Last Notes from Home (16 page)

What is my point, old pardner? It is simply the age-old and proverbial one of power awesomely corrupting its beholders, as it most certainly did with Dulles and Mac-Arthur. Let me be more specific, Big Jim, and say I believe the much-revered MacArthur was a fraud and a fucking liar into the bargain, that despite his protestations of shock at the Chinese entering the war en masse the general never for a moment doubted they would do so and that he stood prepared to sacrifice, like pawns in a chess game, his most forward elements, including the Brigadier’s Seventeenth Regimental Combat Team, to the Chinese in order to get Congress’s permission to wage nothing less than an atomic war of attrition against the godless Chinese, a war our minister’s son doubtless would have endorsed. It is a very harsh accusation, I agree, old pardner. For all that, and though the Brigadier would give the army another twenty-two years of his life after finally leaving the hospital in Waltham, I have reason to know he was forever haunted by the possibility that MacArthur had been rendered so blasé in the execution of what one calls
Command
that he had become a moral monster. You wince with distaste, Mistuh Dillon?

Nor did I know that directly after the funeral we’d repair to O’Twoomey’s second-floor suite in the original part of the Royal Hawaiian, where my best friend, Toby Farquarson III, from Alexandria Bay, or wherever he was from (no one was ever quite certain), would immediately hit it off with O’Twoomey—at their first meeting at the suite they were huddled whispering in a corner—or that O’Twoomey would not return to Dublin with his Hospital Trusts pilgrims and would instead stay on Oahu. For whatever knavery on which he was embarked, he hired Toby to work for him that very day. For that reason, whenever I returned to see Robin, I would stay for a day or two at the Royal Hawaiian to see how the other half lives, as it were (O’Twoomey always picked up the bill), then go out and stay with Robin on the
Cirrhosis of the River.
During my stays with her, we would always take the time to make the thirty-minute flight to Lanai and spend three or four days with Malia and Wiley. One night on the
Cirrhosis
Robin introduced a subject that led me indirectly to telling her why I had been forced to cut Wiley from my life.

At supper Robin brought up a matter that was causing her considerably more anguish than it was causing me: my drinking. Each time she brought up alcohol and lolled it around on her palate as lovingly as if it were a delicious piece of gossip about a movie actor’s recondite sexual habits, she’d ghoulishly apologize and solemnly swear never to mention booze again, only to bring it up two nights later. It was as if she saw vodka as
the
obstacle in what might otherwise be a blissfully beau-ideal relationship. On this night, obviously piqued at having flogged her subject to death, at having explored all its avenues, byways, nooks, and crannies, oh, its obscurist tributaries, at having exhausted her subject with such devotion I was on the verge of booting her in the behind and she damn well knew it, Robin leaped in one breathtakingly absurd moment from the conclusion that I was a hopeless drunk to the idea that I wasn’t in any way an alcoholic.

“Christ, Ex, I’ve seen you drink a quart of vodka a day for days at a time, then one morning just get bored or whatever, get up and walk ten or twelve miles on the beach and go off the booze cold turkey. I mean, drunks start talking to the dicky birds, have to be lugged to the heebie-jeebie ward on a stretcher, and get massive intravenous doses of B
₁₂
and God-only-knows-what-all medications. You don’t have to do that. You’ll concede me that?”

“It’s something I learned from a guy a long time ago.” “You mean like a guru or holy man or priest or Hare Krishna or someone like that?”

I laughed. “Yeah, Robin, someone like that.” My guru was our high school coach. Although we had a parochial school in Watertown, if one wanted to play football and basketball against the Syracuse and Buffalo schools, against those in Utica, Albany, Schenectady, Bing-hamton, Rochester, Elmira, Rome, White Plains, Erie, Pennsylvania (once even Clearwater, Florida), one had no choice but to enroll in Watertown High School and pay the exacting price demanded by the coach, a big, brawny, handsome, tawny-skinned, cigar-chomping, awe-inspiring Woody Hayes type who struck rigidity not only into his players but also into the other students and even his fellow faculty members. With the exception of a half dozen more principled teachers, in whose classes we were cautioned against enrolling, he was perfectly capable of having marks upgraded to keep his needed jocks—he didn’t worry about Nixon-like third-stringers—in uniform. The distaff teachers were so much putty in the coach’s hands. He was not only bright, intimidating, and handsome, he could be extremely gracious, and he did not hesitate to use that charm to his advantage.

He was also a gifted enough coach to be on palsy terms with Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy. At a football seminar held in the Adirondacks at the coach’s summer boarding camp for affluent kids, Leahy gave him the T formation, which he promptly introduced in the prehistoric year of 1943. Thus for six, seven, eight years, well into the 1950s for that matter, Watertown played against single- and double-wing formation teams that hadn’t the foggiest notion what we were doing on offense. He had not only varsities and junior varsities, he had junior junior varsities. He did not call them that; he called them the North and South Junior High School teams. He gave these coaches his T formation playbook and conned the Frontier League, made up of smaller high schools in the surrounding area (including Alexandria Bay, where I now live), into accepting Watertown’s junior high schools into their midst. Thus we thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-olds, just the far side of puberty and not really physically ready, were learning the coach’s plays and competing against—and, more often than otherwise, beating—seventeen- and eighteen-year-old juniors and seniors. By the time we moved into the tenth grade and the old high school on Sterling Street and on to either the junior varsity or varsity—the latter if we were very, very good or very, very lucky—that is, by the time we moved into the coach’s imposing presence, we not only knew his playbook, we had had our physical baptisms against much larger, much stronger boys. Even that did not prepare us for the price the coach would exact.

He did not hesitate to put his hands on his players. Laughingly—I say laughingly
now
—I recall his once stopping a scrimmage when our starting right tackle missed a blocking assignment, taking the left end instead of crossing over and taking the right linebacker. The coach whistled the scrimmage dead, nonchalantly walked over to the right tackle, unsnapped and removed the right tackle’s helmet. In embarrassment, we all stared at the cleated grass. A stunning, hallowed silence whistled around the Knickerbocker practice field. The coach raised his doubled fist high and with seemingly savage fury brought the heel of his fist smack down atop our right tackle’s dome. Today I’m sure the coach didn’t hit our right tackle hard; in fact, with his absurdly histrionic sense he pulled that punch. It was as if he were trying to get a comic strip light bulb to glitter poppingly above our right tackle’s head that the tackle might get the idea of the coach’s maxim: Every play is a touchdown if properly executed. Nonchalantly, the coach replaced our right tackle’s helmet and snapped it firmly on his chin. Nonchalantly, he told us to run the play again.

We did. He told us to run it again. We did. He told us to run it again and again and again. This was in September before Daylight Saving Time had changed to Eastern Standard Time, and the coach made us run that accursed play into dusk and then turned on the klieg lights and made us run it more. By then the coach and his covey of assistants were standing beyond the range of our blinded visions, beyond the lighted practice area, laughing and joking, the kind of laughter that suggested they were swapping raunchy jokes. We were almost sure they weren’t even watching us, but how could we be absolutely certain? So the hitting and the hurting and the thirst and the exhaustion went on.

When at last the coach blew his whistle and bellowed “enough,” it wasn’t enough. He ordered us to run four laps around the quarter-mile track encircling the field, then run the half mile up Thompson Boulevard to the field house, take our showers, and get some sleep. Directly the coach departed with his laughing assistants. We did our four laps, ritualistically removed our cleats, tied their strings together, threw them over our shoulder pads so we wouldn’t leave cleat marks on the lawns of the upper-middle-class homes along Thompson Boulevard, and, too weary to run another ten steps, strolled slowly in our stocking feet, heads downward in embarrassment and tiredness, moving in and out of the light and shadows of streetlamps. Vividly I recall our right tackle’s saying, “Sorry guys, sorry guys, sorry guys,” and our replying, “Screw it,” and “So you blew one,” and “What’s the diff?” and “It could happen to anyone.” But who would ever miss another assignment? Well, I would. But that is only incidental to this tale.

Abruptly we heard a car’s brakes screech to a halt behind us. Turning in panic at the sound of the careening rocking vehicle, we saw the coach emerging from his station wagon.
Did we call this running?
The coach removed the belt from his pants, left his wagon idling smack in the middle of the boulevard, and doing his Mr. Hyde laugh, chased us along the macadam, with his wide leather belt lashing out at the slower-moving buttocks all the way into the locker room. That was one of the half-dozen nights during my football and basketball days under the coach when I put my head down on my folded arms and fell into the stolid sleep of utter fatigue while my mother was re-warming a supper eaten hours earlier by the rest of the family. So bad was it on this night she could not even rouse me until 3
a.m.,
when she again tried to feed me. But I waved the food scornfully away and barely struggled up the stairs and into bed, while the old lady in her housecoat stood at the bottom of the staircase and moved me on with a whispered hand-wringing litany of “Dear, dear, dear, dear.”

Was it worth it all? To this day I don’t honestly know. I do know that we won and we won and we won. I also know that to win and to win and to win leaves little time for anything or anyone else, including Wiley. I did not learn to play a musical instrument or join the glee club. After that Stetsoned son of the prairie I’d produced in kindergarten, I never did another watercolor. I never tried out for the school play. Even today my ignorance of music appalls me. Writing a speech for President Reagan would be beyond me. I could list the gaps in my education until the reader slumbered. One might well ask, then, if being a jock cost me so dearly in other disciplines, why my feelings are in the least ambivalent. When after World War II we arrived in the presence of the coach, his whole bearing tacitly articulated to his players what he doubtless could not have put into words:
Listen to me. Do what I ask. Give me your regard. And I in turn shall show you the way to the world’s regard.

“How could you learn anything from a tyrant like that?” Robin said. “And I don’t see the bloody relationship between going cold turkey and that bully.” Of course Robin knew everything about the Depression, to which we players had been born, from her father and couldn’t comprehend the “abhorrent ambivalence” that forced us old farts into speaking of a period of “economic deprivation”—academic claptrap—with such loving and mawkish sentimentality.

In my senior year, I told Robin, as starting offensive center and, depending upon who was hurt, either nose guard or linebacker on defense, I cost Watertown an undefeated season. In our fourth game at Auburn High School in galelike winds and rain, I was called for holding on their one-yard line on fourth down. We scored, had the play nullified, were penalized fifteen yards, and on the replay from sixteen yards out, we failed to put the ball in. In eight games that year, I continued, though I suspected I myself was talking to the dicky birds by then, Watertown scored 157 points and gave up twelve. “Imagine!” Six out of eight teams we goose-egged. We took our opener 21-6, our second game 41-0. Each week awards were presented to both the outstanding defensive and offensive players, the prize being a free steak and spaghetti dinner at the New Parrot Restaurant. After the 41-0 game, when I won the defensive award, the coach suspended the prizes, saying our defense was so good the award should have gone to the entire defensive unit, which would have cost the owner of the New Parrot, our line coach, Jake DeVito, a small fortune in T-bones and pasta.

“Still, Robin, I got mine. And you know what? That was the best meal I ever ate!”

“Jesus, Ex!”

Because our third game was at Rome Free Academy under the lights on a Friday night, the coaches from the five teams remaining on our schedule were in the stands scouting us. We won 21-0, and the next morning we picked up the newspaper to learn that Dave Powers of Oswego—he was this venerable white-haired dude who’d been coaching upstate forever—was quoted as saying we were the best high school football team he’d seen in ten, maybe twenty damn years. I sighed. “Boy, was Auburn waiting for us.”