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

by Cleo Birdwell

  I sat on a stool a while and watched him begin to bring things to an orderly, well-harmonized, timely conclusion. I realized I ought to be setting the table. I went out to find the dining room. There didn’t seem to be one. I jogged down the hall to the Monopoly room and tapped lightly on the door.

  It opened a couple of inches. Archie’s wry, pointed face and naked shoulder crowded the small opening.

  “Dinner’s ready,” I whispered. “Is there a place to eat it?”

  He looked a little disoriented.

  “Dinnertime,” I said. “Murray came and cooked.”

  He smiled weakly.

  “Where do we eat it?” I whispered.

  “I usually order out.”

  “Well, where do you eat it when it gets here?”

  “In the playroom.”

  “Which one? There are nineteen, according to the blueprints.”

  “The one with Pong and Super Pong.”

  “Shit, Archie. Murray came all the way from Dallas, and it took him hours to get here, and he cooked this whole, big meal.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s arugula, you jackass. Dried in a bath towel. Now find us a decent place to eat it.”

  I heard Floss’s voice from the general area of the bed.

  “Are we really having arugula?”

  “Yes. And veal piccata, lovingly prepared, goddamn it.”

  I heard her padding toward the door. Her head appeared under Archie’s armpit. That was another thing about those two. Aside from their ages, there was a terrific height difference.

  “What else?” she said.

  “Sautéed zucchini blossoms.”

  “Marvelous. Where did he find them?”

  “I don’t know, but he went to a lot of trouble and I think we ought to find somewhere nice, with a tablecloth and napkin rings, to eat this stuff.”

  “The room with Pong is by far the biggest room,” Archie said.

  “What is Pong?” I said.

  “I thought I was out of touch. It’s an electronic video game.”

  We were all whispering.

  “The room with Pong isn’t that bad, Cleo,” Floss said. “Anyway, there’s really no choice. I’ll get dressed and help.”

  They withdrew their heads, and the door closed, and I went back to the kitchen to ask Murray if he ever left New York without napkin rings.

  Wing served us dinner. He moved silently in and out, wearing a white jacket with numerous buttons. I think it is accurate to call him soft-footed. I never knew where he’d turn up. In the midst of some boisterous exchange or other, I’d swing my head toward Archie to zing a remark his way, and I’d find that I was talking into Wing’s elbow, or Wing’s lowered head, as he spooned soup into my plate or replenished the water supply or tactfully lifted Archie’s cuff from the butter dish.

  Wing could have been any of eleven nationalities. He had vague pigmentation and uncertain features. Whatever he was, I think he was relieved to be serving a real dinner for a change. I’d had the impression at the pool earlier that he was showing the effects of having spent a lifetime serving tons of junk food to millionaire hippies, bikers, cowboys, movie stars, dope fiends, and jocks.

  The food was superb. We all had little fits of ecstasy over it. Murray responded by nodding his head gravely, as though appraising each remark for its accuracy and poetic content. Floss was especially impressed and kept after him for hints, tips etc. Murray, in turn, would bend her way, nodding gravely and at the same time sort of stroking his entire face with his right hand, leaning way, way over, taking deep nasal breaths under cover of his hand. It took me a while to figure it out.

  He was smelling her.

  None of my business. No one else seemed to notice and I didn’t think it was demeaning to Floss, although I was later to have second thoughts about that. Anyway, the dinner party progressed in high-spirited fashion, with a lot of laughter, banter, and simultaneous talk. I’ve always thought simultaneous talk was a sign that an event was going well. Aside from everything else, it means no one is listening. Listening is deadly to a sense of good times.

  I mentioned this to Floss. She started talking right through my remarks, mainly to correct a phrase I’d used. Simultaneous talk. She called it overlapping dialogue.

  Archie had made a grown-up attempt to dress for dinner, no doubt at Floss’s urging. He wore a Western shirt with a lot of fancy stitching, a pair of custom jeans with fifties-style pistol pockets, and a stunning pair of Tony Lama boots that a lot of people would have been tempted to rip off his feet if he’d been found dead or in deep shock at the scene of a train derailment.

  “When do you play?” I asked him.

  “Day after tomorrow. What about you?”

  “Tomorrow night,” I said.

  Floss said, “How has the team been going?”

  “Tie some, lose some.”

  Wing poured more wine.

  “No sports,” Murray said. “We talk anything but sports.”

  “What else is there?” Archie said. “Sports, movies, rock ‘n’ roll.”

  “Movies we talk,” Murray said. “Who starts?”

  “You do,” Archie said.

  Murray thought a moment.

  “Where were you when James Dean died?” he said. “I remember exactly what I was doing, what I was wearing, what the weather was like. It was a moment of bright, bright intensity.”

  “I only get those flashes for rock ‘n’ roll,” Archie told him.

  Floss was wearing a vampy dress with slits. It was quite startling, the kind of thing you wear indoors only, and only when you are sure you will be surrounded by people in the same economic and racial bracket.

  We ate the last of the tender, whitish veal.

  “Before we left Mexico,” Archie said, “I tried to change some rupees for U.S. dollars. No luck. They never heard of rupees. That’s another reason to come in from the cold. The rupee is slipping.”

  “What’s the first reason?” Murray said.

  “Elvis dying.”

  “I always thought the only justification for a jerk-off sport like tennis was the worldwide travel.”

  “It’s all right when you’re still in your teens,” Archie said. “Asia looks like something to a seventeen-year-old. After ten, eleven, twelve trips, you don’t even notice the teeming millions anymore. You get over your respectful sense of awe and wonder and all you think about is getting your jaws around a frigging cheeseburger. Europe’s not as lonely. You’re in the same ballpark more or less. The things I’ll miss about Europe and Latin America are the great names they have for avenues and boulevards.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Well, they have these proud, ringing, nationalistic names that recall great, ringing events in the nation’s history. I’m forever dodging taxis on some boulevard called the Avenue of the Seventeenth of October, 1921, Between Five and Seven In the Evening. Like that. Or the Boulevard of the Military Takeover of the Third of August, When the Black Shirts Stomped the Red Shirts, Fourteen to Seven, In a Steady Drizzle.”

  “Fourteen to seven is American football,” Floss said.

  Wing arrived with the cheesecake.

  Even though I knew Archie was uncomfortable in his spanking new dinner clothes, I couldn’t help enjoying the sight. He looked stiffish and cute, like some little boy all fitted out in white for his First Holy Communion, ladled out by the Bishop himself, or however it’s served. Archie looked good in clothes, even though he obviously didn’t know the first thing about them. He was a natural, in other words, just as Murray was an unnatural, a lifetime loser to clothes. If you studied the matter, you could see that Murray had given in, that he would wear nothing but comfortable, half-baggy, balding corduroys in various shades of brown. In truth, I could picture him in little else. Maybe khaki shorts for sunbathing on his roof.

  I watched him sniffing Floss.

  “This cheesecake is scru
mptious,” she told him.

  He leaned closer as if to inhale a wildflower she kept pressed in her bodice.

  “How many eggs?”

  “Four,” he said. “Biggest you can find.”

  “Grated lemon rind, of course. But I detect something else.”

  He seemed pleased enough to do something foppish, like kiss the tips of her fingers.

  “Orange,” he said modestly.

  “Orange rind. But of course. How stupid of me. Brilliant, Murray.”

  “And yet how simple.”

  They kept it up for a while. Archie leaned over to tell me he was beginning to feel a great weight in the pit of his stomach. I told him he was supposed to feel a great weight. This wasn’t some supergoody cheesecake from a church supper in Iowa. This was a low-speed, big-egg, extremist dessert. It was the Symbionese Liberation Army of cheesecakes.

  “Normally I cook only for women,” Murray told Floss.

  She gave a frantic little laugh.

  “What am I?”

  We finished the wine, and Wing brought out Scotch, sweet vermouth, and a water pistol full of ouzo. Archie said this last item was a leftover from a recent party.

  I heard Floss ask Murray, “When did New Yorkers stop saying ciao?”

  “I never noticed. But you’re right. They did stop.”

  “But when?”

  “I don’t know. But you’re right. No one says it anymore.”

  “Overnight it stopped.”

  “Like Nehru jackets.”

  “Remember Nehru jackets?”

  “With the medals that people wore around their necks.”

  “You got the medal for wearing the jacket.”

  “Remember chianti bottles?”

  “Remember the Village when it was the Village?”

  I poked my head in.

  “How are you two getting along?”

  It was nearly midnight. We were making more than a little headway with the Scotch and vermouth. The water pistol lay untouched.

  Overlapping dialogue.

  Floss was looking at Murray’s manuscript. He’d brought it into the Pong room along with a shopping bag full of his precision tools. It sat on an army blanket in a corner of the room.

  “Murray, what are you writing?”

  “It’s my Work in Progress.”

  “How interesting.”

  Archie said, “It must take discipline, being a writer.”

  “Shut up,” Floss told him. “I want to interrogate Murray about this thing. Murray, how interesting, so you’re writing a book. On what, may we ask.”

  “He won’t tell anyone,” I said.

  “How interesting.”

  “It’s not sports. That’s all we know at this point.”

  Archie said, “Would I have heard of any of your books?”

  “Shut up,” Floss reminded him. “So, Murray, how interesting, you’re going in a completely new direction. I admire your courage.”

  “I’ve got nearly nine hundred pages,” he said. “Handwritten.”

  “Handwritten. And what is the general thrust, Murray, if we may ask. Fiction, nonfiction?”

  “Nonfiction.”

  “More my kind of thing,” she said. “Would I like it? Is it the kind of thing I would just totally devour on the Hampton jitney?”

  “I have great hopes for it. But it’s not light reading, Floss. It’s harrowing, brutal stuff.”

  “Have some more wine. Archie, give him wine, so we can get it out of him. I must know what this man is up to.”

  Archie looked sleepy.

  “Wine’s gone. No more Scotch, either.”

  “Well, the sweet vermouth is undrinkable, so that’s out. It’s the vilest stuff I’ve ever set eyes on. The mangiest dog dying of thirst wouldn’t go near it. It’s the foulest smelling thing this side of a Borneo pissoir.”

  I was drinking the sweet vermouth.

  Floss continued, “Short of squirting ouzo at each other, what do we do?”

  “I’ll go find Wing,” Archie said. “Wing will know.”

  He went out, and Floss turned in her chair to face Murray head on.

  “So, Murray, handwritten, and a completely new direction.”

  “It has a nice heft to it. I like to lift the manuscript.”

  “I could never do what you’re doing. I think it’s so brave. I get jittery just thinking about it.”

  “I did it for my own self-respect. So I could like myself again.”

  “How interesting, because I know that feeling exactly. I think you and I feel some of the same things. I sense that about us. But, Murray, why the big secret?”

  “It’s controversial, realistic, animal stuff. My publisher doesn’t want to exploit prematurely.”

  “I think you want to tell us. Or do I misread the whole atmosphere in this room?”

  He inhaled nasally.

  She said, “You have this audience of two in the palm of your hand, and I think you know that.”

  She made a little, poutish face.

  “Please, please, please tell us.”

  “Cleo knows about me and women,” he said. “How much I love the intimacies that can only pass between a man and a woman. The everyday, up-close intimacies. The conversations over coffee. The sound of her stockings as she crosses her legs.”

  Floss clapped the heels of her hands together.

  “He’s going to tell us. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”

  Murray kind of bobbed and weaved in his chair.

  “All right, now look, this is in the strictest confidence. No one outside this room must know. It’s investigative reporting of the most sensitive kind.”

  Floss put a finger to her lips.

  “It involves the mob,” Murray said. “The mob. Specifically, it involves the way they’ve muscled in on a particular industry. Nobody turns a bolt or loosens a screw in this industry without the Mafia’s express approval. They run it. They’ve got the whole industry in a hammerlock. Violence, blackmail, extortion, you name it. The chain of corruption extends right down the line, from mob-installed top management to people who turn the bolts and loosen the screws. Nobody works unless the mob says work.”

  I had to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t help it. It was killing me.

  Floss said, “What is the industry?”

  He bobbed and weaved.

  “Snowmobiles,” he said.

  There was a long silence. Floss seemed to lapse into deep thought. I tried to remember whether I’d seen a bathroom anywhere nearby.

  Floss said, “So, Murray, handwritten, how interesting, a nine-hundred-page investigative report on snowmobiles.”

  There was more than a little sarcasm dripping from the edges of this sentence.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “The point isn’t snowmobiles or tractors. It’s how the mob gets a total stranglehold. It’s unbelievable, what I’ve uncovered in the course of this thing. People have been killed. Shot, blown up, stuffed in furnaces. I’ve uncovered a chain of violence and extortion running from the northeast U.S. clear to the Rockies. In Boston, they stuffed a guy in a furnace. He refused to give in to them. They burned him alive.”

  Floss said, “We ought to organize a protest. Liberals and their children lying down in front of snowmobiles.”

  Murray looked at me.

  “Cleo, I’ve got documented stuff here. Witnesses afraid to speak out in court. They’ve spoken to me. I’ve got names, dates. Almost every city I go to, covering fun and games, I find more evidence, more witnesses, more stories of violence.”

  I said, “It’s still snowmobiles, Murray. I think that’s a thing you just have to face. Frankly, I don’t see how you can keep running down sports and bad-mouthing sports and saying how you’re so terribly unhappy writing sports if this is the alternative. The corruption of snowmobiles. I think you’re better off sticking to hockey and football. Sure, there’s violence. The worl
d is full of violence.”

  “So what else is new?” Floss said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Besides,” she said, “I always thought people were supposed to write about things they know. What do you know about snowmobiles? What could be less Jewish than a snowmobile?”

  “Besides which it’s a sport,” I said. “Snowmobiles are basically sports things.”

  “Recreation vehicles,” he said, a trifle sharply.

  “Yes, so you’re right back with sports. You’re basically writing about sports after all the talk about going off in new, serious, adult, controversial, realistic, animal directions. What really gets me is not the snowmobiles, Murray. It’s the way you savage sports.”

  I liked that a lot. The way you savage sports.

  “That’s right,” Floss said. “There’s a terrible loss of innocence you’re guilty of.”

  My turn.

  “All this talk about the real world,” I said. “Well, which world is the real world? That’s a question I ask myself daily.”

  “We all do,” Floss said. “Increasingly so.”

  Murray said, “The trail of corruption runs two thousand miles right through the heartland and into the Rockies.”

  “They’re still snowmobiles, Murray, and you’re stuck with them.”

  I asked Floss where the nearest bathroom was, and as I headed out the door I heard Murray say, “They cut off a guy’s toes, sent him home in a cab, and then mailed him the toes.”

  I spotted the door around the first bend. When I was ten feet away, the door opened and out came Archie Brewster.

  “Wing thinks he knows where there’s more wine,” he said.

  “Good. I need the toilet. Look out.”

  He put out an arm, stopped me in my tracks, nodded back toward the bathroom, and said in a confidential, discreet, respectful tone, “Wear the helmet, Cleo. It’s hanging right by the John.”

  “What helmet?”

  His tone grew even more discreet.

  “It’s a motorcycle helmet. If you’re going to be sitting down for any reason, just be sure to put it on.”