CHAPTER 11

The first squad cuts were made on the sixth day of practice. Lucien Reeberg survived. The coaches had a last look during the morning scrimmage, and then they called the players over they had to let go. One of them was Dick McMacken, a big 265-pound tackle from Huron College, who lived nearby, I guess, because two or three of his family came to see him scrimmage that lovely Saturday morning—an older man, his father perhaps, and a girl holding a youngster. I noticed them because I saw them come down to the field together with McMacken. The girl, his wife presumably, sat under a tree up on a knoll a distance from the playing field so their little daughter could roam without getting trampled by the spectators watching the practice. The older man stood on the sidelines. After the practice Aldo Forte motioned the tackle over, the two of them standing alone while the rest of the squad trooped up toward the pines and the gymnasium beyond. The father edged along the sidelines. For a second or so, he might have been pleased that a coach had singled out his son for a complimentary word or so. But a slump in McMacken’s stature suggested that he was being let go. His head was down. Forte was talking to him earnestly. They shook hands at the end, and McMacken turned slowly for the gym. The girl joined him, their child roaming on ahead, switching a little stick at the grass, and the older man came quickly across, and they walked up together. They were trying to comfort him. The girl, who seemed very small beside him, leaned her head briefly against the biceps of his arm, and the older man whacked him on the rump.

I walked up to the gym with Don Doll. I asked him what would happen to a player like McMacken on being let go. He told me that Detroit tries to help them. Calls are made around the country to try to place them. The coaches were recommending McMacken for a semipro team where he could make fifty dollars a night and get himself in better shape than when he arrived. Then it would be up to him. That was his trouble. He had arrived out of shape, and was weakened trying to get his weight down, and thus was pushed around. Doll, who thinks a lot about physical fitness and whose weight hasn’t changed a quarter of a pound in ten years, perhaps more, said that he just couldn’t understand. “The guy has the whole spring to get ready, and into the summer, and he knows when he gets here he’s going to be playing for all the marbles. So what happens. He gets here and begins what he should have begun back in June.”

“What do they say when you tell them you’ve got no place for them?”

“They worry about the future,” Doll said. “Where they’re going to go, what they’re going to do. They put a lot of stake in sticking with this club. Then the bottom drops out.”

He looked after McMacken with the lovely girl in close to him. “He just cheated himself, that’s all.” Doll’s voice was tight and furious, and I had the sense that he was about to kick the ground in frustration. “Why the heck didn’t he come set to do a job? Then his girl wouldn’t be saying to him, ‘Don’t worry, honey, everything’s going to be all right, don’t worry, honey.’… Why it makes you just sick, that’s all.”

He seemed much angrier than McMacken up ahead.

We walked along silently for a while—by the pond that was very low and still as metal, with dragonflies resting in clusters on the blue-green water-lily pads, and through the pines up by the tennis courts, and finally Doll said that the hardest thing in coaching was to let players go. It was easier in the beginning of the training season when they could be let go for obvious reasons—lack of physical equipment, or attitude—but when the season got under way and two or three good men had to be cut to get the squad down to the thirty-seven-man limit, that was when the profession of coaching was for the birds. Doll said that in his day the awful process was referred to as “the Turk”—he supposed in reference to the cut of a Turkish scimitar. “‘The night of the Turk,’ that was what we called it,” he said. “The Turk is coming. Nowadays,” he went on, “the rookies refer to it as the ‘Squeaky Shoes’—‘the Squeaky Shoes are coming down the hall, tonight, men.’”

Doll said that when he and the Hawk would come down the dormitory corridor and look in a rookie’s room, just offhandedly, the rookie would rise up off the bed as if an electric charge had gone off.

“You’ll be seeing some of them,” Doll said, “nights of the Squeaky Shoes.”

When I got back to the dormitory I discovered that Dean Look had been let go. I was sorry to see him go. I had got to know him at the rookie table at meals (he had warned me not to drink milk: “… Cuts down your wind,” he had said), and we had played some cards—bridge—with Milt Plum and Tommy Watkins. An articulate, quick-witted athlete, he already had a considerable career of barnstorming behind him—great years as a halfback at Michigan State, two years as a bonus player in the Chicago White Sox baseball organization, and then, shifting back to football, a year with the New York Titans of the American Football League. He used to tell me about life with the Titans—the team I almost played for. It had been nothing but bickering on the practice field, he said, mostly because the plays, both offensive and defensive, were improvised right on the spot, just as they might be in a Central Park touch football game. “You go here, and you cut over here, and the rest of you guys go deep in case no one’s open and I’ll throw the hell out of it”—it was that sort of thing.

Look had played quarterback for them and, hit on the blind side in a game against Denver, he suffered a concussion and a fractured vertebra. He was trying to return as a defensive cornerman. He had cleared out his room and left within an hour of shaking hands with George Wilson.

The days of the squad cuts made everyone uncomfortable—the empty beds and the missing faces—and I felt it strongly. The effect of insecurity was stronger on my fellow rookies, of course, who had so much at stake. But I felt it during those early days, after the first squad cuts, when after the afternoon practice there was nothing to do, and we sloped around, yawning with nervousness, trying to occupy ourselves as best we could. Everyone tried to keep his mind off the future. One found things to do. At the end of each dormitory corridor were the school bulletin boards. Lists and announcements from the preceding school year were still tacked up there—laundry-collecting schedules, regulations, a list of boys allowed by parental permission to smoke. One could stare at the bulletin board for a long time. That helped the tedium. One of the names on the smoking lists was Abdulhadi Al-Awadhi. I wondered about him—a young follower of the Moslem faith, presumably, which frowns on smoking—and about his courage, perhaps his first act of emancipation, involved in writing across the ocean to his parents for permission: “Dear Mom, I have started to smoke cigarettes. Just one or two a day, but I like to, and all the other kids do it, and I wondered…” And then, of course, to speculate on how the parents received this grave request, their conferring about it, and what sort of permission they wrote the school. Did they wonder about the morality at Cranbrook? Often I would see a rookie standing in front of one of those bulletin boards, and when I would pass in the corridor he might half turn and nod weakly, but more likely he would move in closer, working up his own thoughts about those dated and dog-eared announcements. You could keep your mind occupied wondering about such things.

The rookies had a common room down at the end of their wing with paneled walls, one of them decorated with gloomy prints of the cathedrals at Strasbourg and Anvers. A portable television was set up in there on a table, the thin metal ears at an angle, the sound usually turned on as soon as the practice was over, echoing down the corridor, though often when I dropped in, just lazying about, the picture had gone awry with no one at hand to adjust it. Sometimes I’d find a card game going on, but usually the place was deserted. Not much to do in there. College catalogues lay in piles on the tables, and also the Cranbrook catalogue, which began: “Turning boys into men is not done overnight.”

There was a small library—an encyclopedia, a collection of O. Henry, Owen Wister’s The Virginian, an edition of Charles Dickens, a number of books on gardening, Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, with a note on the title page, “See page 263,” which turned out to be the salacious part, very rococo and old-fashioned to reread, Ullman’s The White Tower, and a book on the cocktail hour by Bernard De Voto. On the flyleaf of the Owen Wister book someone had scrawled, “Look on page 64.” I looked, and was instructed to turn back to page 38, and from there was prompted on to page 120, then back to page 40, and I went on faithfully, knowing what was coming, and it finally did with a notation on the last page of the series: “Ha ha sucker!” I looked around for a pencil, going back to my room for one, finally, just ambling along, and when I got back with it I rubbed out the notation and referred the reader to page 263 of the Hervey Allen book. I took my time about it, writing the numbers down carefully and checking with the Anthony Adverse page to make sure it was right—doing this without any sense of wile or prank, somberly and lethargically, and when I’d done I put the books back on their shelf, and stood looking at the print of the Anvers cathedral, done in sepia-brown sunlight.

Then, perhaps, a yawn would begin to collect—arching up along the throat muscles, working at the nostril wings, flaring them, and the mouth would go ajar, enormously, and the yawn would arrive audibly—I don’t ever remember yawning as much, or hearing yawns as noisily delivered as one heard along the corridors of Cranbrook, particularly in the rookie wing. The veterans did a lot of belching over in their quarters—smartly delivered exhalations which seemed to indicate contentedness, and comfort, a good meal down, and not much to worry about. The yawns and the strange lethargy on the other side had nothing to do with boredom or fatigue, but were from the nerves, and the newness and uncertainty of the situation.

In the evening after classes it helped to walk in the school grounds—alone invariably, just moseying around, down by the swimming lake, which had a string of round colored floats across it, and pine trees along the shore, dark and still under them, with the smell of pine tar worked out by the day’s sun. I went down there and stared into the brown water, trying to remember the Harvard football song so I could sing it properly when called on in the dining hall.

Through the blue obscurity

Was that it? Something on that order?

Dum-dum-dum-dum-de-de-de-dum

I sang to myself by the lake border, straining to remember, walking stiff-legged, eyes squinted half shut as if effort itself might bring the lyrics to mind. Curious bits of other college songs I had not thought of in a long time suddenly offered themselves—just snatches of them. One of them was a Yale song which came abruptly to mind—just a line or two of it, remembered, I suppose, because it was so odd:

Oh Yale was begun back in sev’nteen one

By a gift of books weighing nigh a ton.

There were other places than the lake to wander in the school grounds—perhaps up to the art museum and the gaunt Carl Milles statues, tall, stick-like women standing around a fountain that was cool to walk around, a faint mist coming off it, and under the surface ripple you could see the glint of coins visitors had tossed in. There were the basement windows of the biology laboratories to look through—an airplane model hung from the ceiling, high stools around the benches, the Bunsen burners, a miniature skeletal model of a dinosaur off in a corner, and big beakers, quite unarranged, as if the students at the last bell of the spring session had rushed out leaving everything as it was. One window in that same building, which was too high above the ground to look into, faced out from a one-room apartment where a school superintendent had lived. Friday Macklem told me about him. He was from Scotland originally, and he drank, and when the school dismissed him he let himself into the swimming lake and floated up, drowned, among the colored floats. His face appeared at the window (the youngest Cranbrook students were told) from time to time, and at night he was supposed to sail across the lawns, down past the pines, and settle in the lake, where he sat on the bottom, in the weeds, looking up toward the surface. The lawns were suitable for phantoms, being very broad, with nighthawks tilting busily above them, and they were artfully decorated with occasional heavy boulders, Stonehenge-sized, trucked in and set about with great care—so that certain aspects of the grounds, with the night coming on, seemed parts of ancient ruins sinking into the groomed lawns. The Episcopal bishops wandered about, some wearing cassocks, always in pairs, conversing very earnestly, heads down, so they seemed to be watching their feet move them aimlessly across the grass. The dormitory lights came on, and we would start in, the bishops in pairs, the rookies singly.

When night came it was the worst. There was nothing much to do except try to sleep. From their beds the rookies could hear a guitar going over in the veterans’ wing, an occasional laugh, the hum from some distant room where players lounged around telling stories—sounds drifting down the corridors bringing the lonesomeness to them as they stared into the close darkness of those cubicle-sized rooms, turning then, restless, the springs of the boys’ beds complaining under their weight. I wasn’t in their wing, but they told me about it. Lucien Reeberg, who before had slept easily, was having his troubles sleeping, and he said that his roommate, Jake Greer, the spindly end, tumbled around in his sleep, talking a fit, a long leg flopping off the bed, and when his toes fetched up against the hard linoleum of the floor he started up with a little yell, and a moan, and Reeberg would call out, “Hey, cool it, man!” Reeberg said that at times Greer sounded like a couple of people moving around on a haystack, stamping in it, but then he reckoned he thrashed himself around some too, and weighing over three hundred pounds he probably outdid his roommate. I asked Greer one morning, and he shifted his toothpick slightly, revolving it, and then he giggled slightly, shy as he was about any question, and suddenly, with a rush of words, he said it wasn’t Reeberg so much as his bed and its springs. “Ma’, he got a bed… well, ma’, you throwed a comic? a shoe? you drop anything, much less three hundred po’, on that bed and ma’ she stand up an’ scream.”

Much later, with the guitars stopped and the veterans turned in, many of the rookies were still awake. For Frank Imperiale, in the daylight hours trying for a defensive end position, it was often two or three o’clock before he could get to sleep. He’d lie and listen to the hands of big clocks in the corridors click forward every minute, audibly, which I’d noticed too, like post-office boxes clicking shut, and he’d count from one click to the next, trying to match them to the count of sixty. He got expert at it, murmuring his numbers in the darkness. There were variations he could switch to. His room was next to the latrine, which had a row of urinals which flushed automatically, every fifty-three or eighty-three seconds, I forget which, and Imperiale would count the seconds off to whichever it was, and when he got there a low moan of machinery would rise from next door and culminate in a harsh flush of water, the machinery would shudder slightly, and sigh, and things would quiet down in there.

Mainly Imperiale kept at his numbers to keep his mind off football and worrying whether he’d made the team, and to bore himself to sleep, but every once in a while his mind’s eye would fill with a vision, always the same—an enormous phantom lineman opposite him on the line of scrimmage, down in his crouch, the hard eyes staring out from the cage of his helmet, the heavy coil of his body behind. When Imperiale launched himself at the figure he did so with such an effort to establish contact, muscles straining, that in his bed he suddenly felt pounds lighter, not far from levitating himself completely, sailing up off the bed stiff as an ironing board, and then with a gasp he’d collapse back, the sweat beginning to work out and prickle his skin. He’d blink his eyes open and shut to remove the image. His phantasmal opponent in these mental illusions, despite his tough appearance, was always decimated, run through, but launching all that power without the actual shock of physical contact was so frustrating that Imperiale far preferred concentrating on the groaning of water pipes and the sounds of clock mechanisms. But sooner or later the lineman would appear, the outlines of him gathering in the darkness. The nights were hard for the new men.