Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  At some point, it is hard to say exactly when, Cyndi Lauper’s song so thoroughly infused my memories of this cousinly idolisation that it is now almost impossible for me to disassociate the two. Combined with imagined scenes of profound misbehaviour perpetrated by my cousins, Lauper’s words carried with them what seemed an incontestable anthropological truth about teenage feminine desire. Over the years, this truth retained its persuasive purchase to a troubling degree wherever I heard the song play, vanishing as quickly as the snuffed flame of a candle when the music stopped.

  I looked over to the computer next to me. The Irish girl had disappeared. The man behind the counter was absorbed in his own media-augmented world, a television comedy of some sort with lots of canned laughter. I saved the email as a draft, pressed pause on the music, and in the absence of song took one last look at the images of my travels.

  Stair Sprints at Tamarama

  In the days following I pondered Coach Fitz’s invocation of the animal and what it might mean to reformat my body according to this image. I raised the question again with her before our next session of soft sands at Bronte Beach and the stairs in Tamarama Gully. Coach explained that the animal was an image adapted to the peculiar shape of different bodies.

  To aspire to the condition of the animal has nothing to do with reverting to primal urges, she said – although, when I think about it, words like ‘scuttle’ and imaginings of quadrupedal action do inform my experience when I consider animality. I know it’s not about being man or woman but about sensing an aliveness and the varying extent to which we are all in some respects crippled. It’s maybe more a feeling in the bones than muscle. It’s about how you’re put together and this internal desire to transcend bodily limitations, which then oddly become the body in action.

  The entire stretch of the beach was empty, apart from two girls drawing with rocks in the sand at the south end, one of whom was surprised by a wave and ended up with wet boots.

  We took the stairs down to the sand at the north end and Coach, stickler that she was, turned left only at the very edge of the beach so that our first repetition encompassed its entirety. The first bit of sand leading up from the wet past the concrete stormwater drain was especially boggy. I watched Coach respond to the slope by veering sideways and tracking back as we reached level ground. The sand had migrated up the beach so that it mostly covered the exposed concrete.

  The first few reps were particularly taxing with no warm-up and the recent sand run still in my legs. Coach accommodated my slowness while I continued to ply her with questions about animality. Just don’t imagine smooth chests and tidy geometry, she said, imagine your capacity to move unusually, imagine the way your limbs fall, the way you hold yourself together, the energy of that togetherness in movement. She seemed to be wringing her hands of water to demonstrate this idea, flicking her wrists in a cartoonish gesture reminiscent of a petulant child.

  We trudged on as the first dampening of sweat appeared on my brow and Coach began her he-he-haas. The ocean water was giving off a motley of different moods, with a shallow corner near the south end a tempting light blue. Further south the swell whipped into a frenzy of tight barrels, whitewash and disturbed sand, with the ominous slate-grey blues expanding further out and returning to glassy stillness in the rock-protected Bogey Hole.

  At the conclusion of the tenth repetition we continued straight on up the stairs and along the coastal footpath to Tamarama Gully, which Coach told me used to be known as Wonderland City on account of the open-air amusement park that had once occupied the area.

  Coach noted that the name Tamarama, which may have registered the traces of the local Aboriginal people’s name for the place, Gamma Gamma, proved particularly adaptable to punning, with the media at various points favouring Dramarama and Glamarama as a way of indicating characteristics thought to be common to the more recent residents.

  The beach and gully once featured attractions as varied as an ice-skating rink, a roller-coaster, an aquarium, a Japanese tearoom, a theatre, the inevitable elephant, and all manner of other novelties. When I reflect on this assortment, said Coach, it gives me great comfort that we are now able to find a more lasting kind of amusement, if that’s what it must be called, in the endlessly shifting mood chambers offered underwater, or in the swells of differing magnitude that meet the shores here, or simply in the unique perspective afforded by the rock platform, its little pools of orphaned water and the impossible-to-grasp array of pinks, greens, yellows and speckled greys that fringe the edges of the channels cut into the rock.

  Our Anglo ancestors were for some time poorly adapted to the affordances of the coastline, said Coach Fitz. Their expectations were determined by the miserly offerings of their grim leisure resorts, which required casinos and theme parks to brighten up the grey.

  Now these, these are probably my favourite stairs in Sydney to run up, she said as we addressed the first stretch of stairs that coursed up into the bushes at the back of Tamarama Gully. They’re nice and steep with a couple of gentle zigzags and subtle changes in the format of the stairs. It seems as though different parts have been restored at different times, she continued, with slightly different gradients and concrete. As far as I know they are unique. There’s also the coolness provided by the stream off to the right, with some good sandstone boulders, understorey foliage and a decent tree canopy for shade in the summer months. And that’s among their best features, continued Coach. Rarely do you find steps of this scale that are largely shaded. Coach stared at me for a while with the look that on our earlier meetings I thought meant she wanted a response, but had since realised was her way of driving home a point.

  We completed eight repetitions in total, three from the concrete path at the bottom of the stairs and two from the drain at the bottom of the grassy gully that Coach called the ‘pro’s tee off’, a golfing metaphor the exact meaning of which escaped me but which clearly pleased her.

  I particularly appreciated the small rest we had at the top of the gully after bursting through the cool dark shade of the trees. We propped ourselves up on the white wooden railing and looked out over the houses on the north side of the gully, the road that snakes along the coast, the yellow sandstone and the ocean beyond.

  Nothing like a view into the far beyond while the body is completely devoted to the task of breathing, said Coach, not to mention the bombardment of post-exercise endorphins.

  On the fifth repetition an old lady in a blue swimming costume and visor joined us at a slower pace, with a small dog she was more or less dragging. How many for you? she asked delightedly. Seven, maybe eight, said Coach as we passed her. Good for you, came the reply.

  On the eighth set we pushed on at the top of the stairs, all the way back to my car at Bronte. My legs were like jelly by the end, but I was buoyed by this new test and the absence of muscle aches that had accompanied some of the longer runs on hard ground.

  While drying ourselves by our vehicles after the swim, Coach suggested that we ought to meet for lunch next weekend and maybe have just one glass of wine in the lobby of the Medina Hotel at Railway Square – a delightful structure, to use Coach’s words, connected to one of the country’s first experimental architects, Walter Liberty Vernon.

  It’s one of my favourite spaces to chat with athletes, said Coach. For some reason a hotel near a railway line puts me in a mood of tipsy, contemplative bliss. I think you’ll find it fitting.

  Lunch in the Medina

  I took the train from Bondi Junction to Central and met Coach Fitz in the lobby of the Medina. A variety of saddening shops of the kind common to tourist areas and train stations made up the street-level mise-en-scène. The restaurant was on the ground floor of a massive cubic building, a former postal edifice that despite its relative age held its own amid the distractions of the area. I’d been to Central plenty of times but, as is often the case, the presence of the not-inconspicuous structure had been masked by whatever fog I had gathered around myself as I hurtle
d from one place to another.

  Due to the generous dimensions of the room, the restaurant in the Medina was an oasis among this disagreeable mix. Coach Fitz was waiting at a table in a similar outfit to her usual, adapted slightly to the more formal context: shorts, polo shirt, and an old blue blazer that I immediately wished I owned for myself. She had already ordered a glass of white wine and was scrolling through her phone. She looked at me, smiled and we embraced.

  The pasta here is quite good, said Coach as I scrutinised the menu, having my doubts. Will you have a wine? she asked, scanning the restaurant for waiters in a jittery fashion.

  Having wine at lunch was a transgression I had allowed myself on very few occasions. The idea delighted me when I witnessed couples indulging in such behaviour, but confronted with the prospect of being inducted into that community by a figure who still seemed largely anomalous, I regarded the invitation with a disproportionate amount of dread.

  I’m having the chardonnay, said Coach, perhaps sensing my vulnerability at this point of indecision.

  Next time the waiter came around I went through the routine of ordering my wine, though stripped of the excitement I’d thought I would feel when imagining such an occasion. I had no stake in the idea now, and whether this was true or not, felt it foisted upon me by the tacit presumptions of Coach Fitz, who sat there enjoying her wine in a divinely untroubled fashion.

  Still with her head inclined towards her phone, and prodding the device occasionally as though it were an unfamiliar pet, Coach began a discourse on the style of the building. The Parcels Post Office, she began, naming the building that now housed the Medina, conforms to a type I find reliably pleasing. It is a large brick building, the most striking feature of which is its confident squareness. Maybe it’s hard to justify devotion to an object due to this attribute alone, but I comfort myself in the notion that attitudes of endearment are often characterised by extreme specificity, the most commonly acknowledged terms we use for these being fetishes and phobias.

  So you have a fetish for squareness? I asked.

  If we strip from that word any connotations to do with the sexual, and return it to something closer to its original usage, which denoted an object worshipped for magical powers, then yes, I have a fetish for certain varieties of squareness and the sense of unbudgeability they tend to evoke.

  We both ordered the same pasta, a fusilli with cheeses, mushroom, roast cauliflower, pine nuts, raisins and truffle oil.

  During the ordering process I noticed Coach’s poor manner with the waiters. It wasn’t rudeness, but rather a seeming inability to allow the dialogue to unfold harmoniously. I would have assumed she was deaf if I didn’t know she could hear perfectly well in other contexts. It was as though Coach were deliberately muddying the airwaves so the waiter left our table feeling bemused and perhaps insulted. When Coach ordered the pasta and the waiter repeated the order, she needlessly corrected him even though he’d got the order right. No, we said the fusilli, spelling the word out as if the waiter were a child. She expressed this with such a pronounced degree of frustration that I couldn’t help but inherit some of the bad feelings I imagined the waiter to be enduring.

  After this ordeal, Coach stopped and looked up with a playful, disbelieving grin and continued her dialogue about squareness and her penchant for the architecture of Vernon, to whose buildings she attributed a simultaneous sense of the solid and the light. Juggling these contrasting moods, said Coach, is the mark of much great architecture.

  When the pasta arrived Coach ordered another wine, and while I was only halfway through mine she ordered another for me too. I began bracing myself for a lost afternoon, the upshot of which might have been a greater tolerance, and a lessening in the mild irritation and uncertainty, that at that moment characterised my feelings toward Coach Fitz.

  The pasta was very average, a great recipe that in execution somehow lacked nuance, overcooked, too much oil, bad cheese. Yet Coach said it was among the finest things she’d ever tasted and continually remarked on its features, in particular the occasional swollen raisin hidden within the cheesy sauce, which she would pick out with her fingers, hold up to her eyes and say, this is the raison d’être!

  The wine however was an excellent match for the food and in the haze of my sudden drunkenness I soon began to forget my negative emotions. Coach continued to wax lyrical about the inaccuracies of the category ‘Federation style’, about the regrettable pervasiveness of rectangularity as opposed to squareness in the CBD, and about the Parcels Post Office’s previous history as a place of refuge for women who had fallen into hardship in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

  When the waiter came to collect our plates I pointedly resisted Coach’s efforts to order me another wine. I could see that she was disappointed by the prospect of having to go it alone for the last round. But go it alone she did, and without the promise of my inhibitions undergoing a further loosening, I felt a growing keenness for the occasion to wind up, so I could rescue the afternoon from a fate of mild dehydration and fuzzy-headedness.

  This final wine sustained Coach through a discourse on a way of framing endurance training that she believed to be peculiar to her practice. You must think of yourself as training your training, Coach declared, as tautological as that might sound. Once you have accumulated enough kilometres in your legs you will be accompanied by a background of training that you need to direct according to a rhythmic harmony of contrasting training sessions, with many variations in intensity and tempo. I could tell Coach was on a roll. Her voice became louder and her advice harder to comprehend. You’re training your training, she continued, and without this epoque de longue durée approach to a running program, efforts to peak during race time tend to lack the substance they otherwise might possess.

  As Coach became tipsy the whistle in her speech became more pronounced and more than once she spat involuntarily while she spoke. The background is where it all begins, she said. It is here also where you must establish an approach to running that is at once purposeful and carefree, ensuring you allow your body to adapt gradually to the rigours of long-distance training. Think of yourself as a boxer devoting the first stages of their training to footwork alone, resisting the temptation to satisfy your building urges to burst forth and thus exhaust yourself prematurely. Run long, run often, and run without pressure, that way your body settles into the required rhythm that is the necessary foundation from which your more intense periods of training might explode.

  Though Coach’s discourse was enlightening, I couldn’t rid myself of the thought that if she ordered another wine we might be there until late afternoon. I said that I had to visit my auntie in Beecroft to help her shift a lounge, and needed to get an early night’s sleep so I didn’t start the work week on the back foot. Of this Coach was surprisingly understanding and, after gesturing to the waiter in a way that I could only imagine he’d interpret as a signal of distress, she generously offered to pay for my meal.

  After settling the bill we both stood for a while at the foot of the former parcels office, its cubic form bulging proudly above the visual and sonic noise that pervaded the street level.

  The massing makes the ornament appear right, said Coach, like the military uniforms that have often been a source of inspiration for designers. At this she brought my body near with her arms and embraced me tightly. I felt the soft, worn fabric of her blazer against my face and hands and when she released me I saw that Coach might have had a tear in her eye.

  I walked off waving without turning back and imagined that she might have stood there for some time yet, admiring the sturdy island of brick as the flows of people in and out of the station parted to accommodate her. I passed through the Devonshire Street tunnel back to Central Station, wondering about Coach’s sex life. She had not mentioned prior partners and had something of the eternal spinster about her, yet there was undoubtedly a muscular eroticism to the way she expressed herself and admired other bodies. Inevitably I pondered whe
re I was positioned in this hypothetical field of desire. Did she want to strip me of my clothes and grind her body up and down mine? Did an appetite inform her encouragements? Did she imagine us together in crisp lemon-smelling sheets? Would we fornicate on the porch like two chaotic strips of rubber? Would she float down to me and take both my cheeks in her small hands? Would she inspect my scrotum and my penis? Or did she imagine herself as my mother, the host of my emotions? A genius that would prod and cajole me with immunising mixtures of inspiration and criticism? The wine had been reactivated by the music of the buskers in the tunnel and instead of catching the train back to Edgecliff I decided to run off my excesses, and sprinted up the stairs at the eastern end and out into the day.

  Coach’s Failings

  After these early training sessions and dialogues with Coach Fitz, my impeccable conception of her began to accumulate some enduring niggles. The first fault I identified was a tendency to discuss her ailments at length. Coach would often begin a discussion by meticulously describing a vague but evidently defining psychophysical disturbance. It was like the illness was the substitute for the dog or the child of a new and besotted owner or mother.

  On one such occasion she speculated that some bug, as she called it, was having a subtle, transformative effect on a series of activities Coach thought of as key to her sense of vitality. She said that the sickness would seem to retreat after some moderate exercise, only to return again when she spent any length of time in certain interior environments, particularly anything air-conditioned or lit with fluorescent lighting. The illness was detectable as a mild pain behind her eyes and what she described as an electric, metallic taste in her mouth, coupled with an increased abundance of hot, watery saliva. Coach asked me whether I ever used the sense of pressure behind my eyes as an indicator of my wellbeing, to which I replied in the negative.