The Father Contest

They set me upright, and I lurch a couple dizzy steps before puking up beer foam. Twenty- somethings dance out of splatter range. A sweaty guy in a tank top yells, “Party foul!” His buddies’ laughter sounds like braying. The Father cries:

“You call that a keg stand?” The burly guys are already inverting him. “Watch and learn, Junior. This is by God how it’s done.”

The Father drinks and drinks. When he’s finally had enough, they flip him over, and he punches the night sky in victory. Party kids woo-hoo, laugh, and whistle.

“Now top that, sonny-boy,” says the Father.

A barrel-chested guy in a backwards cap thumps my shoulder, and I instantly feel it bruising. “Your old man is an animal!”

“Kicked your ass,” says a bright-faced brunette.

“Like he’s the son,” a skinny guy with long hair observes, “and you’re the old geezer.”

I take a long swill, then stagger a couple steps and chuck my half-empty cup toward the hot tub. They’re right: the Father’s pushing seventy-five but could pass for a college kid. His silver hair’s gone dark, his flabby muscles are toned and strong, and his craggy skin’s newly taut.

What the hell’s going on?

 At some point, I’m on the phone with Sara, my six-months-pregnant wife. I have a memory of my cell bleating, but that might just be one of the goats. I’ve got a pretty good buzz on: maybe I drunk-dialed her.

“It’s past midnight, Jon.”

 “There’s something going on here, Sara. The Father can’t be younger than the son, right?”

“Are you okay?” she asks. “What’s all that racket?”

“He forced me to jog into town with him. That’s gotta be ten miles. Then he won the marathon.”

“Calm down, sweetie.” Then: “He ran a marathon?”

“And won,” I say. “Then he forced me into a pancake-eating contest and won that, too. He insisted we run back home, but I took an Uber.”

“Sounds like he’s keeping in shape.”

“When he got home, I had to help him clear a stretch of his property.”

“Like a lumberjack contest?”

“Exactly,” I say, studying my hands for non-existent calluses. “Only with chainsaws.”

“You must be exhausted.”

“Then there was a race to mill the trees into boards to build the stage.”

“I don’t understand.”

“For the bands.”

“You’re not making sense, Jon.”

I swallow a belch. “Really? I don’t feel that drunk.”

A drummer crashes the cymbals. A guitarist bends a series of squealy notes. A bass line reverberates in my chest.

“It’s the Father Contest,” I say. “It never ends.” I shake my head, but my mind’s still fuzzy. “He’s got all these college friends now. It doesn’t seem normal.”

“Did he go back to school again?” Her voice tightens. “You’re not doing another degree, I hope?”

It’s a valid concern. When I got a BA, the Father went back for an MS. When I got an MA, he did an MEng. I got a JD, and he went for a PhD. From the looks of things, now he’s gone back for a second baccalaureate, though to what end?

“All these twenty year-olds are over right now,” I say. “The place is crawling with them.”

Sara sighs into the phone. “Let this one go, okay? It’s not worth it.”

Now a new band takes the stage. The drums kick and pop. Guitars whine controlled feedback. A bass guitar thumps, and the windows rattle. A white dude with dreadlocks shouts into the mike: “What’s up, Austin?” A roar of applause, guys yelling “Hell yeah!”, girls shrieking, “I love you, Marcus!”

“What is all that noise?” asks Sara.

“Ruby Love.”

“I don’t understand.”

“College band,” I explain. “The headliners.”

“What the heck’s gotten into your father, Jon?”

I mull for a moment, then say, “That’s exactly what I’d like to know.”

It takes half the night. I miss most of the party, and I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I dig through the Father’s closet, search under his bed, and rifle through his medicine cabinet. By now I’m getting pickled, so maybe my search isn’t all that thorough, but I come up with jack squat.

Stymied, I wander through the dark living room and plop down on the sofa. It’s true: the Father beats me.  At everything.  Always has.  Ping-pong and miniature golf, croquet and badminton, racquetball and squash. Says it builds character. The Father can turn anything into the Father Contest: Frisbee-throwing, lawnmowing, park-walking. And he has to win. I tell myself it’s because I let him, especially since he is old and I am young. Sometimes that’s true. Other times not. There’s no denying he’d be a sore loser of the worst sort.

I get hungry and find a bag of BBQ potato chips in the pantry. I plunk down at the kitchen table, munching chips and staring into space. When I get thirsty, I grab a bottle of Dos Equis from the fridge. As I crack it open and pour it into a glass, my eyes wander along the granite countertops to the cookie jar. Mom always kept it full of homemade peanut butter cookies.  I pull off the lid, and what should come spilling onto the Saltillo tile but little pills, oblong and powder blue. I squint and blink until I can make out the marking: a tiny sledgehammer. “Jackpot,” I say.

I find them in every canister. Same with all the vases in the house. Every other lidded receptacle—coffee cans and Mason jars and decorative Oktoberfest beer steins—is loaded with them. I wonder where the Father gets them, how much they cost, how long he’s been taking them. I take a gulp of beer and hold one up to the light. I’ve already seen what they can do: how can I resist?

When I pop one, nothing happens, so I down a couple more with the rest of my beer. Now I carry the cookie jar by the lip and wander back outside. As I glide from deck to firepit to pool, I offer samples to anyone and everyone: “Want a hit?” I say. “Try one.” I have to shout to make myself heard over Ruby Love’s indie rock mayhem. Some of the college kids ignore me, others shake me off with bemused smiles, but most grin, grab a handful, and gobble them down. “Nice,” they say. “Right on.” “Thanks, bro!”

As I amble toward the hand-built stage, the band wraps up their set, power chords dissipating into the inky night. I keep wondering when the swirling red and blue lights will cast things in a different hue. But the Father lives a long way from anywhere, and he owns a lot of land. “Thank you, Austin!” says the lead singer. The crowd howls. Marijuana smoke wafts on the warm night breeze. Everyone begins milling back toward the keg.

All at once, I feel stronger, more focused and full of energy. My beer buzz vanishes. A giddy sensation dances through my chest, and I burst out laughing at absolutely nothing. Once the band make their exit, I wait for a couple minutes, then bound up onto the stage. I grab a Les Paul from its stand, plug in, turn the dials up. I click on a mike, strum a power-G, and say: “This one’s for the Father.”

I played in a couple bands in college, but never like this. My fingers light up the fret board, and my pick hand’s a frenetic blur. A bluesy chord progression and jangly, distorted riff cascade over the party. How am I playing both at the same time? It’s the closest thing to an out-of-body experience I’ve ever had. College kids throng back out with full cups of beer.

I’m deep into the music when the Father marches onstage: “What the hell’s got into you, Junior?”

 I work the wah-wah pedal, then finger this crazy run up the frets.

“You’re cruisin for a bruisin, bucko.”

My new fans have different ideas. They whistle, grunt, and shout. Lovely brunettes in tight t-shirts shower me with adoration. Now I run the pick up the low E-string, then work my way through a sequence of deafening major-7 power chords.

The Father stands stage-right for a moment, flustered and sweating. He still looks twenty, though more muscular than when I saw him an hour ago. Then he spots the cookie jar: “Found my stash, I see.”

“Cat’s outta the bag,” I say.

 He grins, then swoops in and grabs a fistful, cramming them into his mouth. Once he swallows, he says, “Take ’er easy, Junior.”

“Like hell,” I say.  “I’m on fire.”  I finger another impossible riff.  I feel ten-feet tall.

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” says the Father, climbing in behind the drum kit. “The side-effects are no picnic.”

Now he twirls the sticks and thumps the kick drum. It hits me right in the chest. Shirtless bros in the crowd howl and yawp.

Before I know what’s happening, he lays down a solid rock ’n’ roll rhythm, snapping the high hat, popping the snare, thumping the bass. I nod and chuckle, arpeggiate an F-major-7, then rock out on a sequence of jangly chords. Though it’s not easy to admit, the Father and I don’t sound half-bad together.

Just when I’m about to rip into a solo, the Father changes time signature. Is it three-four? Six-eight? I can’t find the downbeat, so how can I follow? But that’s the whole point: hasn’t a lifetime of the Father Contest taught me anything? Now he takes advantage of my confusion, exploding into an ear-splitting solo of his own.

Who is this man, the Father, my father?

I crank up the volume on my Marshall stack, click the pedals for more reverb and distortion, then drown him out with another screaming lick. But the Father will not be interrupted, thumping right over my deft fret work. It’s loud and bombastic and draws impressed hooting and hollering from the college crowd. I try to recover, but even when I max out my volume controls, the Father’s rhythm overwhelms my power chords. His wide grin looks smug in the spotlight. I yank the cable from my guitar, and everyone winces with the feedback surge.

“Aw, c’mon, Junior,” says the Father as he rolls down the tom-toms. “Don’t be a quitter!”

I grip that Les Paul by the neck down near the tuners. I feel strong enough to crush it with my bare hands. A glare at the Father, another at the inebriated twenty-somethings, then I swing that guitar like an ax, bashing it against the stage once, twice, three times, until it’s little but loose wires and jagged wood scraps. The Ruby Love guitarist screams obscenities and pushes toward the stage, but he must shove the wrong bros because a brawl breaks out. Everyone watches, eyes bright. I’m standing at the edge of the stage when the Father says:

“What’d I tell you, Junior?”

A little later, after his bandmates haul the Ruby Love guitarist off to the hospital, the party hits a lull. It must be two in the morning. Revelers come and go in small packs. Clouds of marijuana smoke waft over the Father’s property. Discarded plastic cups dot the ground like blooming carnations. I wander around, munching on little blue pills and chasing them with tepid beer.

I spot the Father at a picnic table with a wavy-haired college kid and four of the most beautiful sorority sisters I’ve ever seen. I wedge in between two blondes who could be twins. “Okay,” I say, planting my right elbow on the table, “let’s go.”

A smile blossoms on the Father’s rosy lips. “Have y’all met my son Junior?”

The kid with wavy hair nods. The blondes scooch over to make space for me.

“So?” I say, wiggling the fingers of my open hand.

He grips my palm, all but crushing my fingers. “You sure this is what you want?”

Maybe it’s just the little blue pills, but I feel invincible. “Uh-huh,” I say. “I’m gonna crush you.”

“Dream on, Junior. I’m not by God losing to the likes of you.” He scans my face. “Though you’re looking a whole helluva lot better than yesterday. Where was this kid when I was winning the marathon?”

I make a show of chomping a couple-three blue pills. “I’m here now, old man.”

A huge crowd gathers around us. The Father Contest is popular among spectators. “Okay,” says the Father, “somebody give us a countdown.”

The crowd yells, “Three, two, one, go!” The Father flattens my arm against the table slats before I even flex my bicep. That’s how quick it’s over. His buddies slap fives, bump chests, and spill beer. The crowd carries the Father off on their shoulders, and I wind up at the picnic table alone.

But that’s not the end of it. The Father Contest is never over. He’ll challenge me to a game of chance, battle of wits, or test of strength at any moment, if I don’t challenge him first. That’s why I crash his little victory celebration over by the firepit. I feel stronger than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. Also, impervious to embarrassment, apparently.

“Enough bragging, old man,” I say.

 “Want me to show him the door, Jon?” asks a shirtless bruiser in a backwards baseball cap.

“Don’t bother.” The Father gives me a pitiful look. “He’s harmless.”

“Let’s go. Wrestle-fest. Mano a mano.”

 He sneers, waving me off. “That wrasslin’s all malarkey, Junior.”

The fire crackles and pops. A beefy dude adds a log, then stokes it.

“Not wrasslin, wrestling. Greco-Roman style.”

He stares me down. “With the costumes and all?”

“You don’t have to—”

“Don’t you need a ring?”

“No, it’s just a padded—”

“If we can’t dive off the top rope or smash heads into the turnbuckle, I don’t rightly see the point.”

“Sounds like you’re chicken to me.”

“You wanna go out yonder and by God roll around with the snakes and spiders and mesquite thorns?”

“That’s not—”

“We’ll both wind up in the ER.” He chucks a frat buddy’s shoulder and points at me. “Or he will, anyway.”

Now I fold my arms into wings. “Bock-bock-bock-bock!”

“Take it easy on those pills,” says the Father as I strut around in a circle. “They don’t grow on trees.”

“Thought you were spending your dotage farming these things.”

“Dotage, my ass,” says the Father.

Everyone thinks that’s hilarious, for some reason.

“Anyway,” he says, “I got a better idea.”

I wait for the grand revelation. “Footrace.”

“How’s that a better—”

“Forty-yard dash.” He’s already leading his entourage toward the stage. 

I get jostled this way and that as I trip after him. “In the dark? Over uneven ground?” Somebody works the stage lights, flooding the field with yellowish-white incandescence.

Though they’re inebriated on cheap beer and weed, those twenty-somethings get the course measured off in nothing flat. The Father stretches his quads. I stand there, bleary-eyed and reeling. A redhead in a crop top pulls a starting pistol from her back pocket, twirling it on her index finger. The Father and I approach the starting line.

“Ready for an ass-whooping, Junior?

“This is a field day competition,” I say. “It’s for little kids.”

“You asked for it. And it’s by God gonna smart.”

“Next, you’ll have us racing in burlap sacks or with one leg tied to somebody else.”

The Father winks at the redhead. She winks back and blows him a kiss.

“What the hell was that?” I say.

I’m still standing there with my hands on my hips when the starting gun goes off. The Father blasts off the line, as if he’s been running forty-yard dashes every day of his life. Maybe he has. I scramble to catch up, but the terrain’s rough. I stumble and stagger and almost twist my ankle. The whole scene is a slow-motion smear: contorted faces, drifting cannabis smoke, exuberant, underwater cheering. When I look up, the Father’s flashing across the finish line, arms hoisted in victory.

I pull up lame a good fifteen yards back, though I haven’t injured myself. I watch the twenty-somethings crowd around the Father, giving him high-fives and hugs, dousing him with tepid beer from the keg. They hoist him onto their shoulders again, parading him around and singing, “We Are the Champions.”

“What a load of BS,” I shout.

The Father directs the crowd to carry him my way. “What’s that, Junior?”

“You’re not so special.”

He gives me a pitying glance. “I warned you, did I not?”

“I saw that wink. You and the carrot top are in cahoots. You cheated.” 

The Father hops to the ground, spry and full of vim. “You’ve got an active imagination.”

“This lousy SOB,” I say, “has beaten me at everything. My entire life. Even when I was just a little kid. Always had to win.”

“You better wise up, boy.”

“At least now I know why.”

The Father spits into the dirt. “You don’t know a damn thing, Junior.”

“You’re a lowdown, dirty, dishonest excuse for a dad.”

“Oooh,” says the crowd.

The Father flinches and scowls. “This is one road you don’t want to travel.”

 “But everything happens for a reason, right? That’s what you always used to say when I was a little boy, after you annihilated me at horseshoes or whiffle ball or one-on-one in the driveway. Remember that?”

“Your mother was too soft on you,” he says. “I did everything I could, but look how you turned out.”

“Damn, dude,” says a guy through a mouthful of weed smoke. “That’s cold.”

“A year to the day since she passed away,” I say, “and you throw a kegger?”

“Hell, yeah!” shout his buddies.

The Father digs a couple of little blue pills from his pocket and chews them into a bitter chalk. “You got no right, Junior. We gave you everything, and how’d you repay us?” He looks around, face yellowed with disgust. “Now you’re a weak-kneed, West Coast pansy.”

“I’ve got a life out there, old man.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Wife and career.” I give him a steely look. “Baby boy on the way.”

His eyes go wide. “You are gonna be a father?”

“Uh-huh.”

His smirk stretches into a grisly rictus, then explodes into laughter. He doubles over, heehawing so hard, I wonder if he’s going into conniptions. A couple of his coed friends attend to him.

I swallow my last magic pill, then hurl the cookie jar at the stage. A hot fist clenches in my chest. Tears burn and dribble down my cheeks. “Laugh yourself silly,” I say. “I’ll be ten times the father you were.”

He goes rigid. “Do what?”

“You heard me.”

 “If you believe that,” says the Father, “you’re beyond all hope.”

“Would you listen to yourself?”

The Father folds his arms across his chest. “I call ’em like see ’em.”

I run a hand over my face. The red fist in my chest swells and grows molten hot. “Goddamnit, for once I wish you would—”

“You can wish into one hand,” says everyone in unison, with nifty choreographed gestures, “and shit into the other, and see which one fills up faster.” They laugh and give each other high- fives, thunking cups and sharing joints.

Then I make a run at the Father. Before he can step out of the way, I plant my shoulder into his chest and tackle him to the ground. He goes down hard. But he doesn’t stay there, using some judo move to flip me off. I scamper to my feet. The Father collects himself.  The party forms a drunken circle around us, cheering and laughing.

We size each other up, circling this way and that around our makeshift ring. The Father seems lithe and limber and somehow completely in his element. Not me. Something’s off. I pant and fume, and my whole body pulses with rage. Even my skin feels hot.

“What’d I tell you about the side-effects?”

I spit and snort. The time for talk’s long past.

“It’s just the chemicals working you over, Junior.”

I dance closer to him, fists clenched, and feint left before going right and connecting with his jaw. Something crunches in my right hand. The Father staggers back a couple steps. Adrenaline zaps through me like electricity. I cackle, nodding and grinning.

He glares at me, then spits blood. “I won’t hold that one against you. Give it twenty minutes to clear your system. An hour, tops.”

In response, I charge him again. He sidesteps me like a matador, using my momentum to pull me into the dirt. He lands a kick to my solar plexus, then another. I make a swipe at his feet, but he dances out of range.

“Stay down, Junior.”

I bound to my feet.

“You don’t really want this, boy.”

I stride toward him. Something’s wrong with my hand, but I can’t feel it. Before I can throw another punch, the Father lands one to my chest, then another to my neck. I stagger backwards, struggling to breathe.

“You’re in a world of hurt now,” he says. “And it’s only gonna get worse from here on out.”

I clench and unclench my left fist. The other hand doesn’t want to work. A low, menacing growl emerges from deep in my throat.

The Father nods. “Those pills are the tail wagging the dog, Junior. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

When he brings the fight, he’s like Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee rolled into one. His friends holler, whistle, and pass him cups of beer while I’m dragging myself up off the ground.

My face soon feels like rubber. I spit blood. At least one tooth feels loose.

“Enough’s enough, Junior.”

I blink and shake my head against the descending haze.

He nods. “You can take a punch. Good on you. But let’s call this quits before somebody gets hurt.”

The whole party goes dead silent. I somehow get myself upright, then lurch a few steps toward him. Magma still courses through my veins. Although my vision’s blurry, I stare the Father right in the eye and smile.

Despite all his showboating, he’s not about to back down. I expect some fancy roundhouse kick to the head, but he comes at me with a hard right hook that sends me reeling. Before I can regain my balance, the Father lands an uppercut, and that’s it.

Lights out. 

When I finally come to, I have no idea where I am. Sunlight floods the room. My head feels like it’s being crushed beneath the wheels of a semi, and my mouth’s so dry, I can barely swallow.

The pain’s intense, and I feel green and queasy. The hot sun’s not helping anything. I lie there in the quiet, taking short, shallow breaths, trying to keep whatever’s in my stomach from spewing out.

I nod off, and when I wake up again, everything hurts. My bottom lip feels three-feet thick. I can only see out of one eye. Near the windows, goats are bleating. The sun pouring through the closed slats feels hotter than before.

After a few deep breaths, I get myself upright. What happened to that eighteen year-old kid I was last night? I feel like a creaky old codger. Standing is even worse.  Every joint pops as I stagger to the bathroom. I ransack the medicine cabinet for pain killers, then splash cold water on my face, but only with my left hand. My right’s puffy, tender, and purple. I grimace at my reflection, but that doesn’t last long because it hurts too much. One of my eyes is black, and the other’s swollen shut. My lower lip is busted. After gargling some mouth wash, I stuff my clothes into my bag and call an Uber.

The house feels empty, though college kids sprawl across every piece of furniture, passed out. In the kitchen, I find that redhead from last night in nothing but one of the Father’s t-shirts drinking coffee. She smiles at me over a “World’s Greatest Dad” mug. Wheeling my suitcase behind me, I slip past her and pour myself some. “Hot and weak,” I say, my voice like gravel on sandpaper. “Just how the Father likes it.” The girl doesn’t respond, blowing into her mug.

As I hobble outside, the sun slaps me in the face. I set my coffee on a patio table and fumble for my sunglasses.

“Look what the cat dragged in.”

The Father, perched in the shade, gazes off into oblivion. Gone are the dark hair and chiseled physique. In their place, an old man with thinning silver hair. He has a few welts and bruises from our scuffle but otherwise seems okay. His coffee cup needs refilling, though I’m not about to volunteer.

I scan the Father’s property. A VW convertible in the swimming pool. Half the stage black and smoldering. Plastic cups and clothing scattered everywhere. And all those college kids, passed out on the patio and gravel drive, in lawn chairs and on top of picnic tables. “What happened?” I say.

The Father takes in the destruction. “You were here. You should know.”

I sip at my coffee, but it hurts too much to drink. What I really need is some ice for this lip. He squints over at me and chuckles. “Guess you got what was coming to you, huh?”

I glare at the bougainvillea. He gives me a head-to-toe. “What’s with the luggage? Where in hell are you going?”

“Home,” I say.

The Father scowls. “Not before you help me clean this place up.” 

“Get your buddies to do it,” I say, pointing at a tangle of kids passed out in the crepe myrtles.

He ignores me, examining the bottomless pit of his empty coffee cup. Mockingbirds mock. Goats bleat. Some meathead passed out in the bushes yells in his sleep. But between us, silence.

At last, my Uber crunches up the drive. As the driver loads my luggage into the trunk, the Father says, “Don’t you ever miss your mother?”

 I glare at him with my one good eye. “All the time,” I say. “Every day.”

The Father spits into the rhododendrons. For a long moment, he says nothing, staring off into space. I’m about to open the car door when he says: “I’ll tell you one thing, Junior. I by God miss her a lot more than you.”

I expect that hot lash of revolt, but when I look at him, frail, gray, alone, I’m flooded with pity. “Take care of yourself,” I say. Then, stiffly, wincing with pain, I climb into the backseat, and we drive off into the hard midday glare.

J. T. Townley has published in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and many other magazines and journals. His stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (three times) and the Best of the Net Award. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MPhil in English from the University of Oxford. To learn more, visit jttownley.com.