The Imaginary Girlfriend (16 page)

By the time I got him, it was all over town that I was looking for him; he was expecting my call. Carr remembered me, but not my face; he couldn't put me with a face, he said. I'm not surprised; in fact, I was surprised he remembered me at all—as I said, we never wrestled each other and my wrestling was hardly anything worth
watching.
If John Carr had had a minute to watch the other wrestlers in the Pitt wrestling room, there were a lot of better guys to watch than me.

I was right: Carr had been a 157-pounder, and he told me he'd been a PG at Cheshire when he won the New England's—
not
at Andover. I told him I was sorry to hear about his dad. Carr wasn't coaching anymore; he complained that the influence of freestyle (international) wrestling had hurt high-school and collegiate (or folkstyle) wrestling. For one thing, there was not enough pinning—wrestling wasn't as aggressive as it used to be, John Carr said. I share his view. I was never a fan of freestyle. As I once heard Dan Gable say of collegiate wrestling: “If you can't get off the bottom, you can't win.” (In freestyle, you don't have to be able to get off the bottom; the referee blows his whistle and
lets
you off the bottom—you can spend almost the whole match in the neutral position, on your feet. And so I knew what John Carr was thinking: he was thinking, How tough is
that?
In a freestyle match, I
might
have been able to beat Sherman Moyer; it was when I was on the bottom that Moyer killed me.)

Carr told me that Mike Johnson was still coaching at Du Bois, and that Warnick's kid—or one of War-nick's kids—had been pretty successful on the mat at West Point. I remembered seeing the name Warnick in the Army lineup and wondering if this was a child of the Warnick who'd arm-dragged me to death in my one winter at Pittsburgh. After John Carr and I said goodnight, and I hung up the phone, I realized that I'd not asked him if Warnick's kid had learned his father's killer arm-drag. I almost called Carr back. But when I start the phone calls, especially at night, I have to stop somewhere. If I keep going, I get in a mood to call
everybody.

Of course I'd like to call Cliff Gallagher—if only to hear him say, “Not even a zebra, Johnny.” And I often think about calling Ted Seabrooke, before I remember that I can't. Ted wasn't a big talker—not compared to Cliff—but Ted was insightful at interrupting me, and at contradicting me, too. I'd be saying something and he'd say, “That sounds pretty stupid to me.” Or: “Why would you want to do that?” And: “Do what you know how to do.” Or: “What's worked for you before?” Cliff used to say that Ted could clear the air.

It still seems unacceptable that both Ted and Cliff are dead, although Cliff (given normal life expectancy) would almost surely be dead by now—Cliff was born in 1897, which would make him all of 98, if he were alive today. I think it broke Cliff's heart that Ted died first—Ted died young. And Ted fooled us: after the diabetes, which he got control of, he had some healthy years; then the cancer came and killed him in the fall of 1980. He was 59.

For Coach Seabrooke's memorial service in Phillips Church, there were more wrestlers than I ever saw in the Exeter wrestling room. Bobby Thompson, one of Exeter's ex-heavyweights—and arguably the biggest-ever New England Class A Champion in the Unlimited class—sang “Amazing Grace.” (Bobby is the school minister at Exeter today.)

It was an outrage to all his wrestlers that Ted was dead. He'd seemed indomitable to us. He had twice been struck by lightning, while playing golf; both times he'd survived. Both times he'd said, “It's just one of those things.”

After Ted's memorial service, I remember Cliff Gallagher grabbing me with a Russian arm-tie and whispering in my ear: “It should have been me, Johnny—it should have been me.” My arm was sore for days. Cliff had a nasty Russian arm-tie. At the time, Cliff was 83.

I don't lead a hectic life. It's not every night, or every week—or even every month—that I feel the need to “clear the air.” Most nights, I don't even look at the telephone. Other times, the unringing phone seems to summon all the unreachable people in the past. I think of that poem of Rilke's, about the corpse:
“Und einer ohne Namen/lag bar und reinlich da und gab Gesetze”
(“And one without a name/ lay clean and naked there, and gave commands”). That is the telephone on certain nights: it is the unreachable past—the dead demanding to give us advice. On those nights, I'm sorry I can't talk to Ted.