Teacher (13 page)
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.
ONE COLD late-autumn day, on the cusp of oncoming New England winter, not long after the Somerville game, when we could still taste the rich, briny flavor of the win, not long after Lears had laid down the riff about Milgram and his experiment, he began class by sending Rick Cirone off to run an interminable errand.
Rick had a high-arching spring in his step during those days—guys in a good mood often did; the bouncing walk was part of their élan—but Rick, being Rick, not only did the bounce, but parodied it, apparently enjoying its pleasures and its deflation at the same time. Rick had been catching passes. Cap’s primary receiver the first few games, Tom Danton, was now getting double coverage. And Rick, who had been playing ball with Cap since grammar school, was snagging pass after pass. Number 49 was ascendant. He flew like his favorite player, Gale Sayers, flourishing the single-bar white face guard (“go ahead, land a shot and knock my teeth out, but you gotta catch me first”)—blithe, quick, wind-propelled.
Lears sent him, Mercury-like, off to the main office, then the library, and then the gym—a ten-minute odyssey, even with the bounce turned up high. As soon as Rick left the room, Lears, sly look on, walking up and down in front of us like a physician pondering the intricacies of a case, laid out his plan. When Richard, as he called Rick, came back, there would be a surprise for him. We were going to play a game. The game would have some counters—a few pieces, as it were. These would be paired sets of lines drawn on the blackboard. There would be about ten of these pairs. Sometimes the lines would be the same length exactly; at other times they would be unequal.
When Rick returned, Lears would get the game going. He would ask us to designate, by a show of hands, whether the lines were equal in length or different. We were, he instructed us, nearly rubbing his hands together, always to answer incorrectly. If the lines were of equal length, well then, a roomful of arms should sprout at the moment when Lears asked how many thought that they were unequal. Get that? Are you ready? Kids?
Rick, bounce and all, took a long time to complete the errand. And while he was gone, we had the chance to writhe and shake in delight. Oh how delicious to see how he’d react to this gambit. What a singular pleasure for school to yield. For this was one of those rare moments—akin to a fight in gym class, a urinary accident in study hall, the sudden gross illness of a teacher—when school became as interesting as life outside its confines could, at its best, become. Rick—well liked, good-humored, funny, intelligent—was about to drop into the scapegoat’s role. We were all well pleased.
In ten or so minutes Rick returned. Still on the bounce, he cut the corner toward his desk with a mock head-fake and resumed his seat. Then the games began. Lears actually made like the exercise was already in full swing and that Rick had arrived at something like the beginning of the second quarter.
“And how many think that both lines are equal?” says Lears, looking out mildly at us all. The lines are different in size, though not outrageously so. Hands grab for the ceiling.
“How many think they are different?” Up, with almost no hesitation, goes the hand of Rick Cirone, one of the pass-catching mitts.
The sole hand is up. Lears looks at Rick balefully.
“How many take them to be equal?” he says, pointing to a perfectly matched couple, lines that would go through life in a state of geometric bliss. No one lifts a hand. Rick sees them, obviously knows they are the same, hesitates. “Different?” Up fly the arms, like salutes at the rally. Rick, after a moment’s hesitation, joins in. Now he’s ours.
It is amazing how good we are at this game. It is splendid how well we restrain ourselves from staring at Rick or laughing or coughing obtrusively; it’s striking how ready his friends and teammates are not to feed him the critical info and let him in on the trick. This is something that Lears will remark: We have a talent for this kind of thing that seems natural, seems innate almost. We are pros at this art, whatever precisely this art might be.
On Lears goes, from one set of lines to the next. Does Rick cave? Does he go trotting along with the herd, off to the next watering place? No, not quite. But he doesn’t stand up to us consistently, either. He about splits the rest. Sometimes he manages to hang tough and to say that the two obviously equal lines are so, even in the face of complete opposition from the class. But other times he gives in, mistrusts his own vision and goes clop-clopping with the group, a stray who’s seen the advantages in getting with the program.
Lears is patient. He takes Rick and the class all the way to the end. And only then does he offer the explanation and let Rick in on the secret, the way the experimenters in the Milgram scam do. Rick doesn’t seem crushed, exactly—just very, very nonplussed. He blushes—something I’ve never seen him do—and moves around uncomfortably in his chair.
