I stared at the photograph for another long moment, Lulu watching me curiously from the doorway. Then I went hunting.
Cassandra had moved around a lot of the stuff on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. The storage boxes full of my tax returns and records. My book contracts and royalty statements. My journals, which to date no major or minor university libraries were clamoring for. I dug past those. I was looking for letters. Not the letters Cassandra was looking for. These were from long ago. These were letters from a friend.
I found them tucked inside a shoebox way in the back, wrapped tightly in rubber bands. Fat, square overseas envelopes covered with exotic stamps from all over the world. I had saved them, figuring they’d one day be a mother lode of source material for biographers. Ah, the arrogance of youth. Although it hadn’t seemed like arrogance at the time. Not in the case of Tuttle Cash. Because there wasn’t a soul on campus who didn’t remark to themselves when they saw him striding across the historic Yard, the walk slightly pigeon-toed, the right shoulder always held a bit higher than the left: “There goes a future president of the United States.” So I had saved Tuttle’s letters from Oxford, where he had served out his Rhodes scholarship. And from Ghana, where he had gone to dig trenches. And from all over Europe, where he had pedaled his bicycle. I had saved the observations and ramblings and wit and wisdom of the man who was without a doubt the most extraordinary and gifted and miserable person I’d ever known. Of course I had.
Not that I’d looked at them in fifteen years. Not that I wanted to look at them now. I was too afraid of what I’d find.
I took them back into the living room and sat in my easy chair, holding them. I sat there, staring at that lopsided grin over my loveseat …
There had been Pittsburgh steel money behind his family at one time. One of his grandfathers had even been a United States senator. But by the time Tuttle arrived on campus there was little left. Just the Cash name. His father taught math at Choate, which was where Tuttle prepped. And where his legend was born. The kid, you see, could do some things with a football. He was offered full athletic scholarships to Syracuse, Penn State, USC, UCLA, Michigan, Nebraska, Stanford. He turned them all down. He wanted an Ivy League education. He paid for it with an academic scholarship. Seems he had done some promising research work in molecular biology his junior year at Choate. Besides, he could still play football if he felt like it. And he did.
The Ivy League has produced more than its share of U.S. presidents and way too many lawyers and economists and literary critics. But its list of athletic heroes is short. We’re talking a scant few. There’s Hobey Baker, the legendary football and hockey star who never made it back from World War I. There’s Larrupin’ Lou Gehrig and Dollar Bill Bradley. And there’s Tuttle Cash.
King Tut.
He was the most graceful open field runner anyone had ever seen, six feet tall, two hundred pounds, with blazing speed and remarkable balance and even more remarkable peripheral vision. Tuttle Cash, the saying went, didn’t have eyes—he had antennae. And an uncommon flair for the dramatic. In his very first game he ran a punt back eighty-two yards in a driving snowstorm with time running out to beat Cornell for the Ivy League title. That same week, at age nineteen, he sold his first poem to The New Yorker. He called it “As the Crowd Roars.”
King Tut averaged 173 yards per game his senior year, nearly eight yards every time he touched the ball. That was the year he won his Heisman Trophy. Not that he was destined for NFL stardom like the big-time college players he edged out. No, he was more of a sentimental choice. Those were the dark, bitter days of Vietnam and Watergate. And Tuttle Cash, he was the exemplar of a vanishing breed—the gallant schoolboy hero. Modest in victory, gracious in defeat, a straight-A student, a generous teammate and classmate. He was, as Red Smith put it, “a throwback, a symbol of a bygone era when scholar-athletes were honored for sustaining the amateur tradition of sport for sport’s sake.”
Of course, Red Smith didn’t know that King Tut, the golden boy, played the last game of his college career high on two hits of windowpane acid. Not many people know that. Not many people knew him. Not really.
For those of us who did, he was just Tuttle—down-to-earth, easygoing, funny, crazy. A regular guy, no different from anyone else, except for the small fact that he happened to have won the lottery when he was born, the one that made him smarter, stronger and handsomer than everyone else, teeth whiter, hair blonder, eyes bluer, body impervious to pain and fatigue, heart impervious to fear. Every woman who met him fell in love with him. Every guy who met him wanted to be him. Everyone, no matter who they were, wanted to stand close to him, hoping that if they stood there long enough some of the magic might rub off on them.
Spring semesters, he ran track to keep in shape. He was our best sprinter at 100 or 220 yards, even with his heavy football muscles. In fact, he could outperform most of us at our own specialties with almost no effort. He high-jumped six feet the first time he ever tried clearing a bar. Threw the javelin three feet farther than I ever could the first time he picked one up. I’m quite certain he could have been an Olympic decathlete if he’d wanted. The only thing that held him back was the impossibly high standard he set for himself. I was with Tuttle the first time he picked up a set of golf clubs. This was at Shinnecock Hills in Southhampton, where the U.S. Open has been played twice. He shot an 85 that day. Within a month he could shoot par. I saw him do it. I was there. And in the clubhouse afterward, he abruptly announced he was never going to pick up a golf club again. When I asked him why he replied, “I’m not good enough.”
Much of track is rigor and drudgery. Sprints. Laps. More sprints. More laps. We fell in together. I never knew why. He could have chosen anyone to be his friend. He chose me. Me and Ezra Spooner, an earnest plugger of a kid from Nashua, New Hampshire, a so-so miler who was very shy around women. Mostly, as we three worked our way around and around the track, we concocted wild, dirty stories about our coach, crusty old Augie Cuchinella, who had been there since something like 1921. Tuttle did a drop-dead imitation of Augie’s gruff, hoarse voice, especially that way Augie would roar out, “Pick those feet up, bub!” when we’d jog past him. Tuttle was an excellent mimic, among his many other gifts. Evenings, we partied. Smoked dope, cruised the bars. Tuttle knew them all. What fun he was to be with. He was frisky. He was up for anything. He was a star. People bought him drinks. Women flocked to him—all he had to do was smile. Every night out with Tuttle was an adventure, a kick, an event. Life was more exciting when Tuttle was around. Life was good.
Tuttle Cash was, to use a quaint, old term, blessed. I certainly felt blessed to have him as my friend. Not because of who he was. No, it was much deeper than that. As the months went by, Tuttle and I developed a special kind of friendship, the kind where two people are forever raising the bar on one another, daring each other to greater heights. Maybe I would have written my first novel even if I’d never met him. But I seriously doubt it. Because I know, deep down inside, that I wrote it to prove something to him—that I was worthy of his friendship. Tuttle pushed me beyond what I believed I was capable of. Simply by being who he was.
After graduation, Ezra ended up in that zany, madcap world of tax law. Went to work for Price Waterhouse. Got married to a dull, rather plain girl from Hartford, had a couple of kids, moved to the burbs. I wasn’t invited to the wedding. Neither was Tuttle. We’d pretty much lost touch with Ezra by then.
But not with each other. He didn’t come back right away from Oxford. The pro football thing was hanging too heavy over him. Everyone wanted him to play. Especially the Dallas Cowboys, who had drafted him in the first round, Rhodes scholarship and all. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to don the pads again. So he went to Ghana. And he toured Europe. And, for a while, he drove formula-one race cars for Ferrari. He was well suited to the task. He was fearless and he always did know how to hit the hole. Mostly, he wanted to write. Or so he told me. A novel perhaps. But he never quite got around to starting
it.
Instead, he reported to Cowboys training camp at Cal Lutheran College in Thousand Oaks, California. Coach Landry and he did not exactly hit it off. Tuttle was a twenty-five-year-old rookie who hadn’t touched a football in over three years. He was smart. He was defiant. He was not a Cowboy. He phoned me from a pay phone after his first scrimmage, deeply upset. A kid from Clemson had tackled him so hard that afternoon he’d had no feeling in his arms or legs for a full fifteen minutes. But that wasn’t why he was so upset. “These guys are not in it for the fun, Doof,” he said in amazement. He always called me that—Doof. He turned in his playbook after the first preseason game. Quit and walked away.
Writer Frank Deford was there in camp to chronicle Tuttle’s experience for Sports Illustrated. His account of Tuttle’s brief stint as a member of the Dallas Cowboys served as the basis for the Robert Redford movie As the Crowd Roars, a lean, taut tale of a thinking man who chafes at the regimentation and dehumanization of pro football. Directed by Sydney Pollack, As the Crowd Roars remains one of the best films ever made about the brutality of pro sports. Tuttle himself did the stunt work for Redford and had a bit role. He was offered more film work after that, but he turned it down.
A lot of those who knew Tuttle hoped he’d go into politics. Not me. Politics isn’t a business for anyone who has an ounce of self-respect or principle. He did try law school, which should have been my first hint that he was in real trouble, but he dropped out halfway through the first semester. Wandered north of the border. Ended up on the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League. He played most of a season for them. Played damned well, really. Was leading the league in all-purpose yardage when he blew out his knee. That ended his playing days forever. Still, the Ivy League welcomed him back with open arms. Made him a roving goodwill ambassador for all Ivy League sports. It was an incredibly cushy setup. Paneled office. Unlimited expense account. Zero heavy lifting. Tuttle lasted less than a year. Officially, the parting was called mutual. The real story was that he got roaring drunk at a fund-raiser for the Special Olympics and proceeded to jump on a banquet table and perform a striptease in front of Eunice Shriver. Not just any striptease, either. It was his old impersonation of Ethel Merman singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” something he’d been doing at gridiron banquets for years, complete with bra, garter belt, wig and slash of purple lipstick. Everyone is known for something by his friends. Tuttle was known for his Ethel Merman. God knows where it came from. I never did. Each of us have places we go that no one else knows about. Or wants to know about. Eunice Shriver sure as hell didn’t. And so he had to go.
He liked women, money and a good time. Inevitably, he ended up in New York. Inevitably, he landed on his feet. Because they made allowances for the Tuttle Cashes of the world in those days. Still do. Some of those alumni who had cheered him from the stands ran television networks. To them, he was King Tut and he always would be. One of the local affiliates took him on as sports anchor for their evening news. For a while, he was damned good at it, too. Opinionated, bright, funny—a TV star in the making. Until that night he showed up for his eleven o’clock broadcast coked to the gills. And called Knicks center Bill Cartwright “a big fat tub of shit” on the air, live. And then couldn’t stop giggling. And there went his broadcasting career.
But he was still Tuttle Cash, the golden boy. Everyone was glad to see him, to drink with him, to bask in his glow. No one seemed to notice that he had no visible means of support. No one seemed to notice that he never paid back the money loaned him. No one seemed to care that most of it went up his nose. He was not alone there. These were the eighties, children. Mostly, he chased women. He had a positively magical touch with them. He was handsome. He was charming. He was a star. His conquests were all the same—body by Nautilus, brain by Mattel. He didn’t care. Not as long as they had good legs and a great, big fetching smile. Especially the smile. He went through women by the dozen, often three in the same day. But there was a grim, joyless quality to Tuttle’s relentless pursuit of sexual satiation. He was, it seemed, searching for something, anything to replace the roar of the crowd. He was, it seemed, adrift.
But I was still his friend and I was still flattered that he was mine.
He was the first person I called when I sold the novel. And no one was happier for me than Tuttle was. We celebrated with a night on the town. Ezra joined us, for old times’ sake. Ezra was plenty excited himself. Price Waterhouse had just made him a vice president, and he was madly in love with some girl—although not the one he had ended up marrying, if I remember right. We three hit every bar on the East Side. We toasted my genius. We toasted the one, the only Augie Cuchinella. We toasted how good and right life was. We got roaring drunk. I believe we even got thrown out of Elaine’s—although I don’t remember why. Actually, I remember very little about that night. Except that we lost Ezra at some point. He had to be at the office in the morning. And that for some reason Tuttle and I decided we absolutely, positively had to drive to some all-night diner way the hell out in Amagansett that served the best corned hash in America, in the world, in the universe. We went tearing out of town in my battered Morgan Plus-4, top down, armed with two fresh bottles of Dom Pérignon. We never made it. I flipped it on the Montauk Highway—don’t ever try to pop the cork on a bottle of Dom Pérignon when you’re behind the wheel of an open car doing 100 miles per hour. Tuttle ended up in a ditch, unhurt. You couldn’t hurt that man. I ended up smeared all over the road. Fractured skull, two broken arms, a broken leg. Also a deep, deep gash in my neck that I was losing blood out of fast. Things didn’t look too promising there for the first major new literary voice of the 1980s. It was four in the morning. There wasn’t another car on the road. We were a million miles from nowhere. Or, I should say, ten. Because that’s how many miles Tuttle ran with me on his back, his shirt wrapped around my neck. That man carried me ten miles to the hospital in Southhampton. No one else could have done that. No one else would have even tried. Only Tuttle Cash. He saved my life that night. The emergency room doctor said I would have been dead in another five minutes if they hadn’t gotten some blood into me.
I owed Tuttle Cash my life. I only wished his own could have been happier after that. Because he was the rarest of individuals: someone who had it all. Someone who could have been anything. And what he ended up becoming was the lead character in his own personal Greek tragedy, someone who spent his days and nights stumbling around in a cloud, morose and haunted and confused.
A few months after the novel came out I met Merilee and my own life changed forever. I invited Ezra to the wedding but he didn’t come. For some reason, he had decided to keep a safe distance from me and from Tuttle. As for my best man, he was drunk at my wedding. And he stayed drunk for months and months after that. There was a darkness, an ugliness building inside of him. More and more, it started to bubble to the surface. He grew bitter, hostile, difficult to be with. Until one morning he showed up at my door, filthy and disheveled and soaking wet. He’d spent the whole night at the grave of Hobey Baker, who was buried somewhere outside of Philadelphia, and he was smiling. Smiling like I hadn’t seen him smile in years. Something had clicked, somehow. He had decided it was time to get his life in order. And he did. He checked himself into the Smithers Clinic. He joined AA. He took a job selling bonds for a brokerage house that was headed by an old classmate of ours. He did well at it, too. Worked hard, stayed sober. He was fun to be around again, like the Tuttle of old. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. I swear I wouldn’t.
I wouldn’t have fixed him up with Tansy.
Tansy Smollet … She was Merilee’s dearest friend. Had been since they were at Miss Porter’s together. Tansy’s father owned most of midtown Manhattan. She herself was raised on Park Avenue. She was tall. She was leggy. She was blond. She was beautiful. She was also smart and tough and independent. After Miss Porter’s, the modeling agencies all wanted her. Tansy blew them off. Ended up getting a master’s degree in land
scape architecture at Cornell and opening up her own very successful practice in Tribeca. Only for some reason, she could never find the right guy. I couldn’t understand why. I thought she was way cool. And if I hadn’t met Merilee first … well, never mind about that. So I introduced her to Tuttle Cash. The two of them fell hard for each other. I was best man at his wedding, just as he had been at mine. And for a while, they were good together. Not long, though. He stopped showing up for work. Started drinking again. Started fucking around on her. And, when she objected to it, he started hitting her. Until one night he almost killed her. Tuttle broke so many bones in Tansy’s face it took months and months of operations to put it back together again. Briefly, the story made the papers. She was a socialite and he was King Tut—wherever he went, people recognized him. But Tansy refused to press criminal charges. Just filed for a divorce and quietly went on with her life. And the story dried up and blew away.
By then, Merilee and I were in trouble, too. Those were my black hole days. Don’t ask me how long they lasted. I didn’t keep count. As for Tuttle, he stopped calling me. I didn’t ask him to. I was his friend. I was there for him. But I was grateful for it. Because Tuttle never got any better. Because all he ever did was wring me dry. Because I had more than enough problems of my own. I bounced back from mine. Kind of. He did not bounce back from his. And he never would.
It had been a long time since I’d heard from Tuttle. But I knew where he was. I always knew.
And now I sat there with his bundle of old letters, Lulu curled up on the loveseat, dozing. I undid the rubber bands and glanced through them. Many were handwritten in his rather primitive scrawl. But a number were typed. Typed on that battered old Olivetti he’d taken to Europe with him back when he wanted to write a novel. One phrase in particular caught my eye: “Just think how much fun I’d be having if I didn’t have to work.” It was his trademark sign-off. He ended every letter that way. It was the exact same phrase the answer man had used to end Chapter Two. I turned on the bridge lamp next to my chair. I held one of Tuttle’s old letters up to the light. I pulled my copy of the answer man’s last letter from the breast pocket of my jacket, unfolded it and laid it directly over it. That characteristic lower-case A, the one that Mrs. Adelman mentioned, was exactly the same in both. A perfect match.
The Man Who Loved Women to Death Page 9