjoy having a son. One of the many surprises I contemplated as I drove east on I-94 on my way back to Chicago late the next morning.

We were at the emergency room until four in the morning, and then went and crashed at Harry’s apartment. I hardly slept at all, mostly because of my hand, indeed broken (two fingers and three of the bones in my hand, the meta-whatevers) and now encapsulated in a cast. All night, and still now as it rests in my lap, it had sent out pulses of pain in time with the beat of my heart.

They let you pick the color of the cast. I guess if you’re, like, Max’s age, that’s a huge deal. But when you’re twenty-three and going to be sporting this thing for six to eight weeks, you’d just as soon have one of the plain white ones like they used to do. I went with black. I spent a lot of my sleepless time on Harry’s couch contemplating my other color choices and wondering if I had made the correct one. At one point I started regretting my failure to choose blue. That’s how tired I was.

I guess adults don’t break bones as much as kids. I can hear Alanna now, saying to me, “Well, maybe if you’d been acting like an adult…”

I should have taken the codeine they gave me. I might have slept some, but I didn’t want to be falling asleep on my six-hour drive this morning, and I wasn’t sure how long they would take to wear off. Relief from pain would have to wait until I was safely back in my own apartment.

This morning I took Harry back to his parents to get Max. He stayed there and was going to get Jack or Lilly to take him home this evening. I made sure I explained the injuries, and managed to make Harry look fairly responsible to his parents and like a hero to Max.

Lilly had asked me if I was going to stop by and see my mom before I left. I guess she and Jack have forgotten about my relationship with her. I just stuck to telling her, “Probably not.” I’m an hour away from St. Paul now, and I didn’t come closer than fifteen miles of my mother. Going by to see her, that just wasn’t me.

Max asked when I was going to come back and visit. I told him that I didn’t know. I didn’t know if I would or not, but Santa and Rudolph sounded pretty entertaining. And having an elf would be a nice touch.