Big Tommy Brings the War Home

Fiction: Chasing a Marine's ascending star in college.

When Tommy Menace got to campus the world shook like a wet dog and some things went flying off when it did. He was big and strong and looked like a man in a way none of us would for a long time. Some of us would never look like that. His arms were like beef tenderloins and his jaw like an Indian arrowhead.

See Tommy Menace was a Marine and he’d just gotten back from the war. We first met him one night in the garage. It was Saturday and the girls’ basketball team was over. Back then Budweiser was selling these big plastic beach balls full of the stuff. You hooked a pump up to it and it performed as the dumbest looking keg you’ve ever seen. But the women were all six feet tall or damn close to it, so they needed a lot of beer to lean over low enough for us to kiss. These broads would get so twisted on that beer that by midnight sometimes they’d have me held against the wall with my feet dangling, sucking my tongue so hard it would be sore the next week and I couldn’t eat anything but soup. These were the best years of my life, and I never knew it until it was long gone.

Billy had a radio taped up on the wall. He put it on The Bull 101, which played all the country hits. He was from the city but he was awfully proud of attending a farm college, and he leaned into the idea with his whole heart on those Saturdays. He rented the house that had the garage, he was the host. He had taken me under his wing, in a way. He was a great boxer. After my swimming career ended when I no longer could float, I started thinking I would be a boxing champion. I never was, and neither was Billy. Big Tommy Menace, he was. Of course he was.

A girl called Autumn was standing like a flag pole, looking the radio in the teeth as Kenny Chesney went on about the beach. She slugged her beer down and began fumbling with the knob. She was huge, a great copper statue to the possibility of the feminine form. I think she played center. But she may have been the point guard. I didn’t know anything about women’s basketball at the time.

Billy saw this from the cardboard box he was on and hollered at her to stop.

“I don’t like hick stuff,” she said. She continued scanning channels. Bits of dead air and fuzz. Right past the rock station. “I only listen to rap.”

No one listened to rock. We had a few urban kids at our college and they were too cool, too at peace to do anything but stand around smoking and listening to music. They got the girls into rap. Billy didn’t like that but I never confronted him about it. I was a deeply closeted progressive. I was open minded. I didn’t think they were prejudiced, my peers. There were only whispers of living authentically then. This all happened before people were trying to figure out who they really were, at the blood level. Back then people played both sides, listening to 50 Cent on the weekends and then studying fisheries on Monday.

Billy sat back down in his cardboard box. It sunk under his weight. A good-size man would have crushed that box but Billy was an ectomorph. He waved her off and tsked, tsked.

I knew Big Tommy Menace would be over. Billy told me. He told me they had a new guy on the club boxing team. He was a heavyweight and Billy felt his spot as team captain was threatened by his presence in the gym. He didn’t know then that Tommy had been in the war. He just saw a big guinea with spiked hair who showed up to the gym and hit the heavybag so hard it swung up and broke the ceiling.

When Tommy came into the garage he had to duck under the door. It was dark outside already and he appeared alongside the light at once, the one single bulb hanging in the middle of the room. Had he chosen to take the bulb into his mouth his head might’ve become the moon.

“That’s him,” Billy said, crunching through the side of his box to whisper to me. “That’s Big Tommy Menace.”

I wasn’t looking at him. I wanted to know what Autumn was going to think about this. She was the leader of the whole pack of big women that stood around Billy’s garage like palm trees. When she spotted him, she made a noise like a kitten. All the women turned at once it seemed. They had to look up to stare Big Tommy Menace in his eyes. He was that tall, that perfect. I knew they’d never slouch enough to kiss me again. My only choice then, and I knew it immediately, was to be among the burned left in Tommy’s wake, or to follow in his tracks and take from his light what I could.

I thought then that I was with him until the end.

They had the regional boxing championships in our gymnasium that year. The defending heavyweight champion was the biggest meanest son of a bitch you’ve ever seen. He came out of Queens and he had tattoos all over his arms. Crowns and bullets and hands in prayer. But you could only see them under good fluorescent light, like what they had over the center of the ring in that gym. He and Tommy made it through to the finals in devastating ease. I heard people in polo shirts saying they should have just let those two duke it out for the title from the start, and save the other boys (rotund, chubby) in the bracket from the head trauma.

Derrice White was the defending champion’s name. He was in the Navy and he wore a cutoff cotton shirt when he fought. See this was amateurs, which meant headgear and top coverings. People in power hated to see nipples in formal settings back then, male or female it didn’t matter. Our school had these singlets they wore, and our guys taped the shoulders to make them narrower. Big Tommy Menace looked like a Greco-Roman warrior in his gear—the red suit he fought in sticking to his body like a wrestling singlet, his full chest erupting from his covering.

The night before the tournament we were all at Big Tommy Menace’s apartment. He was already twenty-five years old, he told us everything. Out of high school he enlisted in the Marines because he wanted to see the war while it was still hot. He did six years on and off over there and said there wasn’t much left to do but shit in the sand and lay around under tarps and sweat. He wanted to be an economist. Big Tommy, he seemed to know everything. He had a great mind. He said he was a Keynesian. He wanted universal health care. He supported the president. He said this about gun control: “Guns are an integral part of the American identity, but I worry the culture has been hijacked by gun manufacturers. The lack of responsible legislation when it comes to things like semi-automatic firearms chambered at high calibers is making it impossible for law enforcement to requisitely keep people safe.”

He seemed to have a real love for humanity, too. He pulled for the underdog. That was rare, at the time. When someone made a sly racial crack about Derrice, whom he would have to defeat to claim the regional crown, he snapped back.

“You hillbillies have no clue what it’s like to grow up in an underfunded urban environment,” he said. “You can be poor out here in the sticks all you want, but you’ve at least got green trees to give you air.”

They always said you shouldn’t ask a military man about killing. But I had no filter. I never have. It’s a great shame to me, and long nights are spent wondering why I say the things I say. I asked him about the War on Terrorism, which my family supported.

“They don’t know any better.” he said. He was washing his dishes while we sat around his living quarters on the opposite side of his kitchen island sipping warm beers. I hung onto his every word like the syllables were a cliff’s edge. “I believe in the war, I do. I still believe in the mission. I believe we can make them like us. But they need to feel the pain, hard and quick. We’ve done it wrong.”

He said it was hard to be home because try as he might, he still saw them only as something to kill. He said he saw one at the gas station just that morning. Head all wrapped up, pumping gas, and all he could think about was putting one right between the man’s eyes.

I nodded. I didn’t want him to think I couldn’t handle war. I said, “do you think that’s something you can get over, Tommy?”

“For six years I killed those people,” he said, “it’s a lot to unlearn.”

When he fought Derrice for the championship, it wasn’t even a contest. Tommy came out of his corner with his red leotard and bounced Derrice’s head around the ring like an air hockey puck. The Navy man was bouncing off the ropes, shirt heavy with sweat, coming out with his head down and swinging low angle uppercuts with his eyes closed. Tommy popped backward on the balls of his feet and jabbed the champion’s head even lower. By the end of the first round Derrice was completely hinged at the hips, his boxing gloves out on the sides of his head like a set of big red throbbing cauliflower ears. When they called it off Tommy went and picked the man up out of the corner and hugged him, whispered encouragement before the belt was strapped around his own waist.

Everyone knew to be at the garage that night. Tommy Menace came into the yard already half lit, not a shiner or scratch to show for his three-bouts that day on the way to the title. Under each arm was a basketball woman, and they looked like a three headed God crossing the grass. Small co-eds dove off the sides to make way.

The hot game at the time was Nails. It had started with me and Billy in the garage, mad drunk smashing nails into an old stump while talking about what we’d do with a girl if we could get one. But then once we got in with the basketball women and people started showing up to the garage on Saturday nights with expectations, nails became just a game.

The way it works is this: Everyone gets a nail to start the game and taps it into the stump right in front of them just far enough so it stands straight up. When it’s your turn to hit, you get the hammer. Flip it in the air and catch it and hit someone else’s nail without adjusting your grip.

This was a game of dexterity, focus, cunning and bravery. I knew Big Tommy Menace would be a champion at this too, and he was. He’d drive a nail in all the way every time. People were too scared to even try for his nail. It seemed like you’d get hurt taking a whack at something coated in Big Tommy’s fingerprints.

That was until the cruiserweight football team showed up. He was done with Nails then, done with the basketball women too. They left at once, dropping tears big enough to drown a small mammal if caught flat footed. Our school at one time had a good Division III football team, but a scandal of underage girls and cocaine abuse shuttered the program. Years later they brought it back in this totally warped way, a gridiron league limited by weight. The titans of the turf had no place on the cruiserweight football field. It belonged to men weighing no more than 135 pounds on game day morning.

When I explained to Tommy what these gangly and gaunt looking halfbacks and wide outs were, his eyelids came up and never closed. He wanted to know everything. I saw him corner one of the few portly ones, a 5’2” fatty who played center.

The boy was trying to get away. He had an empty beer. But Tommy had encased him on either side with his huge arms, holding him in a sort of flesh cage against the exposed wall of the garage.

“Is it a mini field?” He asked.

“No, it’s normal.”

“But a touchdown must be worth fewer points?”

“No,” the kid said, scared. “Six points.”

“And you can tackle?”

“Yes dude. It’s football. We’re just leaner athletes.”

Tommy left the party after that. I didn’t see him for 10 days. Me and Billy got worried. He was our friend. I went to his apartment and he told me to go away through the door. But I heard pain in his voice. It sounded like there was rust in it. I demanded to see him, as a friend. As someone who supported the troops.

He answered the door and he was wearing garbage bags as clothes. They hung over his skeleton like a monk’s robe. He had one around his head like a hood, the yellow plastic drawstring tied in a way to keep it snug. His round full face had fallen inward and his cheeks were pale. I could see the shape of his molars through the skin. Inside the apartment it must have been 130 degrees and a burst of air hit me in the mouth that tasted like pork rinds. I left him to it.

He suited up for the team that weekend, starting on special teams and rotating in at defensive end. He looked terrible in warmups. His arms had become thin and bonelike. They did not expect men of his height to play cruiserweight ball so his jersey barely fit over the shoulder pads. His whole stomach was bare and so sucked in you could count the ridges of his spine while he faced the bleachers doing toe touches and other stretches.

But this lack of calories and total transformation couldn’t stop Tommy once the game got going. I think he cultivated his will to glory in the war. The other school had the ball at their own 5 on their opening possession. Small skinny men cracked out of the huddle like spastic mice. Tommy was out there too, and even in his three-point stance he looked like some other species set among the freaks. The other quarterback took the snap, slid back on an easy three-step dropback. He never even readied his arm to throw. Big Tommy was on him then, enveloping him totally in those long sick arms and sending the QB out the back of the endzone for a safety. The crowd of 15 erupted. The team got together and tried to carry my friend off the field in celebration but couldn’t and collapsed into dust under his charm.

They named the ball field after him. The player of the year trophy for collegiate cruiserweight football was renamed the Tommy Menace Trophy. He got his degree in economics and went to Colgate to get his master’s in political science. But we had fallen out way before graduation. Something about his shape made me sick. Once he got into cruiserweight ball he couldn’t breathe well and he only ate peanut butter sandwiches and what he could forage outside the dormitories. In winter he got no greens.

Ten years passed before I thought about him again. He was on my ballot in the general election, running for state senator. He won that race and served in the state congress with distinction. He was a rising star in the party. I saw him on CNN talking about the war. He had regained his size after all those years sucking weight to maul underweight collegians with pigskin dreams. He looked again to be strong, though he was now dignified as well. His short hair no longer spiked and horny but combed and greased on his skull in an elegant way. He spoke from the heart.

He ran for a U.S. Senate seat the next time out and then won the governor’s mansion in a special election. They said he’s a front runner for the White House next year if he wants it. He was becoming a sort of cult of personality in a way that had never been seen. Fox News couldn’t call heads or tails on him. They didn’t know what to think.

He was excising the doves from the party. His slogan was “America for the World.”

Big Tommy, I knew Big Tommy. I knew his spirit, I saw his heart.

He has my vote.