The Spotter

So here's how I ended up forty-two years old, wearing a harness that rode up in places a harness has no business riding, staring up at a wall covered in neon plastic blobs. A wall I had voluntarily agreed to climb. In front of my boss.

Let me back up.

My name is Jamal, I'm forty-two, and I've been a loan officer at Crestline Bank for eight years. Eight years of sitting in a beige cubicle, smiling at people who want boat loans, and quietly dying inside every time the coffee machine in the break room makes that grinding noise like it's begging for mercy. There's a senior loan officer opening this year. One opening. Two candidates. Me, and a man named Cyril who has been at the bank for six years and treats every staff meeting like it's a hostage negotiation he intends to win.

Cyril is forty-five, has a laugh you can hear through two walls, and once brought in a laminated spreadsheet of his quarterly numbers and handed out copies. Copies. Laminated. I still think about that spreadsheet at night sometimes.

My boss, Ms. Alvarez, pulled me into the conference room two weeks ago and said the magic words every corporate drone dreams of and dreads at the same time.

"I want to see initiative and teamwork from both of you, Jamal. Real teamwork. Not just showing up."

Which, okay, fine, great, except what does that even mean? I show up. I team. I once organized the potluck and stayed late to clean cream cheese out of the microwave. That's teamwork, right? Right?

Apparently not. Apparently she wanted something she could actually point at and say, look, there's initiative, there's teamwork, give that man a corner office. And I had nothing. Meanwhile Cyril had already volunteered to coach the youth financial literacy thing at the library, which I'm sure he did the second the job posting went up, probably with his laminator warming up in the car.

Enter Pierre.

Pierre is my boyfriend. He's thirty-nine, gorgeous, built like a man who gets paid to hang off rocks, because he is that man. He's a climbing coach at The Grip, this gym across town with ceilings so high they should legally be considered weather. We've been together three years now. We met at DeShawn's fortieth birthday party when I was thirty-nine and Pierre was thirty-six, and Pierre spent twenty minutes explaining climbing grades to me while I nodded like I understood any of it. I did not understand any of it. I married the explanation anyway, metaphorically speaking.

Anyway. Tuesday night, I'm on the worn carpet in The Grip's lounge, still in my work shirt, eating the crackers Pierre left out for me, when he sits down next to me with this look on his face. I know that look. That look has cost me money at farmer's markets.

"So," he says, stretching his legs out, "good news."

"Pierre. Whenever you say 'good news' like that, my wallet gets nervous."

"No wallet involved! Well. Not much." He grinned at me. "You know the doubles bouldering comp? The one I help run every spring?"

"The one I have successfully avoided for three years, yes."

"Well, you can't avoid it anymore, because I signed us up!"

I put my cracker down. This felt important. "Signed us up. As in, both of us. On a team. Climbing. In public."

"As a team, yes! Baby, we've been practicing for months. You've gotten so good, your footwork is actually clean now, and your hip positioning, oh my god, I've been coaching you for nothing, you're a natural."

I was not a natural. I was a forty-two-year-old man who climbed twice a week because his boyfriend has eyes that sparkle when he talks about crimp holds. But I had gotten better, I'll give him that. I could do the 5.9s without making noises that frightened children.

"Pierre, I love you, and I love watching you climb, but a competition? In front of people? With judges?"

"With me! You'd be climbing WITH me! It's paired scoring, our points combine, and honestly we could place. We could actually place, Jamal!"

"Place in what, top ten?"

"Top five, maybe," he said it like this was a normal sentence a normal person says.

I told him no. I told him firmly. I used my work voice, the one that denies boat loans to men wearing boat shoes. And then he played his trump card, which he had apparently been holding in his back pocket the whole conversation like a gremlin.

"Okay, but hear me out," he said, turning to face me fully. "Ms. Alvarez. The promotion. She wants initiative and teamwork, right?"

"How do you know about that?"

"You told me at dinner last week, you were stabbing your chicken very aggressively. Baby. Think about it. What's more initiative and teamwork than entering a doubles competition to support the thing your partner loves, after training for months? That's a whole PowerPoint slide. That's the slide where everyone nods."

I opened my mouth to argue and closed it. Because he had a point. He had an annoyingly beautiful point. My boss would eat that up with a spoon. "Jamal supported Pierre's competition," she'd say, wiping a tear, sliding the promotion across the table.

"Also," Pierre added, way too casually, "Cyril is here tonight."

"What? Where?"

"Wall three. Climbing solo. He's been here twice this week, actually. DeShawn pointed him out to me. Is he the spreadsheet guy?"

Oh no. Oh no no no. I got up off that carpet so fast my crackers went flying, and sure enough, there was Cyril at wall three, in brand new climbing shoes that still had the sticker on the sole, flailing at a route two grades above anything he should touch. He'd heard Pierre was a coach, obviously. He was doing exactly what I would do, which was infiltrate the boyfriend's territory and charm him.

"Jamal," Cyril called down when he spotted me, dangling there with one foot slipped. "Fancy seeing you here. Small world, huh."

"Super small world, Cyril," I called back, waving like a maniac. "You climbing?"

"Trying to. This thing is a beast. But you know me, I love a challenge." He laughed his through-two-walls laugh, and a couple of teenagers looked over, and I swear I aged a year on that carpet.

I turned back to Pierre. He was watching me with the patient smile of a man who knows he's already won.

"You saw that," I said.

"Yup."

"That was Cyril. That was my rival. In my boyfriend's gym."

"Yup. And imagine how it looks if HE keeps showing up and supporting local athletics and you don't." Pierre shrugged, the villain. "Also if we place top five, I'm getting you a cake. The good kind, from the Cuban bakery, not the grocery store kind."

"The guava ones?"

"The guava ones."

This man knew my weaknesses and deployed them without mercy. I looked up at the wall, at all those cheerful little holds promising to humiliate me in front of my boss and my nemesis, and I took a deep breath.

"Fine. Fine. But if I fall in front of Alvarez, you're carrying me out of here like a wounded soldier."

"Deal." He kissed me on the temple, already pulling up the registration on his phone. "Practice starts in twenty minutes. Go stretch."

And that, folks, is how I ended up in the harness. The competition is Saturday. My boss is coming to watch. Cyril is training like it's the Olympics.

The guava cakes had better be worth it.

So Thursday evening, I'm at The Grip at six, stretching on the worn carpet like my life depends on it, because according to Pierre, it does. The gym smells like rubber and chalk, which is apparently the smell of romance if you ask him.

"Okay, warm-up wall first," Pierre said, leading me to the short bouldering wall by the lounge. "Show me your footwork."

"Show you my footwork. Like it's a dance recital."

"It IS a dance recital, baby, except the judges score you on whether you fall off the wall."

I grabbed the first hold, which was a big friendly jug, and felt okay about my life for about four seconds. Then the next hold was one of those stupid slopers that feels like grabbing a wet bowling ball, and my feet pinged off the wall, and suddenly I was just a man hanging by one sweaty palm.

"Feet," Pierre called from below. "Trust your feet. You're pulling with your arms."

"I'm pulling with my ARMS because my FEET keep leaving!"

"That's because you're placing them lazy. Toe first, quiet steps, hips into the wall." He moved under me, hands hovering at my waist, ready to spot. "Weight low, hips close. Like that. Feel the difference?"

I did feel the difference. I also felt his hands on my hips, adjusting my position, and they stayed there a lot longer than any spotter physics required.

"Pierre. Are you coaching me or fondling me?"

"Can't a man do both?" He grinned up at me, all teeth. "Hips are important. It's a technical area."

"It's a technical area, sure." I shook my head and went back to the route, and honestly? His tips worked. Quiet feet, hips in, and suddenly the sloper wasn't trying to murder me. I topped out and dropped down onto the mat feeling like a champion.

"THAT'S my guy!" He scooped me up in a hug and spun me, which is a lot of spinning for a man holding another grown man. "You see how that felt? Clean. Saturday, you do that exact thing, just with an audience."

"An audience including my boss."

"An audience including your boss who will be VERY impressed."

We drilled routes all evening. He had me traverse the low wall while calling out holds in the manner of a drill sergeant. He made me do the same easy route five times in a row until my hands burned. He kept touching my hips. At one point I told him his hands were a workplace hazard and he just said "good, stay distracted, it builds character," which is the worst coaching advice I've ever heard.

By nine o'clock I could do the warm-up wall without a single foot slip, and I