The Imaginary Girlfriend

  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.

  A Thief

  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.
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  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.

  The Semifinals

  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.

  Then I got lucky: my butterfly bandage was soaked through--my eyebrow was bleeding on the mat. The referee called a time-out to wipe up the blood, and I was given a quick rebandaging. However few cigarettes I'd been smoking, I was tired; it's not unreasonable to blame my tiredness on my lack of sleep, or on a dawn spent running up and down the stairs (into a wall)--but I blame the cigarettes. The mainstay of what had made me "halfway decent" as a wrestler was my physical conditioning; now a time-out for bleeding had given me a much-needed rest. (In those days, a college wrestling match was nine minutes long; in prep school, I had been used to six minutes. A three-minute period feels a lot longer than a two-minute period. Nowadays, a college match is only seven minutes overall--divided in periods of three, two, two--and the high-school or prep-school match is what it always was: six minutes, in periods of two, two, two.)

  And I got lucky again: the referee hit the Cornell wrestler with a warning for stalling. It was a questionable call. With the score 4-3 on the scoreboard (5-3 with riding time), I knew that a takedown could tie it; a takedown could win it for me, too--if I could stay on top long enough to negate his riding-time advantage. The stalling warning against my opponent would hurt him in a tie; in the rules of that tournament, there was no overtime, no sudden death--a draw would mean a referee's decision. I was sure that my opponent's warning for stalling would give any referee's decision to me--I thought a tie would win it.

  I don't remember my takedown--whether it was Warnick's arm-drag or Johnson's duck-under, or whether it was a low, outside single-leg, which was my best takedown from Exeter--but there were less than 20 seconds showing on the clock, and the scoreboard said 5--4 in my favor. The Cornell kid had the riding-time point locked up--I couldn't erase his advantage in less than 20 seconds--and so the match would be a draw, 5-5, if I could just hold on.

  There was a scramble, a mix-up of the kind that Coach Seabrooke had warned me against; fortunately, for me, we both rolled off the mat. When the referee brought us back to the circle, there were 15 seconds on the clock; I had to ride him for only 15 seconds. This is a drill in every practice session in every wrestling room in America. Sometimes the drill is called "bursts." One of you tries to hang on, the other one tries to get away.

  I don't remember how my opponent escaped, but he got free in a hurry. I had less than five seconds to initiate a desperation shot at a takedown; I wasn't close to completing a move when the buzzer sounded--I lost 6-5. I couldn't bear watching the Cornell kid in the finals; I don't know if he won the weight class or not--or, as I say so often, I don't remember. All I know is, that kid would never have gotten away from Sherman Moyer--not even in 15 minutes.

  Point by point, move by move, you never know how close you are to getting into the finals of a tournament until you don't get into the finals. I called my parents in Massachusetts and told them to be at West Point early in the morning; the consolation rounds would start early. If I lost my first consolation match, I'd be eliminated from the tournament--I'd be a spectator for the rest of the day. If I won, I could keep wrestling; I could place as high as third, if I kept winning.

  My next opponent was an Army boy--a home-crowd favorite of the West Point fans. I remember all those cadets in gray, leaning over the mats from the wooden track above the gym; I remember them screaming. It was a larger teacup than the pit at Exeter, but it was the same teacup effect--except that these were his fans, not mine. I'd wrestled as good a match as I could against the Cornell kid. Possibly it was the effect of the cadets, or maybe I was trying to impress my parents with everything I'd learned at Pitt; for whatever reason, my match against Army was not the kind of match Ted Seabrooke would have recommended for me. It was one mix-up after another; it was all a scramble. I knew from the beginning that I wouldn't win a free-for-all.

  To be fair to myself, I not only lost the first takedown but I was thrown to my back and lost three points for a near-fall in addition to the takedown points. When I reversed him, I was still behind 5-2; he immediately reversed me, and I immediately escaped. When I had a second to look at the score, I saw I was losing 7-3 and the first period had just started. You can't slow down the pace when you're losing 7-3, and so that was the kind of match I was in--a free-for-all. I kept scoring, but he kept scoring back; whenever I checked the score, I was always no more than 5 but no fewer than 3 points behind. The cadets were screaming, not only because their West Point boy was winning; it was the kind of match a crowd loves--any crowd loves a free-for-all. I don't remember the final score: 15-11, 17-13. . . . Ted Seabrooke would have told me--indeed, Ted had told me--that I would never come out on top of a score like that. It was my last match in a Pittsburgh uniform, which I had worn for all of two days.

  Whether they were disappointed or merely underimpressed, my parents were kind enough not to say. My mother was shocked to see how thin I was. I'd gotten much stronger in the wrestling room at Pitt, but I was nonetheless smaller than I'd been at Exeter; unlike Larry Palmer, I'd stopped growing when
I was 15. My mom was worried about my weight. To that end, I was able to get some money from her--so that Caswell and Lee Hall and I could eat all the way back to Pittsburgh. I don't think I told my parents about the hundred-dollar taxi ride; I know I didn't tell them that I'd made up my mind to leave Pitt--I still didn't know where I would go.

  I don't even remember if Lee Hall won the Freshman Easterns or if he lost in the finals; it wasn't like Lee to lose, but I vaguely recall that he had a difficult opponent--a Lehigh kid, as I remember him, but I'm on record for not remembering much. For example, I don't remember how Caswell did; in the end, like me, I think he won a couple of matches and lost a couple--I know he didn't make the finals, but he might have placed. (Caswell did everything in such a friendly, efficient, uncomplaining way; that's probably why I can't even be sure of his name.)

  Back in Pittsburgh, I will never forget telling Coach Peery that I'd spent all the pocket money.

  "You took a taxi?" Rex kept saying.

  I had so much respect for Rex I couldn't tell him why I was leaving Pitt: specifically because I couldn't bear being a backup. Instead, I made up a story about missing a girlfriend back home; I thought this sounded more human--hence more forgivable. I didn't have a girlfriend "back home," or in Pittsburgh.

  My ex-girlfriend was from Connecticut; she was spending the year in Switzerland. The only Creative Writing I'd managed to do at Pitt was a diary I kept; I was imagining that I would show my ex-girlfriend my diary--and thus win her back. Everything in the "diary" was made up; I hadn't exactly had the kind of year that made me want to write about it. I didn't know this at the time, but I had begun a traditional writer's task--namely, I was in the process of inventing myself. Before I could invent anything else, I needed to practice.

  A Brief Conversation in Ohio

  In Pittsburgh--notwithstanding my disappointment in my wrestling--it had been a defeat of a deeper kind to be abused in Freshman English, where I received the grade of C-and was told by an instructor with less of a beard to shave than my own that my overuse of the semicolon was archaic. I shall call him Instructor C-, and if he is reading me still, which would surprise me, there is no telling what he makes of my semicolons today; if they were archaic in 1962, they must be antiquated beyond redemption now.