Half the people who participated in the experiment went all the way—five hundred rousing American volts.
What was supposed to happen, Lears told us, was much different. The Americans in the experiment were supposed to be incensed at the whole idea. When someone told them to send an electric charge through a stranger’s skin, they were supposed to swear at the experimenter, then storm out in rage, maybe ante up a punch in the jaw to the bad guy in the white coat.
In Germany, it would all be different. There, lulled by the banality of evil or subsumed by the totalitarian mind or whatever, the people would cheerfully goose the needle up as high as it could go, as fast as they could get it there.
The experiment never made its way to Germany. The control group failed to perform its function. Instead of providing a glowing image of American independence, many of the people in the experiment showed themselves remarkably eager to do what they were told and torture an innocent man for not being able to pair two words correctly.
“Well,” said Lears (hand-swinging, a bit of tongue-clicking, the tch-tch sound having been recently added, whether because he was getting more comfortable or less, one couldn’t say). “What do people think?” If they did that sort of experiment here at Medford High, what would the results be? Would all of us—Lears always included himself in a potential indictment—be eager to keep on pushing the buttons? Would we be good experimental confederates? Would we follow orders?
We had been quiet for a long time. We had provided Lears with deserts of silence, where he could straggle absurdly, trying to sustain himself in his wanderings on the manna of his own thoughts. We had given him the silent treatment. But now we had plenty to say. We bubbled with insight. We would never, under any conditions, be willing to push the plunger down while someone screamed in the next room. No way—not us.
“So how do you explain these other people doing it, then?”
Buller thought he knew. Maybe the thing was a stunt. Everyone in it was an actor. It was like the American moon landing as explained by the Chinese government to its people—a fat hoax. The experimenters had done it to get attention. Some respectful murmuring at this.
“I don’t think so,” Lears said. “I believe that they really did it.”
We roared on, nobly defending ourselves, our compatriots, America and its way, and Lears nodded and smiled and listened to every word we said as though we were inspired prophets. I spoke up and said that most people I knew would never do such a thing—no way.
And I can still remember the way Lears settled his gaze on me as I talked. His soft brown eyes were mesmerizing; it was as if a deer had somehow acquired preternatural intelligence and could combine warmth with the greatest level of comprehension. It struck me then for the first time that when this guy listened to you, the experience was of a different order from when anyone else did. He wasn’t thinking about anything else. He was completely poised on your thoughts.
What I said was dumb, neither here nor there. But one of kids’ great inducements to say idiotic things is the deeply in-worked feeling that no one cares what it is they might have to say. If it doesn’t matter, then what the hell? And if you’re outrageous enough, then they will at last pay you some attention, though probably not of the sort that you hoped for at the beginning.
But when Lears listened—and this was probably my first full-length expostulation in class—it felt as though, odd to say but true, you were being fed something, something very good and sustaining. And when he stopped listening because your turn was up, it was as though earthly ambrosia was being taken from you. It was a beautiful drug he dispensed. I had never gotten it before.
And the harder and more humanely he listened, the more anxious we felt. The fact that he seemed ready to credit our inane reactions, to respond to them as though they were long-pondered elements of contoured philosophic systems, started out by making us feel better, more comfortable and self-assured. But the listening intensity also somehow threw the issue back onto us. Is this really what we believe? Is it what we think? If it’s not, do we want this person, on whom nothing much seems to be lost, to see that we’re trying to deceive ourselves and him both? It was not humiliating to lie to teachers—we did that all the time. What was humiliating was to be seen through by someone who felt not outrage about our deceptions but compassion, genuine pity that we couldn’t actually think about matters and then speak our minds.
Lears gave us thirty full minutes to defend ourselves and the American way. Then, without a word of commentary, he let us go. But he was not through with the issue, not through with us. This was to be a play in two parts, and the second act was on its way.
ALWAYS AT school there was another world, a place for your thoughts to migrate, where you could loiter in vague, fantastical pleasure, one far from the humdrum mental assembly line you were traveling down. In a while, football would disappear and my world elsewhere, my Erewhon, would be the pool hall and the prospect of getting beer on Friday and Saturday nights. But during November, when Lears told us about Milgram’s experiment, it was still football—that was the place where my thoughts loved to glide.
We had started the year with two wins, one over the redoubtable Boston Latin, an out-of-conference game, and the second against pushover Chelsea. But after that, the great chance had come: We had gotten our rematch with Somerville, the team that had broken the Mustangs’ winning streak last year, stopped Medford’s string of eleven in a row, and started us skidding into deep mediocrity.
They were big, tough Italian kids, the Somerville players, who came from a town where, it was said, there are more barrooms per capita than anywhere else in the world. They wore bloodred uniforms; they walked on the field like construction workers arriving at a site, coming on to do a job; most of them seemed to have heavy beards. The guy who played split end, usually a position for speedy flyweights, weighed 220 pounds. They had a tackle so strong that no one in the Greater Boston League could block him alone. He had to be handled by two or even three players. Their fullback, named Sal Cartelli, was a compressed meteor, tight and strong and crazy. (“The kid’s fuckin’ crazy”: That phrase was a major tribute in Medford and environs.) They came to Hormel Stadium to kick us around, slap their hands together a few times, workmen at the end of the day shift, traipse off together for a few brews, then home, maybe, for a pop at the wife.
Before the game, they kept their linemen in the locker room so that we could stand around and imagine how big and tough they were, like Beowulf hearing the lays about fearsome Grendel, before their match. As soon as the game began, Somerville set to work on us. An early play from scrimmage went to the huge flanker. Tiny Medford defensive backs hit him and flew off like bugs. He looked like a moving popcorn popper. He gained forty yards. Then they smashed the ball up the middle time and again. Their points were quick and easy—they were sure there would be plenty more to come.
They were so big and mean and fast—how could we win? But as fast as they were, none of them was quite as fast as our quarterback and fellow philosopher Tom Capallano. Cap grabbed a kick-off and flew down the sidelines—we had a special play, featuring a line of blockers that, having thrown an initial shot, would set up like a picket fence, each player a post, along the edge of the field. Once the returner made it in behind that fence, he could fly.
From scrimmage, Cap was also a terror. He ran around the ends; he ran up the middle on quarterback draws. He scrambled away from their pass rush and picked up eight, ten, fifteen yards. And suddenly the feeling hit everyone that Somerville wasn’t invincible, and the Somerville team, which had believed all the hype about itself, began to leak slowly like a sad red balloon. As good as they were, they had no one who could catch Cap and no one who, on his own, could tackle our running back, Mo Murphy. Murphy was hurt nearly every day of every game for his whole high school career, except that day. He was like a huge white stallion, with muscles standing out, magnificently contoured. All over his pale, pale face were vicious pustules; his ski
n was tracing paper–thin, you could see every vein in his body; but other than that, he was a study in physical perfection. He ran so hard that his knees nearly bumped his chest. Tackling him once was like getting into a bad poolroom fight.
Suddenly, at the end of the first quarter, the conviction descended on us like a rogue blessing: We could win. They were better in almost every way, but they were afraid now, nervous, embarrassed, executing poorly. And they were out of shape. No grass drills for them under the roaring sun, Mace Johnson striding through the rows. We could beat them.
The game turned into war. It got dirtier and dirtier. In every pileup, the Somerville players kicked and clawed; they punched. One of our linebackers, I can’t recall who it was, caught Cartelli coming around the end on a sweep and hit him so hard that on the bench, and probably in the stands, too, you could feel the fillings in your back teeth jolt. Cartelli was, as the announcers say, slow in getting up.
At a certain point, the contest became so intense, bitter, and hard fought that the cheerleaders stopped cheering full-time and began watching the game. That’s right—the cheerleaders actually began taking an interest in the football game.
In the mythology of high school, the links between the cheerleaders and the football players are established and understood: The cheerleaders are the most beautiful girls in the school, and they live and breathe to serve the studs who play on the squad. As to the cheerleaders being beautiful, that was true enough, at least for our group. They were chosen by a shop teacher—a rotund, grinning fellow named Mr. Pelagrino—and Mr. Pelagrino might as well have been a Persian sultan who had been borne through the ranks of the four hundred–odd girls in the senior class and emerged with the most comely. He was drawn to blondes, was Mr. P., as he was to dark, impossibly lovely Italian girls. It’s likely that all our cheerleaders could jump and kick and spin, but it’s certain that they were quite close to being the fourteen most alluring girls in the school.
As to their being the love slaves of the football team, or even the team’s dedicated admirers, that was another matter. The morning of the Somerville game, I’d arrived at Hormel Stadium the usual three hours before the whistle, so as to get taped, squeeze into the absurdly tight dress pants, and hang around doing endless nothing. The cheerleaders were practicing on the running track in front of our bench, and Rick, with a couple of backfield associates, was looking on, hanging on the chain-link fence, apparently trying to strike a standard cowboy let’s-evaluate-the-mares pose. Rick was wearing a blinding white T-shirt, double-bleached and ironed; his pants fit impeccably; his hair was perfect. From his taped hand hung his Gayle Sayres–style helmet, with the signature white face guard, and a couple of hawk decals—rewards for interceptions and exquisite grabs.
The girls were executing what had to qualify as their most inane cheer: “A touchdown, a touchdown, a touchdown, boys. You make the touchdowns, we’ll make the noise.”
Rick, his mind most likely on the Somerville behemoths now curled up, deep in the back of fetid caves, chewing morning bones, no doubt: “Hey, hey, girls, I got an idea. How ’bout this time you make the touchdowns and we . . .” Rick trailed off. He must have known this was far from his best shot.
Cathy Leslie made a face as though Rick had just become ill in proximity. He shrugged and ambled off. This was about as intimate and friendly as things got between the two groups, at least when both were in uniform.
Who got the idea of having cheerleaders? Where did the practice of having young women hop, dance, and urge the boys on come from? Was it another classical throwback? Were the girls there playing the roles of the women who looked down from the battlements and cheered on their men, cheered them on lustily, because if the men on the plains flagged and the city was taken, the women would be raped and killed, their children sold off as slaves? That, at least, was the objective in Homeric times.
But the Medford High cheerleaders were not quite one with the Mustang warriors. On the contrary, they spent most of the game with their backs to us, facing the crowd. And their objective, unspoken but clear enough to any observer, was to bring the attention from the field onto themselves. They chanted and leaped and sent their short, short skirts flying up, exposing their tight blue underpants. And very often they won the tacit battle for attention. The crowd, or some significant portion of it, males mainly, zoomed in on them and lost contact with the impossible sprawl that was the football game. We fought with the girls for attention most days, and often they came out on top. Sometimes we emerged from the game victorious, little knowing that they had won the ratings war.
But that day, in the game against Somerville, they stopped cheering in unison, put their gloved hands to their mouths, and bit their folded knuckles—or clasped their palms together in prayer-like suspense—and stood stunned as the game went on. When the Mustangs gained a few yards or stopped a sweep, they jumped spontaneously, without any choreographed plan. They were for once—and for the only time all year that I saw—on no one’s side but ours.
With about a minute left in the game—the score 20 to 14, Somerville ahead—we had the ball on their twenty-yard line. Handoff to Mo Murphy, a simple dive between the guard and the center. Murphy broke through the Somerville line, spinning off the big tackle, the moose, who was too tired from chasing Cap all day to wrap Murphy up. Stan Rutollo, another meteor, who played linebacker, was there waiting, perfectly positioned, feet apart, arms wide, neck bulled, ready to make the tackle. Murphy got his knees churning (“like pistons,” as our radio announcer liked to say). But instead of running into Rutollo and creating a red smash like two spheres colliding in space, Murphy reared back a little on his right foot, kicked with his left, and jumped clean over him, like a great horse making an impossible leap. I don’t believe Rutollo touched him. When Murphy was in the end zone, the linebacker was still standing there, position unchanged, poised and ready to hit, as though he were posing for a publicity still. He looked like one of those stone gnomes that people use to decorate, if that’s the word, their country gardens.
With twenty seconds left, Chewy DiCarlo, big Chewy, the tackle, who weighed nearly 250 pounds and who was really a gentle boy, went jiggle-trotting into the game. Chewy was called forth by Frank Ireland, a screaming skull who coached the line and had no business determining how we’d handle the conversion after a touchdown. That was the head coach Ed Connoly’s call. And usually we went for the two-point conversion, with a run or a passing play. Connoly, with his froggy voice, croaked from the sidelines, trying to get Chewy off the field. (“Yeah, I heard him,” Chewy said later. “But no way I was comin’ back.”)
The hike went to Cap, the quarterback, the ball handler. He put it effortlessly down. He was, he told me, smiling as he placed the ball. “It was our game. We deserved it,” he said. (Like all latter-day knights, Cap believed that the universe was a justly wired operation.) Chewy stumbled forward like he’d been shoved in the lunch line, nearly lost his feet, righted himself, and gave the ball a boot. It rose up, up, up, then began to descend, hurt and ungainly, like a waterfowl winged by a hunter from his blind. The football seemed to hover in the air for a full minute. Then it dropped dead down, slapping the mucky ground so hard you felt it must have been logged with water. The referees raised their arms over their heads, the ground crew welcoming a small plane to the runway. The game was over. Medford 21, Somerville 20.
And though I hadn’t played in the game, I went mad, embracing Tony Lincoln, a black defensive back who’d graduated the year before—his stutter aside, Tony was a ringer for Little Richard. Tony had squirted illegally down onto the sidelines to watch us exact revenge. “We’ll get them for you next year,” I’d said to Tony when he was brought, near crazy with pain, out of the game at Somerville the year before. “F-f-f-f-fuck next year” was Tony’s judicious reply. But Tony was now in ecstasy.
We all were. We could have gone on from there and sacked the entire city of Somerville, burning and looting and howling our way through town, stopping
at each of the two hundred or so taverns to hatchet open the beer kegs and toast our victory. The enemy was as good as dead. After Chewy’s ball went through, many of them fell to the ground in shock: the big guys, the shavers, the working men; they were crying like children unjustly slapped.
In the clubhouse we were silent, amazed at what we’d done, thanking powers on high. Usually the coaches gave out the game ball after a win. Today, we simply found it, took it, and put it in Cap’s hand: There were no protests from the authorities.
Coach Connoly, he of the diminished froggy voice, probably the worst clubhouse speaker in the game of football, croaked, “Now you see what can sometimes happen if you stick with a thing and don’t give up.” Which kept the joint quiet for another few minutes. Then we exploded again.
And what had Frank Lears, with his little black book filled with digests of the philosophers, to compare with this? Plato could go on all night about the rhapsodies of pure contemplation and how love of the beautiful in women and men passes on to love of beautiful ideas, then to love of the Good. But this was too tame, too serene. Plato’s plot to offer something more alluring than Homer’s battle joy looks, from the perspective of a bitter winning fight, like so much polite nonsense, sanctified jive. It’s all stay-at-home, all tame. A school thing, a church thing, a tiddle-taddle of teacupclinking voices. “We are skin drums which nature beats,” says a latter-day Dionysian, and when nature lays down its rhythm, you have to move.
It sometimes seems that men love only one thing, and it is not women or family or home, much less fine ideas. It is war. And the closer you can come to war at any time, the better, particularly if you survive. The philosopher William James made a big deal out of concocting something called the moral equivalent of war, a condition in which we could rally all the energies and powers that come with rank belligerence and put them to some civilizing use. But it is a futile exercise, I would have said that day, a Harvard man’s pipe dream. Because victory, achieved by the body over other bodies, the stripping of the armor, the taking of prizes, the humiliation of the foe—that is what the heart wants. Once you’ve had the feeling of total warrior triumph, nothing else exists.
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