The Sportswriter (51 page)

What I wrote was: “Eddie Grimes waked up on Easter morning and heard the train whistle far away in a forgotten suburban station. His very first thought of the day was, ‘You lose control by degrees.’” That seemed like a hell of a good first line. Eddie Grimes is me. It’s a novel about me, with my own ideas and personal concepts and beliefs built into it. It’s hard to think of your own life’s themes. You’d think anyone could do it. But I’m finding it very, very hard. Pretty close to impossible. I can think of yours a lot better, Frank. I’m conservative, passionate, inventive, and fair—as an investment banker, which works great! But it’s hard to get that down and translated into the novel form, I see. I’ve gotten side-tracked in this
.

Maybe a good way to start a novel is with a suicide note. That’d be a built-in narrative hook. I know it’s been done before. But what hasn’t? It was new to me, right? I’m not worried about that
.

I’ve gone away and come back. The suicide note idea doesn’t really lead anywhere interesting novel-wise, Frank. I’m not sure which fickle master I’m trying to serve here (ha-ha). I apologize for the message about the airplane, by the way. I was just trying to manipulate my feelings, get the right mood going for writing. I hope you’re not pissed off. I admire you all the more now for the work you’ve done. I still consider you my best friend, even though we don’t really know each other that well
.

I tried to call Yolanda earlier. No answer, then busy. Then no answer. I also got things straightened out with Warren. That was a fine thing I did there. I admit I should’ve just been friends with him. But I didn’t. So what, right? Sue me. Take care of yourself, Frank
.

I would like this to be an interesting letter anyway if it can’t be a best-selling novel. I feel I know exactly what I’m doing now. This is not phony baloney. You’re supposed to be crazy when you kill yourself? Well forget that. You’ll never be saner. That’s for sure
.

Frank, here’s the kicker now, alright? I have a daughter! And I know all about what you’re thinking. But, I do. She’s nineteen. One of those ill-begotten teenage liaisons back in Ohio early in the summer, sophomore year, when I was nineteen myself! Her name is Susan—Suzie Smith. She lives in Sarasota, Fla, with her mother, Janet, who lives with some sailor or highway patrolman. I don’t know which. I send them checks still. I’d like to go down there and shed some light on all this for her. And me, too. I’ve never actually seen her. There was a lot of trouble at the time. Of course it wouldn’t happen today. But I feel very close to her. And you’re the only person who’ll be able to make sense out of this, Franko. I hope you don’t mind my asking you to go down there and have a talk with her. Thanks in advance. You needed the vacation, right?

I really haven’t felt this clear-headed about things since I was out at Grinnell and had to make the decison to move up to 152, and give up at 145 where I was successful, because there was someone there all of a sudden who was better—a freshman, no less. I had to give up or make a big decision. I finally won matches at the higher weight, but I was never as good. I never was prideful again either. I’m not prideful now, but I think I have a right to be
.

All best
,
Wally

All
best?
Talk about losing your authority! All best, then go boom-blow-your-brains-out? How do we get bound up with people we don’t even know, is my question for the answer man. I’d give anything in the world at this moment never to have known Walter Luckett, Jr., or that he could be alive so I could drop him like a hot potato, and he could have no one to address his dumb-ass letter to and have to figure out the big questions all by himself. Maybe he could’ve finished his novel then. In a way, if it weren’t for me being his friend, he’d be alive.

Whose life ever has permanent mystery built into it anyway? An astronaut? The heavyweight champ? A Ubangi tribesman? Even old Bosobolo has to pursue an advanced degree, and then it’s not a sure thing, which accounts for his love interest on the side. If Walter were here I’d shake the bejesus out of him.

He could’ve found Mrs. Miller (if he knew about her); or read catalogs into the night; or turned on Johnny; or called up a hundred dollar whore for a house call. He could’ve hunted up a reason to keep breathing. What else is the ordinary world good for except to supply reasons not to check out early?

Walter’s circumstances would be a good argument for a trip to Bimini to settle his debts, or a camping trip to Yellowstone in a land yacht. Only now I don’t even have
those
luxuries. What I have is awful, mealy factual death, which once you start to think of it, won’t go away and inhabits your life like a dead skunk under the porch.

And a daughter? No way. I have my own daughter. One day soon enough she’ll want to hear some explaining, too. And that, frankly, is all I care about: the answers I come up with then. What happened to Walter on this earth is Walter’s own lookout. I’m sorry as hell, but he had his chance like the rest of us.

 
    Suddenly we are through the rank, larky meadowlands and entered in the long tunnel to Gotham, where the lights go out and you can’t see beyond your reflected self in gritty window glass, and I have the sudden feeling of falling out of space and into a perilous dream—a dream, in fact, I used to suffer after my divorce (though I am sure it’s primed this time by Walter) in which I am in bed with someone I don’t know and cannot—must not—touch (a woman, thank God), but whom I must lie beside for hours and hours on end in a state of fear and excitation and scalding guilt. It is a terrible dream, but it wouldn’t surprise me if all men didn’t have it at one time or other. Or many times. And in truth, after I had had it for six months I got used to it and could go back to sleep within five minutes. Though if I wasn’t already on the floor, I was at least on the edge of the bed when I woke up, cramped and achy as though clinging at the edge of a lifeboat on a vast and moody sea. Like all things bad and good, we get used to them, and they pass us by with age.

In ten minutes we have docked in the vault of Penn Station, and I am up and out of its hot tunnel, across the bright upper lobby, my dream faded in the crowd of derelicts and Easter returnees, then out onto breezy Seventh Avenue and the wide prospects of Gotham on a warm Easter night. It is now ten-fifteen. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.

Though I am not sorry to be here. The usual demoralizing firestorm of speeding cabs, banging lights and owl-voiced urban-ness has yet to send me careening into the toe-squeezing funk of complication and obscurity, in which everything becomes too important and too dangerous to be tolerable. Here, out on Seventh and 34th, I feel an unaccustomed lankness, a post-coital mid western caress to things—the always dusky air still high and hollowish, streets alive with the girdering wheels of hungry traffic that pours past me and quickly vanishes.

And I sense, standing in the exit crowds from a Shaggy Chrysanthemum show at the Garden, gazing across at the marquee and night lights of the old Statler Hotel, that a person could have a few laughs here, might even find the exhilaration of a woman tolerable excitement, given the right quarters and timing. A person might even have his actions speak (if briefly) for themselves—something that never seemed possible here before—and actually put up with the old ethicless illicit for a while before escape became essential. This must be how all suburbanites feel when the suburbs suddenly go queer and queasy on them; that things cannot continue to fall away forever, and it’s high time for a new, quick age to dawn. It’s embarrassing to be so unworldly and timid at my age.

But still. What am I to do in this fragile truce? If I’m not simply ready to sprint back downstairs, buy my return and sleep all the way home, what am I
supposed
to do?

My answer, even with the city tamed and seemingly willing to meet my needs halfway, just proves my lack of expertise with the complicated life of real city-dwellers. I jump in the first cruising cab and beat it uptown to 56th and Park, where I practice my sportswriter’s trade. There’s nothing I’d rather do than try out some fresh strategies on Herb and turn that emblem of desolation into something better, even if it means putting a wrench to a fact or two.

 
    The twenty-second floor is abuzz with fluorescent light down the rows of cubicles. When I leave the elevator, I hear loud, contentious voices wrangling in the back offices. “Aw-right …
Aw-right!”
Then: “Naaa-na,na,na,na. He’s glue. Pure donkey.” Then:
“I don’t
believe this. This guy’ll be alive in your nightmares, believe me. Be-
leeve
me!” It’s the Pigskin Preview. The NFL draft is in ten days, and they are in extraordinary session.

I head toward my own cubicle, but stop and stick my head in the crowded conference room. Inside, sits a long Formica table littered with yellow hamburger bags and ashtrays and paper coffee cups, thick green ring-bound notebooks, a green computer screen showing a list of names drawn up. A white grease-pencil board is leaned against the wall. The entire football staff with a few of the younger boys on the low end of the masthead are staring in eagle-eyed attention through a layer of smoke at a big video machine showing a football play on a wide imitation-grass field. This is the skull session where our experts decide the first forty college players to be picked by the pros and in what order. After the World Series Roundup it is the most important issue of the year. As a young staffer, I sat in on these very sessions, chewed a cold cigar, shouted my favorites the way these boys are going at it (there’s one female at the back I’m vaguely familiar with) and it became a damned valuable experience. Younger writers, researchers and interns out of Yale and Bowdoin get to see how these old heads do their stuff, how things really go on. The older writers would normally just settle this kind of thing over drinks at a sushi place around the corner. But for the Preview—and to their credit—they bring all the machinery out in the open and run the show as though it were really democratic. Later they’ll all wind up strolling into the early morning streets, feeling good about themselves and football and the world in general, laughing and swearing, and having a round or two at some spudbuster bar over on Third Avenue. Sometimes they’ll all stay out till dawn, and by nine can be seen around the coffee machine, or floating back to their desks with bushed-but-satisfied looks, ready to put the whole business into print.

Plenty of times I’ve seen writers, famous novelists and essayists, even poets, with names you’d recognize and whose work I admire, drift through these offices on one high-priced assignment or other. I have seen the anxious, weaselly lonely looks in their eyes, seen them sit at the desk we give them in a far cubicle, put their feet up and start at once to talk in loud, jokey, bluff, inviting voices, trying like everything to feel like members of the staff, holding court, acting like good guys, ready to give advice or offer opinions on anything anybody wants to know. In other words, having the time of their lives.

And who could blame them? Writers—all writers—need to belong. Only for real writers, unfortunately, their club is a club with just one member.

The Pigskin Preview boys are at odds over the talents of a big Polack from Iowa State who has speed and heart, versus a venomous-looking black cornerback from a small Baptist college in Georgia, who’s tiger quick and blessed with natural talent. Big cigars wag from clenched fingers. Piles of print-out rap sheets are scattered around. All eyes are on the screen as the black boy—referred to as Tyrone the Murderer—in a blue and orange #19 delivers a blow to a spindly white wide-out that would put most people right onto a respirator. Both players, however, bounce up like toys and Tyrone pats the white boy on the butt as they trot back to their huddles.

“Son of a bitch, The Murderer was on
that
play,” a junior man from someplace like Williams shouts. “The bastard started late, missed his key, and still delivered like a fucking freight train.” Eddie Frieder, the managing editor, teeth clenching a cigarette, and wearing a Red Sox cap, raises his brows and nods, then goes back to making computations. He’s in charge here, but you’d never know. Agreement ripples among the other younger men, though it’s clear there’s still division. Two men express uneasiness with The Murderer’s friendly pat on the backside. They suspect the pros might translate it into an impure competitive instinct, while others think it’s a mark of good character on The Murderer’s part. “This guy’s no higher than eight in round two,” they seem to agree.

“What do you think, Frank?” Eddie looks up at the door where I’m half-hidden, wanting not to be singled out.

All eyes see me—a smiling, slender, slightly flushed man in a madras shirt and chinos. A couple of young guys put down pencils and stare. I’m not a pigskin prognosticator; Eddie, in fact, knows I don’t even like football, though I’ll probably end up rewriting a lot of what gets done here and putting together a sidebar about The Murderer’s lifelong fear of inheriting his dad’s fatal alcoholism (that can take a notch out of one’s competitive instinct).

“I hear good things about this Hawaiian kid, from Arkansas A&M,” I say. “He runs a four-five and likes contact.”

“Gone already!” four people shout at once. Heads shake. Eyes blink. Everyone returns to his rap sheet. Someone rerolls The Murderer’s murderous tackle, and people scribble, which reminds me again that I have found out nothing in Detroit for use here. “Denver’s got him on a player-to-be-named with Miami. He can’t miss,” Eddie Frieder says officially, then looks at his notes.