CHAPTER 13

Sometimes, late at night, the “natives would get restless”—as John Gordy would say, and in the dormitory the hijinks would begin. It was a way of letting off energy not consumed by the day’s practice. The mode changed from year to year. It was water pistols one year. My year it was fright masks. And it was rare that the players missed a chance at a practical joke.

I had been warned to expect juvenile behavior. A friend of mine had come to see me before I left for Detroit.

“The jocks—that Army barracks, locker-room mentality, peabrained—the stupidity of ballplayers,” he had said. “Overgrown brats.”

He had played a few years with the Washington Redskins, but it was his Boston College career he kept recalling. There, the athletes were bedded down in their own dormitory, which the students called the Playpen. In the evenings after practice, when the rest of the campus was settling down to its books, a curious ritual went on in the Playpen—done half in jest, though there was something mock serious about it, as if the athletes, being segregated on the campus, felt compelled to play up their reputation of thickheadedness.

What sort of thing went on? I had asked him. Well, this one fellow, every night, ran the hundred-yard dash lying on his back in his bed, everyone sitting around, and then someone would say, “On your mark, get set, go,” and the fellow would pump his legs, really straining, the bed hopping underneath him, the springs squeaking, and after ten seconds or so of this someone would say “Time!” and he’d stop, chest heaving, and he’d pant, “Did I make it?” The players would shake their heads and make clucking sounds, inspecting their watches, and he’d be told, “Sorry, John, you haven’t done it—you haven’t broken ten seconds. You did it in twelve point two. Maybe tomorrow,” they’d tell him.

Afterward, the spelling bee would begin—except they did not spell words, they spelled sounds. Someone would say, “How do you spell Yeeeeaugh!!!” letting out a piercing scream, and the players would sit on the edge of their cots, nibbling at their thumbnails, and think about it. Or someone would say, “How do you spell…?” and he would vibrate his tongue rapidly in a Bronx cheer. Down the line of cots a tackle’s brow would furrow. “A toughie,” he would say. “W…?”

“Come on, now,” I said. “Surely, that was done in fun.” I told him that at the Coffee House, a New York club which is a favorite lunching spot for staff writers on The New Yorker magazine, often these worthies sit around and play similar games. “Animal sounds in different languages—that’s what they’re up to,” I said. “One of the staff will come rushing in and he’ll shut everybody up sitting around the big round table there by announcing that ‘bow-wow-wow’ in Polish is such and such, or ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ in Japanese is such and such. Then someone at the table, very blasé, will cork him up by revealing what the Hindus say for ‘quack-quack-quack.’ There’s no fooling around—no easy ones. I mean if you said that the French say mimi for ‘miaow’ or the Germans wau wau for ‘bow-wow-wow,’ you’d get short shrift.”

“Well, there you are,” my friend said. “What those staffers are doing is something quite special—I mean that requires erudition.”

“Seems to me even a New Yorker writer might stumble trying to spell a Bronx cheer,” I said lamely.

“You know the joke, don’t you?”

“What joke?”

“The coach says: ‘Shape up. That guy in the line is outhitting you.’ So the player says: ‘Don’t worry, coach. After I hit him a few more shots, he’ll be as stupid as I am.’”

“Oh, that one,” I said.

My friend kept at it—assuring me that the general mental equipment of a professional football player was pea-sized, that I’d find no erudition around a training camp. He could not have been treated well at Washington. He kept pressing the point, and he called me when I got back from Detroit.

“Whatja think?”

“About what?”

He told me, and I remembered. It was his first question, even before an inquiry as to the state of my health, whether or not I’d survived without breaking something.

“Well, you were wrong,” I said.

“A bunch of Einsteins? Come ahn!”

“The four years of college rub off. The average intelligence has got to be higher—certainly higher than in baseball. It’s a crazy question anyway. You can’t general…”

“So what do they do in the evening. Read books?”

“No,” I said truthfully.

I hadn’t seen any books around the camp, and I never saw anyone writing a letter, nor, afterward, did I ever receive a letter from one of the Lions just wanting to stay in touch. Communication was done by phone.

“It’s an aural society—no different from the rest of the country,” I said. “It has nothing to do with intelligence.”

“So what do they do?”

“Cards. Music. Talk. Damn good talk. Better talk than I’ve heard in places where it’s supposed to be good.”

“And there was no infantilism?”

“What the hell happened to you in Washington?” I asked.

I didn’t tell him about the big men scampering down the corridors with water pistols and fright masks… off on pranks. Nor did I disclose my own involvement, that I’d look out into the corridor in the evening at Cranbrook and see the task forces going by. “What’s up?” I’d call. “Want any help?”

They’d motion me to be quiet, and they’d fix me up with a fright mask and we’d tiptoe down the hall.

Detroit, as might be expected, had long had a reputation for the prank and the excessive gesture. Jim Hardy, who backed up Bobby Layne at quarterback, once told me that to announce his arrival for the training season (the management had persuaded him to come out of retirement and he was arriving a week late) he not only hired a small private plane and buzzed the practice field, but he dumped a couple of hundred jockstraps, dyed kelly green, out on the players below.

He told me, “The pilot looked over and saw me cramming these things out the window. He said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ I was having a devil of a time stuffing those things out. You couldn’t get the window open much. ‘Jockstraps,’ I told him. ‘Green jockstraps.’

“We had to make about twenty runs on the field to get them all out. The pilot was fractured by it. He kept saying, ‘Well, if you gotta, you gotta,’ and he saw it through until we didn’t have a green jock left in the plane. They were all over the landscape, let me tell you, up in trees, on roofs, and they turned up for months—you know, a guy’d be walking his date along the lane, and he’d see this thing hanging on a bush, and he’d say, y’know, very sudden-like, ‘For Chrissake, there’s a green…’ The wives, that year the wives of the Lions wore those jockstraps to the game on Sunday, no, not wearing ’em like men, for Chrissakes, but as headdresses, armlets, scarves, crap like that, like wearing favors it was—I mean those girls used such imagination you couldn’t tell looking that what they was wearing was green jockstraps, for Chrissakes.…”

When I was at Detroit, the pranks were on a lesser scale. The most elaborate practical-joke apparatus belonged to Friday Macklem. He kept it in his equipment room. It was a wire enclosure with a wooden box at one end which had a round entrance, like a woodpecker’s hole, and Friday called it his “mongoose box.” He’d tell you that there was a mongoose in there, back in his house, and sometimes at the round entrance just his nose would appear, because he was shy. Friday would tell you all this, tapping at the cage to get the mongoose to show himself, and when you got right down, face right up to the wire mesh, trying to peer in the round hole to see the mongoose’s nose, Friday would press a spring, the top of the box would fly off, and a pelt of fur would leap up, unleashed by some sort of catapult, extraordinarily lifelike. The victim would beat around the room for a while, starting and leaping, until he could see he had been duped by a weighted piece of mangy foxtail.

Friday worked the thing very satisfactorily on me, a group of players standing around watching, trying to keep their faces solemn as I got my face up close to the enclosure.

Friday had made the whole contraption himself and he had a good time with it, even making money with it, renting it to the trainer of the Detroit Tiger baseball organization. It gave him pleasure to recall the reactions of some of his victims. Joe Schmidt had been his prize. Somehow the fake mongoose had sprung up and attached itself to Schmidt, caught on him somehow, as if it had sunk its teeth into his suit, and Schmidt spun around, whacking at the pelt, and yelling. “For a big man,” Friday said, “he had great moves in here that day.”

Roger Brown had been another fine victim. He had crashed around after the mongoose sailed at him, and he swept the equipment off the length of a workbench. Jokes of this sort were always dangerous, since a sizable victim, which all the Lions were, properly terrorized, could decimate a room, particularly a dormitory cubicle, simply by thrashing around.

Most of the props used for enjoyments of this sort were far less elaborate than Friday’s mongoose box—someone might have a whoopee cushion, or a fright mask, or a rubber snake to coil and put on a bed, or perhaps there would be a sudden spate of cap pistols. There was always improvising with what was at hand—such as the pleasure that a frog found hopping around the quadrangle fountain could afford. One of these was put under an ashtray in front of Roger Brown at an eight-o’clock meeting in the classroom one night, and it moved when Roger did not have his eye on it, but he heard the scraping sound of something across the tabletop just in front of him, and he stared, until finally the ashtray moved again, convulsively, and he let out a great yell just as Aldo Forte was asking if there were any questions or comments about a play he had diagrammed on the blackboard.

“Any questions?”

“Man, what’s going on?” Brown called out, his voice high and alarmed, as he scraped back his chair.

Forte was just as startled, assuming that Brown’s anguished shout was directed at his diagram, and he gave a quick glance back at the blackboard to see what he had done wrong.

The year before, Alex Karras had a frog set under his ashtray at an eight-o’clock meeting, and when it moved his eyes grew very nearly as large as his spectacles—it was recounted—his chair went over behind him, and with a yell he bolted from the room, playacting probably, being a great clown with a fine sense of timing, his yell coming just at the moment when Forte, as might be expected, was turning from a diagram, waving his dead cigar, quite as usual, and asking for questions or comments.

“Any questions?”

Karras’s shout went up, making everyone jump and turn in time to see him rip out past the fountain, career around a corner, his legs pumping hard, and disappear.

“What’s going on?” Aldo called out. “What’s wrong with Alex?” He looked out at his players.

“Maybe he had to go to the can,” someone said.

Karras was the favorite victim of practical jokes that year, because his reaction was invariably very pronounced, playacting or not, which gave great satisfaction to the perpetrators. Dick LeBeau was another attractive victim, primarily because of an abstracted air which made it possible for the jokesters to work around him, setting up their props, without his being aware. LeBeau was from Ohio, with a pronounced Midwestern twang, nasal and slow, which made the songs he put to his guitar quite incomprehensible, though fetching: gentle songs full of melancholy and poverty, one supposed, and love unrequited. He himself had a lady-killer reputation. Thin-hipped, built like a high-school basketball player, his hair worn longer than most of the others’, he was called Ricky, less a diminutive of Richard than derived from a crop of teenage movie stars and singers of the time, all of that name, whose manner and attitude he seemed to cultivate. At the Gay Haven he was a great dancer with the twist variations of that summer—the frog, the bird, the slop. He danced with an aloofness close to disdain, which made the girl moving opposite him, invariably pretty, work very hard, though in the manner of those dances he never looked at her, staring out to one side, then the other, then over the girl’s head, self-absorbed, the motion of his body stiff yet graceful, and always controlled.

In the evening in the dormitory he would murmur at his guitar, or lie in his bed like someone sunbathing on a beach, eyes half shut, humming, and in his mind’s eye—one always assumed—an acreage of girls. At such times, with his concentration elsewhere, the pranksters would work close to him, like a matador to the controlled bull, and a hotfoot would be bestowed, or perhaps his shoelaces tied together, or a rubber snake coiled up on the floor beside his bed. The favorite prank was to terrify him with a fright mask—suddenly jumping at him, or leering over his bed, which made him squawk and rise off the bed as if doing a levitation stunt. Often the fright mask would be used very late at night, the wearer carrying a candle and making moaning sounds as he crept into LeBeau’s room, and though it was done to him a number of times it was not something one could get used to easily, and his yell would reverberate in the corridors.

The fright masks were made of thin, pliable rubber, grotesquely featured, which fitted entirely over the wearer’s head down to the neck, with small slits to see out of—vampire heads, some of them, Frankenstein’s monster, and others, and chilling to see suddenly from around a corner. The most effective one I saw belonged to Joe Schmidt, which was a dark gray mummy’s face, creased like an elephant’s foot, with a long white tooth that hung out from the lower lip and flapped. He kept it on the shelf in his clothing alcove. John Gordy borrowed it one night to “fright” LeBeau. His idea was to slide into LeBeau’s clothing alcove among his suits, and wait there until LeBeau finally bestirred himself to prepare for bed—coming to the clothing alcove for his toilet kit, which he kept up on a wooden shelf there, at which point the mummy’s face would jut out from between his jackets, and from within Gordy would deliver his patented “mummy’s scream”—which he demonstrated to me once, and which I heard with respect.

Outside LeBeau’s room he slipped on the mask, and when he peered in he saw LeBeau on his back, looking up at the ceiling above his head. The light was on. The clothing alcove was just next to the door, and Gordy took two soft steps into the room and began to back into the alcove, working his way back among the clothes, crouched, so as not to jostle the coat hangers. Suddenly, behind him, deep in the alcove, he heard the sounds of someone breathing; he felt a hand brush against his neck, then he heard a muffled shout, and Gordy let out a yowl which was not his patented “mummy’s scream,” but one of his own bona fide terror, and he bolted from the alcove with a houndstooth jacket of LeBeau’s caught across his shoulders.

I have forgotten who was in the alcove behind him—Pat Studstill, I think, who had crept in there earlier with the same intent as Gordy (they had talked about such a caper a few nights earlier in the dining room), wearing a U-Fright Mask Company Special, which was a pale vampire mask with two red fangs hanging down from either side of the mouth. He had slipped this on, and got himself into the alcove without LeBeau’s being aware, and he waited in back of the clothing, listening to LeBeau’s humming. His plan was to fly out when LeBeau came to the alcove, calling, “Hi, Ricky, baby!” like a moonstruck teenage girl, and fling his arms around him. It was hot under the mask, and he was getting impatient, when the dim light in the alcove suddenly faded, cut by the dark bulk of something moving stealthily in to join him, which was, of course, though he didn’t know, Gordy backing up. He took a look to see, assuming it was LeBeau, and there was just enough light to see the back of Gordy’s fright mask, which was very nearly as awful a thing to see as the front, a fearful expanse of wrinkles, a bas-relief map of mountain country in the shape of a head, an old woman’s knee moving toward him, and Studstill took a startled whack at it, sucking in his breath involuntarily as he did so, which brought the rubber of his own mask back into his mouth and made him strangle and cough. That was the muffled shout Gordy heard—at which he had bolted.

As for LeBeau, he heard the wild commotion, and he started up in bed to see a first figure erupt from his alcove, just a glimpse of a mummy’s face floating by above his houndstooth jacket, then a second figure emerge, arms flailing, bent almost double, with a white face mask severely puckered in at the center, the whole mask, as it happened, flowing into Studstill’s mouth—it looked like a decomposing skull—and some clothes went out with him too, a few pairs of slacks, and these LeBeau recovered from the corridor, which was deserted when he looked out, except for his jacket and a few other articles of clothing lying in discarded heaps.

All of this came out later. It took a long time to piece together what had happened.

The night before the Pontiac scrimmage, they tried to work the fright mask on me. It was late, but I was wide-awake, staring up through the darkness, thinking about the game the next night, and I heard the giggling and the whispering outside my door. I watched the door open and the candle come in, with the fright mask looming above it—it was Joe Schmidt’s mummy face at work again, with him inside it—and I could look past and see Terry Barr and the others behind, all grinning, peering forward to see what would happen. It did not work at all. From inside his mask Schmidt could see me grinning at him, and he swore lustily.

“Poor moves out there,” I said, using football terminology. “You sounded like a herd of cattle.”

It was very often like that—the perpetrators giving themselves away by breaking down and giggling behind their masks. But there was thought to be one player on the Detroit team who was very serious about such activity—a near-pathological case. He was called the Mad Creeper.

No one was quite sure who the Mad Creeper was, but he was talked about, and it was thought to be only a matter of time before he went on the prowl. His habit was to creep along the corridors late at night, three or four in the morning, sneak into someone’s room, lean over his bed, and throttle him hard and briefly, just closing his hands around the fellow’s throat and then skittering off down the corridor, listening to the gasping behind him. He always worked alone. No one had ever seen him, and he probably did not wear a mask. Almost everyone thought Brettschneider, “the Badger,” was the Mad Creeper, and, though he denied it, there was strong evidence to support the theory: the Badger had originally played for the Cardinal football organization, where the Mad Creeper had first appeared, so famous for his night forays there that every team in the National Football League had heard of him. When the Badger was traded to Detroit, the throttlings ceased in St. Louis. True, there had not been a Mad Creeper attack at Cranbrook, but the feeling was that it would come—that the Badger had simply been intimidated by the heavy traffic of fright-mask people in the corridors at night. The experience of Gordy in LeBeau’s clothing alcove was not lost on him.

One evening, sitting around in someone’s room—talking about the Mad Creeper—someone said to me, wondering what my attitude was toward these hijinks, “You must take us for a bunch of nuts… that we’ve gone… well, ape.”

“Well, no,” I said honestly. “I was studying for a while at Cambridge, in England, where this sort of thing went on all the time—and that place is one of the great… er… seats of learning.”

They wanted to hear about it.

“Well, the sport of frightening people at night there, at least at my college—King’s College—was called ‘Hoovering,’” I began, “after the Hoover vacuum cleaner, which was the essential piece of equipment. These vacuum cleaners were stored in broom closets. Very late, at three in the morning, an expedition of students, great scholars among them, mind you, future Parliamentarians, barristers, would set out and swipe one of them—preferably with a big circular floor polisher attached. The thing to do was hustle this thing back to the room, stand it up, and maybe test it out, just to be sure it worked. The Hoover gives off a fine groan, the way cleaners do, and if it had the floor polisher attached, this would turn and move the cleaner across the floor—eerily.”

I demonstrated, moving my hands around vaguely, and they all nodded.

“Well, the idea of Hoovering was that you’d sneak this thing into someone’s room, in the dark, and… well… set it going… scare the hell out of the fellow in bed”—the effect sounded miserably tame—“but the fun of it,” I continued gamely, “was in the preparation—deciding whom to Hoover, and getting the equipment, and testing it, and then the reconnaissance into the fellow’s room, because you had to turn the lightbulbs loose in their sockets so when you plugged in the Hoover’s extension cord and threw the main light switch the lights would stay out. Sometimes, when you reached for a lamp in the dark, doing everything by touch, hearing the fellow breathing in his bed, you’d find the bulb still warm—which meant that he’d only just turned it out. After that, the Hoover’d be carried in, very quietly, plugged in, and everyone would back out of the room, the last one out throwing the light switch and shutting the door. Inside, the lights wouldn’t go on, being disconnected, but the Hoover would, starting up with that eerie moan and all, the black bag puffing out, and the circular polishing brush would revolve, hauling the machine around after it, you see, so that the poor fellow in bed’d wake up and hear the moan and see the bulk of the thing moving, knocking against the furniture, and he’d reach frantically for the lights, which wouldn’t go on, of course, and very often he’d leap up and bolt for the door. Peering around a corner, you’d see him stumble out into the corridor wild-haired—which was, well, that was the ultimate in Hoovering, to see the fellow stumble out into the corridor wild-haired like that. Most of the time, of course, that wouldn’t happen. You’d hear the Hoover going, then it would stop, the door would open, and the Hoover’d be tossed out, landing with a crash on the stone flagging, the black bag collapsed, and the handle off at some crazy angle.

“Sometimes the fellow inside’d lean out into the corridor and shout: ‘Christopher Cory, for God’s sake act your years!’ Cory was a very large fellow who’d been to Eton and he thought about Hoovering a lot of the time—he had a special outfit he wore, all black, even black gym shoes so he couldn’t be spotted in the dark of a victim’s room. He came to my room one night, very excited, and he said a small group of choirboys had arrived for tryouts with the King’s College Choir, one of the best in the country, and they were bedded down in college somewhere. Well, we went up there that night with the others and did it, and I remember that particular expedition because we set this Hoover going in one room—occupied; you could see the shape of the choirboy under the blanket—but this time it was different: the Hoover kept on groaning away, it wasn’t turned off, and you could hear the polishing disc fetch it up against things, and the crash of a glass ashtray, and the clank of a big wastepaper basket going over. We waited out in the corridor, nervously, because we couldn’t reckon what was going on in there, and finally Cory went in and got the machine out. He said that as best he could tell the choirboy had pulled the bedclothes up over his head, and Cory, telling the story later, used to say that when the boy appeared for his audition the next morning and opened up his mouth to sing, nothing came out of his throat at all.”

“Perhaps the sound of a Hoover,” said one of the players. They had listened respectfully.

One of them said, “I like the idea of feeling for the lightbulbs and finding them still warm.”

I felt, though, they were of the opinion that sneaking vacuum cleaners around was pretty small potatoes—that is compared to the Mad Creeper on the prowl, or Joe Schmidt in his fright mask—and of course they would be right.

Talking about this got everybody restless, and later two or three of us went to Joe Schmidt’s room to borrow his mask. He was eager to use it himself. He had been reading a paper, but he put it aside and got the mask off his shelf and put it on. “Let’s give it to Friday Macklem,” he said.

The face really looked awful on him.

“Quick and simple,” he said.

“That could kill him,” I said.

“Friday is indestructible,” he said.

We went up the stairs to the second floor and down the dormitory hall toward an end room. I had been in there earlier that day. Friday had a bottle of Scotch in the back of his bureau drawer, and he had taken it out and offered me a drink. I did not feel very comfortable standing outside his door watching Schmidt set his mask and turn the doorknob. He was gone quite a while. Then we heard a yelp, and Schmidt came out, walking quite slowly, as if he were sure whoever was in there would not be coming after him.

We went down the corridor.

“Friday wasn’t in,” Schmidt told us. “But his assistant, that kid Jerry Collins, was in the next room. So I gave it to him. It was beautiful.”