The Imaginary Girlfriend (5 page)

“West Point? A hundred bucks? Sure, man,” the driver said. “Where's West Point?”

Caswell said he couldn't read a map in a moving car without throwing up, and Lee Hall couldn't comfortably fit in the front seat; the meter crowded him (Lee had to cut a lot of weight to weigh 177 pounds). Therefore, I was our navigator—I sat up front with the driver.

“You just go up the Hudson,” I told him.

“Sure, man,” he said. “Up the
what?”

I have flown nonstop from New York to Tokyo; I have driven nonstop from Iowa City to Exeter, New Hampshire. But that trip up the Hudson was the longest of my life. Didn't the Dutch explore the Hudson in boats? Not even in a boat could we have made worse time.

In the first place, the only map was a map of Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx. In the second place, as soon as the city lights were gone, our driver informed us that he was afraid of the dark.

“I never drove in the dark before,” he whimpered. “Not
dis
dark!”

We inched along. It began to sleet. It seemed that only back roads led to West Point—at least they were the only roads we found.

“I never seen so many trees,” our driver said. “Not
dis
many!”

If our taxi driver was terrified of the dark, and of the unusual number of trees, the soldiers who were dressed to kill—and who guarded the formidable entrance to the United States Military Academy at West Point (I presume they were M.P.s)—were his undoing. The Military Police were not expecting the predawn arrival of three wrestlers from Pittsburgh; the other wrestlers had long ago arrived—the soldiers presumed they'd gone to bed. However, it was not necessary to open our gym bags in order to verify that we were wrestlers; it was only necessary for the M.P.s to get a look at Lee Hall.

It was then a matter of deciding on the whereabouts of our barracks. Where were all the other wrestlers sleeping? The soldiers at the gate, intimidating though they were, were not brave enough to call the Army wrestling coach and ask him where we were to be sheltered—it was about 4:00
A.M.
, only three hours to weigh-ins. Lee Hall and Caswell knew what I was thinking when I suggested to the soldiers that we sleep in the gym. I explained that the mats were usually rolled out the night before; that way the mats are lying flat by the time of competition—you don't have to tape the corners to the floor. We could sleep on the mats, I offered—we didn't mind.

Lee Hall and Caswell knew that I was thinking of the
scales
, not the mats—I couldn't have cared less about the mats, or sleeping. We had three hours before weigh-ins and we hadn't been able to check our weight since we left Pittsburgh. If I was a half-pound over, I needed to sweat; I'd been a pound and a half over when we left Pittsburgh. I'd eaten nothing, and I'd had nothing to drink; usually, if I was a pound and a half over in the afternoon before a morning weigh-in, I could drink eight ounces of water and still lose the weight in my sleep. I hadn't slept or had my usual eight ounces of water, but I was dying to get on the scales, to be sure.

The M.P.s didn't think that letting us into the gym was a good idea. There was a barracks somewhere for visiting teams; the soldiers sounded more or less sure of this, although they weren't sure which barracks it was.

Lee Hall confided to me that he thought we should go somewhere warm and “just run.” That way we'd at least be losing weight. And how much sleep would we get before weigh-ins, anyway? I agreed with Lee.

Caswell looked remarkably well rested; he'd slept the whole way from Manhattan and was now viewing the austere buildings of the military academy with the eagerness of a child who'd just arrived at an amusement park—apparently Caswell never worried about his weight.

It was then I noticed that our taxi driver was too frightened to leave; he couldn't possibly find his way back to the city—“not in
dis
dark,” he said. The M.P.s were doubly unsure which barracks might be available for
him.

One of the soldiers got up the nerve to make a phone call. I don't know the name or rank of the man who was awakened, but his voice was exceptionally powerful and loud. We were brought to a darkened building in a Jeep—our taxi driver, too; he'd happily left the keys to his cab with the M.P.s at the gate. It was one of those stone dormitories where the stairs were lit with timed lights; on each floor, a single switch turned on the lights for the entire stairwell. At every stair landing, next to the hall door, the light switch was indicated by a small bulb that glowed the dull yellow of a cat's eye. The lights “ticked” for two minutes and then they went out; to turn them on, you had to find the nearest cat's eye again. By this torturous method, a few wrestlers were sprinting or jogging up and down the stairs—sometimes in light, sometimes in darkness, depending on the whim of the timed lights in the stairwell. One of these stair runners directed us to a huge, bad-smelling, overheated room where many wrestlers were lying on cots; they were fully clothed, under mounds of blankets—trying to sweat off the extra weight while they slept. (Most of them were lying in the dark, awake.)

“Man, it stinks in here,” our taxi driver said.

At first glance, it seemed there were no empty cots, but this didn't trouble Caswell, who made himself comfortable on top of his gym bag on the floor; I think he was asleep by the time Lee Hall and I had changed into our sweatsuits and were running around the stairwell. The guys who'd been running the stairs ahead of us had worked out a system with the lights: when the lights went out, whoever was nearest a stair landing looked for the dull-yellow bulb. We kept running, whether the lights were on or off. Nobody talked on the stairs. Every so often I would call out “Lee?” and Lee Hall would say “What?”

After 15 or 20 minutes, I was sweating the way I wanted to; I started trotting more slowly, moving just fast enough so the sweat didn't stop. I think I was asleep when I ran into a wall in the dark. My eyebrow was split open. I could feel that I was bleeding, but I didn't know how badly I was cut.

“Lee?” I called.

“What?” Lee Hall said.

I was 128 pounds at the weigh-ins. The Army trainer shaved my eyebrow and covered the cut with a butterfly bandage; he advised me to have the cut stitched up properly when I got back to Pittsburgh. I knew I'd run too much—my legs felt dead.

We went to the mess hall after weigh-ins, and there was our taxi driver; it's time I gave him a name—let's call him Max.

“What are you doing here, Max?” I said. For starters, Max was eating an enormous breakfast—steeling his courage for the ride back to Manhattan, I thought. But Max had decided he'd hang around and watch the preliminary round of matches.

“If you guys win, maybe I'll stay for the next round,” Max informed us. “Anyway, it's still sleeting.” In the daylight, Max appeared to be almost erudite. It also seemed he had adopted us. We were trying to get focused on the tournament—we didn't give the matter of Max much thought. Lee Hall ate a much bigger breakfast than I did; my stomach was shrunk—I felt hungry but, after half a bowl of oatmeal, I felt full. Caswell, with his characteristic air of contentment, took a nap in the locker room after consuming a generous number of what looked like pancakes.

They were posting the brackets for the different weight classes on the walls of the gym, and Lee Hall and I looked over the matchups for 130 and 177 pounds. I wished Caswell hadn't been sleeping, because I wanted to drill some takedowns; Lee Hall and I were the wrong size to drill with each other. Instead, I rolled around on the mats by myself and watched the crowd straggle in. I remember it as an old, oval-shaped gym with a wooden track above, like an elongated version of the pit at Exeter, except that the floor space was vast; there were at least six mats rolled out for the preliminary rounds, and a long line of bleacher seats—extending almost to matside—ran the length of the gym wall.

I kept an eye out for my parents; although they were making a two-day trip of it—they had left New Hampshire yesterday and had spent the night with friends in Massachusetts—it wasn't like them to be late. Depending on the number of entries in your weight class, you might have two or three preliminary matches before the quarterfinal round, later that afternoon; the semifinals were that night. The next day would begin with the wrestle-backs (the consolation rounds), which would lead to the consolation finals; the finals would be tomorrow afternoon. It would be dark by the time we got to New York, I was thinking—and a long night's ride on the bus back to Pittsburgh. We would be hungry then, with no more weigh-ins to make—and no money for food. I was also thinking that it was odd to be at a big tournament without a coach.

With me wrestling 130, and Caswell at 137, we would often be wrestling on different mats at the same time, or at overlapping times; we wouldn't be able to coach each other—Lee Hall would have to choose between coaching me and coaching Caswell. As it turned out, when Lee Hall was wrestling, both Caswell and I were available to coach him. Lee, however, needed little coaching; he would easily maul his way into the finals—his opponents rarely lasted past the second period. Caswell and I would shout out the time remaining on the clock; that was all Lee needed to know—Lee didn't need to be informed of the lopsided score.

John Carr, our ineligible (or injured) 157-pounder, had not made the trip to West Point, but his dad was there; Mr. Carr volunteered to coach Caswell and Lee Hall and me. Mr. Carr loved wrestling; he must have spent many exciting years watching his son—John Carr was a very good wrestler. I remember thinking that Mr. Carr must have been disappointed to be watching
me.
I remember little else about the preliminary rounds. I beat two guys from schools with monosyllabic names (like Pitt). I could guess that they were from Yale and Penn, but they could have been from anywhere; it doesn't matter—in both matches, I got the first takedown so cleanly that I kept repeating it.

You take the guy down, you're up two points; you let the guy go, he gets one point—then you take him down again. After your three takedowns and his three escapes, you're leading 6-3. After that, the guy has to chase you, which makes it easier for you to take him down.

I was working Warnick's arm-drag, which Warnick had worked on me all winter in the Pitt wrestling room; I was working a duck-under, although it wasn't nearly as smooth a duck-under as Mike Johnson used to work on me—about a hundred times a week. Anyway, I advanced to the quarterfinals, realizing that I'd actually learned a little wrestling in the course of taking a pounding at Pitt.

In the quarterfinals, I pinned a guy from R.PI.—I remember where he was from only because Lee Hall or Caswell asked me what “R.PI.” stood for and I realized that I didn't know how to spell Rensselaer
or
Polytechnic. Suddenly I was in the semifinals.

That hour—maybe it was two or three hours—between the quarterfinals and the semifinals . . . that was the best time of my one season of wrestling at Pittsburgh. That was when I knew I wasn't coming back. Lee Hall was talking to me; he was saying what a great freshman team we had—if only most of them had been able to wrestle. He was saying that Pitt would have walked away with the team title at that tournament—if only Johnson and Heniff and Warnick and O'Korn and Carr had been there. I agreed with Lee. But I knew that if Johnson and Heniff and Warnick and O'Korn and Carr had been there,
I
wouldn't have been wrestling; there was no room for me in that lineup. Caswell would have agreed with me: in such a lineup, there would have been no room for Caswell either.

And so I began to savor just being in the semifinals. It's fatal when you do that; you have to think about winning—not that you feel good to just
be
there. It's fatal to get distracted, too, and I was a little distracted; the thought that I would not come back to Pittsburgh had been in my mind before the Freshman Eastern Intercollegiates, of course—only now I
knew
it. I was also worried about my parents. Where were they?

I called their friends in Massachusetts, where they'd spent the previous night; to my surprise, my mother answered the phone. The sleet that was falling at West Point was snow in New England. My mom and dad had to wait out the storm. Whether I won or lost in the semifinals, I would be wrestling the next day—either in the finals or in the consolation matches that could lead to a third or a fourth-place finish. My parents would see me wrestle at West Point tomorrow, either way. It was a long trip for them, from New Hampshire; they'd never missed a match of mine at Exeter, and I began to feel a little pressure—to win for
them.
That's fatal, too—the wrong kind of pressure is fatal. You have to want to win for
you.

I
wasn't
distracted by the discovery that Max, our taxi driver, was nowhere to be seen; he might not have been as interested in watching us wrestle as he'd claimed. It was later that evening when I learned that some of my fellow wrestlers had been robbed; they'd left their wallets or their wristwatches in the locker room, either forgetting or neglecting to put that kind of stuff in the team's “valuables box.” I immediately suspected Max. In retrospect, I thought he had the perfect combination of instant charm and compulsive deceit that I associate with thieves; yet his terror of the night, and of the multitude of trees, could never have been feigned—not unless I have underestimated his thespian skills.

As for the semifinals, I was what Coach Seabrooke always said I was—I was “halfway decent”—but the other guy was good. He was a kid from Cornell, and the favorite to win the weight class; he was the number-one seed. In the absence of a coach who knew me—Mr. Carr, given the greater abilities of his own son, generously overestimated my potential—I wrestled the kind of careful match that Ted Seabrooke would have recognized as the only kind of match I could win against a better wrestler. I even got the first takedown. But the Cornell kid escaped immediately—I couldn't manage to hold him long enough to gain any riding-time advantage—and he scored a slick takedown at the edge of the mat, just as time was running out in the first period; I had no time to get an escape of my own. I was trailing 3-2 going into the second period, and the choice of position (a flip of the coin) was mine; I chose down. I finally escaped for a point, but the Cornell kid had ridden me for over a minute. It was 3-3 on the scoreboard but I knew he had a riding-time point, which made it 4-3 in his favor starting the third—unless I could keep him on the bottom long enough to erase his riding-time advantage. He got away from me in less than 15 seconds, which made it 4-3 on the scoreboard—in reality, 5-3 (with riding time). I knew that the two-point difference was a
possible
gap for me to close in the final period.