VQ II: A Synopsis
Swains Out of Nowhere
Roy Swain (17), son of the late astronaut and Olympic gold medal wrestler Louden Swain, has caught his father on the Arts and Entertainment channel again. It's the Biography that contains the scene of Roy himself as a fourth grader in class watching his father blast off on the space shuttle and the subsequent explosion as the rocket carrying the shuttle reaches out toward the darkness on the other side of the sky. The little boy's face is frozen. Every young face but Roy's shows astonishment. Roy is devastated, but not astonished. Roy's father had told him since before Roy was old enough to reply that life was a dangerous place, and particularly dangerous for a man who rides a controlled explosion beyond the bounds of gravity. Roy's face is a mirror of loss and knowledge. Of course this can happen when we approach the darkness, whether it's the darkness of space or the darkness in other human beings. It's dangerous to be a warrior. Death is among the discoveries the warrior makes on the hero's quest.
And there is Roy at his father's funeral in Arlington National Cemetery, holding hands with his mother, Dr. Gloria Swain, the famous primatologist.
The final scene in Roy's brief appearance in his father's Biography is set in his room -- filled with stuff from their years in Africa -- in the family home in faculty housing at Stanford, the same room where he sits now, eight years later. As the young Roy speaks he also gestures in American Sign Language. "Matter can neither be created nor destroyed" the little boy says. "My father is still out there. Somewhere. Accessing him is the challenge." Gloria sits on the other bed, and beside her sits a chimpanzee who wears a look of devastation and holds her hand in both of his. The chimpanzee releases Gloria's hand and gestures to Roy in ASL. He steps down off the bed and walks across the room. He puts his long arm around Roy's shoulder and leans in until his cheek touches Roy's.
Seventeen-year-old Roy mutes the TV, swivels his chair, and bounces up. The African motif is richer now, posters on the walls and ceiling, African R&B on the stereo. He turns to the chimpanzee, Bhop, also seventeen, chinning himself on a bar in the doorway. "Accessing him is the challenge," Roy says in an affected little-boy voice as he signs. "What a pretentious little dick I was."
Roy is in Blockbuster video, and what is the employee's pick of the week playing on the bank of monitors? That's right: Vision Quest. "Good lord, Dad," Roy says to the multiple images of the actor Matthew Modine playing the role of his father as a high school wrestler, "you're everywhere. And bigger than life. How am I ever supposed to forge my own identity?"
Roy is amused with himself and with the movie. It's the scene where Louden has dis- covered the laundry fresh from the dryer, with Carla's panties prominent at the top of the basket. He picks up the panties and buries his face in them. Carla, the older girl staying in his house, walks up while Louden's eyes are closed in ecstasy.
A tall, lithe black kid stands beside Roy. Both boys smile. "Swain," the black kid says, "he a hound."
"Guy was a hose monster," Roy says.
Dixon James (17) nods toward the monitors. "That's my dad," he says.
Roy gives him a look. Dixon would be considerably lighter in complexion if this were so. "Matthew Modine is your father?" Roy says.
"No," Dixon says. "Louden Swain is my father."
Dixon James
Dixon has no father. He lives as Louden Swain's spiritual son, and he contends that he's on a perpetual vision quest. He's a good athlete and he's smart -- he segues from street talk to standard English in the same sentence; the problem is his anger. He keeps getting kicked out of schools for fighting and mouthing off to teachers. Dixon has been observing Roy and Gloria since he saw the Biography of Louden in school and learned that they lived only a few miles south on the Stanford campus.
Dixon met Roy's father once, at a wrestling clinic for kids, after Louden won his Olympic gold medal. Swain pointed at Dixon and motioned him out onto the mat. "I want this little man," Swain said. He let Dixon pin him. But it isn't the memory of having been allowed to pin an Olympic gold medalist that welds Dixon to Swain; it's that no man in his life ever treated him with such a mixture of tenderness and respect.
Roy Swain
Roy might be America's most physically gifted Anthropology geek. He inherited his mother's and father's intelligence, and he got his dad's physical gifts besides. He does not, how-ever, use those gifts in martial ways. Roy's sport is the triathlon. He is the epitome of a kid raised on the fuel-mix of love and a maniacal devotion to play. Roy grew up in Central Africa with a chimpanzee named Bhop as his brother.
Roy knows much, particularly about the natural world, but Roy is ignorant of the savag-ery of human beings. Roy expects from the wider world the love that he received so fully from the little world of his family. And the wider world, as Dixon James knows, is not a place that conducts its business in the currency of love.
The Brawley Boys
Jeb (18) and Jesse (16) Brawley are two of the toughest brothers to come along in prep wrestling, a sport where tough brothers -- the Brands twins, the Petersons, the Smiths -- are legendary. But the Brawleys are mean to boot. If Roy Swain is the poster boy for a loving childhood, these kids are pups of hate and fear. They were, in fact, raised in a hate group, and nurtured in the belief that to be feared is to be respected.
The Brawley Boys have been home-schooled, their wrestling reputations built in tourn-aments around the country. But this is about to change. The group has moved from Oklahoma to the Spokane area, and their leader, the Reverend Joseph Kampf -- the boys' stepfather -- has decided that the brothers will represent white separatism as students in Deep Lake public high school where their wrestling skills will receive wider exposure.
The boys' natural father, Tom Brawley, hasn't had contact with Jeb and Jesse for twelve years, since their mother ran off with Joe Kampf. Tom has followed the boys' wrestling careers and seen them wrestle in tournaments when he was able to elude Kampf's security force. He has taken twelve years of lumps to watch his boys wrestle from the top of bleachers in high school gyms all around the country. Now Tom has moved to Spokane and taken a job as a history teacher and assistant wrestling coach at Thompson High.
Both Jeb and Jesse remember their father. But twelve years of indoctrination in white supremacy has transformed their memories so that this kind man has become the personification of weakness. This is acutely so for Jesse, to whom Joe Kampf has become the embodiment of masculinity and wisdom.
Jeb, however, still has flashes of longing for his dad. One memory keeps coming back. It is of the time his dad took him to a wrestling clinic where he spent a minute on the mat with Louden Swain, the wrestling legend. Jeb would never tell this to a soul, but he remembers the way Swain treated him that day, how he's never felt both safe and free around any other man. Any other man except his father.
On the wall in Jeb's room hangs a framed child's T-shirt that says I PINNED LOUDEN SWAIN!.
Act I establishes Roy and the irony of his father's legacy. Having a good dad gives a guy a head-start in life, to be sure, but when your father's stature is such that both jocks and geeks adopt his spirit, it can be a heavy weight to bear. Roy is primed to make a statement of individuality when Dixon walks into his life at Blockbuster. All Roy needs is another kid who wants to be Louden Swain -- another Swain out of nowhere -- to move him to action.
Roy admires the warrior spirit Dixon cultivates. Even to Roy himself this spirit is the essence of his father's myth. Sometimes Roy is afraid his father would like Dixon better.
The boys pledge to spend their last year of high school at Thompson High in Spokane, Louden's old school, where Kuch, Louden's best friend, and Roy's godfather, is the wrestling coach. Dixon will play football and wrestle, and Roy will run distance. It will be a vision quest for them both. The first challenge in their quest is convincing their mothers to let them go. Dixon's mom, Georgia, is the tough sell. She hasn't always been able to keep her boy in school, but she's kept him out of jail and alive, and she's reluctant to lose control now. Gloria knows she needs to let go of Roy, and it's her example that convinces Georgia.
Roy, Dixon and Bhop roll into Spokane in Roy's old Land Rover with Earth Wind and Fire's Let's Groove cranked. They turn a corner and find themselves smack in the middle of a white supremacist rally. Here's a dark black kid so striking that he looks like he just stepped out of a Benneton ad, a fine-featured white kid, and a chimpanzee dressed like the funkadelic Mr. George Clinton driving into an Edward Norton block party early in American History X.
Who they meet, screaming into their faces, are Jeb and Jesse Brawley.
Act II: Roy and Dixon live on the outskirts of Spokane within shouting distance of Kuch in a house Roy's father and mother built and filled with as much of Africa as they could bring back. Kuch keeps an eye on the boys, but even so it's a dream deal for a couple of high school seniors. The guys' expectations are stratospheric. Things go bad immediately.
Kuch's grandson, Josh (5), idolizes Dixon, who has no patience for the boy, or for the three big dogs who follow him everywhere. The dogs turn vicious at the first scent of Bhop, who has never been mistreated in his life, let alone preyed upon.
Kuch invites people over for campfires in the evenings. Family stuff -- kids and dogs and picnic food. Dixon is uncomfortable in the woodsy dark, and he's uncomfortable with the people, even Tim Stalls, a black man who wrestled Louden Swain in the Olympic Trials, and whom Dixon thinks Kuch invited to be his role model.
And Dixon can't sleep without traffic noise. Plus, there's nothing out the windows but great big goddamn trees. Not that Dixon could sleep anyway in a house where Louden Swain slept. And so he walks the floors where Swain walked, stands at the windows and looks out into the dead-silent dark where the black branches swirl in the wind. He knows his future is floating there in that black ocean a million feet deep and full of monsters. He looks at his reflection. Dixon can stand up to anything, except maybe that dark future.
In a frame on the wall in Dixon's room is a child's T-shirt that reads I PINNED LOUDEN SWAIN!
So Dixon seeks familiar territory. He hits the weight room, meets the guys, finds out when football starts. But Kuch says Dixon will not play football. If Dixon wants to wrestle, then he is going to, by God, wrestle. Six days a week: mat work, weight work, running, aerobics, more mat work, watching video. Nutrition. Sleep. Embrace your dream, and maybe your dream will embrace you: vision quest. You want to be like Swain? You need to find out what that means.
But Dixon has always played football.
Then Dixon can go back to Oakland and play football.
There's a triathlon on Labor Day weekend. Roy needs to get in some miles on the bike, so he clamps the kiddie kart behind his sixteen-speed, and he and the Bhopster hit the country roads in the beautiful green last days of summer. A pickup sails by, and an arm lets go a full beer can. It hits Roy in the helmet and bounces off. Ha, ha, you redneck morons! Roy makes the fatal gesture: he flips them off. And they come roaring back.
Roy's in better shape than any of these doughboys, but Roy is not a fighter. Roy has all the future to lose. These guys have no future; they don't even have a present. They are not skin-heads. Their ignorance hasn't yet found a focus. They don't even know there is a path to choose.
The first punch sends Roy over backwards and the bike twisting with him. Bhop comes screaming out of the cart, his canines bared, and his long arms flailing. The dough-boys dive back into the truck. One flings a tire iron, and it catches Bhop through the biceps like a spear. Roy has never seen such behavior in this animal he was raised with. This moment of atavism in Bhop foreshadows the atavistic change that will take place in Roy. If we are to survive in this world, sometimes we have to let our animal out.
A girl rides up on a sixteen-speed. She's clipped in. She's training. This is Emma. Emma has a cell phone.
Roy cares for Bhop's wound and drives him to The Chimpanzee and Human Communi-cation Institute in Ellensburg, where Bhop has family and friends, chimpanzee and human. Roy and Bhop keep in touch on computer videophone.
While Roy is gone Dixon rides the roads on Roy's bike hoping to see the pickup Roy described. Dixon is spooked by the silence and solitude, but touched, too, by the beauty of farmland just before harvest. The edge of his anger goes dull. His attention is caught in the blaze of sunset on a field of hay stubble when a horn honks behind him. Look, another monkey!
The doughboys are armed with shovel handles. But they have never stood stick-to-knuckle with an animal like Dixon James.
The four-foot wooden handle is a blur aimed at Dixon's head. But Dixon's arm is a faster blur. He catches it, jerks it away and flings it in a high arc backward over a fence into a field, never taking his eyes off the big kid who swung it. In this frozen moment the whir of the shovel handle tells these boys that they have just entered the world of pain and shit which up to now has been for them a figure of speech.
So Dixon makes them hurt like he hurts, and for all the reasons he hurts, none of which have a thing to do with these boys themselves.
Dixon blocks a shovel-handle blow that breaks his left forearm. With his right arm he grabs Roy's astonishingly light bicycle and uses it as a mace.
Dixon walks home in the dark. He will pay to fix Roy's bike, which is even more ex-pensive than it is light, but there's no way it can be ready for Roy's triathlon. And he will have to talk to Kuch, because he needs to go to the hospital.
Roy is in the running leg of the triathlon, on a two-lane blacktop road deep in tall pines. He catches up with a heavily muscled guy who has no number grease-pencilled on his upper arm or thigh. He's a kid, really, Roy's age. Not in the race. Just a kid out running. But what a kid. Classic wrestler's build. Like a statue. He looks familiar, but Roy can't place him.
The two run together. The big kid is in shape. But Roy is a real runner, and he's in a race. They shake hands, and Roy pulls away. The big kid's name is Jeb.
School starts. Thompson is a huge suburban American high school, which means that it hosts more ethnic and socio-political factions than Beirut in the mid-Eighties.
Dixon finds homies and jocks. Roy finds AP classes and jocks. The girl jocks at Thompson, one of whom is Emma, look like God's flygirls.
There is one place in school that transcends ethnicity and social status, and that is the Louden Swain memorial in the Thompson trophy case. This is an alter for every kid with dreams. Swain was a lower middleclass kid; he grew up by the river; he walked these halls; he ate his bag lunch in the cafeteria; then he wrote his name in gold, and then he wrote it in a banner of smoke and fire and hung it on a star.
Across the hall from the Swain memorial, on the way to the weightroom, is the Child Development classroom and daycare center, and it is here one morning where Dixon encounters a vision he had not sought. She is Anissa (17), not a jock, not a homie hiphop girl, but oh so beautiful. Every morning Dixon watches Anissa greet the kids as their moms and dads drop them off. Dixon is touched by how she comforts the children who reach out to their departing parents. He knows this desperation: Mom is leaving, and what if -- like Dad -- she never comes back. Anissa wipes their tears with her cheek, wipes their snotty noses with her fingers. One little boy, Darren, seems immune to such distress. He looks at home in Anissa's arms, but he doesn't want to stay there; all he wants to do is crawl away at full speed and play..
Anissa exudes a voluptuous vitality that approaches the mystical, and it renders Dixon so awestruck that he's reluctant to introduce himself. It's no exaggeration to call this quality sacred when it combines with commitment and character as generous as Anissa's: she is a nursing mother, and Darren is her son.
Roy and Emma are running cross country, and Roy's got it bad for her. At one meet Jeb, the kid from the triathlon, shows up. How did Jeb know Roy was running for Thompson? Jeb didn't know Roy ran for Thompson, but he knew Emma did. Jeb met her at the triathlon, after Roy left him in the dust.
Roy invites some kids over for a campfire. Dixon can't get into it. But it's a good time. Emma leaves and comes back with Jeb. Jeb's natural tendency -- off the wrestling mat -- is to be gracious, but he's not used to such kids, and he's been taught that world music is part of the world conspiracy to pollute the white race.
The Spokesman Review runs an article on white supremacy, featuring the Brawleys. Jeb and Jesse are pictured in their wrestling singlets and their Nazi uniforms. Joe Kampf looks as innocent and earnest as Al Gore with his arms around his stepsons. Tom Brawley, the boys' estranged father and new assistant coach at perennial wrestling power Thompson High, is also pictured.
Emma is more shocked than revolted to learn that Jeb embraces hatred. He seemed like such a nice boy. Jeb seemed like a decent guy to Roy, too. Kuch, who knew this was coming, says it's going to be an interesting wrestling season. Dixon would love to get a crack at one or both of these representatives of the master race.
Jeb sneaks out of the compound to see Emma. They meet at convenience stores in the country. She likes Roy. Who wouldn't like Roy? But she feels in Jeb a need so broad and deep that to fill it might also fill the broad, deep need in Emma herself. And what could Roy Swain possibly need?
Jesse can't understand what his brother sees in this Emma and her race-mixing friends. She's just another child of privilege, asleep to the threat of mongrel races and to the allegiance she owes her own race. If Jeb doesn't get his head on straight, Jesse is going to tell Reverend Joe.
One evening Roy makes a bread run to the Quick Stop and sees Emma and Jeb. His pride is hurt. He's also sick of Dixon and his homies hanging out at the house, watching MTV, smoking ganja every night. It turns out that Dixon has finally worked up the nerve to ask Anissa out, and he and she and Darren have just sat down with popcorn and The Prince of Egypt video when Roy walks in steaming.
"Vision quest?" Roy yells in Dixon's face. "You wouldn't know a vision quest from a TLC video."
Dixon thinks that's funny.
But Roy is after him. "You can do the physical shit, all right. But you won't do the headwork."
Dixon is tired of Roy's good-student rap.
But Roy cuts him off. "I'm not talkin' about studying. You can't spend five minutes by yourself. A guy doesn't get to be somebody without putting in his time alone."
Something deeper is eating at Roy. He screams at Dixon. "How many hours by himself do you suppose it took your spiritual father to go out and spend nine minutes alone on the mat with the Russian, or with that monster from Afghanistan? Louden Swain could turn himself into a black hole and suck the gravity out of a room.
"How many hours do you suppose he put in alone before he could step out on the mat with the darkness of the fucking universe?"
Roy is crying now. He also sees that he has misread the evening's social dynamic. The only people here are that stunning black girl from school and a toddler in Winnie Pooh jammies.
"I hardly remember him anymore," Roy says, "and I know that."
Dixon understands about not remembering your father. "I didn't know," he says. "There's all this stuff about the great father-son Swains."
"Sometimes I think I remember," Roy says, "but I always trace it back to the movie, or TV, or something somebody told me."
"Don't trace it, Roy," Dixon says. "Go ahead and remember."
Roy apologizes to Anissa, and to Darren, and he leaves.
No behavior Anissa could see in a young black man would impress her more than the self-control and compassion she witnesses in Dixon.
Dixon looks out the window at the swirling darkness. But this time the reflection is not of him alone. Dixon and Anissa and Darren in her arms is the image reflected. It is an image of binding, redeeming, perpetuating love. It is an image of family.
Dixon takes to heart Roy's admonition about the self-knowledge to be found in solitude, the sense of ourselves that leads to a power we find in no other way. He spends more time alone, but he also spends more time with Anissa and Darren. Anissa, who is on a quest to be indepen-dent of men and to be a good mother, tells Dixon that the more they become someone on their own, the more they'll have to give to each other. He is more generous with Josh; he even be- comes friends with the dogs. Josh has been begging to sleep in the tent, so Dixon and Josh and the dogs sleep in the tent in the woods. This is no small feat for Dixon.
During Thanksgiving break Roy and Dixon invite kids for a campfire. Emma shows up with Jeb, and Jesse is not far behind. Jesse has no respect for any people but his own, and he has no fear. He confronts Jeb and insults Emma. Jeb is conciliatory; he doesn't want to wreck the party. He's apologizing every which way and hustling Jesse down the trail when Jesse insults Anissa and Darren. Anissa blows her top, but Dixon gets between her and Jesse. Jesse decks Dixon. Jeb charges in to block Jesse, but he's so fast and so scary that Roy thinks he's going after Dixon too, so Roy tears into Jeb. Darren is wailing, Josh is crying for his grandpa, the dogs are barking.
Through the firelight streak two old wrestlers, Kuch and Tim Stalls. Kuch grabs Roy and Tim grabs Dixon. They toss the boys over their shoulders and put distance between them and the Brawleys. Tim tells Jeb and Jesse to head for home, and they do, but not before Jesse tells Dixon that his black ass is marked.
When all the young people except Anissa and Darren have gone, Dixon tells Tim he felt the gun in his shoulder holster and asks him why he didn't shoot the Nazi bastards. Tim admits that he's an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and they have Kampf and his people under surveillance. Roy asks the depth of the shit they're in now that they've tangled with these people. Tim says that until devotion to stupid ideas becomes a federal crime, ATF has nothing on them. "But," he says, "anybody who needs to hate folks as much as these people do is dangerous. So you kids be prudent."
Joe Kampf is waiting for Jeb and Jesse when they get back to the compound. He knows the boys have been sneaking out. Jeb says it was him sneaking, not Jesse. Jesse was doing right.
Anger is Joe's usual response to transgression, but now he is hurt rather than mad. Hurt, he says, that Jeb would do this to his race, and to him. Jesse realizes Jeb is Joe's favorite. Jeb is sorry he let Joe down.
Roy is transformed by the exhilaration of combat. Yes, he took his lumps, and he would have gotten hurt if Kuch hadn't pulled him away. But what a thrill to let the animal out. Roy had not known that such a part of him existed. What a thrill it would be to do this with rules, where the point wasn't to hurt, but to merge the animal and the man into something fierce and smart and efficient, into a warrior.
So Roy calls out his name with the rest of 150-pounders on the first day of wrestling practice. Chances are he won't make varsity, but he's going to give it everything he's got. The essence of his dad may still be streaking out through the galaxies, as he wanted to believe when he was a child, but now he knows that the place to look for his dad is inside himself. And he knows that the way to get to this place is on the path of obsessive physical, emotional, and intellectual commitment. Roy Swain is indeed his father's son.
It turns out that Roy is a natural wrestler. By mid-season the only guy on the team who can beat him is Dixon. They make one room of the house into a wrestling room with mats on the floor and two-thirds of the way up the walls. They hang speakers from the ceiling, blast R&B, and wrestle until all hours of the morning.
The season's final duel meet is against Deep Lake and the undefeated Brawley brothers. Roy will wrestle Jesse, and Dixon will risk his undefeated season to wrestle up two weights and take on Jeb.
The days leading to their big matches are long ones for Roy and Dixon. After practice they stop in front of the trophy case and study the photos of Louden when he was their age, trying to connect to his strength. And the nights are even longer. Yes, there is glory in the warrior's struggle, but nobody wants to get the shit beat out of him in front of his mother and a thousand schoolmates. One night they jog through the snow, looking for the spirit. They can't find it, so they knock on Kuch's door. Kuch thinks it's a perfect night for a campfire.
"A guy believes in what seems worth believing in," Kuch says as the pine sap pops in the fire. "For a lot of people -- for most people, I suppose -- that's the Bible, God, Jesus. The super-natural. World of the spirit. But even as a kid Swain's focus was the natural world, and the spirit in the natural world.. He took it to an extreme, of course, like he did everything. The guy's life goal was to become an exobiologist. He wanted to study life in outer space, and he was on his way.
"Swain had read this thing that Seattle, Chief of the Duwamish, said. We taped it inside our locker doors so we'd see it every time we put on our wrestling duds.
Even if my people must eventually pass
from the face of the earth, they will live on in
whatever men are fierce and strong, so that when
women see a man -- even if he has a white face --
they will cry: "That is a human being!"
"Swain decided fierce and strong was what he wanted to be, and I think he probably worked at being that every day of his life."
The boys are affected in opposite ways by their talk with Kuch. Dixon is contemplative; he can't look out the windows without seeing again the reflection of him and Anissa and Darren. He wonders what kind of man they see when they look at him.
Roy is into hyperdrive. He's on the phone or at his e-mail every free minute. He tells Dixon he wants to pack the bleachers with Swain fans. Dixon shakes his head. He's not sure this will be a spectacle they'll want anyone to see.
Act III: Gloria and Georgia drive up from the Bay Area to find their boys much changed. Dixon is more at peace than Georgia has ever known him. This young mother, Anissa, is clearly a force for good in Dixon's life, but Georgia does not want her boy to be the father of a family before he goes to college.
Gloria Swain understands the term alpha male beyond its use as a pejorative cliche. The change she sees in her son is his evolution into this classic male role. There are moments when, from a certain angle, or in a certain tone of voice, Roy seems to be Louden.
White supremacist groups pour into Spokane for the match. Tim Stalls appears to have called a reunion of Olympic Trials wrestlers, each of whom wears a receiver and a mic, and one of whom is beside Tom Brawley at all times. Spokane Police and Sheriff's Department officers provide uniformed security.
CNN/SI is shooting a feature called Swains Out of Nowhere, since they interviewed Dixon and Jeb and found that both boys have held Louden Swain as a lifelong inspiration. And here is Roy Swain himself, looking like the incarnation of his father. A sidebar on the father theme highlights the painful irony of Tom Brawley coaching against his sons.
When the 150 pound match is called, Jesse walks to the center of the mat. Everyone looks to the door of the warm-up room, but Roy does not come running out of it. Dixon, Tom Brawley and Kuch look at each other, then back at the door. Nothing. Swain was acting weird -- maybe he left town. The gym is silent.
And then a sound like far-off thunder rises. And then the boom of drums fills the gym and shakes the walls. And then out of the door on which every eye in the place is super-glued bursts Roy Swain in Zulu battle dress followed by every African in the Spokane area. These African men, women, boys, girls, and old folks, dressed and dancing and drumming and singing for war, snake around the bleachers, through the crowd, and around Jesse Brawley who stands dumfounded in the center circle. When the shimmering ebony line un-coils, Roy is left in the circle facing Jesse. Roy takes off his ceremonial garb and tosses it to Dixon.
The Brawley fans are insulted and outraged right up to the edge of rationality. And Jesse, it turns out, is over the edge. He wrestles a wild, stupid match, and he makes a fatal mistake.
When Roy pins Jesse the supremacist fans are a millisecond from erupting. But Jesse throws a tantrum on the mat that is so bizarre it rivets the attention of everyone in the gym and shifts his fans' rage to embarrassment. He screams and curses and punches the air. No one takes a step toward him. He kicks at one of the Thompson cheerleaders, an Asian girl, whom Tom Brawley lifts into the air and carries out of reach. The gym is silent except for Jesse's profanity and the whoosh of the punches he windmills into the air. Then Joe Kampf walks out of the bleachers; Jeb meets him at the edge of the mat and together they walk to Jesse. Jesse slaps Jeb's hand away. But when Joe reaches for him, Jesse falls on his shoulder in tears and lets Joe lead him to the bench.
For a beat Jeb is alone in the center of the mat in all that silence, the focus of all those eyes. He looks at Tom holding the girl in his arms. He watches as Tom sets the girl on her feet. Jeb is bigger than Tom now, but he remembers when he was a little boy, held in his father's arms.
Jeb beats Dixon with an escape in the last few seconds. The Aryan fans go wild, but Jeb himself knows that he's been on the mat with the best wrestler he's ever faced. He gives Dixon an honest handshake.
Jeb stands in the circle with the ref raising his hand. He looks at his mother and step-father and the rest of the love-crippled people he's lived with for the past twelve years. He turns and looks at the Thompson fans, at Emma, Roy, Dixon, at his father. He turns back to the white supremacists, screaming, ready to welcome him off the mat into the arms of victory for the mas-ter race. But Jeb turns again, and makes the choice that will change his life forever: he walks to his father. Tom opens his arms, and Jeb steps in.
The resolution finds Roy, Dixon, and Jeb at the State Wrestling Tournament in Seattle, in the same Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the University of Washington where Louden Swain battled for the state championship twenty-eight years before.
The quest is not over, but three young men have seen their visions.
Dixon sees that he has made himself into a worthy spiritual son. He learns that we make ourselves warriors by our questing, by winning with grace, losing with grace, practicing decency in the world, never diminishing a child. He learns that a life spent in this spirit is the reward a warrior seeks. He also learns he's been awarded a Division I wrestling scholarship.
Roy learns that his father's warrior's spirit runs through him. More important, he learns that his father needed combat, needed achievement to fuel his spirit, but that Roy himself, does not. Roy's father and mother gave him what might be the greatest gift parents can give a child, the gift of sufficient self-love so that he feels no need to prove a thing.
And Jeb Brawley learns that hate is poison. Hate is a powerful fuel on which to run a life, but it's so corrosive that it eats right through your heart. There's got to be a better way to live, and Jeb is going to find it: Vision Quest.
In the concluding sequence Roy drives the Land Rover west on the interstate through the high desert. His bike is on the roof rack. He turns off at Ellensburg, rolls onto the campus of Central Washington University, and pulls up at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute. Bhop stands on the grass with a group of human and animal friends. Roy and Bhop exchange greetings in ASL, they shake hands, hug. Roy carries Bhop's bag.
Roy settles the George Clinton hat onto Bhop's head at just the right angle. Bhop looks through the tapes and hands one to Roy. Roy smiles and slips it in the player. Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes, Paul Simon.
The Land Rover pulls onto the interstate, and Roy and Bhop get down to this great R&B, which -- like love -- has the power to transcends continents, ideologies, even species.
END SYNOPSIS |
