But though I may be a nothing on the football field, at least so far, I am coming to feel very much at home here. In particular, I love my uniform. In the beginning, when I first started to play, I didn’t understand how anyone could sustain all this gear for hour after hour. I was alternately frantic, like someone locked in a dark closet, and despondent, like a horse that has never felt a saddle until one very rough and heavy one is applied. But now things are different. I feel that when I pull on my helmet, I am completely transformed; the great cage, three bars horizontal, one down the middle—designed, come to think of it, much in line with the helmets that they wore at Troy—confers a new identity. I’m wearing a mask. It’s a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing. Now the animal can get into play.
I love the feel of the shoulder pads and the thigh and knee protectors and the smell of the harsh shirt—like rotting leather, really, but appealing to me. Suddenly, within the armor, I—who am usually a human incoherence, ready to fly off in every adolescent direction—pull almost completely together. I am now all of a piece, unified, self-contained. And I am also blissfully, beautifully, isolated: No one can get in; no one can get at me. A lovely place to hide.
But mainly it’s the sense of power that I love; every piece of armor ensures some protection, but most of them are weapons as well. The shoulder pads are bludgeons; the helmet is a battering rock.
We always go on the second “hut,” our offensive line. Knowing this, the defender has an advantage. Tom and I move at about the same time. He leads with his helmet, getting a good push out of his stance. I know what is coming. Never cock your forearm—he’ll be on you before you get it thrown. It’s like a short punch, a jab, but I know how to sink every fiber into it. I do. Sully simply flies to the ground in a thrown-rag-doll heap. He rolls over and groans a little, more in humiliation than pain.
This leaves Frank Ball unprotected. He appears, for all his size, terrified. Which adds, if possible, urgency to my rage. I feel at that moment like a wolf bearing down on some large, injured thing that is not dangerous at all, despite its tusks and girth. I spear him just above the waist with my helmet, and all the air goes out of him. There’s not even time to wrap him with my arms. He’s on the ground—gone—just like that. He grunts twice, on the first hit and then as he smashes down.
“Frank, get outta here,” says Rourke. Ball is a disgrace to alpha maledom. He has all the biological sine qua nons, but he won’t activate them. Rourke presumably wants him chloroformed. Then he spits. “Sull, you all right?”
You are always all right, whatever has happened to you on a football field. If you have your limbs scattered at random across the grass, like the Scarecrow in the Oz movie, you are nonetheless all right. Sully shakes his head in assent. Rourke asks how he could have let Edmundson do that to him. This sends me into a million furies.
Sully lines up again. No runner now. He comes fast off the line, jumping the count by a fraction. No problem, because I’m jumping it by a little more. This time I rap him with both forearms and send his helmet up on his head; his chin strap goes over his mouth, his cage lifts up; he reels back. Then, foolishly, he bends at the waist and takes a step forward. He wants to make one more stab. This time my right forearm knocks his helmet off his head and into the dust. His nose is bleeding wildly. Now I can really destroy him, bash his brains right in (you let Edmundson do that?), and it is—I say to my shame—all I can do not to throw a stone fist at his down-tumbling innocent head. It’s all I can do not to jump on him and throttle him when he hits the ground as a warrior out of The Iliad, a thug like Diomedes, would do, though I would have no fine rhetoric to accompany the assault.
Sully rises, dusts himself off, and walks ignominiously away. Then other linemen, with no inducement from the coaches that I could see, line up in front of me and take their turns. Some I blasted, a few I fought to something like a draw, but none of them came close to blowing me out. Rourke stood there and spat tobacco and whistled his soft, ironic whistle and took off his baseball hat and rubbed his curly hair, like rich black lamb’s wool. Mace Johnson was more demonstrative. Every time I won a round, he’d whoop or throw his coach’s cap onto the ground. He was the backfield coach, not my boss, as Rourke was, but he was in a form of identificatory ecstasy that’s hard to reach day to day.
For Johnson and I were actually of a similar species. Though he was hugely strong and fast, like Ajax to Rourke’s Odysseus, Johnson wasn’t terribly well coordinated. I’d seen him play baseball for the Pantops Bullets, a local semi-pro team, and his contributions mainly consisted of hustle, “huss” and “extra huss” as he put it. He stole bases often and roared down the path like an out-of-control train. Once, the story went, an umpire had called him out on a close play. Johnson rose, looked at the opposing second baseman, and said, “Son, you know I’m safe.” The man, who was probably a year younger than Johnson, took the coach’s flaming stare for a moment, then nodded. The umpire reversed the call. But such scenes made up the major glories of Mace Johnson’s baseball career. Unlike Rourke, who was the star short stop, Johnson wasn’t bred right for big-time glory. He recognized me that day as one in the confraternity of the striving breed, and he was well pleased. He gave me his nod.
How did I feel that day? In Homer there are moments when, it’s said, a god descends and makes himself manifest to a mortal, proferring him some much needed help. But we moderns have learned to read it differently: We see the mortal as temporarily embodying the prowess of this or that deity. Suddenly the thinker glows with Athena’s power of mind. Occasionally, for the gods are whimsical, they pick someone low in the pecking order of life to favor with a visit, and so some randomly skipping cosmic force did for me that day.
After the day of trial by combat, I had a new identity on the football team; I was reborn, though modestly enough. No one cut in front of me anymore in the line where we waited for the trainer, Pete McKusick, to tape us up. On the practice field I was no longer “Hey, Emunson” or “Hey, sixty” (my number that year) but Marco. The rogue seniors, the linemen with all the talent who had come back flabby, to be ignominiously benched, took me up. I became their surrogate weapon against the less gifted, sometimes brown-nosing upstarts who’d taken their jobs. “Hit ’em wid da flipper, Marco,” Frankie Donatello would holler in his mock North End accent (which was really a heightening of an authentic North End accent). Donatello weighed well over three bills and was the only one who could move the seven-man sled solo.
In the last game of my junior year, the game against Malden, I saw some genuine playing time. I went in at offensive guard, beside Steve O’Malley, who was our all-league tackle, by far the best football player on the team. On my first play, our quarterback called a simple blast—halfback follows the blocking back—through the hole between Steve and me. We trot to the line. Steve, who has been playing both ways, offense and defense, for more than three quarters now, is streaked with dirt, grass, and blood and he is, to say the least, in a state. He is drunk with what the epic poets like to call battle joy. As we crouch preliminary to taking our stances, he stares at the linebacker and tackle across from us, grins a broken-toothed grin, and screams, “Right here! The play’s going right here!”
He points to the hole where, in a moment, Phil Campesio will come firing through, followed by Tony Eagan with the ball. I am up against a first stringer in a real game that, give or take, is still at issue, and O’Malley is telling them the plays! He turns in my direction and looks sheer death at me. As we come off the ball, I hear a horrible noise, like a truck collision. It is O’Malley, pushing his helmet under the defensive tackle’s chin and making his face mask and pads ring like iron. I’m on the linebacker. He throws me down—he does have some advantage in this one—but I go to all fours and crab-block him out of the play. Campesio goes through untouched, headed for a very unlucky defensive back, and the ballcarrier follows—a pickup of a dozen yards. On God’s verdant earth there may have been people happier than I was then, but I could not imagine who
they were.
It is not a Christian game, football. It is not about following a list of prohibitions, a decalogue. The game is about achievement, not renunciation; you make the most of every chance, create chances where you can. And honor is always won at the expense of others. Before Achilles leaves for war, his father tells him, quite simply, that he must strive to outdo everyone else in any activity he undertakes. This way of life, the way of honor, is built on your own vision of self and what you believe you owe it, and, second, on what others on par with you think. By exercising his prowess, the warrior gains an enhanced fullness—his justly won pride expands, and expands him.
I can picture Steve O’Malley standing alone along the sidelines during one of his rare breathers. His arms are padded from top to bottom, and by mid-game the tape and bandages have begun to unravel and are smeared with the dreck of the field. From his left hand dangles his helmet, with its massive cage; it’s embossed on either side with a red skull and crossbones, his rewards for ferocious play. His nose seems to have been repeatedly broken; at seventeen, he looks like a veteran of a dozen barroom brawls. His presence is so powerful that standing there, slouched insouciantly on the sidelines, rammed with the confidence that anything in the world that comes after him will not depart in one piece, he presents, at least to my sixteen-year-old self, a glowing and rather beautiful image. The circumference for about ten yards around him is his own space, alight with his dangerous aura. No one—not even the coaches—readily steps into it.
If you had asked, up until the afternoon of the great trial by combat, what was to become of me when I left high school, I would have shrugged and said I didn’t know. (“I dunno.”) But I had my fears on the matter, and they were dire enough. I pictured myself—and this is perhaps why the guidance counselor’s lines hit a nerve—actually working for the city. In my thick glasses and green fatigues, I turned up daily to pick up trash from the roadsides or to empty barrels. I made a joke or two from time to time, but mostly I tried to avoid subtle humiliations, steer clear of major disgraces. After work I went home to TV, the Red Sox or the Patriots, a quart bottle of beer, my special chair, where I sat fat and lumpy and loaded, hating the hours. Maybe this was a dun basement apartment of my own; maybe it was in my parents’ house. But it was death in life, as the poet Coleridge called a similar condition, brought on by opium withdrawal and failed imagination, and the thought of it kept me up at night.
But after that day, a day spent banging heads and being a grim blind-as-a-bat warrior under Mace Johnson’s eye, the worst kinds of imaginings I had about the future receded a little. I thought that maybe there was hope for me, that rather than standing on the edge of things, I might enter into the game, such as it was, and not always go down. Life ahead may have looked harsh, but in some part of myself I was ready for that now. I had something in me as bad as most things out there, and that, oddly, was a comfort. I was not going to die stillborn. Though what sort of life I would have was still hard to describe. It was that feeling of hunger unslaked and with no object, but a hunger that now assumed a right to food, that made me good and ripped, if only internally, at the kind guidance counselor when she told me that Salem State was about as far as I was likely to go in the world. Before that day, when I’d tried by my lights to murder Tommy Sullivan, I would have bought it all and decided that State was surely the best I could do.
FOURTH QUARTER, final minutes. At this point hell, or your best high school conception of it, swallows you whole. The pain of leaping up and smacking the ground yet again brings you near to tears. You push and grind and pump, and suddenly there’s the feeling of the captive dancing in chains, sensing that he’ll never be free unless he so tortures his body that the right pain-conquering chemicals kick in and take over and the world disappears.
And now the coaches talk more forcefully, more fluently, risen as they are on the wings of our pain; they go on with epic panache about how, compared to what we’ll face someday, this is nothing. Compared to the burdens we’ll have to bear, this is just small potatoes. Not long ago, the United States Marines have gone nose to nose with the Viet Cong during the Tet offensive. A war is being waged, prisoners taken and prisoners shot. And we are the raw material that is now being processed for that war. We’re being readied for a great jump into the dark. These are the best years of our lives. After this, the conflagration.
I once heard a pontificating expert deliver a derisive line about the American troops who went to fight in Vietnam. He said that their main preparation for the debacle was nothing more than high school football. High school football! And what poor chumps must they have been who went into the jungle with only that? High school football players, inept and maladroit and not ready for anything so bad as those heroic VC. Well, yes, I see what he meant. But a lot of those football players fought like Spartans, first for victory, then, years and resolution to win passing, for their lives and the lives of their friends. The war was the most appalling thing I ever encountered; it threw me out of love with America nearly for good. But I’d never say a dismissive word about the Americans who fought in it. I got ready with those kids for the same game. My ineptitude was theirs. (The fourth quarter, I can see, is almost over: The coaches are coming off their contact high, registering their impatience a little.)
For I was, even at best, going nowhere very special, and to have thrown myself into something and to have emptied myself to the bottom for it—well, football taught us that was not something to be sneered at. Or so I might have said then had I the words, as we began to walk, in tired World War II Sergeant Rock strides, off the practice field, across the running track, and into the Hormel Stadium locker room. There’s a dignity in getting as bone-weary as we were then—a feeling akin to triumph, though it is not easy to explain.
But when I think about it, I remember many of the men my father’s age, in their fifties, who came to his funeral. They were big; many were drink-ruined, with great hands and weary, weary expressions, as though they’d spent their lives rolling the boulder up an endless hill. They had done their work, laid concrete, driven the bus, dug the ditch, and now they were truly and honestly tired, tired and ready for the end. Uncomfortable, genuinely sorry, not knowing what to say, in their too-tight, once- or twice-worn Sears, Roebuck suits, they still exuded vast dignity. Working guys, from the beginning of life to the near end, they were pure proles, all class.
It was from this world—from their world and that of Mace Johnson and of football, and most of all from the world of my father—that Franklin Lears would wrest me away.
Chapter Three
BLIND GIRL
Paul Revere rode through Medford, Massachusetts, on his famous midnight ride (on the eighteenth of April, in ’seventy-five), immortalized in verse by my ancestor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, onetime professor of modern languages at Harvard, who, could he have visited Medford in the fall of 1969, might have been surprised at how far his descendant had fallen. Revere, seeing the two beacons burning in the Old North Church in Boston and so knowing that the British were coming by sea, took off to spread “his cry of alarm to every Middlesex village and farm,” flying through Medford (“it was twelve by the village clock, / When he crossed the bridge into Medford town”) on his way to Concord, where the Revolutionary War would begin.
Medford wasn’t entirely without distinctions beyond Revere’s ride. The great historian Francis Parkman spent summers there as a boy, hiking, swimming, and canoeing in what was eventually to become the Middlesex Fels Reservation. (My friends and I spent many hours there drinking beer and dodging the MDC police. Depending on whom you asked, MDC meant Metropolitan District Commission or More Dumb Cops.) The great aviator Amelia Earhart lived in Medford for a while; when she came back from her transatlantic flight, the town held a parade, for which 20,000 turned out. Four were arrested for pickpocketing. It’s said, too, that Medford was the site of the nation’s first traffic light. More certain is the fact that Fannie Farmer wrote her cookbook while living in Medf
ord and that “Jingle Bells,” the Christmas song, was written there.
In the past, Medford had days of relative prosperity. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was a port town; ships were built there, and sailed in to dock on the Mystic River, which traverses Medford Square. (The city had relatively easy access to the local trading hub, Boston, eight miles away.) The most salient commodity in the town’s commercial life then was Medford Old Rum, touted as “the best rum made in the States.” The days of Medford Rum were the days of what historians refer to as “triangular trade”: New Englanders, sometimes the descendants of the Puritans, traveled to the coast of Africa, where they exchanged simple manufactured goods for slaves. Then the slaves traversed the horrid Middle Passage to the West Indies, where they were in turn traded for the molasses that, in America, in Medford, was distilled into rum. Various citizens of Medford, some of them perhaps stern abolitionists—slavery was abolished in Medford in 1787—profited from this trade no end.
By 1969, Medford was a sad, somnolent working-class city of about 60,000. It was full of triple-decker houses, dreary, weed-grown parks, and an unremarkable square, which to me was principally defined by Brigham’s ice cream parlor, Stag’s pool hall, and Papa Gino’s pizza joint. The majority of the population was Italian; there was an Irish constituency, along with a few Jews and, in West Medford, where I lived, a black neighborhood. Though only a few miles from Boston and Cambridge, Medford was substantially another world. Many residents of Berkeley and Madison would have known more about the cultural life of Cambridge and Harvard than we, a twenty-minute drive away, did.
All these things Franklin Lears understood about Medford before he arrived. He had probably taken a driving tour or two through the town. He had no doubt read up on the city in one book or another, sitting at his ease in the great reading room at Harvard’s Widener Library. But still, he would not really have gotten the flavor of the place, the high school in particular. You could stack up postcard visions and yellowing prose accounts forever and not convey the sense of what Medford, at least as I tasted it then, was all about.
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