The Imaginary Girlfriend
Page 11
It made me so sad I simply had to call Anthony Pieranunzi. There was a greater likelihood that Pieranunzi would remember me, I thought: our matches had been close. But the operator told me that there was no Anthony Pieranunzi in East Providence, and only one in Providence; it had to be him, I was certain--I called immediately. An extremely likable woman answered the phone. I instantly remembered Pieranunzi's girlfriend. (It's possible she was his sister--she was a knockout, anyway.) I imagined I was talking to the high-school sweetheart of my archrival--now a devoted wife of some 30-plus years.
I said something truly stupid, like: "Is this the home of Anthony Pieranunzi, the wrestler?"
The woman laughed. "Lord, no," she said. She'd heard of the wrestler; there had been other phone calls--and, of course, bills sent to the wrong address. (Bills had become a common theme--they were perpetually being sent to the wrong address.) The woman told me that someone had once called her husband and asked him if he was the Anthony Pieranunzi. It was the Anthony Pieranunzi I was looking for, of course. But he had slipped away with Vincent Buonomano, neither of them ever knowing how important they were to me.
I felt like talking to a friend.
Following a conversation with Sonny Greenhalgh, which deteriorated into a dispute concerning whether John Carr had wrestled at 147 pounds or at 157, I decided to call John Carr. The conversation with Sonny, as with most conversations with Sonny, entailed a fair amount of Sherman Moyer. To this day, it stands as an outrage in Sonny's life that he lost twice, in the same season, to Moyer--although this was 33 years ago. (Sonny was an All-American;
Moyer wasn't. I'm guessing that this is what makes the losses unacceptable to Sonny.) To this day, my sympathy for Sonny is moderated by the fact that, at the time, I was cheering for Moyer, who was my teammate; I didn't know Sonny then, except that I knew he was a highly regarded 130-pounder at Syracuse. My sympathy for Sonny's two losses to Moyer is also lessened by the fact that I wrestled Moyer every day for an entire wrestling season; as such, I lost to him every day--a mere two defeats at the hands of Moyer seems like no disgrace and no special hardship to me. Sonny and I always talk about this, notwithstanding the fact that we have other things in common to talk about. (I coached Sonny Greenhalgh's son, Jon, when Jon was a teammate of Brendan's at Vermont Academy; Jon Greenhalgh won a New England title in 1989.)
But this time my conversation with Sonny concerned John Carr--was he a 147-pounder or a 157-pounder? What turned the talk to Carr was that Sonny had heard that Carr's dad had died, and I remembered Mr. Carr fondly--from the time he'd enthusiastically stepped in and coached me at West Point. By the time I got off the phone with Sonny, there was another thing I wanted to talk to John Carr about: I knew he'd won a New England title the year before we both went to Pittsburgh, but I couldn't remember if he'd been a PG at Andover or at Cheshire--in both cases, in my memory, the uniforms were blue.
At the New England tournament that year, the Outstanding Wrestler award was given to Anthony Pieranunzi, the presently elusive East Providence standout, who'd kept me from winning a New England title; John Carr arguably deserved the award.
Pieranunzi was good, but the talk in the locker room suggested that Carr was better; I don't really know, because I never wrestled Carr. And that was why I believed Carr had wrestled at 157 pounds: if he'd wrestled at 147, I would have wrestled him--he would have been a workout partner, at least a few times. (As a 130-pounder, I used to work out with the 147-pounders occasionally, but the 157-pounders were too big.)
When I called information, the operator informed me that there were seven guys named John Carr in the Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania, but it didn't take long to track him down. I talked to the wife of the wrong John Carr, and to four or five other wrong John Carrs, too; they all said, Oh, you want the wrestler." Or: "You want the coach."
By the time I got him, it was all over town that I was looking for him; he was expecting my call. Carr remembered me, but not my face; he couldn't put me with a face, he said. I'm not surprised; in fact, I was surprised he remembered me at all--as I said, we never wrestled each other and my wrestling was hardly anything worth watching. If John Carr had had a minute to watch the other wrestlers in the Pitt wrestling room, there were a lot of better guys to watch than me.
I was right: Carr had been a 157-pounder, and he told me he'd been a PG at Cheshire when he won the New England's--not at Andover. I told him I was sorry to hear about his dad. Carr wasn't coaching anymore; he complained that the influence of freestyle (international) wrestling had hurt high-school and collegiate (or folkstyle) wrestling. For one thing, there was not enough pinning--wrestling wasn't as aggressive as it used to be, John Carr said. I share his view. I was never a fan of freestyle. As I once heard Dan Gable say of collegiate wrestling: "If you can't get off the bottom, you can't win." (In freestyle, you don't have to be able to get off the bottom; the referee blows his whistle and lets you off the bottom--you can spend almost the whole match in the neutral position, on your feet. And so I knew what John Carr was thinking: he was thinking, How tough is that? In a freestyle match, I might have been able to beat Sherman Moyer; it was when I was on the bottom that Moyer killed me.)
Carr told me that Mike Johnson was still coaching at Du Bois, and that Warnick's kid--or one of Warnick's kids--had been pretty successful on the mat at West Point. I remembered seeing the name Warnick in the Army lineup and wondering if this was a child of the Warnick who'd arm-dragged me to death in my one winter at Pittsburgh. After John Carr and I said goodnight, and I hung up the phone, I realized that I'd not asked him if Warnick's kid had learned his father's killer arm-drag. I almost called Carr back. But when I start the phone calls, especially at night, I have to stop somewhere. If I keep going, I get in a mood to call everybody.
Of course I'd like to call Cliff Gallagher--if only to hear him say, "Not even a zebra, Johnny." And I often think about calling Ted Seabrooke, before I remember that I can't. Ted wasn't a big talker--not compared to Cliff--but Ted was insightful at interrupting me, and at contradicting me, too. I'd be saying something and he'd say, "That sounds pretty stupid to me." Or: "Why would you want to do that?" And: "Do what you know how to do." Or: "What's worked for you before?" Cliff used to say that Ted could clear the air.
It still seems unacceptable that both Ted and Cliff are dead, although Cliff (given normal life expectancy) would almost surely be dead by now--Cliff was born in 1897, which would make him all of 98, if he were alive today. I think it broke Cliff's heart that Ted died first--Ted died young. And Ted fooled us: after the diabetes, which he got control of, he had some healthy years; then the cancer came and killed him in the fall of 1980. He was 59.
For Coach Seabrooke's memorial service in Phillips Church, there were more wrestlers than I ever saw in the Exeter wrestling room. Bobby Thompson, one of Exeter's ex-heavyweights--and arguably the biggest-ever New England Class A Champion in the Unlimited class--sang "Amazing Grace." (Bobby is the school minister at Exeter today.)
It was an outrage to all his wrestlers that Ted was dead. He'd seemed indomitable to us. He had twice been struck by lightning, while playing golf; both times he'd survived. Both times he'd said, "It's just one of those things."
After Ted's memorial service, I remember Cliff Gallagher grabbing me with a Russian arm-tie and whispering in my ear: "It should have been me, Johnny--it should have been me." My arm was sore for days. Cliff had a nasty Russian arm-tie. At the time, Cliff was 83.
I don't lead a hectic life. It's not every night, or every week--or even every month--that I feel the need to "clear the air." Most nights, I don't even look at the telephone. Other times, the unringing phone seems to summon all the unreachable people in the past. I think of that poem of Rilke's, about the corpse: "Und einer ohne Namen/lag bar und reinlich da und gab Gesetze" ("And one without a name/ lay clean and naked there, and gave commands"). That is the telephone on certain nights: it is the unreachable past--the dead demanding to give us advice. On those nights,
I'm sorry I can't talk to Ted.