challenge

Going the distance

October 30, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I was four when I saw my first grown-up movie. Dad took me. We stood in line and got popcorn and a big Coke and he let me eat all the M&Ms I wanted so long as I promised to sit still and be quiet. It wasn’t easy.

Looking back now, I understand that I was only a body. My father isn’t the sort of guy who would ever go see a movie alone (nowadays, he’s not the sort of guy who’ll go see a movie at all). Mom wasn’t interested in coming along, my sister only a baby. That left me.

“I want to watch this,” he told me when the lights dimmed. “Okay? You won’t understand it, but that’s okay. Just eat.”

Dad was right—I didn’t understand that movie at all. Just people talking about things I couldn’t follow, punching and exercising and showing off muscles and cussing. The good guy? Boring. The bad guy? Not so bad, unless you count the fact that he had kind of a big mouth and thought he was pretty much the best person in the world.

I was the only one in the entire theater who spent much of the movie counting ceiling tiles and kicking the chair in front of me, though. Everybody else acted like this was the best thing they’d ever seen. The entire two hours came down to a fight between the good guy and the bad guy. They circled around and beat each other senseless. That’s when people started standing up in their seats. Started hollering for the good guy. Started cheering. I was a four-year-old boy whose entire life revolved around supper and baseball and the monster I knew lived under my bed, but even I understood the movie I was watching wasn’t real and the good guy on the screen had no idea people were cheering for him. But they all cheered anyway, standing up and waving their arms, and then I got into the act, too. Dad, he just sat there and looked at me.

I’ll never forget that. To this day, whenever I’m flipping around the channels and see Rocky on, I’ll stop and watch. I’ll remember all those people cheering in the theater and my dad sitting there stone still and silent, but I’ll also remember the way his eyes looked—wide and gleaming—and how I knew that on the inside, he was cheering Rocky on, too. Because Rocky was him. Rocky was all those people. Rocky was me and you and everybody.

I’ve seen the other movies, six of them total. Rocky beating Apollo and Rocky beating Mr. T and Rocky beating a big Russian, but none of them are as good as the first. It took me a while to figure out exactly why, but I have now. I sat down and watched that movie over the weekend, and it hit me in a tiny bit of dialogue between Rocky and his fiancee, the adorably awkward Adrian. Read this:

Rocky: I can’t beat him.

Adrian: Apollo?

Rocky: Yeah. I been out there walkin’ around, thinkin’. I mean, who am I kiddin’? I ain’t even in the guy’s league.

Adrian: What are we gonna do?

Rocky: I don’t know.

Adrian: You worked so hard.

Rocky: Yeah, that don’t matter. ‘Cause I was nobody before.

Adrian: Don’t say that.

Rocky: Ah come on, Adrian, it’s true. I was nobody. But that don’t matter either, you know? ‘Cause I was thinkin’, it really don’t matter if I lose this fight. It really don’t matter if this guy opens my head, either. ‘Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed, and if I can go that distance, you see, and that bell rings and I’m still standin’, I’m gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.

There. Right there. That’s why people loved that movie, why they love it still. Because here’s a guy who knew he couldn’t win, but that was okay. All he wanted was to last, to go the distance with the champ, to hear that last bell and still be standing, because then he would finally knew he wasn’t just another bum. And we all have something like that in our lives, don’t we? We all have that one thing that could prove to us we’re not bums, we’re somebody. Living in that neighborhood or having that job or driving that car, and as long as we don’t have that, we’re nobody.

I know a lot of people who fall for that lie. I’ll raise my own hand and count myself first.

The truth is we all have something to prove, if not to others then at least to ourselves, and I spend a great deal of my time wondering if that’s such a bad thing or not. Sometimes I think it is. Other times, I think it isn’t. But I do know this: Rocky lasted those fifteen rounds. He went the distance with the champ. But I don’t think that happened because of luck. I think it more had to do with the fact that he wasn’t a nobody to begin with. He was somebody, and I think we all are.

Believing in the Maybe

August 18, 2014 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

My daughter and I are standing in the middle of a one-lane dirt road deep in the woods. Locals call it the Coal Road, the story being that generations ago coal from the mountains was transported through here by some sort of rail. I’m not sure if that’s true or not—something about that doesn’t seem right—but it’s the Coal Road nonetheless, maybe like big people are often nicknamed Tiny or Slim.

It’s peaceful here on the Road, though during summer nights and autumn weekends the local teenagers come here to drink and, in words my grandmother would once whisper, “Know each other in the Biblical way.” The thirty thousand acres leading from the Coal Road into the mountains are both unspoiled and wild. Mysterious, too. There are plenty of stories about this wood and the spirits that are said to inhabit it. And as someone who’s tromped and trampled through much of it over the years, I can say at least some of them are true.

But those are other stories for other times, because at the moment my daughter is on the prowl. On a mission. Strapped to her narrow waist is a fanny pack that Scooby and the gang might call a Clue Kit, and right now she’s using a magnifying glass to inspect some rather strange footprints in the dirt.

“This is something, Daddy,” she says. She moves the magnifying glass from the ground and stares at me with it. One of her eyes looks like a giant brown golf ball. “This might be him.”

I offer a serious and grave nod as if it might just be him, even though I’m pretty sure what my daughter is looking for would not be wearing a size eleven hiking boot. She takes the small digital camera from her fanny pack and snaps off a couple pictures. “Okay,” she says, “let’s keep going.”

We move from the Road to the trail—this one about three miles and leads to a large reservoir, but I don’t think we’ll go that far. The day is hot and she knows there are snakes. My daughter doesn’t like snakes. I figure if I can come up with a few more clues, that will satisfy her.

Included in the fanny pack is the book that started all of this. I can’t remember the name, Monsters of the South or Unexplained Monsters of Virginia, something like that. My daughter likes her ghost stories, so any book that includes Monsters or Unexplained in the title is fair game. Her grandmother says such reading material is a little too Devil-like, but I don’t mind. I like Monsters and Unexplained, too.

That book led to another and then to another, and then finally to an internet search that lo and behold revealed that Bigfoot himself—or at least one of his kin—had been spotted here in the unspoiled and wild and mysterious wood along the Coal Road back in the 1980s. I don’t remember hearing such a story, but I’m inclined to believe that anyone could see anything here given enough moonshine. I didn’t tell my daughter that when she suggested we take a lazy Saturday afternoon and turn it into an Unexplained Monster hunt, I just said okay. I’d never hunted a monster, and we were due for some daddy/daughter time. Besides, there wasn’t much else going on.

“Look at that!” she says. “There’s a clue.”

And it is, though the marks on the old oak in front of us are a clue that a bear has been by rather than a Bigfoot. I tell her to take a picture. She does. I leave out the part about the bear. That would scare her more than a Bigfoot.

We find other things on our walk—deer hair that is really Bigfoot hair, the chatter of squirrels that are really Bigfoot giggles, and a small hole in the rocks that just might be a Bigfoot home. All are studied and pictured and cataloged in the small notebook in her fanny pack. By then it’s noon. We’re both getting hungry and we’re both sweating, signs that it’s time to head home.

We drive the old truck over potholes and washed-out dirt road, the sun shining through canopies of leaves. It’s been a good day. A great one. We’re making memories.

“Daddy,” she says, “I really don’t believe there’s a Bigfoot. But I like to believe in maybe.”

I nod and smile and rub her head, satisfied that our trip here to this ancient and (some would say) haunted wood has revealed something to us both.

Because she’s right, my daughter.

It’s always good to believe in maybe.

An Invitation to Hell

March 24, 2014 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

For the last three months my buddy Kirk has sequestered himself in a rented cabin deep in the Blue Ridge mountains. As far as I can tell, he took with him only the barest of essentials to complete his stated purpose—a dozen bags of deer jerky, four cases of MREs (that’s Meal, Ready to Eat for you non-military folks), three cases of beer, and two dozen protein bars. That should get him through, he says. If not, he’ll just go hunting.

Get him through for what, you ask? Well, now there’s a story.

Kirk is an old high school classmate and friend. Back then he was awkward and shy and always had his head in a book—three characteristics that guaranteed he’d have a tough time until after his senior year. But he sat in front of me in freshman English and, well, some friendships are born of compatibility and others location.

Even then Kirk wanted to be a writer. A published one. But as both his talent and his confidence were lacking, he always qualified “I want to be an author” with “Probably won’t, though.”

Like a lot of high school friends, Kirk and I lost contact after graduation. But then I ran into him at the mall three months ago.. Well, not him. Not the Kirk I knew. This was New and Improved Kirk, and version 2.0 was quite different.

He had found a cure for all that awkward shyness.

Kirk had become a Ranger in the U.S. Army.

Now that he was out, he was back to pursuing his goal of writing a book. And in the spirit of his down-and-dirty Ranger training, he was locking himself in a cabin in the middle of the wilderness to do it.

And you know what? I bet he will. I can almost guarantee it.

There were a lot of reasons why Kirk wasn’t ready to be a writer in high school. You have to grow some and learn some and fail some and hurt a lot first. But more than that, you have to be trained. Kirk told me he’d had his training now. He was a Ranger.

I’d never considered special forces training and training to be a writer to be one and the same, but he was adamant. They’re exactly alike, he said. Both are a process that tests you, then breaks you down, and then shows you whom you truly are.

But to Kirk, his Ranger training gave him one very big advantage—he’d been taught how to be comfortable in misery. He knew how to embrace the thirst and the hunger. How to endure the cold and the heat. And above all, he knew he was being readied for war and that war was hell, which is why his drill instructors trained him to, in his words, “Get the damn job done. Regardless.”

I think he’s onto something.

Because you can (and should) read all the books you can about the craft of writing. You can learn about plot and character and point of view, learn to kill your darling adverbs and adjectives, and speak in present instead passive voice. But until you learn to be comfortable in misery, you will not succeed. Ever.

There are times when sitting down to write is an invitation to pure bliss, when the words leap from your fingers virgin and perfect and you know without doubt they come from the very best part of you. Enjoy those times. They will be few.

Because for the most part, it’s just the opposite. The writing life is not bliss. It’s roaming through the desert of one submission after another, searching for whatever scrap of food or drip of water you can beg, borrow and steal in order to stay alive. It’s enduring the cold of having nothing to say and the heat of knowing you must write anyway.

And above all, writing is war.

It is a war fought not against agents and publishers, but against yourself. It is a war in which the enemy isn’t acceptance, it’s surrender. And yes, it is hell. No doubt about it. But you know what? A writer, a real one, wouldn’t have it any other way.

I haven’t seen Kirk since. For all I know, he’s still up in the mountains writing his book. I like to think he is. I like to think he’s pounding away at those keys and fighting his war.

That he’s getting the damn job done. Regardless.

I like to think that’s what you’re doing, too.

ANSWERS

February 10, 2014 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

To a certain extent, ritual plays a part in every life. We all adhere to our own ceremonies to mark the important occasions that come along. It can be something as extravagant as a neighbor of mine plans every Thanksgiving, when his home becomes a meeting place for family scattered to all corners of the country. Or it can be as small as the shot of whiskey a friend of mine takes at 4:12 in the afternoon each July 27, in remembrance of his father’s passing.

My own ritual—smaller than either of those I mentioned, yet to me no less significant—revolves around cleaning out my desk before the start of every novel. It is no mammoth undertaking, usually requiring no more than an hour’s time and involving no more than shelving books and filing papers. But I like to start fresh with each story I write, and nothing says fresh more than an empty slab of oak upon which to write.

As I cleaned and filed and shelved this morning, I came upon a tattered manila envelope at the bottom of a stack of papers. ANSWERS had been written diagonally across the front in red permanent ink, in a hand I can scarcely recognize now. The inside bulged with notes and scraps; newspaper clippings; magazine articles; letters written to me and copies of letters I’d written to others. Some were dated as recent as last year. The oldest had 4 Oct. 89 scrawled along the top.

I spread them out before me, reading each one until I remembered, trying to place the where and why of myself—what it had been that led me to include those stories there, in my envelope. I am not to the point that I can say I have lived many years upon this earth, have accumulated many things along the way, and yet I have always counted that envelope among my most important possessions. Because, what you see, what rests in there are all the questions I wish to ask God when I am able to see Him face to face. They are the things I wish to know.

I will stop short of calling that envelope EVIDENCE FOR PROSECUTION, though I admit it was very nearly labeled that instead of ANSWERS. And whom was I determined to prosecute, way back in the very dawn of my adulthood? God, of course. And for the single reason that I did not approve of the way He did things.

Laugh at that all you will. Take a look inside my envelope, though. You may change your mind.

You’ll see an obituary for a high school classmate of mine, who was killed in a freak accident not two years after our graduation—a bright, funny, loving boy, full of life until he wasn’t.

You’ll find a story of a missionary tortured and killed.

A small girl who wandered from home and became lost in the woods, never to be found.

A single mother of three, dying of inoperable cancer.

Accounts of oppression, disease, and injustice. Diary entries of heartbreak and doubt. Themes of death and evil. Tales that over the years forced me to wonder what you or anyone else have wondered at one time or another—

How can a good and loving God allow such things?

At a certain point, I understood there would be no answers to that question on this side of life. People have been questioning the origins of evil and it’s place with God for thousands of years, and we are not too far down the road to answering it. So I’ve kept all my questions here, in this envelope.

How exactly I would get that file to heaven with me was something I never quite figured out. In the past few years, I’ve devoted less and less time to pondering that problem. Not because evil no longer bothers me—it does, perhaps more now than ever—but because of the very likely possibility that I won’t care much about my questions in heaven. I’ll be too full of joy. I’ll be too busy spending time with all those who passed on before me, and preparing for those yet to arrive.

I still don’t understand a great many things in life. I suppose I always won’t. I don’t know why there must be cancer, and why that cancer must take so many innocent people. I don’t know why there is evil, or why there seems to be so much more of it than good.

I don’t know why God does the things He does, or allows what He allows.

But I can do one thing. I can approach those questions now as though they were parts of a story, one I would write just as God writes His own upon all of creation. And I would say—not as a pastor or theologian or philosopher, but as a storyteller—that it is far more beautiful a thing to be redeemed than be innocent. It is far more amazing for fight for peace in a fallen world than to maintain peace in a perfect one.

And it is far more noble to spend your life in search of something than have nothing to search for at all.

The state of our Union

January 27, 2014 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Screen Shot 2014-01-27 at 3.12.12 PM The State of the Union speech is tomorrow, at which several thousand media-types and politicians will take their accustomed places and either praise or condemn, and the other 200 million of us will offer a collective, exasperated sigh that things really have gotten this bad.

But I’ll still watch it, just as I’ve watched every State of the Union since I was ten. I’ll take my spot on the sofa and soak in every word and round of applause, every bit of analysis and rebuttal. Watching has become a tradition of mine, though politics has nothing at all to do with it. Martin Leonard Skutnik III does.

Lenny to his friends. If you’re forty and over, chances are pretty good you remember him. His face and story are likely stuck inside a dusty drawer in the back of your mind, one labeled BIG THINGS. Lenny was a big thing. Thirty-two years ago, he was maybe the biggest. And rightly so.

He was on his way to work on January 13, 1982. Just a regular guy trying to weave his regular car through regular traffic to get to his regular job. That changed when the jet fell out of the sky. Air Florida Flight 90 had taken off earlier from Washington National Airport, bound for Tampa. As Lenny neared work, the Boeing 737 struck the 14th Street Bridge and plunged into the Potomac.

Lenny was only one of hundreds of people who watched as emergency personnel worked to save the victims, one of whom was a passenger named Priscilla Tirado. Frightened and cold and exhausted, Priscilla was too weak to grab hold of a line lowered by a rescue helicopter. She flailed and began to fade. Lenny and the great throng of others watched in horror. But as the rest of them looked on helplessly, Lenny Skutnik decided to do something.

He took off his coat and boots and jumped into the icy water, swimming the thirty feet or so to where Priscilla Tirado struggled in nothing but pants and short sleeves. Lenny got her to shore. Saved her life.

Two weeks later, Ronald Reagan delivered his State of the Union. I watched it only because my parents made me. Partway into his speech, Reagan mentioned an ordinary man named Lenny, sitting in the gallery next to the First Lady.

Lenny Skutnik stood. The chamber roared.

Everyone. Citizens and media alike. Democrats and Republicans. Liberals and conservatives. All of them united for one small moment, for one small man.

That’s why I watch the State of the Union each year. Because it kindles the memory of that ordinary man who did an extraordinary thing.

And you know what? I need that reminder. We all do. The dark side of man is on display for us to see at every moment. It stares at us with each news segment from Syria or Iraq. It dares us with every profile of a political prisoner or story of the hungry and cold and oppressed. It’s as close as a click on a link or a turn of the channel. Every day, everywhere, there is proof that we are less than we should be.

It’s easy to see the bad in us, and how we’ve made such a mess of the world. That’s why people like Lenny Skutnik are so important. Not simply because of the great things they do, but because of the great thing they prove: That there is evil in us, but there is goodness in us as well.

Immeasurable, unfathomable glory. Bravery and love and heroism.

Greatness.
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Ambitious goals

January 23, 2014 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Spencer said, “I ain’t never doin’ it. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

The words were slurred because his tongue was still hanging out of his mouth, giving the impression that this five-year-old had been drinking a little more than his customary Kool-Aid.

“Do you have to keep sticking your tongue out like that?” I asked him.

“Yeth,” he slurred again. “If it’s in my mouff, I can’t control it.”

“Ah,” I answered and nodded in approval. It was a good idea, I thought. A more practical way to tame the tongue. “Good luck with that. If it works, you’ll be famous.”

“Why?” he asked, eyes bulging.

I shrugged. “It’s never been done before. Not as far as I know. Folks say it’s impossible.”

Spencer hadn’t considered the prospect of fame. Riches, yes. But renown might be even better.

“I ain’t never doin’ it,” he repeated. Meaning that was that and I should probably be moving along.

So I did. Away from the Sunday school rooms and through the foyer to grab this week’s church bulletin, then finally into the sanctuary to settle my family. It just so happened that Spencer and his family settled in two rows behind. Just after the first hymn and just before the first prayer, I stole a look over my shoulder.

Spencer’s tongue was still out, despite the repeated attempts by his mother to rectify what she no doubt considered ill manners. I raised an eyebrow at him and got a thumbs up in reply.

His father takes the blame for the entire situation. He was the one who took care of Spencer’s loose bicuspid with a bit of fishing line and a doorknob. “Quick and painless,” he’d told his son. Spencer didn’t think that was quite so. Turned out that both of them were right.

The trick was quick, yes. And also painful.

Fathers often resort to desperate measures to put a stop to a crying child, and Spencer’s tried everything in the book up to and including an impending visit from the Tooth Fairy. That perked Spencer’s ears a bit and brought the wailing down to a somewhat manageable sob, but that only lasted until Spencer found out all the Tooth Fairy was good for was a dollar. To him the pain and suffering alone was worth at least ten, not to mention the mental distress.

Knowing his son was quite the budding capitalist, Spencer’s dad decided to up the ante with an old wives tale.

“Better stop cryin’,” he told his son, “or else your tongue might slip into that hole in your mouth.”

Spencer stopped. “Why?” he mumbled.

“You mean you don’t know what happens if you keep your tongue clear?”

“…no.”

“If you never let your tongue touch that spot, the tooth that comes in will be gold.”

It was without doubt a stroke of genius, a psychological ploy designed to divert Spencer’s attention away from the pain he was feeling. More than that, he gave his son a goal. And we all know that a little pain is nothing if there’s a goal to be reached.

However.

There is that unscientific yet utterly concrete law of unintended consequences. Each cause has more than one effect, which will lead to any number of side-effects. In this particular case, the effect was what Spencer’s dad intended—his son stopped crying. The side-effect, though, was that Spencer walked around the house for a full day and a half with his tongue hanging out.

His parents didn’t mind (though his mother would have preferred her son not stick his tongue out while in the house of the Lord). In fact they encouraged it, going to far as to tell Spencer that it was considered permissible to house his tongue inside his mouth during sleep. Evidently consciousness is a prerequisite in the cultivation of a gold tooth.

In the end his parents have experience on their side. They understand the desire to accomplish a goal, no matter how intimidating the odds. They also understand that very often the thing we’re trying so hard not to do is the very thing we end up doing. Life is all about the constant battle between the two.

The pastor delivered a fine sermon that Sunday, but I have a feeling no one will remember it. What they will remember is the sound of a little boy shouting “Aww heck!” in the middle of the service. The Bible does indeed our desires are tough to tame. We’re always getting in our own way. Which is why the real sermon that day came from a child in a pew rather than a preacher at the podium.