Chapter Two
MUSTANGS
If Franklin Lears’ so-called philosophy class was going to be a circus, all to the good. I detested school; a little diversion would help me get through the day. What I cared about—and with an intensity that bordered on religious devotion—was football. The football field was where my real life was going to unfold. For I had grand hopes for this, my senior year. When I think back on the game and what it meant to me—and what it meant for Lears to pull me from it, as he eventually would—one day in particular stands out.
This was our last day of double sessions, two-a-day practices. (It might, in fact, have been the day that Frank Lears got his first look inside Medford High, faculty orientation day.) On the field, it was brutally hot. Eighty degrees is bliss on a leafy New England street; on a high school practice field, where the ground is so hard that you and the ballcarrier bounce like a couple of india-rubber dolls when you make a tackle and the dust billows perpetually in an ongoing simoom, it’s something else again. I felt like I was being boiled alive in the cauldron of my helmet.
This was the only day all year that we did grass drills. As far as I know, the last pro football coach who could regularly get his team to do grass drills, or up-downs, as they’re also called, was Vince Lombardi, the man of whom the defensive tackle Willie Davis said, “Coach treats us all like equals, treats us like dogs.” Lombardi was a legend even during his life.
Mace Johnson was here today. He was my history teacher, our last year’s backfield coach, now in charge of his own team on the other side of Boston, and he was legendary to us. Johnson had come to revisit his old squad, whom he’d keep track of through the year almost as closely as he did his new team. Though physically absent through the season, he often seemed more with us than the new coaches who had come on to take his place.
Most anything Mace Johnson asked we would have done, and what he asked for on this particular day was grass drills. It was time, as he said in his staff sergeant’s drawl, to “get ’em up.”
He is there, standing in front of us, in blue coach’s jersey and shorts, with his close-clipped hair and his whistle dangling. Johnson was six-feet-two, about 190 pounds, all prime-grade Marine Corps muscle. He was handsome, with a face that looked like it had been cut from a block of marble. The cheeks were long and smooth, the forehead high and similarly unlined. Johnson had close-set eyes, soft blue, and a nose unremarkable and perfectly proportioned to the rest of his face. There was a simplicity and purity in Johnson’s appearance, as though he were a knight who knew that he served the best of kings and that his causes were just. There was no room on the face or behind it for self-dissatisfaction, ambiguities, mysteries, doubts.
Johnson had the whistle between his teeth and he was striding up and down the rows in which the team was arrayed and running in place, his great thigh muscles rippling and relaxing with each step. When Johnson blew the whistle, we stopped our running, kicked our legs out behind us, and threw ourselves at the ground as though we were going to hit luscious feather beds. It was, he proclaimed, only the beginning of the second quarter—we’d just begun the drill—and we would have to push much harder if we expected ever to win a football game, if we ever expected to survive a football game alive and standing.
Someone passing by would have seen the arresting sight of sixty bodies, dressed a little like astronauts, a little like gladiators, heads and shoulders expanded, waists waspish, tightly feminine, all of us suspended for a moment in the air, as though by magic, on invisible carpets. Then down to the ground we went, onto the dusty near-concrete surface. There was the thud and the bounce, then up again onto our feet, and running, running in place, as Mace Johnson orated. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The sun roared in the sky. We sweated and strained and watched Johnson, and hated him and adored him with about equal verve.
Doing grass drills at the end of what has already been a vicious practice, pushing toward what you know will be your far edge, you enter a hallucinatory state; you see the world as a gross illusion, the way grinning, half-mad convicts are supposed to. Nothing out there—not the chanting players pounding on their thigh pads or the bawling coaches or the stands that line one side of the practice field—is entirely real, and so your pain is part illusion too. But it’s got to be dealt with, so you drop down inside yourself, stumbling and uncertain, and what you come upon is pooled rage, good octane, high-combustion stuff. I didn’t have great physical skill or remarkable strength, but I had enough hot rancor to push myself through this drill and plenty more like it.
As we sweat, Mace Johnson’s rhetoric is climbing higher, into the provinces of Christopher Marlowe and Herman Melville, masters of swelling poetic style. Johnson is launched. Up and down in front of our military rows he strides, hollering out to us that it’s getting later in the game and that the team that guts it out is the one that will win; he tells us that we’ve been pussyfooting all day, we’ve been pussyfooting through our hit-and-shed drills, dogging it during wind sprints; that we’ve lived our lives in obscene luxury and that now it’s time to wake up and become men. He tells us that in not too much time, many of us will be soldiers; some—the best of us—may be marines. He never mentions the Viet Cong by name, but it is after all 1969 and somewhere on the far side of the Hormel Stadium practice field, the Cong and the NVA are waiting, and they are doing something more drastically preparative than grass drills.
He bellows out one of his favorite injunctions: “You’re gonna be lean, mean, agile, mobile, and hostile.” Then a scream: “I mean hostile!”
Running in place next to me, wearing his helmet with the signature white-plastic face mask, Rick Cirone, my fellow philosophy student, rounds off Johnson’s litany: “How ’bout infantile?” Rick can clown well enough, but he can also play. Neither of these things can be said with confidence of me.
Up-downs are like a collective madness; you get high, the whole group does, and you hear yourself say things, hear yourself call out injunctions to yourself and the other players, scream the baseline phrase “Get ’em up!” and bellow the line that will be with us for the first month of the season: “Beat Somerville!” “Beat Somerville!” “Somerville!” “Somerville!” “Somerville!” Somerville is our local rival, the team that broke the Medford Mustangs’ winning streak last season in a game where player after Medford player was carried off the field, bloody and weeping. The chants shift. “Kill Somerville!” we scream. Neither Johnson nor any of the other coaches says a word to stem the blood lust.
Mace Johnson himself is off the Tamerlane-like tone and is now hitting a quasi-philosophical note that I’ve heard him touch before. “These are the best years of your lives, boys!” he cries at us, in a knowing, almost statesmanlike voice. “Best years of your lives!”
And as he says it, my heart gums up with fear. Could this possibly be true? Is there a chance that from here it runs downhill? For I cannot imagine anything worse than high school—at least anything inside the chain-link park-fence bounds of American life—that is more tedious, mean, anxiety-ridden, and sad. If this is the best, then I think I will do away with myself before I have to taste what’s left simmering in the pot.
“Third quarter!” Johnson hollers. And I and all my compeers in pain scream out in antiphonal response, for this is religion, American religion: “Third quarter!” Kill Somerville (and the invisible Cong)! No mercy, not for anyone, least of all us, in the best years of our lives.
Mace Johnson was a man of mantras, talismanic phrases that sewed life together at its seams. “Atta boy!” was the leading commendation, applied to any display of guts. “First off the deck!” was another, meaning that once you’d gone down, you had to spring up first, faster than your opponent, and go block someone else; then you were two men rather than just one forked thing scrambling on the field.
Johnson’s pet verbal formula, the one that, from his perspective, I imagine, elevated him to higher grounds of urbane eloquence, went this way: “There are three th
ings in life that I cannot abide: small dogs, women who smoke in public, and [fill in the third spot with whatever abomination has just assaulted his eyes] quarterbacks who won’t stand in and take a hit”; “linebackers who don’t stick their heads into a tackle”; “runners who cannot understand that a good back never loses a yard.” I’m sure Johnson was serious about the small mutts. He was the sort of man who would own a mastiff or a Doberman, and that dog would be trained. But did he really abhor women smoking in public? Did the new Virginia Slims—cigarettes of, by, and for the female—cause him bouts of anxiety as women hoisted to their lips derogatorily reduced versions of the royal scepter and manly wand? I can’t really say.
Mace Johnson had little capacity for the ambiguous or the equivocal, much less for being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubt, without irritable reaching after fact or reason. (Keats called this negative capability and I had, up until Frank Lears, who eventually displayed it in remarkable measure, never met anyone with a turn for it.) It was Johnson’s emphatic downrightness, his willingness to promulgate and live by a code that was nearly chivalric, that drew us to him. Here was a blue-collar bastion of Camelot, created by the coach; here was a place where you could be measured by a discerning eye and given a seat—or denied one—at the Round Table. You’re not a man, it’s been said, until the other men acknowledge you as one. In Mace Johnson, overemphatic, loud, monovocal, we had identified someone with the right of investiture.
It was a touch absurd, this male business—we saw it even then. We’d pass each other in the halls and call out “Atta boy!” or “Get ’em up!” and fall out laughing. But the whole enterprise was elevating, too; it pushed you to places you would never have reached on your own.
Football is a Homeric world, and like the assault on Troy, it attracts hitters, orators, and orator-hitters. In every coach there is the urge of Nestor or Odysseus to rally the troops with high-sounding hymns to fathers and manliness. Girls watch and chant madly from the sidelines, spinning and prancing, urging on the combat.
It’s important that Achilles, the apogee of heroic culture in The Iliad, the apogee of all male warrior culture up to the present, really, isn’t just the great doer of deeds, the man, that is, who kills so many Trojans one day that he gluts a river with blood until the river god is revolted and tries to drown him. Achilles is also a great orator. His powers of expression are nearly incomparable. But you don’t go to Achilles for an elevating discussion. He makes speeches, lays down the word, and in his orations he unfolds the heroic code. The code revolves around one issue—honor—and its preservation, enhancement, and demolition. Achilles always knows what he must do—what god he must respect; when he must sacrifice; whom he must kill and despoil. And when Achilles speaks, everyone goes silent and listens. If you don’t, you’ll be blood on the sand. The most maladroit peewee football coach urging his kids to hold the line is tied, however pathetically, to this rap-and-wreck tradition.
Socrates, who comes on later in history, is not prone to speeches. He’ll give them if he’s pushed, but he’d prefer to pose questions, endless questions. With them, he hopes to get his interlocutor to know something about himself. And, too, Socrates aspires to be improved by the exchange. Unlike Achilles, who assumes he knows everything worth knowing (including the fact that he’ll die very young), Socrates says he knows nothing. For this, the oracle at Delphi commends him, calls him the wisest man in Athens. As soon as Achilles opened his mouth, Socrates would have begun badgering him with questions.
Though they are not entirely unlike, these two, Achilles and Socrates, they are much opposed. There was only one Socrates; we’ll never see his like again. But his spirit is always abroad in the world, and when it meets up with the spirit of heroic manliness, Achilles’ spirit—and this will happen before my eyes, soon—then one has to give way. And it will not always be the homely figure with the ready laugh who steps aside.
MACE JOHNSON, the spirit of football, the spirit of manliness, call it what you like, had anointed me at the end of last football season—though such investitures can always be revoked. Here is how it happened.
I came to football with precious little aptitude. My first year on the varsity, junior year, I was six feet tall, radically uncoordinated, tallowy in body, and bat-blind without my glasses. I missed getting cut from the team by a hair. On the fateful day of the last cut, the linebacker coach, Brian Rourke, pulled me aside and informed me that I was utterly without ability and that the only reason, the only reason in the world, I wasn’t going to be cut was that I “hustled like a bastard” on the field and was an example to the “lazy shits” with which the team, that year, was rife.
Rourke came on like a Thoroughbred: He’d been the captain of the Malden Catholic team and had then gone to Harvard, where he was a star football player. The next year we heard he skipped away to Harvard Business School, and today, for all I know, he owns great expanses of cement and steel and whole choirs of computers and is worshiped by phalanxes of cell phone–yammering princelings of global commerce. At the time, what came through was that he was deplorably handsome, a movie star in the flesh, and absurdly tough. He spat tobacco juice down on us while we pushed the blocking sled along, him riding atop it like Darius of Persia. He was a triumph of prole genetics, was Rourke; I was a mutt, just managing to bark along after the team as it strode through the stadium.
Rourke was not a subtle motivator; he wasn’t, I’d wager, trying to inspire me with a brash challenge. No, he was simply calling roll, letting me know where the scales of justice were poised. He was in charge of order and degree, like Ulysses in Shakespeare’s play, and he was going to let me know where I stood in that great chain of being on which he held such an exalted place. He was good at everything; I, at nothing. Rourke, I surmised, believed that you either were born top-flight or should do the world a favor and cut from the nearest bridge.
I went at football with a novitiate’s devotion. The coaches told us that before practice we were to do a set of exercises with an absurd device called an Exer-Genie, an isometric contraption that must have cost a good five dollars on the open market. The drill was excruciating, and though almost everyone else ignored the machines, I did double the amount. I never dogged it on the field. I filled every minute there, in accord with the Kipling poem that someone had posted on our bulletin board, with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. In fact, I worshiped that poem, “If,” with its muscular, colonialist faith (and I was being groomed as a lower-echelon colonialist, wasn’t I? For beyond the stadium walls there was Vietnam, and all the other American adventures abroad that were to come). I threw myself into every drill like a fiend hopping into the fire, hoping to ascend another degree of flaming rectitude.
I never did the one thing that would have made all the difference. I never contrived to go out and get myself some contact lenses or some sports glasses. No, I simply stowed my everyday glasses in my locker—they wouldn’t fit under the helmet—and went out to practice. So I stayed nearly stone-blind. But other than that, I was close to transformed over time. From a disoriented, buttery boy in mid-August I had become, by late November, a pretty solid, pretty reckless head banger. Rourke, my devilment, had taught me a technique for flipping my forearm and sending the blocker coming at me spinning, and I practiced this one motion more than a dancer does her pas de deux. I can do it fluently still. (Come at me; come on!) Step with the left, flip with the right; step right, flip left, with no trace of wasted motion, as though your forearms are the moving bumpers on a pinball machine. If you can move your forearm fast enough, you can make a sound like a bass drum in a cathedral inside your opponent’s helmet. Other players saw what I could do and began to duck me when we lined up to scrimmage.
One day, Mace Johnson presiding, Rourke attendant priest, we lined up for tackling drills. Two large blue tackling dummies, smelling of sweat and sawdust, are placed five yards apart. In the middle is an offensive lineman; back behind him, a ballcarrier. Nose-up to the blocking lineman, c
rouched in his stance, football’s Zen meditative position, is a defender, with forearms poised if he’s a linebacker or an end, down, in three points, if he’s a tackle.
I step into the defensive slot, get my forearms—seal flippers, they look like in their thick, laundry-scented pads—into place. In front of me, blocking, is Tommy Sullivan, a nice, nice kid, my year, a junior, who plays a lot in the games, at linebacker and at guard. (“You ain’t never never gonna play,” says Rourke aloud, of me, while the team is watching my filmed self blitz the quarterback at the behest of J. T. Tedesco, senior, thus leaving my slot open over the middle and getting us burned for a touchdown pass in a scrimmage with Salem.) Tom is a freckle-faced kid with a great shock of Woody Woodpecker–red hair.
Behind him is Frank Ball—built, in Medford parlance, like a brick shithouse. Ball is actually a cowardly lion, a Baby Huey. He is a rich kid (by Medford standards); his father owns a used-car dealership. He is also a handsome one—in the off season, he wears a carefully tended mustache.
I can tolerate Frank Ball; Tom, I like a lot. But right now I am filled with a rage that simply pours through me like fast-rushing water; I can hear it move. For on the human map, and on the Homeric map of football, I am simply an unequivocal nothing, a flunky in school, of less than no account socially, with no money, no connections; I’ve got zip and zip-minus listed in every account book that matters. I can no longer bear the shame of being simply myself. I am raging so much internally that I’m surprised my body doesn’t lift off the ground and rise, corkscrewing into the air.
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