Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League

by Cleo Birdwell

  His face is sticking out of the middle of this writhing mound of bodies, this massive pileup, this multiracial, bisexual, extended family of people doing nameless things to each other inside a foundering houseboat at high noon.

  No, no, no, no, no.

  But it was him all right. I’d know that smirky little smile of his anywhere. And the rimless spectacles. He was wearing his glasses in the midst of all that fleshy upheaval. Clean shaven. He’d shaved his Whole Earth Catalog beard. His dolphin-obsessed, macrobiotic, Vermont-commune beard. But definitely unmistakable, all the same. My brother Ken. From Badger. Dorothy Bird well’s boy.

  I practically staggered out of there. I was numbed by the impact of it all. I don’t know how I got back to the hotel. All I remember is spending the rest of the afternoon flat on my back looking past my own chin at a bunch of nitwit local newscasts about the storm, most of them featuring a man standing waist deep in snow, in a live report, shouting, “I’m standing waist deep in snow! Look how deep! It’s up to my waist!”

  I ate a quiet dinner in my room. Then I called Shaver. We had the same conversation we’d had when I was in Philadelphia. This probably meant that when I called him from Chicago, we would have the same conversation we’d had when I was in Boston. With luck, we’d start a new cycle in Detroit.

  I didn’t realize I’d ordered dinner so early. It was only seven when I finished. Five hours before I’d be able to fall asleep. Twenty-five hours to game time. Nineteen years before I’d forget the sight of my brother in that festering mass of bodies.

  The phone rang and I pounced on it.

  “Cleo, are you alone?”

  Sanders Meade.

  “If someone’s there, it’s all right. I understand. You couldn’t know I’d call. Just say, ‘Wrong room’ or, ‘No, we didn’t order banana splits’ and I’ll know someone’s there and the person will think it was just an errant dialer and I’ll hang up and take a book or magazine down to the corner coffee shop and sit at one of the small tables out in the open because you have to be two or more to sit in a booth, and I’ll read quietly while I wait for my order to arrive, and then I’ll eat fast because I’ll be out in the open, alone, not bothering to linger over coffee, and I’ll come back here and make myself some hot chocolate.”

  “No, we didn’t order banana splits,” I said.

  “Someone is there. I knew it. Male or female, Cleo? If it’s female, say, ‘Where’s my dry cleaning?’”

  It was Sanders Meade weather, wasn’t it? A Sanders Meade night, wild and howling. I thought back almost nostalgically to the simple carefreeness of that episode. And the good food and wine. And the early, grinding aspects of our lust.

  “I’m alone, Sanders. It’s all right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “I’m tempted to fly up. We need to have a good talk. I’m not sure I know where our relationship is going and I think we ought to sit down and kind of thrash it out, don’t you, over some good food and wine.”

  “There’s nothing to thrash out. It was one night, Sanders. That’s life on the road in big-time sports. You know that, I know that. What’s to thrash out?”

  “I don’t think our night was born out of desperation or restlessness or the kind of fast living that goes on in the pro ranks.”

  “What was it born out of?”

  “Lust.”

  “Well, lust, okay, so what’s the difference?”

  “The air was crackling with it.”

  “It was still one night.”

  “We were lonely, too. That’s a potent combination.”

  “There is no relationship, Sanders.”

  “There’s something. Call it what you will. Relationship, attachment, lingering memory. Call it sight, call it sound. Are you sure you’re alone?”

  “I’ll look again if you’d like.”

  “You’re speaking in short sentences.”

  “It’s been a rough day, that’s all. I don’t have much to say, I guess.”

  “The weather. It’s the weather.”

  “It’s hard sometimes. That’s all. It’s just hard.”

  “Hey, you really are upset.”

  “We sit in these rooms. Four walls and a bed. You can’t go out because of a blizzard. You can’t watch TV because it’s so de-pressingly awful. You can’t go to the movies because they show your brother having an orgy. I can’t even read Wadi Assad. I can’t even do that.”

  “You can’t read Wadi Assad?”

  “My one comfort and solace. I can’t concentrate. Or maybe I’ve read too much of his stuff and I’m just sick and tired of it.”

  “Hey, I don’t like the sound of this. I think I will fly up. Good food and wine, Cleo. A blizzard. A hotel in a distant city.”

  “You can’t fly up. They’ve closed the airport. Even if you could, it would attract attention. The Garden prexy doesn’t travel with the teams.”

  “No one will know. We’ll meet secretly. It’ll add a whole new dimension. There’s nothing that intensifies a relationship like the element of secrecy.”

  “There is no relationship. There are just two people bound together by a night on the road. That’s all it was. A night on the road. Torkle versus the Sex Fiends. That’s the name of our relationship and the extent of our relationship. The Night of the Living Torkle. Escape of the Torkle People.”

  “All right, Cleo.”

  “Gone with the Torkle.”

  “I get the idea,” he said.

  “How Green Was My Torkle.”

  “That’s not funny. I refuse to respond. It’s cheap humor.”

  “King Solomon’s Torkle.”

  “You could use that word with anything and it would seem funny.”

  “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Torkle.”

  “But it’s not funny. Not really. And I’m frankly a little surprised to be hearing such shabby attempts at humor from someone like you.”

  “Torkle of Arabia.”

  “I think you’re surprised, too. It must be the mood you’re in.”

  “Torklin’ in the Rain.”

  “It’s the mood you’re in. It’s made you destructive. This is how you manifest it.”

  “The Torkles Karamazov.”

  “You’re compromising your own sense of humor. You’re destroying your standards.”

  “Separate Torkles.”

  “You’re reaching for catharsis. You want to get rid of your tension and depression by bringing all this cheap humor to the surface.”

  “Torkles Aweigh.”

  “It’s a purging. That’s what it is. Now I begin to understand.”

  “Far From the Madding Torkle.”

  “Sorry Wrong Torkle.”

  “The Day the Torkle Stood Still.”

  “I see what you’re doing. Meet Me in Saint Torkle.”

  “Wuthering Torkles.”

  “The Maltese Torkle. It kind of cleanses, doesn’t it?”

  “Inherit the Torkle.”

  “I’m definitely coming up there. It’ll be good for me to get out. Hughes Tool is telling people I’m still in Boulder. They’re not ready to have me come into the office yet. I don’t go anywhere except to the corner coffee shop. I want to come up, Cleo. The weather won’t stop me. I’ll find a way to get there. Isn’t it about time I acted?”

  There was a knock at the door. I told Sanders it would be a mistake to come to Buffalo, but down deep I guess I wasn’t really against the idea. It would have been something to look forward to in a way. I pictured him showing up in a sheepskin coat, a pair of partly buckled, flapping galoshes, and a low, furry hat with collapsible sides to protect the ears, looking like some derring-do commuter who makes it in from the suburbs during the worst storm in years. Only Ivy Leaguers make it in on days like that.

  I hung up and went to open the door. It was J. P. Larousse. The pure fear had left his eyes, but he still had that life-a
nd-death manner about him as he walked gravely in, a little hunched over, gesturing with the ever-present cigarette.

  “It is a big risk we take,” he said.

  “What risk?”

  “I don’t like it. I am in the room of a player who is also a woman. This is foolish, eh? It is not a smart way to run a hockey club. The media finds out I am in the room of this player, she is a woman, they send me to my death. It is a great danger.”

  He walked across the room, shaking his head slowly, and sat leaning well forward in a low chair by the window. It is a great donjaire.

  “But I must come here, you see. I put it in their hands, the media, if to send me to my death or if to make me live. It is no longer a choice of my own. I have fought in my heart to stay away. For three, four days, I don’t know how many, this battle of the heart goes on. Tonight I wave the white flag. I give up to my heart. I say, ‘I lose, you win.’”

  He shrugged shamefacedly and gave me a half-boyish smile.

  “For a French person, on the road, alone, eating sliced bread, this is a tragedy, with children, three or four, I cannot begin to explain, without a language, month after month, in these tempests of snow, flying through the air in a seven hundred and seven. I cough when I am smoking, I cough when I am stopping to smoke. We lose another game, I will have to wonder when I will fall to sleep. The Negroes drive cabs. It is the only way I can relax, driving with the Negroes in or out the arena, in or out the airport, with the playing, the flying, the soft white bread, and no one to speak a language to, so I talk only with my mouth, I talk only grammar and words, eight, nine months of the year, I talk with the front of my mouth. There is no communication from the heart or soul, they are absolutely not in touch with the mouth. The team is not playing. The team is standing around. Everyone is out for a skate. They do not chop the man’s ankles. Before I know it, I am once more stiff with terror in a seven hundred and seven. My children, at least they have a language, they speak, they talk the words, and a roof over their heads, which it is full of snow, the winters in Quebec that are fantastic beyond belief, to make me worry some more, sitting in a Negro cab.”

  With his knuckles, he stroked his tough, darkish, day-old beard. Jeep’s beard always looked a day old. It never changed, morning or night. I liked the sandpapery sound his hand made, rubbing the beard.

  The only other chair in the room was right next to his chair. I wanted to find out what he had in mind before I made any moves one of us might regret. So I remained standing, because the only other place to sit was on the bed.

  This is the thing about hotel rooms. The bed tends to dominate. Of course, beds are the whole point. You can’t deny that. But there ought to be a way to make the bed less conspicuous and all-absorbing. Some sort of Glenway Packer cunning space. I don’t mean the radical extreme of pallets. Just a more minimal bed, a cleverer bed. Anyone who has opened a hotel door to a member of the opposite sex knows what I mean. The room is all bed. People are always bumping kneecaps as they try to skirt the bed. Depending on who’s involved, there’s either a slight embarrassment or a kind of dirty smirk in the air.

  Although I have to admit I didn’t feel either of these with J.P. in the room. Maybe it was his life-or-death manner. Or maybe it was just that he was French, or at least French Canadian, and therefore somewhat European, and lent a mature presence, a world-weariness even, that was grown-up enough to ignore the bed, or to accept the bed for what it was, to take the bed on its own terms, to feel at ease either with the bed or without the bed.

  “So what’s on your mind, Coach?”

  He reached behind him and turned the three-way lamp down to its lowest wattage.

  “I want to speak French with a woman.”

  He got up and walked past me and double-bolted the door. I looked at him a little wide-eyed. He twisted the extra lock on the knob.

  “That’s it? You want to speak French with a woman?”

  He went to the window and pulled the curtains together.

  “It is impossible to understand the travail of this condition if you do not speak French, or write French, or read French, or hear French.”

  He went to the adjoining window and pulled the curtains together. Then he picked up the phone, dialed room service, and ordered two cognacs.

  “That’s probably true,” I said. “I do not understand the travail. I probably do not. But since I don’t speak French, how can we do this thing you want to do?”

  “I will speak,” he said.

  “All right, you will speak. But I won’t know what you’re saying. I do not hear French.”

  He turned a dial on the low cabinet near the bed, and soft, stringy, hard-to-describe music came out.

  “I do not write French, I do not read French, I do not hear French.”

  “It is not necessary,” he said. “You will know what I am saying. This is the fantastic thing about my language. You will know. You are a woman, eh? What am I?”

  “A man.”

  “You will know.”

  He closed the bathroom door, maybe to shut out flushing sounds from nearby rooms. Then he went and sat back down, and this time he motioned me to sit in the chair alongside. Well, the man wanted to speak French. It was obviously a deep need. And the man didn’t want to raise his voice. I could understand that. Some languages lose something when they’re hollered. You could probably holler in German all day and nobody would know the difference. If you were speaking Swedish, you’d want to keep it down. I’ve known seven or eight Swedes in my hockey travels and I’ve never heard a Swede holler. Not in Swedish, anyway. I don’t think it’s possible to holler in Swedish.

  Anyway, I went and sat by Jeep. He was hunched well forward, making dramatic gestures with his cigarette, and I was wondering what he was going to say now that he’d arranged this whole thing.

  He started right in. The man didn’t waste any time. I’ll give him that. He looked at me with deep expressiveness, and his left hand started revolving in the air, and he talked and talked and talked. It was kind of interesting. Obviously the man needed to talk. And it was dramatic, flowing, heartfelt talk. It was good talk. I could tell it was. I nodded to show him I knew how much it meant to him and how interesting it was to hear.

  After a while I began to feel I was getting the drift of what Jeep was saying. It was mysterious, it was almost magical, but I really felt I was starting to understand. Of course a lot of the words were close to English words. That helped. I heard the French pronunciations of tragedy, folly, melancholy, disenchantment, and suicide, and also the adjectives difficult, intolerable, and miserable, all three of which I think we both got from the Latin.

  He talked with smoke coming out of his mouth and the cigarette in his hand, with the cigarette in his mouth and smoke in his face, with smoke coming out of his nose and tobacco on his tongue, with his hand in the air and smoke in my face, with the cigarette in his hand, tobacco on his tongue, smoke in his face and my hand in the air.

  The waiter came with our cognac.

  Jeep talked about feelings between men and women. I caught compassion, grace, suffocation, and combat. Later I caught bizarre, mauve, and plateau, which made me think I was losing the drift. I sat back, relaxed, sipped my cognac, listened to the music, and let the words flow over me, not even trying to understand.

  The words flowed over me. His rhythm went from rushing and dramatic to a softer, soothing, easier pace. I felt he’d probably gotten the most urgent stuff out of the way, the things that were crushing him and paining him, and he was beginning to embellish at his leisure, to develop themes, to search out psychological niceties, to savor the rich, sweet, orangy centers of his words and phrases.

  I didn’t try to understand. I let it all flow. I slipped out of my shoes and stretched my legs straight out so that my feet rested on the end of the bed. I noticed Jeep interrupt himself ever so briefly to glance at this little stretching thing. He sipped his cognac, glancing. I realized it was the bed
that had caused him to pause. I had reached out to touch the bed, and even though it was a perfectly natural thing to do, with no other piece of furniture handy to rest my feet on, it was significant, he probably thought, in the sense that it introduced a new element into the combination of music, cognac, soft lighting, locked doors, drawn curtains, and French.

  He blew some smoke through his nose in a particularly dramatic and foreign-seeming way. Then he started talking again. He spoke with wonderful feeling. For a while, I watched his face, and even when he was caught up in a torrent of words, and was gesturing, and was practically lost in smoke, I could see a shyness in his face and eyes. I believed he was a tender person, a little withdrawn, a little retiring, who normally kept things pretty much to himself. I was sure he loved his children very much, and missed them terribly. He was the kind of man who liked playing with children, I felt, who genuinely liked fooling around with them, playing little tricks on them.

  When I come across a man who kids around with children, I feel my defenses melting.

  I stopped watching him and sat way back and closed my eyes. The words flowed over me. It was like a bath in words. I was floating in perfumed French. I think I did some soft writhing. I felt so warm, so good. The brandy caused a pleasant heat all through my face. I knew he wanted to touch me. Even with my eyes closed, I was pretty sure. It was in his voice.

  His voice grew softer, more personal. I could tell he was talking about me, but I didn’t want to know what he was saying, I didn’t care, it made no difference. I wanted only the flow, the pure French.

  Then he was silent. I opened my eyes. We looked at each other.

  “You do not know what this has meant to me,” he said. “It is only my life that you have saved.”

  He shrugged in that shy, boyish, half-amused way and picked some tobacco off his tongue.

  “Do you feel better, Jeep?”

  “You must call me Jean-Paul.”

  “All right. Jean-Paul it is.”

  “I feel better. The whole world feels better.”

  “Can I rub my knuckles on your beard?”