the loser

by Shaun Anthony McMichael

The first thing I remember winning was a Beanie Baby.

 I was in fifth grade and getting picked on. Crazy about math and sporting my coke-bottle glasses, I lacked the self-awareness to realize what a walking target my precociousness made me. My mom picked me up from school because, after my name came up missing at midday roll call, a recess proctor found me tied up to a fence in the field.

On the way home, Mom stopped at this family-owned drug store soon to be bought out by a family-owned corporation. And there was this teddy bear dressed like an angel on a doily inside a bell jar. I had collected Beanie Babies feverishly not two years prior. A nearby crystal bowl held the handful of folded entry forms already collected. There’d be a drawing later that day. The cashier, seeing my tear-muddied face, let my mom put in two slips.

They called around five that night and we picked up the bear with its wings and halo made from tulle and wire.

That time, as with all the times to follow, the win soured.

I kept the bear on my dresser for a few days. But that Friday, my one friend, Alex from youth group, was coming for a sleepover. I put the bear away in a drawer.

A few days later, my mom found it and asked why I’d put my prize bear away.

“Cuz it’s too girly,” I said.

I later traded the bear with Alex’s sister for some firecrackers she stole from him.

*****

None of this is to make anyone feel sorry for me. In fact, just so we’re clear, I’m to blame for everything that I’ve won and then tried to wish away.

Let's take Leigh's naked back for instance. It's got these ridges of bone and banks of muscle with thin, pale skin pulled tightly over the continent inside her. It’s a swimmer's back. A sixteen-year-old boy's back. I trace my fingers along the greenish-blue veins trailing just below her surface.

My wife's a lot prettier.

Leigh rolls over onto me.

"What are you thinking about?"

My wife used to ask me this question.

"About what a win you are."

It makes Leigh smile, but she doesn't belief it, because the smile is sad and fades as the fog outside fades as the sun rises over San Juan Island.

I've been thinking about having an affair since the honeymoon. But I never did anything to make it happen. This thing with Leigh just fell on me.  And a part of me wishes it would fall off just as easily, but just like that, she's on top of me again.

I probably sound like Odysseus whining about the beautiful island women who supposedly entrapped him into fucking them. Poor epic hero baby. But after I'm spent and she's still going with an immortal’s pent-up estrus, I kind of feel for the guy. And I'm scared. Sure, I'm scoring. Hitting her jackpot now in fact. But the tax on this might be more than I can pay.

*****

The next thing I won was an actual jackpot.

I was eighteen and working as a bus boy at a small steakhouse chain—the kind with a jack-a-lope nailed into the wall and peanuts you can munch on before tossing the shells on the floor. I wore a shirt that said Serious Meat to Eat. One of our more flamboyant guests told me the shirt made more sense on me than on the dowdy waitresses. By then I’d swapped my glasses for contacts and traded gaming for rock climbing. Anyway, the job was supposedly to save up money for community college, but it turned into just something to do because I’d graduated with a low GPA and hadn’t been accepted anywhere.

I worked till midnight to get tips paid out by the bartender and servers. Then, because I was underage and couldn’t go to any of the late-night places they’d go to—strip clubs mostly— I’d wander around the parking lot of the nearby strip malls.

The casino was always the only thing open, and I’d wander in and listen to music out of the old-timey juke box. No one ever bothered me because I was just a kid ordering chocolate shakes and listening to music until three when I’d bus home. Also one of the old bar hens—a Polish woman named Zhana—took care of all my orders and put up with the meager tips I left.

One day I helped serve a big wedding party at the steakhouse. “Who goes to a dump like this for their fucking wedding party?”  Marty, the bartender, demanded.

But the groom ended up being some big real estate agent’s kid and they left a hundred-dollar tip. Marty split it with me fifty-fifty.

So, I went over with my fifty bucks feeling lucky and after I sent Zhana off to get me my milkshake, I snuck a dollar into one of the machines—one called the White Lion.

 I pulled the lever and three sevens lined up like a bunch of butlers to meet my every need.

At first, I thought something was wrong because red whirly lights started spinning. A bunch of alarms went off too and then gold-colored coins started pouring out of the machine.         

I started shouting for help. I thought I would go to jail.

I’d won ten thousand dollars.

After Zhana convinced him, the manager let me keep it all on the condition that I never set foot near the casino again.

I never set foot in town again but used the money to start my first quarter at a university. Sure, it was a smaller Christian one willing to overlook my grades—mainly because they needed the money. And they liked my sob story (getting picked on, not having dad around, etc…). But I read every page assigned to me, practiced each skill on the syllabi, never went out, didn’t make any friends, and got all A’s. And in Business of all things because my mom said it was practical. After I’d drained the jackpot, the proceeding scholarships buoyed me through to graduation. I even TA’d for my math professors and found I could explain algebra to people. Each problem is like a puzzle. Or a game. Think of the equal sign like a net. Only, unlike in sports, with this game, you get to make both sides even by canceling things out.

But when I walked through the cut ivy with the tassel turned, I realized that the only thing I knew how to do was get A’s and tutor math. I didn’t have any brilliant ideas for a business; not even any crackpot ideas for one. And while I hadn’t lost any money, I was twenty-two and probably needed things like a car and a place to stay.

Realizing this, I had that same sour feeling that I’d had with the angel bear. I found myself wishing I’d just gone home that night after getting the fifty and kept working at the steakhouse with the peanuts on the floor. I would have made more money. I wished I hadn’t felt that seizure of confused victory set to the soundtrack of that hissing waterfall of coins pouring down.

*****

So, to make up for my losses, I won something else: a gig with Teach for America. To this day, I don’t know why they chose me. My wife thinks it was probably my bio: son of a single working mom, lonely kid, etc…The sob story again. Either that, or it was because I said I wanted to teach math. Either way, at teacher-bootcamp—hosted in an old military base outside of Dallas—there were the future state senators, civic leaders, non-profit starters, and corporate founders of the country and me. And everyone knew it.

Talk about a win you want to give up. The perks included a meager salary and loan forgiveness that I didn’t need, and, after bootcamp, a cockroach-infested apartment in the industrial part of St. Louis which would later be torched in a race riot by some of the kids that were my students.

They were okay kids. They were pretty nice to me considering I knew nothing about their lives. There was no way to find out about their lives from under the weight of the curriculum, canned and paced out by the minute. I felt like a coward following the pacing guide to the letter, but I had a job to do. I only knew two ways of doing life: being a loser or going balls to the wall. Every night I cried in my car, my white collared shirt and wide-striped tie already soaked yellow by my sweat. Every morning I had to white knuckle my drive back to that low ceilinged building with yellow tiles and weeds in the planters where you could hear the brown river skulking along with its slicks of oil and refuse. What made it so bad, I think, was my inability to make the kids hear me. I mean the actual words I was saying. My voice felt like such a reed in the wind below their banter, which was admittedly more interesting than anything I was saying. Even when they were quiet, I could tell they weren’t listening. They had already survived more than I had and lost bigger than I ever would. Not that I’d know. Because I never asked.

*****

I dropped out of Teach for America, only I wasn’t alone. I was engaged.

Bethany was a fellow Teach for America victim and she and I bonded over mutual misery. But that faded fast when we started living together and having fun.

Now Bethany’s a near exception to my life of chagrin-wins. I do wish I could give her back—from the bottom of my heart actually— but only to spare her from ever having met me. To spare her from what we’ve become.

Bethany’s a string bean of a girl with strawberry blonde hair, a square jaw and a light brown mole that sits right below her nose. Funny, I never noticed it when we were first dating. Neither had I noticed how shapeless her body is or how she can’t really tell a story without going on too long, not realizing all her hearers have tuned her out—all except me usually. But I even started defecting about a year ago. It’s funny how each of these quirks that make me so mad now were things I wasn’t even aware of three years ago.

We certainly had our fights that first year. We had a studio apartment by the train tracks. One time, we were arguing about who would cook dinner (me) and how to stack the drying dishes (straight or askew so they could dry). And a train came by. Its clanging tonnage made the room shake and for a minute we couldn’t hear each other, so we started yelling. Then its rumbling faded and all that was left was our sheepish expressions.

This isn’t working, I thought.

But one night, not long after our two-year anniversary, she leaned into me—her eyes getting big in my periphery, her mole out of sight.

“I’m still so in love with you,” she said with surprise.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t stand you,” she laughed. We made love. Only I remained awake afterward, staring at the ceiling with the realization that I’d won her heart and that I would have to do something really stupid to lose it.

*****

One of the things we argued about a lot was money and so we both went on our separate quests to get more. Bethany got an accountant’s certification and went to a number crunching job at a nice company. Out of some masochistic urge, I went back to school for my Masters in Teaching. I read a bunch of books on teaching and watched tutorials every night till long after Bethany fell asleep.

I threw myself into my year-long, cluster-fuck of a program, and my student teaching serfdom where my ‘mentor teacher’ went to go drink at the bar while I taught his class of students for free. They were relieved to learn from someone with the lights on upstairs. And I found myself relieved to teach them. No canned curriculum this time. And I did okay.

I barely saw Bethany that year. I’d turned her into a kind of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Someone I could stick all my problems on and make myself feel better next to, as I criticized her in my mind. Which was too bad, because during this time, she really needed me. She would come home with the meaninglessness of her job hanging heavier on her than a grand piano. She would try to tell me about how much it hurt being ignored all the time.

“There was this work party today. I went to, you know, try to meet some of the new people. I just stood there trying to talk to people and waiting for people to talk to me. And no one did.”

Probably because they think that mole under your nose is a booger needing to be wiped away, I wanted to say. I acted preoccupied with doing the dishes and thought about how shitty it was that my wife had to be the office wallflower who no one talked to because she wasn’t the pretty ‘it’ girl. And what was more, that she had to come home to her workaholic husband who was falling out of love with her.

I tried to use the pity to buoy me back to her, but she could smell it. I’d always had to steal my kisses from her. But I started having to steal smiles from her too.

*****

My second first year of teaching was better. The books finally paid off.

I spent a sleepless summer planning a year of constructivist style math curricula and readying my classroom. From day one, I had those kids wrapped around my finger and they loved me for it. Black, brown, and white alike. Boys, girls, and trans-kids too. How could they not? Each unit was like a who-done-it, only instead of figuring out a murder, my students had to figure out an algebraic proof. Each night that year, I left the building at six and arrived the next morning at six and yes, I cried in my car on the entry and exit. But the tears were from the fatigue of excellence. In truth, I was swimming. My classes achieved, they passed their tests, the principal bought me a hundred-dollar bottle of scotch on the last day of school, and I won the Prescott-Sykes Award—a national accolade for math teachers.

The award came with a summer fellowship in the San Juan’s.

Leigh Selarik was going too. With her pixie cut, athlete’s build, and strait-laced ways, I’d never thought of her in any way other than professional. But we’d been roomed next to each other. And the first whole day of us sitting at the same table with her giving little glances as I dumbly admired her water-ready figure, I wasn’t surprised at all when she invited me to come in around midnight with this irritated sound in her voice like she was pissed I hadn’t asked.

“Are you going to come over?” She asked it in the same tone Bethany uses when she’s hungry and I know the only way to deal with it is to feed her. So, I went over and here we are, having fucked away three post-conference nights.

Leigh is draped over my breathless body.

“Stay with me. For another week,” Leigh paws at me.

“A week! One day,” I say.

“We can go to Orcas. Hike Mount Constitution. Turtleback Mountain.”

“There’s no way I’m going to be able to keep up with you.”

*****

Over the phone, I tell my wife the conference heads have an extended seminar for stars like me. I’ll be another day. This is a big opportunity! I might be able to become a trainer with them! I’ll make about the same but have less work. Less grading, less planning! But I can tell she doesn’t believe me.

“Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what’s going on,” Bethany asks in a dry voice.     Part of me does, but I don’t even really know what’s going on. The wrong is like hot mud being poured over my whole body and the feeling rushes me away. The one thing I know is that I wish I could give back everything I’ve won.

I say, “I wish I could give this all back.”

She hangs up.

*****

On the last night of the conference, Leigh asks me, “For real, what are you really thinking about?” So I tell her all of this, stream-of-conscious style. What have I got to lose?

“But why?” she asks. “Why are you like this? Why can’t you just be here. Where you are. With the moments that are given to you?” She shakes her head, puts on a hoodie, and turns out the light. I slink back to my room, suddenly more tired than I’ve ever been.

The next morning, I find a greeting card of the San Juan Islands at the foot of my room door. The big, mountainy island, Orcas, is circled with a heart.

“Come and find me,” she’s written inside.

I take the first ferry home.

I want to go home. To the ruins of my marriage with Bethany.

It’s a loss. Even if she never finds out what I’ve done. And she will. She’s smart and I’m a bad liar. She’ll smell it on me. But I’m hoping that this time, by starting with a loss, I can lose whatever it is that keeps me from loving what I have. And when I’ve done that, maybe I can get that thing. That foundation inside that people stand on when they say, ‘for better or worse, fair and square, win or lose, no give backs, this is mine.’

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BIO: Shaun Anthony McMichael is the Pushcart-nominated author of THE WILD FAMILIAR short stories (CJ Press, 2024) and the poetry collection JACK OF ALL…(New Meridian Arts, 2024). Since 2007, he has taught writing to students from around the world, in classrooms, juvenile detention halls, mental health treatment centers, and homeless youth drop-ins. He’s edited two collections of poetry by youth affected by trauma and mental health issues (THE SHADOW BESIDE ME and THE STORY OF MY HEART). Over 100 of his poems, short stories, and reviews have appeared in literary magazines such as The Chicago Review, The Bellingham Review, and Adroit Journal.  He lives with his wife and son in Seattle where he attends church most Sundays. In addition to teaching English to immigrants and refugees at a public high school, he hosts an annual literary arts reading series, Shadow Work Writers. Visit him at his website shaunanthonymcmichael.com or on social media.