“Goddamn,” Howie said, “are you the football player?”
“Stop that swearing,” Cass said.
Smiling, I was sure that Howie, having grown up clutching the skirts of the breathtakingly bedeviled Cookie, owned a considerably larger stock of obscenities, any of which would make goddamn seem an epithet issuing from the mouth of a ten-year-old maiden. As Howie started up the staircase, in sneering defiance of Cass, he hollered, “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn, Exley, that’s what I want to be—a center!”
Cass sighed. “What a brat.”
Outside, one of those terrible late autumn rains, heralding the winter months, had begun blistering the storm windows. I moaned. We had only two more games, Onondaga Valley of Syracuse the following Saturday before closing out against Lackawanna of Buffalo on Thanksgiving Day. Both of these games, I was sure, would be played on wet cold muddy fields. It wasn’t so much that our running backs were so fleet, with great maneuverability, which would be severely hampered, but that we used the T, and I would be expected to lay the slimy ball into the quarterback’s opened hands on every offensive play, as well as make those long wet snaps back to our placekicker and punter. I hated cold wet fields.
When Cass at last asked what was bothering me, wondering aloud if it had something to do with the brat Howie’s interruption, I said hell no and told her the truth of what was so distressing me. As there didn’t seem to be any appropriate response Cass could make, and as she probably understood football as little as most girls (half the time our own cheerleaders, like a bunch of stick-legged mongoloids, were clapping and jumping idiotically up and down when they should have been hooting with derision), Cass abruptly rose, turned out the light on my mahogany end table, then the one on her side, we were suddenly laid out on the couch, with Cass facing me from the inside and were into some heavy petting, tongues exploring each other’s mouth, my right hand going up under her sweater to her bra-covered breasts, up her skirt to her smooth copper-toned thighs, we went through the goofy mock-ritualistic bumping and grinding of teenagers. How long it took, I don’t know, but not long. When my erection was most unbearable, I furtively reached down, unbuttoned my trousers, struggled to get it out of my underwear, then ardently took Cass’s left hand and placed it there.
“Jesus!” Cass cried, struggling out from behind me, bolting stiffly upright and snapping on the light, while I, as red-faced as I’d ever seen Cass, furiously forced my penis back into my underwear and with shaking hands buttoned my fly. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“But I thought—”
“I know what you thought. Your brother told you about me, didn’t he? The difference between you and him is that he’s a gentleman. Besides, he was going back to his base.” Here was that entire nursing healer-of-men syndrome again, one that I wouldn’t understand until many years later. “And I thought you were going to take me to the movies.” Was it as simple as that with Cass? In retrospect I expect that it was, this unctuous pathetic need for Cass, who had for so long, all her short life, been deprived not only of normal family intimacy but of any normal access to her school friends—I had had to speed her “home” from something as ludicrously mundane as a class meeting—so that Cass wanted nothing less than the bogus dignity that would accrue to her should she date a jock. Perhaps I would even give her one of my cleats on a gold chain? Lord, what a pompous, arrogant, aloof, pampered, snot-nosed bunch we jocks were and how I now loathe (even thinking of it causes the sinuses to contract and the neck muscles to stiffen) every moment of that epoch of my life, so much so that, whereas I should be boundlessly sympathetic, I now smile with sadistic relish at the nemesis of an athlete, to drugs, to armed robbery, to exposing himself to little girls in the park.
Apparently I had been that drunk in the phone booth. Certainly I remembered thinking of suggesting a movie to Cass. “I will, I will,” I said. “Who takes care of Howie?” Cass mentioned a friend from the Home. We sat in sulky silence, watching the rain pelt the windows, and unless I was much mistaken some of it had turned to snow.
“God,” Cass said, “you’ll never be able to walk home in this.” She rose, walked to the desk, took a slip of paper from the upper right-hand drawer and looked back at the mantlepiece clock, which read five till two. It was apparently a list of phone numbers at which Fairley could be reached at certain hours. Cass got him at the second number she tried (in those day we didn’t dial and instead asked the operator for a four-digit number) and I heard her say things like, “Yes, Bill’s got a brother. Fred. He’s in the class ahead of mine. He’s only got this old silk basketball warm-up jacket and he’ll get soaked.” A long pause. “Okay, Uncle Fairley, I understand. If he’s not asleep, though, I’ll kill him.” Cass laughed. “Okay, Uncle Fairley, if he’s not asleep, I’ll tell him you’ll kill him.”
Cradling the black receiver, Cass made a shush gesture with a finger to her lips, slipped from her loafers to her baby-pink anklets or bobby socks, and started stealthily up the staircase. Suddenly I heard Cass shout, “Damn you, Howie! There won’t be any hot dogs for you tomorrow!” As Cass bounded down the carpeted staircase two at a time, I heard her hiss “shit,” an epithet doubtless acquired during her own long proximity to her aunt Cookie. “What’s the problem, anyway?” Her uncle Fairley, Cass said, had told her she could drive me home if Howie was asleep. Don’t worry about it, I said, I’ll be all right and picked up the basketball jacket from a chair across the room. “Hold it!” In her bobby socks Cass fled through the kitchen into an enclosed back porch or shed. When she returned, she had a long rubberized wool-lined yellow raincoat and one of those yellow hats Maine lobstermen wear in nor’easters. As I was putting on the coat, I detected that on its inside WATERTOWN FIRE DEPT. was stenciled. Smiling, I was recalling the Brigadier’s tales about how much money Fairley spread around among every department in our municipality (once they had caught city workers paving his driveway). Fairley was doubtless an “honorary fireman” but even imagining him got up in that outfit tickled the funny bone. When I was going down the front steps, Cass said, “Don’t be too hard on Howie, Ex. It was he who found Cookie that day in the garage. He really hasn’t slept well since then.”
3
At was the longest walk I’d ever endured—and not because of the rain, the snow, and the wind. I was giddy—giddy with love, I thought—and suffered two or three bad spells of vertigo, against the northwesterly winds moved at a snail’s pace, feeling oddly weakened and diminished. It hadn’t been love, I would discover within the next few days. For the past two weeks I had been playing with a moldering case of athlete’s foot on my right foot, one that had become so putrescent that the callused skin on the balls had begun coming out in mushy chunks. On that day, I had played with the spaces between my toes and my sole sloshed with sickly purple calamine over the infected areas, after which thick globs of cotton had been stuffed between my toes to absorb the blood and the pus, the balls of my foot bandaged and taped (I no longer hear of cases as exacerbated as this and assume the disinfectant in the wells leading to a shower is more potent, or that the doctors have unearthed some better ways of treating the infection than calamine).
After the game, I’d had to remove the blood and pus globs of cotton from between my toes, the bloodied bandage from my foot. I’d then scrubbed the foot clean in a pail of near-scalding water, loaded with disinfectant, was given a tight shoe rubber, and was allowed to complete my shower. When this was done and I’d thoroughly dried myself and my foot (the towel would be thrown away), the trainer repainted the infected areas and gave me a new white silk sock to wear under my regular one. He also gave me two extra socks and two towels, to be used Sunday and Monday mornings. When at last, through the rain, snow, and gale winds, I reached home and struggled up the stairs, I slipped from my loafers, dropped the WATERTOWN FIRE DEPT. raincoat and wide-brimmed nor’easter cap to the foot of the bed, threw back the covers, and, fully clothed, crawled into bed and slept soundly until five the following aftern
oon.
Waking somewhat refreshed, I put on a new white silk sock, a slipper on my right foot, and made my way downstairs, for the first time detecting an odd throbbing soreness in my right foot. As with most lower-middle-class families, the Exleys ate their main meal between noon and one on Sundays; on Sunday nights it was popcorn, fudge, and radio night. My mother had, however, kept my dinner—chicken, chicken gravy, mashed potatoes, and peas—warm; at the kitchen table I ate what I could of it (not much), repaired to the living room, tried to concentrate on the radio, but could think only of Cass, and forsaking the popcorn ate two or three large pieces of chocolate fudge. By eight I was back upstairs, where I slept until I was forcibly awakened for school.
Had the coach ordered me to run the first two days, he would have seen immediately that I wasn’t up to it. Instead, for fear of further aggravating my foot, he had it dressed in the same way as he did for a game, allowed me to wear a loosely tied sneaker on my right foot, and excused me from calisthenics and the mandatory two-mile run that closed our practices. All I had to do was run offensive plays against cutoff telephone poles, creosoted and buried in the ground, these to make sure everyone understood his blocking assignment. Only Bruno Grant (the best football player I ever played with), our fullback, middle linebacker, and punter—against Rome Free Academy that year, and to the ooohs and moans of their alien crowd, he’d boomed his first punt sixty yards in the air—saw that something was terribly wrong with me.
Ordinarily we spent twenty to thirty minutes a day practicing the snap from center, after which Bruno would punt away to guys in our defensive secondary, who alternated fielding the ball. “Jesus, Ex,” Bruno kept crying, “what the hell yuh doin’?” My snaps were literally dribbling along the ground, so that he had to scoop them from the turf. When Bruno became particularly irate and I put all my strength into my snaps, the ball came in such a slow-motion underwater banana loop it had a hang time longer than a pro’s sixty-yard pass, which would have allowed the entire Onondaga Valley line to be atop Bruno before he took his first step into the ball. “I’ll be okay,” I kept assuring Bruno. But in my heart I knew that I wouldn’t. Even when I bent over to frame Bruno between the inverted V of my legs, the vertigo would seize me instantly and, like a drunk, between my legs I’d see two and three Brunos, a phenomenon I’m sure our opponents were glad they never saw.
To see a Red Skelton movie at the Olympic, Cass had suggested she pick me up at the corner of Franklin and Moffett Streets at 6:45 P.M. Tuesday, this in order to see the early screening. To that I’d laughed disparagingly. Misinterpreting, an irritated Cass said, “I know I’ve only got a junior operator’s, but if I get caught Uncle Fairley can fix it. Uncle Fairley can fix anything.” Explaining to Cass that I wasn’t laughing at her driving at night, I said the coach often kept us until eight or later and that we’d be safer to plan on the late showing.
“He makes you practice in the dark?”
In weather like this, I said, we didn’t even practice on the main field, we’d do too much damage to the turf. Instead we practiced in the area bordering South Hamilton Street between the track and the street. He had a telephone pole over there, mounted with klieg lights, and though the visibility was hardly that of high noon or that of the fully lighted playing field one could see enough to go through the motions.
“He’s crazy, isn’t he? Uncle Fairley says he’s crazy.” Cass also thought he was crazy. She said he spoke to all the best-looking girls in the halls, including Cass, not so much spoke as growled like a rabid police dog (for the first time it struck me how easily saliva came to the coach’s lips). The only thing that rendered his growl friendly, Cass added, was that he actually conjured something like a smiling leer. When the coach was angry and brought his face next to an offending player, afterward the guy needed a towel to dry his face. From the opening whistle, the coach was as oblivious to the crowd as the players. During the Massena game, when I was being so punished by Borgosian that I tripped up our own quarterback, he substituted for me; while leaving the field I made the grievous mistake of removing my helmet and in view of a crowd estimated at ten thousand he hit me over the head with the clipboard on which he diagrammed plays, let me brood on that for two series of downs, then returned me to the game. Whether the coach was crazy depended upon the point from which he was viewed.
When Cass picked me up Tuesday night at nine, I saw immediately that she was driving Cookie’s yellow Lincoln coupe, either a ‘40 or ‘41, the last they made prior to the war (though the postwar cars were now coming out and Cass would doubtless have a new one soon), and it was a beautiful piece of machinery, with that yellow-and-chrome-encased spare tire mounted on the rigidly right-angled outside of what our Limey cousins call “the boot.” Alarmingly, and though Cass was an average five-five, I thought the automobile way too much for her, something about the strain it took for her lovely legs to reach the brake and clutch pedals, the petiteness of her leather-gloved hands on the wheel. It soon became apparent that Cass, like her aunt Cookie, was wonderfully dextrous and wheeled that baby around as if it was one of those miniature electric vehicles that bump each other on the wooden board tracks in the carnival section of a state fair. When we reached lower State Street, we found all the parking places taken, we circled Public Square a number of times trying to find a place at the east end of the square, in exasperated impudence, Cass, finally giving it up, turned the Lincoln into a no-parking zone in front of a fire hydrant. When I pointed out we’d probably get a ticket, perhaps even hauled away, Cass snapped, once again after the arrogant manner of her Aunt Cookie’s shooting a scratch round, ‘They wouldn’t dare touch a car owned by Uncle Fairley.” Increasingly disarmed by Cassandra “Cass” Mclntyre’s newly acquired and blatant confidence, I nonetheless wasn’t surprised when we left the theater and discovered that though lower State Street and the square were all but empty of cars there was no ticket on Cass’s windshield.
Wherever the occupants of the cars were (probably at a supper and social in the First Baptist Church across the street, the church whose high limestone tower’s four facades held the town clocks), they weren’t in the theater. Allowing Cass to lead the way, I found myself following her up into an empty balcony and coming out on a landing that separated the balcony into two parts. At this juncture we could have gone down left, which would have taken us into the loge seats closer to the screen and overlooking the spottily occupied orchestra. Instead, Cass turned boldly right and started up into the Alpine regions of the upper balcony. Cass may as well have proclaimed, “I haven’t come here for chit-chat, Exley.” Following her, I was again seized by a spell of vertigo, again thought it had to do with being dizzy with love, and to steady myself I gripped the outermost aisle seats as we ascended toward forbidden altitudes. We ended in the back row of the balcony, in the two seats against the easternmost wall, so far away one needed opera glasses to see the screen. As I had been with our punter Bruno, I was in any event seeing two and three images. Red Skelton was then at his prime. I’d never found him in the least funny or endearing and over the years, as he made the transition to television, I was appalled to find he was, if possible, becoming increasingly slapstick and even less amusing. Whenever I accidentally tuned him in, though, that night in the Olympic Theater in all its horrific ecstasy would rush nightmarishly back to me and I’d immediately switch channels.
After neatly folding a beautiful double-breasted midnight-blue cashmere polo coat, with great mother-of-pearl buttons and asking me to put it in the seat next to mine, Cass sat by the wall, I removed Uncle Fairley’s fire department slicker I’d worn with a view to returning it and placed it atop Cass’s. In those days I had a butch cut (imagine a guy today saying his hair was “butch”? Ah, semantics and the peculiar history of words), which due to frequent showers and lack of tending caused the hair to lie down in all directions, including down my forehead in piquant little bangs. I wore basketball sneakers, my best slacks, an old much-washed and faded football jersey,
over which—the ultimate concession to the ritual of dating—I sported a beige corduroy jacket with dark brown leather patches at the elbows.
Abruptly Cass reached over and took my hand to hold, then as abruptly reached over with her left hand and placed her palm on my cheek. She said, “God, Ex, you’re burning up. And sweating too.” She laughed impishly and said, “Is this what you guys call ‘having the hots’ for someone?” I laughed too and said, “Probably.” And just as abruptly we were again into some heavy petting, my hand discovering when it went under Cass’s sweater that she hadn’t worn a bra, then finding she was directing me by gently clasping the back of my head and leading my lips from one nipple to the other, back and forth, back and forth. At last she pushed me gently away and, incredibly, began unbuttoning my trousers. When she had me out, she tried coming to me over the high rigid armrest. But this proved impossible. Hence Cass rose, took Uncle Fairley’s raincoat from the seat, spread it on the carpet at my tennis sneakers, and moved to her knees before me.