He started laughing at the memory of Floss Penrose in tears. Then he downed his drink in one amazing gulp.
“But you’re happy with the money?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re happy with the incentives?”
“Yes.”
“She got us to put in all kinds of shit-ass clauses.”
“Well, that’s her job.”
“Have another drink,” he said.
“I’m still working on this one.”
“I’m trying to get you drunk, Birdwell, so I can pretend to myself I’m on the verge of molesting your body. Hell shit, I can’t molest Bruce McLeod, can I, or that fuggin Mongol we just bought from Colorado.”
“What fuggin Mongol?”
“Wayne Lassiter,” he said. “That’s the kind of player, all kidding aside, you’re gonna have to watch out for whoever and wherever you play. Those crazy fuggin Canucks from the mines, from the smelters, from the mills, from the iron ranges. All they know is hitting people. Bent noses, glazed eyes, those gaps in their teeth.”
“Mr. Kinross, I’m a professional. I’ve played all over North America. I’ve played in the Western League. It may not be the slickest and showiest hockey in the world, but it’s tougher than the NHL, physically. Not that I don’t appreciate your concern.”
“I’m glad to hear somebody appreciates something around here what with all the shit I been taking from the fuggin Zionist media. I’ll tell you the truth, Birdwell, my days are numbered. I’m like a space object with a decaying orbit. The press can’t stand me. Hughes Tool don’t know what to make of me. Bunch of pussies if you want to know the truth.” He leaned across the desk and lowered his voice, speaking confidentially. “Talking about pussy, my wife’s been keeping it under wraps. She rolls it out once a year, on New Year’s Eve. I’m supposed to say, ‘Whoopee, the dessert trolley!’”
He laughed and coughed simultaneously. He turned red and starting hitting the desk with his fists.
“I’m glad you’re amused, Mr. Kinross. They say laughter is a wonderful tonic. But your choice of words leaves me a little cold, frankly.”
“What words? Are we talking about fug?”
“No.”
“What words? Fug? What words? Did I say fug?”
“I don’t mean that.”
“What words? What? Fug? No fooling, tell me, so I can adjust. Fug, sug? What words? What?”
“Pussy, if you really want to know.”
“Pussy? What do you want me to say? I grew up in the streets. I come from the streets. Little shits like Sanders Meade, I stomp on. I stomp on people like that.”
“Stay calm.”
“Anybody come into our neighborhood, we’d crack their fuggin heads open. I opened more heads than a brain surgeon. We used to break aerials offa cars and use them for weapons. Swish, swish. Whip one of them things across somebody’s face, he’s gonna be looking at glass eyes on a jeweler’s tray. We used tire irons, we used chains, we used windshield wipers, we used entire steering wheels. We ripped entire steering wheels out of cars. All our weapons came from cars, except for rocks. Not many cars have rocks for parts. Our rocks came from empty lots. We used to have rock fights at point-blank range in empty lots. You wouldn’t believe the blood, the guys out cold, the guys staggering around holding their open heads—it was fuggin urban mayhem. And you’re telling me I can’t call it pussy?”
His secretary came in to tell me I was urgently wanted for an interview being beamed live to Japan. Behind her were two Japanese men leaning under the weight of still cameras and lights. One of them spoke English well.
“Our TV equipment is being unloaded from the truck. The ice is free right now, Miss Birdwell, but I wonder if, beforehand, we can get a couple of still shots of you and Mr. Kinross against that window there.”
I looked at Kinross.
“All right, I guess so,” he said. “Do the Japs have hockey?”
“No, but we have women,” the man said.
“What do they call their pussies?” Kinross said. “I’m looking for a new word.”
Floss Penrose was nice enough to let me stay in her apartment while I looked for a place of my own.
Later that same day, she made me a nice little meal of mostly salad and two kinds of soup. She lived in a prewar co-op building just off Park Avenue, and it was full of European treasures—paintings, lamps, tapestries, vases, goblets, fancy dishes, all kinds of objets d’art. I was impressed. Here was someone in sports who didn’t decorate her apartment with pseudo abstract paintings of some quarterback throwing a football through a green slime of bodies.
We took our coffee into the sitting room.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Floss said. “I’ve asked Archie Brewster over for a drink later. He’s here to sign books at Brentano’s. I wanted him in the pit at B. Dalton as well, but there are all sorts of time conflicts.”
Archie Brewster, of course, was Floss’s top moneymaking client, winner of every major tennis tourney going. He was a tall, lanky type—kind of freakily attractive in the sense that he wasn’t the everyday godlike body you come across in the world of sports.
As if reading my thoughts. Floss said, “Now, don’t you get too interested in Master Archie. You’ll need every bit of energy and verve for the Black Hawks tomorrow night. Besides, Master Archie will be too tired for anything but Monopoly. Poor boy has been logging air miles by the hundreds of thousands.”
Sure enough when Archie came by about an hour later, out comes the Monopoly set and we all sit around the table throwing the dice and moving the weird little things around the board.
“I’ve never seen a hockey game,” Archie said.
“It’s vile, don’t go,” Floss told him. “I’m worried sick for Cleo. I’m afraid she’ll be brutalized psychologically.”
Archie landed on Park Place and bought it. His travel fatigue was beginning to interest me. He sat there with his shirt half open like some soldier home on leave in the relaxing warmth of mom’s home cooking, and he’d occasionally stare off into space with his hawkish eyes kind of hooded and weary and knowledgeable, as if he’d seen and done so much that nothing could ever again get him truly interested, and that happens to be just the kind of thing that gives me a buzz. I like a withdrawn man with a far-off look.
Although I have to say I wasn’t crazy about the fact that he was a tennis player, or athlete period. I wanted to try something in the arts.
Archie landed on Boardwalk and bought it.
“Done much traveling?” he asked me.
“Short range compared to you.”
“The game is nothing. The outside interests are nothing. What kills you is the travel. You’re looking at a two-hundred-year-old man. All I can tell you is learn how to travel.”
“What’s this book you’re here to sign?”
He shrugged and looked at Floss.
“I can never remember the title,” she said. “Something about Archie Brewster’s killer backhand. Nice cover. Picture of Archie hitting a backhand.”
“Frigging terrific,” he said. “Who wrote it?”
“I don’t know who wrote it. Who writes these things? Does anybody know?”
We played Monopoly for about twenty minutes. Next thing I know, Archie’s easing out of his shirt altogether. Floss gave him a long, tight, searching look.
“Aren’t we playing by the usual rules?” he said.
“Don’t be a beast. You’re tired and need your sleep. Two blue pills and off you go.”
Archie looked at me.
“What we normally do to get me unwound is play strip Monopoly.”
Floss turned her head toward the window and just sat there, tremendously motionless, gazing into the night.
“Whoever owns property,” Archie went on, “has to take off an article of clothing every time someone lands on the property and forks over rent. This way the rich get naked and the poor get to keep the
ir dignity. At least that’s one way of looking at it. Depends on what kind of body you have, I guess, and how much you like to show it.”
“And Floss just landed on your hotel,” I said. “Which is why you’re taking off your shirt.”
When Floss finally moved, it was on a short, straight line right out of the room.
I said, “I can’t believe she removes her clothes in anyone’s presence. She can’t bear being looked at. She thinks it’s the worst thing that can happen to a person.”
“She does it with me. We have a special something. She’s my Aunt Glad and I’m her Master Archie. That’s the kind of thing jet lag does to people.”
A special something, he called it. The world outside Badger, Ohio, where I first laced on skates, was sometimes slow to come into focus. But I guess my eagerness and high spirits sent me crashing right into the middle of things, even when the edges were so blurry I didn’t know where I was.
Inside of ten minutes of intense dice-throwing, buying and selling of land, and paying rent and collecting rent, I was down to my teddy pants and old Badger Beagles T-shirt, while tennis great Archie Brewster was the sleepiest nude since my old dog Bowzer.
“Roll a five,” I told him, “so you’ll land on one of my green streets. I’m beginning to feel overdressed, and it’s embarrassing.”
What Archie did was to slump, ever so slowly, toward the table, finally resting his head right in the middle of the board. It didn’t seem strange to me that I crept under the table and began playing with his thing. It woke up, but he didn’t. He was too heavy to carry, so I knocked him off the chair, gently, gently, and tried dragging him by one long foot out of the room. On his back, of course.
I got him into the hallway, his thing still amazingly aloft, and I was trying to figure out how to get him past Floss’s room and into one of the other bedrooms without making any noise when it occurred to me that the rug in the sitting room might be the answer, and so I went back in there, moved the table with the Monopoly set, kicked our clothes out of the way, dragged out the rug, and with a little maneuvering got Archie onto it. And then, leaning over and moving backward with a hand at each of the two nearest corners of the rug and my ass up in the air, I proceeded to pull the jet-weary fellow along the floor and into my room.
Quietly I shut the door. Then studied the body. Arms tan only as far as the biceps. Legs tan from calves to thighs. A body full of long, lean muscle. Sort of quietly strong. And that far-searching hawk’s face with sunken cheekbones and a humorous mouth. Droll is a word I like for certain kinds of mouths. A longish pecker softly fluttering. Long, bumpy feet. Knobby knees. Wide, bladelike, touching shoulders. Poignant shoulders. Callused, nail-bitten hands. Definitely capable of a killer backhand.
I ought to stop right here and say I am more or less a connoisseur of the male form. Despite being as young as I was, which was twenty-three, and that’s old for someone entering the NHL these days, I was pretty thoroughly informed on the subject of men’s bodies, having played their games and shared their locker rooms to one extent or another since the age of about four and a half. I like to look. I enjoyed my years of looking. They are interesting bodies, the bodies of athletes, because of the wounds and bruises as much as the general excellence of form. The hurt is what gives these bodies their special emotional quality. Years of physical stress have made the players look noble and battered and ancient Greeklike, except for goaltenders, who look like mounds of vanilla horsemeat, by and large. Pain is what makes the bodies interesting to look at. Pain, stress, defeat etc.
But it’s one thing to look at an unconscious nude person and quite another to climb aboard. So what I did was dribble Archie’s head back and forth, crooning little words of encouragement. I was astraddle him, doing this, and when he woke up he looked straight into my T-shirted breasts as if they were a couple of old friends whose names he couldn’t recall.
I got off him and jiggled out of my things.
“Some body,” he said. “Excellent stuff.”
I thought he was talking about something that’s aged in oak casks. I sat cross-legged on the bed. Archie was still on the floor.
“My body isn’t very up to date,” he said. “It’s a forties body. It’s the body of a gawky tail gunner who gets killed while John Hodiak is bringing his crippled B-17 in for a crash landing. You see a close-up of this pilot in his Zero, and he’s grinning as he fires his guns. Then you see me die, with glass flying. Then you see John Hodiak struggling with the controls. Then you see the landing field. You see the tower. You see the faces of men looking into the sky. You see the windswept field. You see the ambulance crews, guys smoking. You see the commanding officer, with binoculars. You see the tower again. You see men looking at the sky, their trousers whipping in the wind. Back home my girl is helping my mom bake a cake, but you don’t see that until after the plane lands.”
“I think your body is interesting. It makes me feel tenderness and pity.”
“It’s my boyishness.”
“Could be,” I said.
“The bell rings. My girl runs out and opens the screen door. It’s a man with a telegram.”
“You’re dead.”
“Cut in half,” he said.
He did some sit-ups and then climbed onto the bed. We embraced. I reached over and turned the three-way soft-white bulb down to thirty watts.
Rain fell on the city.
“I wish we’d done some necking first,” he said.
“We still can.”
“And I would have liked feeling you up. We should have felt each other up.”
“Don’t you need your clothes on to get felt up?”
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “And I’m too sleepy to get dressed.”
With the lights low, and the rain hitting against the windows, and his longish thing probing between my thighs, I felt as romantic and tender and young as someone can feel who has five full years of professional hockey behind her.
2
So my season began. In the dying moments of games, I heard lonely, wounded, human sounds bellowing down from the dimmest heights of arenas, and on the bench I’d glance up over my shoulder and wonder at the stark emotions that lived in the thick smoke up there.
The world of men was a sound in my ears. Men on skates marching over concrete. Sticks tossed into corners. Men muttering matter-of-fact curses. The blast of hot showers. A hundred banging kinds of background noise.
That’s why these memoirs will be quiet, reflective, and thoughtful.
I’ll recount this much about my debut, and it’s mostly stuff you didn’t see on television or read about in the newspapers the next day. After we’d won and I’d played creditably, getting an assist on a goal by Jack Ferguson, helping keep their second-best line basically throttled while I was in there, and drawing warm applause from the big crowd, I’d finished all the interviews and was dressing in the restricted area they’d set aside for me, savoring the first quiet moment of a pretty hectic day, and sort of enjoying the bone-deep fatigue, when a man whose face I recognized but whose name I couldn’t recall right off—an ex-Ranger I played against when we were both in the Central League, stuck his head around the corner and gave me a couple of words of congratulations.
I was more or less naked to the waist, but seeing he was a former player I didn’t especially rush to cover up.
He said, “How come they’ve got you dressing back here?”
“Sanders Meade’s idea.”
“What did he say?”
“It would be disruptive if I dressed with the guys.”
“You’re part of the team.”
“I agree. I dressed with the guys in Springfield and Flint, and nobody fell over dead. I didn’t exactly flaunt myself. I remember showering pretty quickly as a matter of fact. We all showered quick. We were just a bunch of kids and the novelty was probably so startling we were all kind of immune to the great social issues.”
He wa
s studying my upper torso.
“Big-league boobs,” he said.
“What?”
“Just paying a compliment.”
“Okay, but don’t call them that.”
He was a short, chesty guy with white-blond hair, and he was still young, maybe twenty-six. There was something else besides his name I couldn’t recall, some story or rumor or garbled version of something—I’d heard it in Kamloops out in B.C., but I couldn’t remember the exact nature of the thing.
“Remember me from that charity game in Toronto?” he said.
“Sure, you nearly checked me into the gray seats.”
He paused, I thought a bit sadly.
“They gave you my old number.”
“Fourteen. I didn’t realize.”
“A nothing number,” he said.
“That’s what I said. It is a nothing number.”
I was about dressed and waiting for him to say so long.
Instead he said, “Speaking of fourteen, do you know the story of the fourteen scorpions?”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t.”
“An idiot boy was walking in the desert one day and came upon fourteen newborn scorpions moving in single file. The first scorpion says to him, ‘If I sting you, you will be completely paralyzed for three days and three nights.’ The second little scorpion says, ‘If I sting you, your eyes will fall out of your head and your teeth will rot.’ The third scorpion says, ‘If I sting you, your feet will hurt so badly you will spend the rest of your life walking on your hands.’ And so on and so on, all the way to the fourteenth and last scorpion. This scorpion says to the idiot boy, ‘If I sting you, you will live happily ever after.’ Whereupon the boy picks up a stone and crushes the last scorpion to death.”
Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League Page 2