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

by Cleo Birdwell

  Kenny was making moron faces.

  “You’ll also hear occasional references to finger-fucking. This is something boys will talk about when the subject of girls comes up. There’s no avoiding it. It’s best you hear these things first in the home, Cleo, where they don’t have the snarl of the gutter about them. Hearing things at home is the best way to avoid confusion and shock later on.” Puff, puff. “Finger-fucking. Dry-humping. Beating the meat. Lapping cunt. Fucking like a bunny. That’s a golden oldie. Fucking like a bunny.”

  I was mortally stunned.

  “Confucius say: woman who fly plane upside down have crack up.”

  Kenny was giving me bucktooth idiot looks with his eyes bulging out. He started hopping up and down.

  “I don’t know what kind of phraseology they’re using for sixty-nine these days.”

  “I’ll ask Mom,” I managed to say. “Maybe it’s something nautical.”

  My voice was a horrific little squeak. It scared me. I didn’t recognize myself. I could barely get the words out. A pathetic, half-dead whimper. For some reason, it brought a look of wise amusement to my father’s face.

  What did he think we were talking about—ovulation? Something you could study with diagrams and labels? The language of men, when you hear it from your own father, could easily bruise your rib cage, and worse. I was all tensed up, sitting there squinting. I swear I couldn’t move my arms.

  “The language of men lends itself to insult,” he said. “You want to be ready for all sorts of things. ‘Your mother’s cunt. Stick it up your ass. Eat me, I’m a licorice jelly bean.’ You’ll be hearing these and more.”

  “Oh, great,” I squeaked out. “I can hardly wait.”

  He fiddled with his pipe, doing all those familiar, fatherlike, homey things, scraping at the bowl of the pipe, banging the pipe on the arm of the chair, refilling the pipe, relighting the pipe, shaking out the match flame, those reassuring things, as he sat with his knees high and his rear end way down low in the half-buried chair, the pleasant-smelling pipe smoke wafting around his head, our little, hairy, innocent dog curled up at his feet.

  “In nature, creatures without tails tend to have homosexual anxieties. Male creatures, I’m talking about. You’ll hear a lot of soap jokes in the locker room. Soap jokes go back to the ancient Greeks.”

  He told me some soap jokes. I was wishing I had the nerve to bring up the subjects of fellatio and cunnilingus, Georgie Schlagel’s two favorite words, spotted in one of his father’s manuals, with diagrams. We pronounced them flateeo and coonylinkus. I knew how my father would react. Where did you hear those words? I can’t believe a daughter of mine knows words like that.

  But I didn’t have the strength, the nerve, or the moral courage. It was all I could do to breathe in the air that was keeping me alive.

  “Of all the names for the male member, cock and prick still easily dominate. That’s what you’ll be hearing, on and off the ice.”

  Kenny was flapping his arms like a chicken.

  “Might as well be ready, Cleo. You’ll be hearing the same, old, aged-in-the-barrel vintage stuff over and over. A lot of these words have rhyming partners. Prick, dick. Fuck, suck. Tit, shit. Let’s think about it and see if we can come up with some more. Forewarned is forearmed.”

  Mother McCormack is my mother’s mother, in case you’re wondering.

  10

  Everybody knows the winters are getting worse. It is one of those little knowledges of doom we carry around with us. We don’t even bother shrugging when the experts say there are no statistics to support this feeling. It is a feeling. That’s the whole point. We know it in our bones.

  It wasn’t snowing in Detroit, but it was gray and bitterly cold, and the wind had a cutting edge. I went for a walk with our Swedes, Nils and Lars, and they spoke wistfully of Chicago, Buffalo, Lapland, and all that snow. I didn’t take them altogether seriously.

  In my room, I tried to get Shaver on the phone. Finally I called Washington Post and he said as far as he could recall Shaver had not left the building. I asked him to buzz up and see if he got an answer. After a lot of moaning and groaning, he went and did it, and there was no answer. I thought of asking him to go on up there to make absolutely sure there was no sign of a stiff, cold, bluish, blond-haired body with eyes gaping open (that’s how worried I was at this point) or even to sniff at the door for telltale odors, but I know that was a crazy thing to ask, and that he wouldn’t go anyway, and that my imagination was running away with itself, and there was a perfectly reasonable explanation, if only I could figure out what it was.

  Then I thought of Dr. Sidney Glass. I thanked the doorman and called New York City information. Seconds later, I reached the doctor at his office. He did not seem surprised to be hearing from me.

  I said, “Do you know where Shaver is, or how he is, or anything at all?”

  “He’s in a Kramer cube. Where else would he be?”

  “A Kramer cube?”

  “That’s where people sleep. That’s where we sleep them.”

  “You mean Shaver is asleep?”

  “If someone’s in a Kramer cube, you can bet he’s asleep. That’s where we sleep people. There’s nothing else to do in a Kramer. It’s like Tuesday night in East Orange.”

  “And you have already slept him, as you call it? I thought we would have a warning.”

  “A Kramer became available. When this happens, you have to act fast. There are only nineteen Kramers in the world. Nurse went over there this morning. No complications. He got in the cube and I applied the sleep.”

  “How did you apply the sleep, as you call it? Did you give him an injection?”

  “No, no, no, no.” (I imagined Dr. Glass looking amused.) “We use ordinary phone lines. Nurse tucked him in the Kramer and stayed with him while I dialed his number from here in the office. He answered from the cube, received the impulse, and went to sleep. Last month, I slept a woman in New Zealand this way.”

  “Terrific. But what if you’d reached a wrong number? Five months, Doctor. Some poor person is sitting at home doing crewel-work. The phone rings.”

  “No, no, no, no.” (I don’t think he was amused any longer.)

  “Obviously I made sure I was talking to the right person before I activated the Butler box.”

  “What’s the Butler box? The thing that sends the sleep impulse to the brain of the person at the other end of the phone?”

  “Something like that,” he said. (I think I was winning him back.) “In any case, Nurse ought to be changing his air right about now.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear he’s not alone. But why didn’t Nurse answer the phone or the buzzer? I’ve been trying to reach the apartment.”

  “She turns the radio up loud. A little hard of hearing, although she won’t admit it.”

  “Well, how long will she be there?”

  “She’s waiting for you to get home so she can show you the controls.”

  “Doctor, I’m in Detroit.”

  “What an odd thing to say. Your home is here. A Kramer isn’t totally self-sustaining, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “The idea is for a loving family in an American home to play an active role in the patient’s treatment. We find this increases the family’s understanding of the problem and actually improves the patient’s chances of reducing his symptoms.”

  “But I’m in a hotel.”

  “What are you doing in a hotel?”

  “I play hockey. I do that for a living, and because I like it, and sometimes we travel. We play home games and we play road games. When we play road games, we stay in hotels.”

  “Young lady, when I go on television and say that people can be treated successfully in the American home, I don’t mean a drafty, old Victorian house at the edge of town, with a senile grandmother in the turret window and rain drumming on the roof. I’m talking about a place with a loving family and dear, dear
friends. A totally warm and familiar and loving atmosphere. I don’t mean a dingy apartment in the middle of a large, noisy city, with rust rings in the toilet bowl. That’s not the American home I’m talking about.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?”

  “This is most odd. Detroit.”

  “Can’t Nurse stay with him?” I said.

  “She’s not his nurse. She’s my nurse.”

  We talked in circles for a while. His two other phones were ringing, and since we weren’t getting anywhere anyway, I said goodbye and hung up. I was angry, frightened, confused, and worried. When I get this way, I immediately start pacing, and that isn’t easy to do in a small hotel room with a bed and a couple of chairs blocking your path. I was more or less pacing in place, trying desperately to clear my head, to think logically. Some days you go from dumb to smart in seconds. This wasn’t one of those days.

  Half an hour later, with my head buzzing with half-thought-out ideas, solutions, and schemes, and with my feet still moving up and down, I decided the thing to do was act. When you don’t know what to do, do it anyway.

  The game with the Red Wings was the following night. There was a practice in about an hour, and later in the evening I was scheduled to go to a speaking engagement with Toby Scott, who would “introduce” me. I was addressing a group of convicted sex offenders, believe it or not, who were being returned to the world via some Episcopal church basement, and I had no idea what I was supposed to say to them, or why they’d want to listen to a hockey player, or why people like Toby were always asking me to have cookies and soft drinks with murderers, car thieves, flashers, and pimps.

  I called the Swedes’ room and asked whichever one answered—they sounded the same in English—to tell Jeep for me that I couldn’t make practice because of a sudden family crisis.

  I called Toby Scott and told him the same thing. He wanted to know whether it was a religious crisis. I told him I didn’t think the average religious crisis was all that sudden, and that people didn’t ordinarily skip hockey practices and speaking engagements to rush to the side of the stricken person in order to clap hands and sing hallelujah.

  Scratch one practice, one church basement.

  I picked up the phone again and called American, United, Eastern, National, Northeast, and Northwest.

  I found the flight I wanted, put on a coat, and went racing out into the windy street. Found a cab, got to the airport, made my plane, and then sat there taking deep breaths as we soared into the whitish sky.

  It wasn’t until we landed in New York that I realized I had no luggage. Where was my luggage? Then I realized I hadn’t brought any, which was the clever thing to do—no waiting at the baggage carousel.

  I ran outside, jumped in a cab, and gave the man my address. We headed toward the bridges, the tunnels, the rivers.

  “Please hurry,” I told the driver.

  “What is this, what I’m doing?”

  “Okay, but which is the absolutely fastest way?”

  “For your situation, I recommend the Triboro.”

  “They always recommend the Triboro. What’s so time-saving about that big loop out into Long Island Sound? You practically see the white cliffs of Dover.”

  “You’re that hockey woman.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I hate hockey.”

  “Good.”

  “Sure, you’re her.”

  “I’m her.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Good.”

  We reached Manhattan and he was moving slowly along my street, looking for the house number, when I threw some money into his cigar box and leaped out before he had time to come to a stop. I ran into the building and had to wait until Washington Post, in his big, heavy, oversized, gold-braided doorman’s uniform that reached almost to his ankles, asked me who I wanted to see and was I expected.

  I stared deeply into the little oblong face with the sweat droplets over the upper lip, and the short, gray sideburns, and the put-upon eyes that were always ready to retreat into some defensive limbo, some vague, hidden, put-upon place that the eyes of other people could not reach.

  “Birdwell,” I told him. “Seven-D.”

  “Let me announce it. What’s your name?”

  “I’m not visiting Birdwell. I am Birdwell. Cleo. Seven-D. You loaned me your bayonet.”

  “Let me recall.”

  “I moved in. I had cartons. You were nice enough to let me use your bayonet to slit the cartons open. I had no utensils yet.”

  He waved his hand in front of his face, indicating he recalled. He also remembered the nurse, and said she’d just left. I hurried into the elevator, pressed seven, and went on up. I opened the door and headed right for the bedroom, taking off my coat and tossing it at a kitchen chair. Everything was still and quiet. I opened the door. Late sunlight slanted into the room. I struggled to fight off a craving for Ralphies.

  The Kramer looked like something you might employ to keep dinner rolls warm. Only bigger, of course. I thought it would be attached to the bed, or arrayed over the bed, but it was a self-contained unit and it sat alongside the bed. Now that I was within arm’s length of the thing, I began to feel a reverence and awe. I lost some of my long-striding, coat-flinging self-confidence. The thing was just so elaborate and important looking, and hummed with the power of life and death.

  There were multicolored dials set into two exterior panels. Little glassy wires ran through the thin surface of the plastic, cubelike shield that covered Shaver. Inside the cube, on each side of him and even above him, were a number of plastic bottles containing various fluids whose nature I decided not to dwell on. Tubes connected some of these bottles to Shaver’s arms and nose. Other tubes connected bottles to other bottles. In calling these things bottles, I am probably making a grave error. They are probably called interfaced containments, or ICs, or anything but bottles.

  I tiptoed closer. There was a note taped to the side of the Kramer. I checked the signature first. nurse, it read. At a glance, I could tell the note contained instructions. There were headings like Nutriments, Wastements, Bedsore Rotation etc.

  I turned my attention to the patient. He was wearing a pair of striped pajamas. He looked like any sleeping person, only more so. An ordinary bed sheet covered the lower two-thirds of his body. I felt as though I’d entered the four-thousand-year-old tomb of some prophet or king. It was so still in the room, and the sunlight was full of dust, and Shaver’s unconscious body seemed pale and a little deflated. In the waking state, his body had a built-in conceit and self-importance, and even when he was sleeping normally there was something proud and chesty about him. But in the Kramer, all that was gone. He looked overly rested, rested right out of his mind and body, no longer totally himself, and this was just the first day of the program. Whatever that Butler box transmitted to his brain cells, it made one hell of an impact. But I guess that’s what it was supposed to do.

  A longer look at the note alerted me to something Nurse called the cloudy fluid. I decided not to read that section. The last part of the note dwelled on ease of operation and the importance of loving participation by the patient’s family, including things that small children could do to make them feel involved. It appeared that most of the day-to-day tasks were done by the Kramer itself, automatically. A few other things could be done only by human hands, but they seemed simple enough and safe enough. The problem, of course, was that I wouldn’t be there to do them.

  I went down to see the doorman. He was cleaning the glass on the revolving door, and when a small boy entered the building he went right on cleaning, stepping into the turning door and moving in short, hurried, mincing steps, like some little maiden in feudal Japan running errands for a band of samurai.

  I waited for him to emerge. When he did, I gave him a broad outline of the situation in 7D. He walked away from me waving from the hip.

  “It’s just a little adjusting of dials, emptying
of bottles,” I told him. “Anyone can do it.”

  He kept moving across the lobby with me following.

  “I will pay well,” I said.

  His back was almost completely turned and he kept waving me away with little hand gestures from the hip.

  “His air just needs changing now and then. And his cloudy fluid.”

  He had to stop at the wall, but he kept waving from the hip to make me keep my distance.

  “I don’t take no jobs involving secretions from the body.”

  “Well, I’m not completely clear myself on exactly what the cloudy fluid is.”

  “What do you think it is, Missus?”

  “Well, we could speculate, I suppose.”

  “I draw the line at wastage.”

  “We don’t know for certain,” I said. “It could be something from the glands that’s just being stored because he doesn’t need it while he’s asleep.”

  “That’s a desperate remark.”

  “It is desperate, yes. I admit that freely. But in the absence of any clear proof, I think we’re allowed to speculate.”

  “Desperate written all over. Like a blinding light.”

  “I’m not asking much, Mr. Willie, and I will pay very, very well.”

  “You think that make my day? Cloudy fluids?”

  I tried pleading.

  He said, “I’m just here to spin the door so you can move in and out without coming in contact with common building materials.”

  “Minutes a day,” I said.

  He moved along the wall, waving me away.

  “People expect to see me at the door. I can’t go loping through the building changing bottles for some nonleasee. You don’t expect that. I’m supposed to man the door. I’m the doorman.”

  To illustrate this remark, he started heading along the wall toward the revolving door. I tried to get closer to plead my case more convincingly, but he wagged his hand at me.