He lived in a small wartime house, so we had to put it into his garage. I'd never been in there before, but I'd always wondered why they never parked their car inside. French's dad saw us coming up the driveway with this beat up ping-pong table and he came out on the porch and said: "Where the fuck you putting that?"
French said: "garage".
French's dad came down off the porch and opened the garage door. There was a bench press in the middle of the garage. There was a bar set up on it just stacked with weights. The bar was bending under the mass of weight on either end. There was a ragged copy of the Good News Bible sitting on it, as well.
He laughed and said: "If you can bench that you can have the garage."
There was no chance that I could do it, so French gave it a go. He spit on his hands and got in position. French could just barely move it.
His dad slipped into place once French gave up. He lit a cigarette and benched the stack of almost 300 pounds eight times. He'd bring it down inhale his smoke, then press it up and exhale a cloud of smoke.
It was all part of his system. He'd walk his route as a mailman, walk home, head to the garage, turn on CJET country radio, read the Good News Bible (that French got at his confirmation), and lift weights.
Somedays we'd play ping-pong outside if the weather was good.
7 comments:
Ha! He sure showed you! (Not that I condone smoking, by any means.)
My dad built us a ping-pong table that we played on a total of maybe five times. It sat at the back our basement for years and then got relegated to the wall to cover up water damage.
It was the thing to do in the Nixon era.
jesusgod! i have just erupted into either slime, dust, or light! i can't tell the difference. i am in love with every aspect of this. i think this is a poem or a prayer or a bible or wtf? something with a name that has never been invented before!
xo
erin
We had a pool table in the rec room when I was a kid. It was pretty wonderful b/c it had a ping-pong top that could be clamped over top. It was kind of a big ordeal to make the pool/ping-pong switch and much too big of a chore for me, as a child. But I loved both games and played them a lot.
It comforts me, somehow, to know that a person who loves cigarettes and the F-bomb can also love the Good News Bible.
You know this is one of my very favorite places to visit.
Real ping-pong. Glad to hear that! I wonder about Wii sometimes--if you can do the REAL game, shouldn't that be preferred?
Exercising in a garage. With stacks of weights, rumbling furnace, dust and must everywhere. A right of passage, I say
SC
nice...used to play ping pong at the rec center...and grew up with a ping pong table in the basement...
so... this one rocks. completely.
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