Page 24 of Playworld
The captains are huddled around me again. In the row of chairs, I see Miss Sullens, who sits next to McElmore. She nods at me and then gets up to leave. Kepplemen is already giving Tanner a pep talk before he takes the mat.
“You did great,” the captains say, “that switch you pulled was amazing, he was a two-time state champion, you never had a chance.”
I sit through the meet’s conclusion, blind to the proceedings, crushed but utterly elated. I replay the match with perfect recall. Was this what my father meant about being in the moment?
Nothing in my life ever felt so real.
The Agony of Defeat
Of course, it was an election year. In the run-up to November, I didn’t give the candidates much thought. During my sessions with Elliott, we often stopped at the Second Avenue diner. We took our seats at the counter, the waiter winked at Elliott while taking another order, and I realized that he probably saw the good doctor eight times a day. The cook kept the radio above the griddle tuned to the news.Ten-Ten WINS,I was sure to hear my father’s voice say at least once before we left,You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world.
The anchor led with the presidential race, the tightening October poll numbers. Elliott slapped the Formica with his open palm, a bit of performance he played self-consciously when the waiter arrived, ordering a cup of black coffee for himself and a chocolate egg cream for me. Elliott’s hands were laced around his cup. “Maybe we should’ve gone with Ted Kennedy,” he said. “A lot of enthusiasm swirling around him. Nostalgic, to be sure. All that Camelot crap. Kennedy was no Lancelot, let me tell you. The guy didn’t agonize about cozying up to the nearest Guinevere either. But there’s a lesson in that. In politics, as in art, put your money where your inspiration is.” The hostage crisis, Elliott observed, was like an endless stretch of bad weather for our president, “asif he needed stronger headwinds besides this economy.” Elliott shook his head. “Am I right, or what?”
I shook mine too. An egg cream, I reflected, didn’t have an egg in it.
“Of course, Teddy screwed up with Chappaquiddick,” Elliott continued. “That was probably disqualifying.”
“I can’t disagree,” I said, because I’d found the more I agreed, the more camouflaged I was by his monologue, the less we discussed my terrible grades.
As for my own politics, my sense of Carter was acquired by pure osmosis and was bound up in a whole other series of images from the nightly news,Time,andNewsweek,a collage soundtracked by the complaints of grown-ups—which I picked up at our get-togethers, particularly Al Moretti’s and my father’s, and could imitate pitch-perfectly—of endless gas lines and a small group of Saudis I figured was OPEC. “He’s a fuckingdisastah,” said Al, “a hick and a scold with his bullshit redsweatahand his crisis of confidence crap. Don’t tell meI’mthe problem. Don’t tell meI’vegot the malaise. You can lead a horse to water, but if you’re the leader of the free world, youmakethe fucker drink.” Failure, as I look back on it now, swirled around our president like the sands that choked those helicopters’ rotors during the botched Operation Eagle Claw hostage rescue; was like the black water that flooded Kennedy’s car and filled Mary Jo Kopechne’s lungs after they went sailing over the bridge in Chappaquiddick.
“But this Reagan character,” Elliott said to me now, “this former GE spokesperson,” he added with disdain. “Don’t even get me started on him as governor. At least the American people aren’t that stupid to elect him to the highest office. We’re not that stupid, are we, Aldo?”
Aldo, the short-order cook, visible in the service window, leaned down to look at us beneath the pennants of order tickets. “I could use a raise,” he said.
“Speaking of,” Elliott said to the waiter. He pulled a five from his fat black wallet, its fold stuffed with so many bills it looked like a slim book of poems. “Keep the change.”
As for Reagan, Elliott, Al, and my father wrote him off as a lightweight or worse—this again entirely according to their chatter—as hawkish, racist, repressive, and dangerously unqualified, not to mentionfiscally irresponsible. And here too my assessment was Polly-want-a-cracker parroted from bits and pieces I could glean from conversations at the dinner table and during the Sunday morning news shows. Play the part of the bright, underachieving kid who kept up with current affairs, and according to Elliott—which Dad reported to Mom—I was “full of potential.”
“Look at his record in California,” Elliott said. “Mr. Maximum Freedom until the college kids start protesting at People’s Park and he sends in the National Guard.”
“Bloody Thursday,” I said, and shook my head in disgust.
“It’s fascist, is what it is,” Elliott said. Pleased by my input, he stopped and reached out to shake my hand. “You’ve had a bumpy start to high school. But you’re righting the ship. You’re turning it around.”
“The wind’s at my back,” I said.
“Onward,” Elliott said.
“Ándale,”I said.“Arriba, arriba.”
But as an actor, it was difficult not to recognize, even at times appreciate, Reagan’s actor slickness, his stealth-comic timing made more obvious and suspect to me by his pomaded hair, the sometimes just barely perceptible tremor that he used to amplify his sense of disbelief, as if the stupidity or obvious hypocrisy of a comment set his head a-bobble. Just four days before the election, for homework in American government class, we had to watch Carter and Reagan’s first and only debate and write three paragraphs about three issues discussed. “There you go again,” Reagan kept saying to Carter, as if it were off the cuff, although I knew a canned line when I heard one. I called Cliffnotes to get his thoughts and maybe tweak mine based on his, but even before we could start, Cliff said, “Did I tell you about Pilchard?”
Simon Pilchard had spent the past several weeks with a taped splint holding his nose in place, his eyes fading from a raccoon-like black to blue and green after the severe break Cliff had accidentally inflicted upon him. We hadn’t spoken to him since the accident, but we’d occasionally seen him trudging to the basement with Kepplemen, carrying his headgear now affixed with a face guard that resembled a hockey goalie’s.
“His father’s suing us,” Cliff continued. Pilchard’s father was a well-known judge and shouldn’t have needed the money.
“For what?”
“Pain and suffering and the denial of his son’s love.”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand.”
“Oh, snap!”
“I’m going to kill that piece of shit,” Cliffnotes said with uncharacteristic venom. “He’s fucking with my family.”