Teacher (6 page)

I went at football with a novitiate’s devotion. The coaches told us that before practice we were to do a set of exercises with an absurd device called an Exer-Genie, an isometric contraption that must have cost a good five dollars on the open market. The drill was excruciating, and though almost everyone else ignored the machines, I did double the amount. I never dogged it on the field. I filled every minute there, in accord with the Kipling poem that someone had posted on our bulletin board, with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. In fact, I worshiped that poem, “If,” with its muscular, colonialist faith (and I was being groomed as a lower-echelon colonialist, wasn’t I? For beyond the stadium walls there was Vietnam, and all the other American adventures abroad that were to come). I threw myself into every drill like a fiend hopping into the fire, hoping to ascend another degree of flaming rectitude.

I never did the one thing that would have made all the difference. I never contrived to go out and get myself some contact lenses or some sports glasses. No, I simply stowed my everyday glasses in my locker—they wouldn’t fit under the helmet—and went out to practice. So I stayed nearly stone-blind. But other than that, I was close to transformed over time. From a disoriented, buttery boy in mid-August I had become, by late November, a pretty solid, pretty reckless head banger. Rourke, my devilment, had taught me a technique for flipping my forearm and sending the blocker coming at me spinning, and I practiced this one motion more than a dancer does her pas de deux. I can do it fluently still. (Come at me; come on!) Step with the left, flip with the right; step right, flip left, with no trace of wasted motion, as though your forearms are the moving bumpers on a pinball machine. If you can move your forearm fast enough, you can make a sound like a bass drum in a cathedral inside your opponent’s helmet. Other players saw what I could do and began to duck me when we lined up to scrimmage.

One day, Mace Johnson presiding, Rourke attendant priest, we lined up for tackling drills. Two large blue tackling dummies, smelling of sweat and sawdust, are placed five yards apart. In the middle is an offensive lineman; back behind him, a ballcarrier. Nose-up to the blocking lineman, crouched in his stance, football’s Zen meditative position, is a defender, with forearms poised if he’s a linebacker or an end, down, in three points, if he’s a tackle.

I step into the defensive slot, get my forearms—seal flippers, they look like in their thick, laundry-scented pads—into place. In front of me, blocking, is Tommy Sullivan, a nice, nice kid, my year, a junior, who plays a lot in the games, at linebacker and at guard. (“You ain’t never never gonna play,” says Rourke aloud, of me, while the team is watching my filmed self blitz the quarterback at the behest of J. T. Tedesco, senior, thus leaving my slot open over the middle and getting us burned for a touchdown pass in a scrimmage with Salem.) Tom is a freckle-faced kid with a great shock of Woody Woodpecker–red hair.

Behind him is Frank Ball—built, in Medford parlance, like a brick shithouse. Ball is actually a cowardly lion, a Baby Huey. He is a rich kid (by Medford standards); his father owns a used-car dealership. He is also a handsome one—in the off season, he wears a carefully tended mustache.

I can tolerate Frank Ball; Tom, I like a lot. But right now I am filled with a rage that simply pours through me like fast-rushing water; I can hear it move. For on the human map, and on the Homeric map of football, I am simply an unequivocal nothing, a flunky in school, of less than no account socially, with no money, no connections; I’ve got zip and zip-minus listed in every account book that matters. I can no longer bear the shame of being simply myself. I am raging so much internally that I’m surprised my body doesn’t lift off the ground and rise, corkscrewing into the air.

But though I may be a nothing on the football field, at least so far, I am coming to feel very much at home here. In particular, I love my uniform. In the beginning, when I first started to play, I didn’t understand how anyone could sustain all this gear for hour after hour. I was alternately frantic, like someone locked in a dark closet, and despondent, like a horse that has never felt a saddle until one very rough and heavy one is applied. But now things are different. I feel that when I pull on my helmet, I am completely transformed; the great cage, three bars horizontal, one down the middle—designed, come to think of it, much in line with the helmets that they wore at Troy—confers a new identity. I’m wearing a mask. It’s a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing. Now the animal can get into play.

I love the feel of the shoulder pads and the thigh and knee protectors and the smell of the harsh shirt—like rotting leather, really, but appealing to me. Suddenly, within the armor, I—who am usually a human incoherence, ready to fly off in every adolescent direction—pull almost completely together. I am now all of a piece, unified, self-contained. And I am also blissfully, beautifully, isolated: No one can get in; no one can get at me. A lovely place to hide.

But mainly it’s the sense of power that I love; every piece of armor ensures some protection, but most of them are weapons as well. The shoulder pads are bludgeons; the helmet is a battering rock.

We always go on the second “hut,” our offensive line. Knowing this, the defender has an advantage. Tom and I move at about the same time. He leads with his helmet, getting a good push out of his stance. I know what is coming. Never cock your forearm—he’ll be on you before you get it thrown. It’s like a short punch, a jab, but I know how to sink every fiber into it. I do. Sully simply flies to the ground in a thrown-rag-doll heap. He rolls over and groans a little, more in humiliation than pain.

This leaves Frank Ball unprotected. He appears, for all his size, terrified. Which adds, if possible, urgency to my rage. I feel at that moment like a wolf bearing down on some large, injured thing that is not dangerous at all, despite its tusks and girth. I spear him just above the waist with my helmet, and all the air goes out of him. There’s not even time to wrap him with my arms. He’s on the ground—gone—just like that. He grunts twice, on the first hit and then as he smashes down.

“Frank, get outta here,” says Rourke. Ball is a disgrace to alpha maledom. He has all the biological sine qua nons, but he won’t activate them. Rourke presumably wants him chloroformed. Then he spits. “Sull, you all right?”

You are always all right, whatever has happened to you on a football field. If you have your limbs scattered at random across the grass, like the Scarecrow in the Oz movie, you are nonetheless all right. Sully shakes his head in assent. Rourke asks how he could have let Edmundson do that to him. This sends me into a million furies.

Sully lines up again. No runner now. He comes fast off the line, jumping the count by a fraction. No problem, because I’m jumping it by a little more. This time I rap him with both forearms and send his helmet up on his head; his chin strap goes over his mouth, his cage lifts up; he reels back. Then, foolishly, he bends at the waist and takes a step forward. He wants to make one more stab. This time my right forearm knocks his helmet off his head and into the dust. His nose is bleeding wildly. Now I can really destroy him, bash his brains right in (you let Edmundson do that?), and it is—I say to my shame—all I can do not to throw a stone fist at his down-tumbling innocent head. It’s all I can do not to jump on him and throttle him when he hits the ground as a warrior out of
The Iliad,
a thug like Diomedes, would do, though I would have no fine rhetoric to accompany the assault.

Sully rises, dusts himself off, and walks ignominiously away. Then other linemen, with no inducement from the coaches that I could see, line up in front of me and take their turns. Some I blasted, a few I fought to something like a draw, but none of them came close to blowing me out. Rourke stood there and spat tobacco and whistled his soft, ironic whistle and took off his baseball hat and rubbed his curly hair, like rich black lamb’s wool. Mace Johnson was more demonstrative. Every time I won a round, he’d whoop or throw his coach’s cap onto the ground. He was the backfield coach, not my boss, as Rourke was, but he was in a form of identificatory ecstasy that’s hard to reach day to day.

For Johnson and I were actually of a similar species. Though he was hugely strong and fast, like Ajax to Rourke’s Odysseus, Johnson wasn’t terribly well coordinated. I’d seen him play baseball for the Pantops Bullets, a local semi-pro team, and his contributions mainly consisted of hustle, “huss” and “extra huss” as he put it. He stole bases often and roared down the path like an out-of-control train. Once, the story went, an umpire had called him out on a close play. Johnson rose, looked at the opposing second baseman, and said, “Son,
you know
I’m safe.” The man, who was probably a year younger than Johnson, took the coach’s flaming stare for a moment, then nodded. The umpire reversed the call. But such scenes made up the major glories of Mace Johnson’s baseball career. Unlike Rourke, who was the star short stop, Johnson wasn’t bred right for big-time glory. He recognized me that day as one in the confraternity of the striving breed, and he was well pleased. He gave me his nod.

How did I feel that day? In Homer there are moments when, it’s said, a god descends and makes himself manifest to a mortal, proferring him some much needed help. But we moderns have learned to read it differently: We see the mortal as temporarily embodying the prowess of this or that deity. Suddenly the thinker glows with Athena’s power of mind. Occasionally, for the gods are whimsical, they pick someone low in the pecking order of life to favor with a visit, and so some randomly skipping cosmic force did for me that day.

After the day of trial by combat, I had a new identity on the football team; I was reborn, though modestly enough. No one cut in front of me anymore in the line where we waited for the trainer, Pete McKusick, to tape us up. On the practice field I was no longer “Hey, Emunson” or “Hey, sixty” (my number that year) but Marco. The rogue seniors, the linemen with all the talent who had come back flabby, to be ignominiously benched, took me up. I became their surrogate weapon against the less gifted, sometimes brown-nosing upstarts who’d taken their jobs. “Hit ’em wid da flipper, Marco,” Frankie Donatello would holler in his mock North End accent (which was really a heightening of an authentic North End accent). Donatello weighed well over three bills and was the only one who could move the seven-man sled solo.

In the last game of my junior year, the game against Malden, I saw some genuine playing time. I went in at offensive guard, beside Steve O’Malley, who was our all-league tackle, by far the best football player on the team. On my first play, our quarterback called a simple blast—halfback follows the blocking back—through the hole between Steve and me. We trot to the line. Steve, who has been playing both ways, offense and defense, for more than three quarters now, is streaked with dirt, grass, and blood and he is, to say the least, in a state. He is drunk with what the epic poets like to call battle joy. As we crouch preliminary to taking our stances, he stares at the linebacker and tackle across from us, grins a broken-toothed grin, and screams, “Right here! The play’s going right here!”

He points to the hole where, in a moment, Phil Campesio will come firing through, followed by Tony Eagan with the ball. I am up against a first stringer in a real game that, give or take, is still at issue, and O’Malley is telling them the plays! He turns in my direction and looks sheer death at me. As we come off the ball, I hear a horrible noise, like a truck collision. It is O’Malley, pushing his helmet under the defensive tackle’s chin and making his face mask and pads ring like iron. I’m on the linebacker. He throws me down—he does have some advantage in this one—but I go to all fours and crab-block him out of the play. Campesio goes through untouched, headed for a very unlucky defensive back, and the ballcarrier follows—a pickup of a dozen yards. On God’s verdant earth there may have been people happier than I was then, but I could not imagine who they were.

It is not a Christian game, football. It is not about following a list of prohibitions, a decalogue. The game is about achievement, not renunciation; you make the most of every chance, create chances where you can. And honor is always won at the expense of others. Before Achilles leaves for war, his father tells him, quite simply, that he must strive to outdo everyone else in
any
activity he undertakes. This way of life, the way of honor, is built on your own vision of self and what you believe you owe it, and, second, on what others on par with you think. By exercising his prowess, the warrior gains an enhanced fullness—his justly won pride expands, and expands him.

I can picture Steve O’Malley standing alone along the sidelines during one of his rare breathers. His arms are padded from top to bottom, and by mid-game the tape and bandages have begun to unravel and are smeared with the dreck of the field. From his left hand dangles his helmet, with its massive cage; it’s embossed on either side with a red skull and crossbones, his rewards for ferocious play. His nose seems to have been repeatedly broken; at seventeen, he looks like a veteran of a dozen barroom brawls. His presence is so powerful that standing there, slouched insouciantly on the sidelines, rammed with the confidence that anything in the world that comes after him will not depart in one piece, he presents, at least to my sixteen-year-old self, a glowing and rather beautiful image. The circumference for about ten yards around him is his own space, alight with his dangerous aura. No one—not even the coaches—readily steps into it.

If you had asked, up until the afternoon of the great trial by combat, what was to become of me when I left high school, I would have shrugged and said I didn’t know. (“I dunno.”) But I had my fears on the matter, and they were dire enough. I pictured myself—and this is perhaps why the guidance counselor’s lines hit a nerve—actually working for the city. In my thick glasses and green fatigues, I turned up daily to pick up trash from the roadsides or to empty barrels. I made a joke or two from time to time, but mostly I tried to avoid subtle humiliations, steer clear of major disgraces. After work I went home to TV, the Red Sox or the Patriots, a quart bottle of beer, my special chair, where I sat fat and lumpy and loaded, hating the hours. Maybe this was a dun basement apartment of my own; maybe it was in my parents’ house. But it was death in life, as the poet Coleridge called a similar condition, brought on by opium withdrawal and failed imagination, and the thought of it kept me up at night.