Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League

by Cleo Birdwell

  A phone call from Shaver Stevens, who do you wuv? Sweet but dumb.

  An unsigned, handwritten note, i am waiting in your room. come to me now, my darling.

  First I get these long-drawn-out soulful looks from Jeep. Now these bits and pieces from four other men. What’s going on here? Am I letting things get out of control? Are these men starting to back up on me?

  In the elevator, I tried to figure it out.

  Maybe I was purposely complicating things. It was a way to survive the road. I wanted to balance all the make-believe with complicated human contact. Touch, feel, see, hear, speak. Mostly touch and feel, I admit.

  Or was life on the road the true complication, the true life? Maybe these brief, grasping, captured moments, these reckless encounters in the night—maybe they were unreal, the stuff of webby dreams, lacking texture and graininess.

  (Either way, it is possible thematic material, at least for now.)

  I got out of the elevator, went down the corridor, put the key in the lock, opened the door, and who do I see in his broad-sashed, wide-sleeved kimono with matching sandals, looking like a dehydrated sumo wrestler, but Sanders Meade, reading a copy of Time.

  “Who let you in here? This is my room. The short, gnarled man let you in? That little jerk, I’ll kill him.”

  “Anything for a price, Cleo. This is Chicago. Stormy, husky, brawling. You know that.”

  “Sanders, what are you doing here?”

  “Well, I tried to get to Buffalo bright and early yesterday. An incredible saga of human endurance. I started by flying to Montreal. Conditions being what they were, the only way to get from there to western New York was to take a train to Toronto—our city, Cleo—and hop a bus or something to Buffalo.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Well, to make a long story short, I got to Chicago an hour ago via Butte, Montana.”

  “I’m tired. Shut up. Who cares?”

  “On Air Montana,” he said.

  “I play hockey, Sanders.”

  “Missed Buffalo completely.”

  “Who cares? Shut up, you jerk.”

  “Cleo, we need to thrash things out. Sit down, get comfortable, I’ll call room service. I haven’t eaten in ten hours. Air Montana hands out Chiclets.”

  “Well, you’d better start licking the excess sugar off your teeth because you’re not eating dinner in this room, or breakfast either.”

  “You look tired and drawn,” he said. “You have no color.”

  “I have white. I’m a white person.”

  “Wait now, hear me out. I know what you’re going to say. You’re a hockey player. Good enough. I understand that. And it’s hard. A hard game. In a sense, we’re all hockey players. We’re on the road all the time. We all play hockey in a very real sense. And it’s hard. The pressure is intense. Sit down, Cleo. Hear me out. Let me speak my piece.”

  “I’m so tired.”

  “We’re all tired. We’re a bunch of tired hockey players. I know how rough the game can be. And you’re the only woman. I understand that and I empathize with it. It’s hard. I know it’s hard. Being a woman is damn hard. I know how hard it is to be a man, so I think I’m in a unique position to appreciate how hard it is to be a woman.”

  I decided to stop letting my fatigue get to me, irritate me. I threw my coat down, sat in the chair at the right side of the bed, and gave Sanders a look of genuine, unaffected sincerity. He was sitting in a chair at the left side of the bed.

  “I’d really like to get some rest,” I said. “That’s simple enough, isn’t it? That’s a fair request. That’s plain, that’s fair, that’s simple.”

  “We’d all like to get some rest,” he said. “I’ve been traveling steadily for almost two full days. I don’t think I’ve had an hour and a half of sleep in all that time. I’m tired, you’re tired. But we have to go on.”

  “Why do we have to go on?”

  “Because that’s life, that’s existence. We can’t just fold up and collapse. I’ve been living on Chiclets and warm water. But I’m here. I’m ready to talk. I said I’d be here and I’m here.”

  “You didn’t say you’d be here. You said you’d be in Buffalo.”

  “Buffalo is wherever you are, Cleo. From now on, that’s Buffalo to me. There are still ten or eleven days to this road trip. It’s all Buffalo as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You don’t plan to follow me, Sanders, I hope?”

  “I’ll do whatever I have to do. I’ll go on. People go on. I’m like a homing missile searching out a heat source.”

  “That makes me a tail pipe, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s always been physical between us, Cleo. We both know it. We have a thing for each other. We may as well try to understand that and accept it.”

  He got out of the chair and began crawling across the bed toward me. I could see down into his kimono to his navel and beyond. He had an earnest, half-determined look on his face.

  “Nothing’s been the same since Toronto,” he said. “Our lives are indelibly changed. It would be great if this thing between us were more than physical. It would help us put our animalness in perspective. But we have no choice. It’s there. I feel it, you feel it.”

  “You feel it,” I said.

  “I feel it, you feel it.”

  “I don’t feel it, Sanders. You feel it.”

  “That wonderful urgency. We ran for the elevator. Remember how we ran, Cleo? That sense of Now, oh god, now.”

  He reached out and put one hand on each arm of my chair. His upper body was right above me, balancing. His knees and lower body were still on the bed.

  “I feel it now,” he whispered. “I’m so ready. I’m here. I’m now.”

  “I’m not now. I’m then. What else can I say?”

  “But I sense it. People sense these things. We’re both ready. I feel it. The air is crackling with it.”

  His face was right above mine, inches away.

  “I felt something once upon a time. Something fleeting. I don’t feel it now.”

  “Try.”

  “It’s not an uncommon situation between a man and a woman. Someone feels it, someone doesn’t. People just work it out. It happens all the time. People work it out.”

  “How do they work it out?”

  “Someone leaves,” I said. “One of the parties gets up and leaves.”

  “Cleo, our lives are woven together, whether we like it or not. We have a thing. That’s the message of Toronto.”

  “One of the parties stays in her room. The other party gets dressed and leaves.”

  “Try harder,” he said. “I’m not getting a clear picture of someone really trying. There must be some erotic stuff you do, mentally, to get in the mood. Would it help if I turned on the radio?”

  “Sanders, you can’t recapture that fleeting moment we had. Be sensible. That was a different place, a different time.”

  “Granted, this is a different place. Bareheaded, shoveling, wrecking. Toolmaker, stacker of wheat, half-naked, sweating. But do you realize what it took for me to get here? It’s like a Norse saga. Wild dogs attacked my cab on Wacker Drive.”

  His nose was in my hair.

  I could look right down his kimono. His erection was so earnest and pronounced I thought it might cause his kimono sash to come untied.

  He was taking big whiffs of my hair.

  Then his face was in front of me and he was kissing me—a big, quivering, thrusting kiss. I kept my eyes open. I knew as long as I kept my eyes open, I’d remain objective. I’d also stay awake.

  He was wriggling closer and putting so much passionate body English into this kiss that the bed was moving with him, inching across the floor toward my chair. To do that, a man would have to be exerting tremendous pressure with his knees, digging in fantastically. This may be a testimonial to the energies that sex can unleash in a person.

  He kept pressing in on me, maintaining the kiss while a
t the same time beginning to change from a kneeling or crawling position to a sort of push-up stance, his hands still balancing on the arms of my chair, his body at an incline, his whole face practically in my mouth.

  I reached up with my right hand and grabbed the hair at the back of his head and just jerked the whole mass of hair, skull, and flesh back out of my face. It was like pulling a toy arrow with a rubber suction cup off a wall.

  It made a noise that sounded like Platt, Utah, although I don’t know if there is such a place.

  He looked at me a little dazed and panting. He had the stupefied look of an adolescent who’s been kissing his girlfriend for four and a half hours on the living room sofa, and someone turns on the lights. It’s like emerging after nine months on a nuclear sub. Any kind of daylight’s too strong.

  I was wondering if I’d waited too long. The man had a pretty good head of steam up. He may have felt he’d come too far to be turned back. His hands were still on the chair arms, supporting most of his weight, and his feet were on the bed. His hands and toes were the only parts of him in contact with solid objects. He was sort of in mid-push-up, in other words, and the strain was beginning to show in his face, and I was wondering if he felt that the awkwardness and embarrassment of disengaging himself from this position between the bed and the chair was even more costly than the risk of going on ahead, of letting his animal momentum carry him toward the brink, with the chance that I’d really get mad, that I’d call hotel security, that the press would find out, that Hughes Tool would leave him in “Boulder, Colorado” forever—or that I’d submit.

  It wasn’t impossible, mathematically. Hopping into bed with a fellow is sometimes heads I do, tails I don’t. It just depends.

  Our faces were six inches apart.

  “Despite everything you say and do, Cleo, I’m pretty convinced we want each other. I do sense something. The air is heavy with it. Sexuality, chemistry, electricity, particle physics—whatever you want to call it.”

  He started coming in again, moving the bed with him. It was incredible. Just his toes were touching the bed, and he was able to pull it with him, quarter inch by quarter inch, making little screechy noises, closer and closer to the chair I was in.

  He maintained the push-up stance. Our noses were almost touching.

  “Being a man, I understand the roots of your deep fatigue,” he said. “You’re a woman who lives among men. You’re always on display. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s subtle, but you’re always at center stage, Cleo, always in the smoky lights, never allowed to just fade into the background. It’s hard for you to be yourself, just blend in and be yourself. People expect certain things from you. After a while, your reactions become programmed. You begin to drift away from the real center of yourself, the core, the person you really are.”

  “Sometimes that does happen,” I said, not intending to put such sadness and vulnerability into my voice.

  “Of course it happens. It happens to you, it happens to me. In a very real sense, we’re all women. We all live among men. We all lose sight of the persons we really are. We’re all women. We all play hockey. We’re all tired. We’re very tired.”

  We looked at each other. I was trying to feel it. I didn’t feel it, but I was trying, I was making an effort.

  Sanders seemed to realize that for the first time all night, I was doing a little wavering. He lunged for another kiss. I heard the bed screech along the floor. His arms were so tired from maintaining the push-up stance that they started trembling with muscle spasms. My whole chair was shaking as a result. It made for a physically dangerous kiss. But Sanders wasn’t about to let anything stop him at this point, not muscle spasms, a broken nose, the media, or Hughes Tool.

  My lids were growing heavy. When the bed hit my knees, I realized we’d been kissing for quite some time and also that Sanders was practically in my lap, most of him anyway.

  Was I beginning to feel it?

  Still interlocked with me in this windswept, teen-age kiss, Sanders began backing onto the bed, taking me with him, little by little, first by seizing onto my lip with his teeth, and then, once he had one hand on the bed, for balance, by pulling on my shirt front with his other hand.

  I ended up stooped over the bed, my body wedged between the chair arms. Sanders started climbing into the kiss, enabling me to straighten up a little ways. Finally, he was on his knees on the bed and I was more or less standing erect, my shoulders hunched over, and my head lowered, and my arms at my sides, in a sort of limp finale.

  Sanders broke off the kiss and crawled backward on the bed, quite, quite fast, and then undid the kimono sash and whipped the whole garment right off his body in what you’d have to call an impressively fluid motion. It was almost as though he’d been in rehearsal for this gesture in four out-of-town locales before bringing it in to Chicago.

  Well, there he was and there it was. I guess I didn’t need a word-picture. The way these events usually work, it was my turn to disrobe. Sanders sat cross-legged on the bed, watching me, his hands on his knees, his stiff thing aimed up out of the middle of him. He looked like Swami Ramaputra doing the Wheel of Supreme Bliss.

  I got my shirt off, but being wedged and trapped as I was between the bed and the chair, with the chair lodged against the wall, I couldn’t get my pants past my hips. Sanders sprang backward onto the floor and then scrambled around to the foot of the bed and lifted it off the floor and sort of swiveled it a foot or so in a northeasterly direction, or whatever, so that I was able to get on with the disrobing.

  He stood in a semicrouch, watching. Being able to survive that push-up business was making him feel athletic, I guess, and I half expected him to do some sit-ups holding a floor lamp behind his neck.

  I was down to my red flannel long Johns.

  “While you’re up and about,” I said, “maybe you ought to check to be sure I locked the door.”

  He padded over there, sort of swinging his arms tribally. The man was ready. No doubt about it. He was primed for some all-out displays of prowess. If he’d thought of oiling his body beforehand, he could have gone into a series of body-builder poses, grappling with his own limbs, flexing his body as if to prevent warping or cracking.

  “Check for tape on the door,” I said. “Maybe somebody’s hired some ex-Watergate burglars to come in and bug the room.”

  Harmless little joke.

  Slowly, Sanders turned away from the door. He had a strange, crooked look on his face. He stood hunched over, erect, looking at me.

  “What did you say?”

  It was a profound whisper. I didn’t know what to make of it. There was an element of tremendous, hoarse drama in his voice.

  “I said check for tape. Just a joke, Sanders. What gives?”

  “What else? You said more.”

  “I said somebody might be trying to bug us. Not very funny, but it’s about two in the morning. You can’t expect a monologue that has them wetting their pants.”

  “No, no, more, more. You said more.”

  I stood there in my long Johns. His voice had the desperate, whispered urgency of some doomed character in a Gothic horror tale.

  “More?”

  “You said more, Cleo.”

  “Watergate. I said Watergate. Is that it? I’m trying my best to remember. It was just something I tossed out. I never expected an oral exam.”

  He stroked his jaw, nodding slowly.

  “I knew something would happen,” he said. “All through the kiss, I was worried about something like this. It never fails, does it? I was so ready. It was just too good to be true. It had to happen.”

  “What are you talking about? What did I say?”

  “You know what you said.”

  “What? Watergate?”

  “There it is. See? She said it again.”

  We watched his penis de-erect. It was like a flag-lowering ceremony. All we needed was a sunset and a blast from a yacht club cannon.
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  “Sanders, what’s going on here? What did I do? I don’t understand.”

  “What did she do, she says.”

  “What did I do?”

  “What did she do?”

  “I said Watergate. What’s that?”

  “See? There it is.”

  “Watergate, Watergate. So what?”

  He shuffled over to the bed and put his kimono back on. He sat with his back to me, turning his head to speak over his shoulder.

  “Why not bring in Vietnam?” he said. “Why not go all the way? Why stop at Watergate?”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Were you that sure Watergate would be enough? Am I so transparent? Or were you holding Vietnam as your trump card? If Watergate doesn’t get him, Vietnam will. Am I that easy to handle, Cleo? God help us both if I am.”

  “Sanders, will you explain what you’re talking about?”

  “She doesn’t get it,” he said. “She wants me to explain.”

  “Yes, damn it, and fast.”

  He took a deep, audible breath and his shoulders sagged. His voice sounded terrifically hoarse. It was a possessed, haunted sound.

  “Cleo, what do you think was stalking the male American psyche all through the seventies if not the twin specters of Vietnam and Watergate? The eighties don’t promise much relief. It’s still there, stalking, haunting. It’s caused untold damage.”

  “What kind of damage?” I said.

  “The deepest.”

  “Watergate?”

  “Vietnam, Watergate, Iran.”

  “Iran?”

  “Late seventies. Iran. It carries us over into the eighties.”

  “Sanders, are you telling me that just because I said the word Watergate, you’re not going to be able to function?”

  “She doesn’t seem to understand,” he said.

  “You’re telling me it’s that deep? The damage is that powerful and far-reaching?”

  He turned his head to speak. Either he couldn’t look me in the face or he was shutting me out. It was strange having a conversation with the back of someone’s head and I was glad to see him swivel a little when it was his turn to speak. It gave him a sort of hooded aspect, his chin tucked in under the left shoulder as he whispered hoarsely into his armpit, the barely visible lone eye darting a hurt look my way.