Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken

by Di Filippo, Paul

  At noon Rudy returned with the hired men for a big lunch Roz had prepared. Rory sat down to eat with them. He hoped his father would not talk about the old man’s favorite subject during this last meal Rory would be sharing with him for some time. However, Lieutenant Rudy Honeyman, Ret., did as he inevitably did and turned the subject to his lone preoccupation.

  “I hope you’ve given some more thought to enlisting after all this sports stuff is finally behind you.”

  Rory stared down at his peas. They resembled little green cannonballs. “We’ll see, Dad. I’ve got to get through some important and stressful events first.”

  His father gestured with his fork as if it were a bayonet. Rory hoped he would not hear about “the Japs” again.

  “Fighting the Japs,” Rudy said. “Now that was important, that involved some heavy-duty stress. That’s when I learned about the treachery of the Oriental mind. We’re encountering the same wily deceit right now in ’Nam. Tunnels, little men in black pajamas hiding in rice fields, women and children stabbing our boys while their guard is down. We need some smart cookies like you over there. Officer material. Not all this city trash they’re drafting. You’d be leading your own platoon in no time, battlefield promotions—”

  Rory pushed back his chair and stood. “Dad, I’ve got to finish packing. We can talk about this when I get back.”

  “I don’t care about myself. Just don’t let yourself or your country down, that’s all I’m asking.”

  Rory went upstairs and began tossing articles haphazardly into his suitcase. Block of beeswax, his favorite trunks (Speedo be damned!), his good sports coat, some Sans-a-belt slacks, a few Van Heusen shirts, a wide striped tie. He slammed the lid, flipped the locks, then sat musing on his suitcase atop his bed. He felt lonely and confused.

  Promptly at one a car horn sounded outside. Rory snatched up his suitcase and ran down the stairs.

  His mother grabbed him at the door, squeezed him as tightly as she had that day he had dived into the icy river, and kissed him fiercely. “I’ll see you in Mexico City,” she said. Releasing him, she suddenly pushed him away as if she hated him and couldn’t wait to see him go.

  Only when he noted the city-limits sign for Independence did he realize he had never said goodbye to his father.

  Rory turned then to regard Czeslaw Dzubas, who was whistling cheerfully albeit tunelessly as he nonchalantly drove.…

  August, 1962. Twelve-year-old Rory stood an inch or two back from the lip of his familiar farm-surveying ten-meter platform. He was searching inside himself for the nerve to attempt a 3½-flip somersault. He tried envisioning his grandfather driving underwater to New Orleans. That image usually fortified him.

  Suddenly from below a funny voice called up with advice.

  “You are going to whack your head, young man, if you don’t get closer to the edge.”

  Rory looked down, saw a strange car he hadn’t heard arrive and a strange man. “Who are you?”

  “A friend,” said the man mysteriously. “Go ahead now, you can do it. Just remember what I said.”

  Rory felt embarrassed and a little contrary in front of this busybody. Still he moved closer to the edge of the platform. Then he launched himself into space just like John Glenn.

  His splashdown would’ve rated an “A-1” from Mission Control.

  Hanging by his elbows from the pool’s concrete rim, he looked up through dripping eyelashes at the man, who was hunkered down on his hams.

  The unknown advisor had black hair unstylishly hacked as if he had attempted to trim it himself. Lugubriously lined, his face was garnished with a long droopy mustache. Overall he evoked a walrus. Despite the Iowa summer heat he wore a sweater-vest under a corduroy sports jacket. Even above the chlorine Rory could smell a miasma of tobacco and cheap shaving lotion floating off the fellow.

  The man stuck out a hand.

  “Coleslaw Tubas,” he said.

  Or so Rory heard. Figuring that, however unlikely the name offered, Rory owed his own in return, the boy lofted a hand and named himself.

  “May I speak to your parents?” the man asked.

  “Sure,” said Rory, still thinking the guy wanted to buy some honey or something. Why he was being so nice to the kid simply constituted one of those myriad adult mysteries.

  Inside, as Rory later learned, Mister Tubas introduced himself to Roz Honeyman and explained himself.

  Czeslaw Dzubas had defected from Hungary in 1956. He left behind a not-inconsiderable post: top-ranked diving coach in the entire USSR. Behind the Iron Curtain remained a wife but no children. Mrs Dzubas, overseer of a squad of hotel matrons, cared not to accompany her husband. So must such separations arise, however lamentably, when the spark of romance has fled a joyless union.

  Once in America Dzubas soon learned his past skills and resume meant nothing in the national pecking order. Only menial assignments awaited his best efforts at job-hunting. With the Red Scare fulminating, no reputable institution wanted to hire a Communist, even one who had recanted his alien faith. Thus Dzubas had been forced to work as a janitor, a short-order cook, a truck driver and a newspaper delivery boy for the past six years. Just now he idled between vocations. While visiting some long-naturalized relatives here in Iowa—they owned a dairy farm near Waterloo—he had heard gossip in a diner about a local boy who was reputed to be a diving wonder. He had detoured to witness this prodigy with his own eyes.

  “Mrs Honeyman,” said Dzubas, puffing on a gnarly pipe, sitting on their couch next to a requisitioned Rory (who had changed into his jeans and tee-shirt, but was still barefoot), “Your son boasts certain innate talents. Perhaps a larger share than any other youth I have ever had the felicity to work with. I am sure you have apprehended such a clear truth before now. Naytheless, self-taught as he is, he has acquired some obvious bad habits which, unless soon broken, will prevent him from ever attaining his full stature as a competitive diver. My people say that a man who represents himself before the Central Committee has a fool for a client, and will doubtlessly end up in a gulag rendering Siberian fir trees into toothpicks with his fingernails. Well, the same adage applies to an uncoached athlete. Your boy needs a coach if he is ever to progress to his destined heights.”

  Roz Honeyman looked uncommonly nervous. “Well, I don’t know.… What would your services cost?”

  Dzubas tossed his hands and arms skyward. “Cost! We are not talking paltry dollars and nickels here, good madam, we are speaking of glory, fame and the celestial perfection of a body in flight! Money must not loom as an impediment, nor mere cash stand as a bogeyman between your son and his destiny. What about a stipend of fifty dollars a week?”

  “Forty-five. And I’ve got to clear this deal with my husband first.”

  “Done!”

  Dzubas reached down to tousle Rory’s hair, a gesture Rory usually abominated. But today he only smiled. Rory liked this weird guy. He talked funny, but he seemed to know what was important in life. Although only just met, he seemed already like a familiar uncle or godfather.

  A fairy godfather, determined to make this Iowa hayseed a Prince of Diving.

  Dzubas soon had Rory attending one competition after another, honing his skills, perfecting his technique. They began to travel out of the state, to regional meets. Always Roz accompanied them. In her son’s half-chosen, half-accidental new career she had finally found an outlet for her love of glamour and cosmopolitan excitement that even trips to Chicago had never provided. She became the consummate diver’s mother, cheering from the sidelines, snapping endless pictures, giving her son efficient and brisk massages that almost turned into pummeling when she felt he wasn’t performing up to snuff.

  The six years after meeting Dzubas had passed as in a twister. Somehow Rory had progressed from an unknown of no status at all in the arcane world of amateur diving to recognition as one of the sport’s top-ranked competitors.

  At that point came the moment Dzubas had been aiming for all along: Rory’s tr
iumphant passage through the Olympic trials and his acceptance on the 1968 USA Olympic diving team.

  Now they were bound for Boulder, Colorado, and the official training camp. From there they would depart for Mexico City for the Summer Games of the Nineteenth Olympiad itself.…

  Czeslaw Dzubas ceased whistling. Guiding his new 1968 Plymouth Sports Fury with one easy hand he managed to take his pipe from his pocket, scoop tobacco out of a zipper pouch (scattering crumbs on his coat and lap), tamp the bowl and light it. He jetted a foul cloud out the window; Dzubas smoked some East European blend available only in homemade packages through a network of fellow émigrés with contacts back in Hungary.

  “It is a splendid misadventure we are now embarked on, my boy.”

  Dzubas’s ominous observation jolted Rory out of his reverie. “Huh? What?”

  “Good Lord, I repudiate my innermost thoughts once again through mangling the Queens English! I only hope the network newsmen will make allowances for my foreign provenance of birth when taking their interviews. I meant of course only to stipulate that with any luck at all our expedition will culminate with you bending your worthy neck as Mister Avery Brundage bestows the gold medallion around it.”

  “Jeez-Louise, will you just lay off talking like that, Czeslaw? I mean, I’m not superstitious or anything but you can’t go counting your chickens before they’re hatched. I’m just gonna give it my best shot, and that’s all I can do.”

  “A most commendable lack of hubris, Rory. Naytheless, allow please your old coach to vaunt his pride a little.”

  “‘Misadventure.’ Jeez-Louise!”

  The plane left Cedar Rapids airport promptly at four. By early evening Dzubas and Rory were unpacking in their quarters at the Colorado camp.

  Boulder had been chosen in an attempt to simulate the high altitude of Mexico City. Rory noticed the thinner air immediately. The change made him lightheaded. He felt continuously as if he had just downed a shot of piestengel. This hazy-brained condition was to persist subliminally throughout his entire Olympic “misadventure,” and whenever in the future he would look back on these days, Rory always pictured himself from outside, as if his sensory center had been tethered like the Goodyear Blimp above his head, shooting constant film of his actions.

  Rory knew most of his fellow divers, both men and women, from previous meets. Among the men were Bernard Wrightson, James Henry, Keith Russell, Edwin Young. Some of the women were Sue Gossick, Maxine King, Keala O’Sullivan, Ann Peterson. That first day Rory greeted the males warily. He found it hard to switch from thinking of them as rivals to bonding with them as teammates. Besides, he considered most of his peers egotistical airheads. He couldn’t say he ever got real friendly with any of them. He knew too well that their performances, considered miraculous by spectators, originated solely in the Pavlovian responses of a well-honed body.

  Rory felt the same toward those other natatorial Olympians, the swimmers. Puffed-up and transparent glory hogs, especially that kid Mark Spitz. Boasting about all the medals they were gonna win. The way Spitz preened for the newspapers disgusted Rory. He felt no sense of community with those human motorboats.

  Anyhow, practice mostly kept him too busy to socialize during the day, and night found him too tired. Dzubas had heard that one of the Italian divers, Klaus Dibiasi, who was favored for the gold, made one hundred and fifty practice dives per day. He insisted that Rory should make one hundred and fifty-one. “We will be that silly little millimeter longer,” said Dzubas, parroting a popular TV cigarette ad.

  Whenever Rory did have a spare moment he found himself inexplicably drawn to an unlikely group of fellow athletes: the track and field men. He had discovered something ineffably magnificent about the runners. Graceful as springboks, lean as cheetahs, seemingly nuclear-powered, they struck Rory as the quintessential athletes there. Perhaps their link to the ancient original Greek games—which surely hadn’t featured platform diving—added a sense of mystery and immortality to their sprinting and distance-running.

  A lot of the track guys were Negroes. Their exotic nature added to the attraction Rory felt. He had associated with few Negroes in his eighteen years. Hell, he had seen few “Blacks” in that time. Iowa claimed a Negro population of one percent, and that miniscule slice mostly urban. No American diver boasted black ancestry. The sport attracted only white boys. Consequently, the runners possessed a wild jungle allure for Rory.

  Controversy constituted the final dash of spice in the mix. Three of the Black runners had run afoul of international racial tensions.

  Tommie Smith, Lee Evans and John Carlos were students at San Jose State. Smith had short hair and a roundish face, and held eleven world records. He had married a girl named Denise, had a son named Kevin. Evans had a big jaw, a mustache and longish hair. He too was married, with a son named Keith. Carlos, still single, had grown up in that mythical place called Harlem, and wore a goatee.

  Led by one of their professors, Harry Edwards, these men and some others had spearheaded a movement which had succeeded in banning South Africa from the Games. This anti-apartheid protest success had not come without cost. Many of their fellow athletes disagreed vehemently with the principled stance of the dissidents and snubbed them coldly. Professor Edwards had received both death threats and bribes encouraging him to recant. Someone had gutted his two pet dogs and left them on his doorstep. Much controversy and hysteria attended the Olympian squabble, seen by alarmists as a symptom of the larger Black Power movement.

  These times were not noted for rational and calm discussions. Yippie street theater had replaced the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But the excitement and high passions made the era a great moment to be alive. Everyone had a sense of the high stakes involved in simply living an honest awakened life. Rory could feel the unique thrill that signified expanding mental horizons every time he associated with the trackmen.

  One night toward the end of training when Rory was sharing an illicit beer with the runners, he became a minimal part of the following conversation:

  EVANS: “These Eye-Oh-Cee cats burn my ass, man.”

  SMITH: “Yeah! Who the fuck are they to tell us what we can say in public? We still slaves, or what?”

  CARLOS: “The Afro-American Black man will never know true freedom until he stand united with his brothers in negritude across the whole world.”

  SMITH: “Yeah, right on! Solidarity, we’ve got to show some solidarity with the wretched of the earth.”

  EVANS: “We’ve got to have some kind of symbolic thing, man, some kinda gesture we can make once we got the eyes of the world upon us.”

  CARLOS: “Now you’re talking, blood! Some visual thing to catch Mister Charley’s boob-tube eyes. Make those honky mofos realize that the exploited Black American athlete ain’t no different than some imperialist-slaughtered Biafran.”

  SMITH: “What exactly would this move be though? Some kinda salute like?”

  CARLOS: “Obviously we got to give this some more thought.”

  HONEYMAN: “Erm, uh, guys—what’s a ‘honky mofo?’”

  EVANS, SMITH, CARLOS: [general laughter and hoots of derision, followed by exclamation in unison]: “That’s you, Iowa-boy!”

  The Olympics were to commence on October 12,1968. The American athletes left Colorado a few days prior, to settle into their new digs and become accustomed to the even thinner atmosphere of Mexico City.

  On the plane south, Dzubas turned to Rory. “How do you feel son? Have the caterpillars of anxiety made their cocoons in your belly?”

  “No, I feel pretty calm. I figure I’ll just do everything like I did in practice.”

  “Good, good. Do not allow yourself to grow nervous at the notion that millions of the world’s sensation-hungry citizens will be watching every twitch of your Speedo-clad buttocks.”

  “Gee, thanks for reminding me of that little detail. I’ll try not to let it bother me.” Rory stayed silent a moment. “Say, Czeslaw, did you ever consider that every white pers
on in America shares in the continued oppression of the Black race?

  Dzubas snorted most irreverently. “Rory, my son, you are gathering wool among the upper strata of cloud nine with such kind of wild talk. Those vestpocket anarchists you have been commingling with know nothing of true oppression. They should have experienced my Hungary in ’Fifty-six, or participated in the revolt in Czechoslovakia this very August. Then they would truly know whereof they prattle, and which faction is the real enemy of freedom.”

  Rory had no response to this. Eventually he determined that Dzubas, being a foreigner, had a different, possibly warped perspective on North American politics.

  Roz Honeyman dominated the scene at the Mexican airport arrival gates. She wore pink pedal-pushers, backless high-heel sandals, a white blouse knotted above her navel, a big straw hat, and sunglasses. Rory thought she looked nineteen, not forty-two.

  Roz threw her arms around Rory and squeezed the breath out of him. She even spared a hug for Dzubas, who, once released, seemed extremely embarrassed.

  “Is that the glamorous Roz Honeyman behind those Foster Grants,” asked the coach to cover his confusion, “or merely Miss Julie Newmar?”

  Roz laughed wildly. Rory had never seen his mother so high. The Olympics seemed to represent the culmination of her lifelong quest for glory and excitement. Rory wondered briefly if the rest of her life hereafter would not seem anticlimactic.

  It did not then occur to him that possibly his own would, too.

  After checking into the Olympic Village, Rory, Dzubas and Roz went out for lunch.

  “Uh, how’s Dad?”

  Roz waved her taco in the air dismissively, spraying shredded lettuce across the tablecloth. “Oh, the same old stick-in-the-mud. All he thinks or cares about is those damn bees. I tried to get him to come of course, but he wouldn’t hear of it. The harvest was more important than anything else. It was all I could do to get him to promise to watch you on television.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I never got a chance to say goodbye to him properly.…”

  “Don’t worry about it, he never noticed,” said Roz casually.