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time.”
    Had I been picking them, I would’ve picked Big Bill fi rst, Mentzer second, Dickerson third, and Zane fourth. Arnold would’ve fi nished sixth behind Boyer Coe, maybe even seventh behind Roger Walker.
    When Zane was announced at t hird, I quickly made the adjust ments. Mentzer second, Miller fi rst.
    Big Bill gave me a wink, then held his chin up to greet the news.
    I prayed that I would not hear his name next. I grabbed his hand and squeezed. It was Chris Dickerson, another surprise at second.
    Big Bill gave my hand a squeeze, and looked impressed, and avoided looking at Mentzer as he rocked back and forth on his heels.
    Tough luck for Mentzer, I thought. It was his last shot, and he fi nished out of the money. Though watching his reaction from twenty feet away, I could see, unmistakably, that he still thought he’d won it all.
    But I knew differently.
    There are moments when realities collide, when expectations become so real that there’s no telling them apart from the future. Always in that terrible instant of contact, there’s a chill that shoots through you, almost like a shiver, or a bolt of electricity, and something is lost irretrievably in that moment. For Mike Mentzer, it was his shot at ever claiming an Olympia. For Big Bill Miller, it was something else entirely. I wish I knew what. But when Arnold was announced as the winner in the Masters Division, something was inexplicably lost between my father and me. We would never again capture the intimacy we shared in those hours before the ’80 Olympia.
    Big Bill was irritable for the rest of our stay in Sydney, spitting vegemite into napkins, complaining about portions, refusing to walk through the Royal Botanic Gardens. Willow tried to fi nesse his ego-bone back into place for the next two days, but her patience had worn thin by the afternoon of our departure, and when he started grumbling about the length of the check-in line at the Sydney airport, she let him have it in front of all of us.
    “Damnit, Bill, since when did you ever have any trouble moving on? Tell me that.” She blew a few frizzy strands of hair out of her face, dragged her suitcase forward a foot or so, and growled in frustration. “You’re so damn quick to just forge ahead at every juncture, until the minute your damn ego gets involved, and suddenly you’re incapable of forward propulsion, Bill, you’re spinning your wheels in the mud. And the rest of us are tired of getting spattered.”
    But it didn’t stop. Something had burrowed its way under my father’s thick skin. It soon penetrated the muscle and began to fester there. I’d always assumed it was failure in some shape. With hindsight, I see it probably had nothing to do with his disappointment at the results of the 1980 Olympia. It was probably just guilt.
     
     
     

 

     
     

    Forever
     
     
    For all his improved posing and posturing, I don’t think the discomfort of living was ever any less acute for Big Bill. Willow taught him poise, but she could not teach him fi nesse. Because, more than anything else, he liked short endings. Whether they were happy or sad, he liked them abrupt. He liked to avoid confusion. And nowhere was this more apparent than in his relationship with Lulu, where everything ended in yes.
    “I’m asking you, because I already know what Mother will say.
    Can I?”
    “Yes.”
    “Will you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Tomorrow?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can William?”
    “Yes.”
    Yes, Lulu, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Not because it’s a good idea, not because you earned it, but because, well, it’s short. Nobody argues with yes. In this way my father failed Lulu as a stepfather. He assumed no jurisdiction over her beyond the word yes . What did he deny her by never saying no? Suspense? Dialogue? I can’t say for certain. Maybe just the knowledge that her life was somehow conditional.
    But then, maybe that’s not fair. Maybe I’m not quali fi ed to make that judgment, having asked Big Bill for so