But still. What am I to do in this fragile truce? If I’m not simply ready to sprint back downstairs, buy my return and sleep all the way home, what am I supposed to do?
My answer, even with the city tamed and seemingly willing to meet my needs halfway, just proves my lack of expertise with the complicated life of real city-dwellers. I jump in the first cruising cab and beat it uptown to 56th and Park, where I practice my sportswriter’s trade. There’s nothing I’d rather do than try out some fresh strategies on Herb and turn that emblem of desolation into something better, even if it means putting a wrench to a fact or two.
The twenty-second floor is abuzz with fluorescent light down the rows of cubicles. When I leave the elevator, I hear loud, contentious voices wrangling in the back offices. “Aw-right … Aw-right!” Then: “Naaa-na,na,na,na. He’s glue. Pure donkey.” Then: “I don’t believe this. This guy’ll be alive in your nightmares, believe me. Be- leeve me!” It’s the Pigskin Preview. The NFL draft is in ten days, and they are in extraordinary session.
I head toward my own cubicle, but stop and stick my head in the crowded conference room. Inside, sits a long Formica table littered with yellow hamburger bags and ashtrays and paper coffee cups, thick green ring-bound notebooks, a green computer screen showing a list of names drawn up. A white grease-pencil board is leaned against the wall. The entire football staff with a few of the younger boys on the low end of the masthead are staring in eagle-eyed attention through a layer of smoke at a big video machine showing a football play on a wide imitation-grass field. This is the skull session where our experts decide the first forty college players to be picked by the pros and in what order. After the World Series Roundup it is the most important issue of the year. As a young staffer, I sat in on these very sessions, chewed a cold cigar, shouted my favorites the way these boys are going at it (there’s one female at the back I’m vaguely familiar with) and it became a damned valuable experience. Younger writers, researchers and interns out of Yale and Bowdoin get to see how these old heads do their stuff, how things really go on. The older writers would normally just settle this kind of thing over drinks at a sushi place around the corner. But for the Preview — and to their credit — they bring all the machinery out in the open and run the show as though it were really democratic. Later they’ll all wind up strolling into the early morning streets, feeling good about themselves and football and the world in general, laughing and swearing, and having a round or two at some spudbuster bar over on Third Avenue. Sometimes they’ll all stay out till dawn, and by nine can be seen around the coffee machine, or floating back to their desks with bushed-but-satisfied looks, ready to put the whole business into print.
Plenty of times I’ve seen writers, famous novelists and essayists, even poets, with names you’d recognize and whose work I admire, drift through these offices on one high-priced assignment or other. I have seen the anxious, weaselly lonely looks in their eyes, seen them sit at the desk we give them in a far cubicle, put their feet up and start at once to talk in loud, jokey, bluff, inviting voices, trying like everything to feel like members of the staff, holding court, acting like good guys, ready to give advice or offer opinions on anything anybody wants to know. In other words, having the time of their lives.
And who could blame them? Writers — all writers — need to belong. Only for real writers, unfortunately, their club is a club with just one member.
The Pigskin Preview boys are at odds over the talents of a big Polack from Iowa State who has speed and heart, versus a venomous-looking black cornerback from a small Baptist college in Georgia, who’s tiger quick and blessed with natural talent. Big cigars wag from clenched fingers. Piles of print-out rap sheets are scattered around. All eyes are on the screen as the black boy — referred to as Tyrone the Murderer — in a blue and orange #19 delivers a blow to a spindly white wide-out that would put most people right onto a respirator. Both players, however, bounce up like toys and Tyrone pats the white boy on the butt as they trot back to their huddles.
“Son of a bitch, The Murderer was on that play,” a junior man from someplace like Williams shouts. “The bastard started late, missed his key, and still delivered like a fucking freight train.” Eddie Frieder, the managing editor, teeth clenching a cigarette, and wearing a Red Sox cap, raises his brows and nods, then goes back to making computations. He’s in charge here, but you’d never know. Agreement ripples among the other younger men, though it’s clear there’s still division. Two men express uneasiness with The Murderer’s friendly pat on the backside. They suspect the pros might translate it into an impure competitive instinct, while others think it’s a mark of good character on The Murderer’s part. “This guy’s no higher than eight in round two,” they seem to agree.
“What do you think, Frank?” Eddie looks up at the door where I’m half-hidden, wanting not to be singled out.
All eyes see me — a smiling, slender, slightly flushed man in a madras shirt and chinos. A couple of young guys put down pencils and stare. I’m not a pigskin prognosticator; Eddie, in fact, knows I don’t even like football, though I’ll probably end up rewriting a lot of what gets done here and putting together a sidebar about The Murderer’s lifelong fear of inheriting his dad’s fatal alcoholism (that can take a notch out of one’s competitive instinct).
“I hear good things about this Hawaiian kid, from Arkansas A&M,” I say. “He runs a four-five and likes contact.”
“Gone already!” four people shout at once. Heads shake. Eyes blink. Everyone returns to his rap sheet. Someone rerolls The Murderer’s murderous tackle, and people scribble, which reminds me again that I have found out nothing in Detroit for use here. “Denver’s got him on a player-to-be-named with Miami. He can’t miss,” Eddie Frieder says officially, then looks at his notes.
“Here’s our next millionaire, Mike,” someone cracks.
“You’re the experts,” I say. “I just got in from Altoona.” I wave to Eddie, then slip away down the row of cubicles to my own.
My desk. My typewriter. My video console. My rolodex. My extra shirt hung on the modular wall. My phone with three lines. My tight window-view into the city’s darkness. My pictures: Paul and Clary under an umbrella and smiling during a Mets’ rain delay. X and Clary wearing Six Flags T-shirts, taken on our front steps six months before our divorce (X looks happy, progressive in spirit). Ralph on a birthday pony in our backyard looking bored. A taped-up glossy of Herb Wallagher in his Detroit helmet, beside another of Herb in a suit of clothes, in his wheelchair on the lawn in Walled Lake. He is smiling in the second, glasses cleaned, hair combed — beatific. In the first he is simply an athlete.
My plan of attack is to write on a legal pad the very first things that come into my head — sentences, phrases, a concept, a balancing word or detail. When I was writing seriously I used to sit for hours over a sentence — usually one I hadn’t written yet, and usually without the first idea of what I was trying to say. (That should’ve been a clue to me.) But the moment I started writing sports, I found out it really didn’t matter that much what the sentence looked like, or even if it made sense, since somebody else — Rhonda Matuzak, for instance — was going to have it the way she liked it before it went into print. I got into the habit of putting down whatever occurred to me, and before long the truth of most things turned out to be waiting just over the edge of worried thought, and eventually I could write with practically no editing at all. If I ever write another short story I’m going to use the same technique; the way I would if I were writing about an American hockey player who becomes a skid-row drunk, rehabilitates himself at AA, scores forty goals and wins the Stanley Cup as the captain and conscience of the Quebec Nordiques.