Pantheon of Loss

Abstract

Pantheon of Loss Sean Prentiss (bio) As a high school junior, my knee sinks into the soft wrestling mat as I unlace my running shoes, kick them off, and remove cotton socks. I undo my belt, unzip my jeans, and slide them off my bony hips. Thirty-by-thirty-inch jeans fall from a twenty-four-inch waist. I remove my sweatshirt, careful not to knock off my glasses, and slide out of my boxers. Chilled from undressing in the windowless Bangor High wrestling room on a cold March day, I rub my hands over my frame, feeling only muscle, bone, and a skin wrapped tightly around both. Naked, I prepare to step onto the scale for maybe the three hundredth time this season. Twice a day, six days a week, every week since October. Some days I’d weigh myself six or eight times to obsessively see if I’ve lost that half a pound needed to make weight. But after today, I won’t step on this scale again until October when my senior year of high school begins. Standing before the scale, I gaze at the flat platform covered in abrasive black tape, the thin neck reaching three feet into the air, the weights adjusting left to right on the balancing bar. As I slide the large weight to the one-hundred-pound slot and the smaller weight to three pounds, I feel an emptiness different from any hunger I lived with for the past four months. Today’s emptiness comes from a season ended sooner than expected. From November through yesterday, I aspired to be the next great Prentiss competing through the end-of-season tournaments, as my father did in the 1950s and ’60s. But I lost that dream yesterday when I lost to Wolf and lost my chance to compete at Regionals and State. Today, I return to the wrestling room as if I have qualified for Regionals, as if I have reason to keep starving and dehydrating, even though, since losing to Wolf twenty-one hours ago, I’ve done little other than eat and drink. Now I’m curious how much weight I’ve gained since my loss yesterday. From the feel of my body, I’d guess a lot. I prepare to step onto the scale, [End Page 141] and—like every other weigh-in—I imagine that if I step lightly I’ll weigh less. But no matter how gently I step, the scale arm whacks against the top of the scale. Normally that sharp thunk causes my stomach to drop as I realize I’ll need to run stairs to shed the last pounds before a match. But today—with no weigh-ins for seven months—I smile and push the small weight from three pounds to six to nine to eleven. The scale doesn’t even consider moving. At 113 pounds, I weigh more than ever before in my life. I push past fifteen and seventeen. By 119, the arm drops before settling against the top. Not only am I above the 103-pound weight class, but I’m at least seven pounds over the next class—112, and I’m about to surpass the 119-pound class. I move the weight to 120 and the scale arm floats. Twenty-six hours ago, I weighed 103 pounds. Today, even after gaining seventeen pounds, moving up three weight classes, and adding 16 percent to my body weight, I stare at my body. My butt sinks inward toward my hip socket. My spine crawls out of my back like gumdrop knolls. All ten ribs curve across my lower chest like fingers reaching for food. In 1997, eight years after my junior year of high school wrestling, three collegiate wrestlers—Jeff Reese from University of Michigan, Joseph LaRosa from Wisconsin-La-Crosse, and Billy Jack Saylor from North Carolina’s Campbell University—died within thirty-three days of each other. One wrestler dying in a decade is an anomaly; three in a month is unprecedented. Most people assume that starvation is what killed LaRosa and Saylor, that starvation caused a glassy-eyed Reese to die as he crawled to the wrestling...