Pacific Coast Classic 2008

My weekend...

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“Drew! Drew!”

Mrs. Avelino was shouting over my shoulder.

“Andrew!”

Drew finally turned around.

“What?”

“Can you please go get me a pretzel? You can keep the change!”

“No!”

“Please?”

“No!”

“I’ll do it.” Timmy jumped up and spun around.

“See?” Mrs. Avelino told Drew. “Timmy will get me one.”

Timmy handed his own half-eaten pretzel to my brother James. “If you eat my pretzel, I swear, I’ll kill you.” He took the money from Drew’s mom and turned down the bleachers.

Drew sighed in exasperation and began to follow Timmy, as the other boys started placing orders too.

“Wait!” Mrs. Avelino yelled after him. “Take Gabriel!”

“No!” Drew emphatically shook his head this time. “I don’t want to take him!”

“I can go with Timmy,” five-year-old Gabriel grinned toothily out of the hood of his gigantic sweatshirt.

“Timmy doesn’t want him either, Mom!” Drew pointed out, as Timmy reached the floor and took off for the food stand.

“All right. Gabriel, honey, Mommy’s sorry, but you can’t go with them this time.”

“Can I have my juice?”

Mrs. Avelino rooted around in her purse for the small bottle of apple juice Gabriel wanted. I turned around and kept watching the competition, although I kept moving aside for Gabriel to play cars on the bleachers next to me.

Timmy came back with three pretzels in his hands. Drew walked behind him holding three plastic cups filled with cheese.

“What the f?” Timmy took his pretzel back with a noticeable bite gone. “I’m going to kill you!”

“It wasn’t me!” James protested. He pointed to Nick. “It was him.”

Nick, not to be outdone, pointed over at James’ other side at Jon. “Jon ate a bite too.”

Timmy whipped back around in his seat, and Gabriel clambered down the few rows to Timmy’s side.

“Can I have a bite?”

Timmy grudgingly offered Gabriel a bite, then ignored the tiny arm that went across his shoulders as if they were best buddies.

#

In another few hours, the meet neared the finish. The boys all got up and left to do who knows what. We figured we wouldn’t be able to get up the elevator in all the departing traffic, so we stuck it out in the same set of bleachers.

“I tell you story,” I heard from Timmy’s mom, Mrs. Wang. “In Olympic Trials, I get the Paul Hamm’s autograph for Timmy.” She was standing, along with my mom, while Mrs. Mondragon still sat in her seat. “Everybody goes in this door, but I say, ‘Timmy, we go to that door,’ and he say, ‘Mommmm, no one’s going in that door.’ But I say, ‘No, come here.’”

The arena was emptying out. If anyone was around us, they could probably hear Mrs. Wang telling and the rest of us laughing very easily.

“And then, we wait by the door, and the Paul Hamm sticks his head out, and I take him like this. (Here, she grabbed my mom’s arm.) And I say, ‘Come.’ The security comes and says, ‘No, no, no,’ but I say, ‘No,’ and take the Paul Hamm over and say, ‘Sign this,’ and all the parents are following me.”

By this point, we’re all laughing. The little Chinese mother stalking the gymnastics superstar.

“And then I ask Paul Hamm if he be in Hawaii competing, and he says, ‘Yes.’ So I say, ‘I will see you there, then.’ And he looks like he doesn’t believe me, but then, we go to Hawaii, and he comes out, and I am right there, and he says, ‘Ah!’”

Now we’re losing it. Stalking him all the way to Hawaii!

“And I get the whole Chinese Olympic team’s autographs too! I only missing Li Xiaopeng, but I get him too, right as he getting on the bus. I call, ‘Li Xiaopeng, Li Xiaopeng!’ and he turns around for me, and I take him by the arm, and he signs. And I got the Japanese team also, I get on their bus, and they ask me, ‘Are you Japanese?’ I say, ‘No, Chinese.’ They say, ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ and sign my thing.”

Is she crazy?

As if in answer: “The people around me at the Olympic trials, they call me crazy lady,” she said proudly. “And then the coach, he tell people that my name is Amy, so the people, they all call me ‘Crazy Amy’!”

My mom said that if Paul Hamm ever writes an autobiography and includes a section on crazy fans, we’ll be sure to read about Mrs. Wang.

By that time, the arena was pretty cleared out, so we stepped down the bleachers. Mrs. Mondragon started to finally stand up but stopped short and sat back down laughing hysterically. We looked back.

“I’m stuck!” she wheezed. “I’m stuck in the bleachers!”

The zipper of her jacket was stuck between two sets of bleachers. With four hours of sleep the previous night, she was in no state to free herself. Between hysterical giggles, we managed to get her unstuck.

#

“Where are the boys?” I asked as we left the arena.

“I’m sure we’ll find them,” Mrs. Mondragon said as we walked around the corner past the escalator that was curiously stopped dead, though people were trudging up it.

“Speaking of the boys,” said my mom, as we came across James, Nick, Jon, and Kevin sitting on the sofas in the hotel lobby. “What are you boys up to?”

“We’re playing hide-and-seek,” James replied in perfect seriousness.

“I think you boys are missing some part of hiding,” Mrs. Mondragon said.

“No, we’re seeking,” Kevin said.

“You’re seeking?”

“Yeah, well, by sitting here.”

“Where is the Timmy?” Mrs. Wang asked. “Timmy need to go to bed, do homework.”

“Yeah, James,” my mom said, whacking my brother with the meet program. “You need to do some homework too. Don’t be out too late. Come up in a little bit. You have the room key.”

“Timmy’s hiding,” Nick said.

“TIMMY!” Mrs. Wang called, as if he could hear her.

“He could be anywhere between here and the fourth floor,” Nick continued.

“TIMMY! Come down here! I give you five seconds!” Mrs. Wang yelled.

“If you guys ‘find’ him,” my mom said, “tell him to go up to his room.”

We walked toward the elevators. There were two guys standing there waiting too—they looked as if they’d come from watching the same competition.

“Ooh, Timmy,” Mrs. Wang was still fuming. “TIMMY!”

The two guys tried to hide smiles. I wondered if they were thinking of “Crazy Amy.”

The elevator opened with Mrs. Wang still muttering about finding Timmy. We packed several of us in and made the head judge from the meet take another elevator. We hit the button for 12, Mrs. Wang asked for 5, Mrs. Mondragon hit 4, and the two guys asked for 7.

We stopped at 2 to take on more people. The doors opened to a crowd of faces pressing in.

“YOU!” Mrs. Wang pointed out into the crowd. Timmy stopped dead.

“Get in here!” She pulled him in. “I looking for you! Where you been?”

“Mom, I was just playing hide-and-….”

“You need go to your room!”

The two guys were cracking up, as well as the hotel employee who had joined us on the second floor. The rest of our group was having trouble holding back laughter as well. We made it to the fourth, fifth, seventh, and twelfth floors without further mishap, albeit wheezing a bit on the way out.

#

My brother came in half an hour later.

“So did you have fun?” my mom asked.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said.

“We have to tell you the Mrs. Wang story.” We filled him in on the hilarity.

“Ha, that’s funny,” he said, as he put his phone and iPod away. “Did I tell you that the guys broke the escalator?”

“What?!” my mom exclaimed.

“Yeah, Timmy decided to ride on the side, but then the rest of the guys said, ‘Hey, that looks like fun,’ and they got on too. Then the whole thing just slowed down and slowed down, and then it stopped.”

“You broke the escalator?”

“I didn’t! It was them!”

Thus ended the 2008 Pacific Coast Classic.