The Imaginary Girlfriend (14 page)

“Johnny, Johnny,” Coach Seabrooke said. “If the guy's in the military, he calls
everyone
‘sir.'” Incredibly, that hadn't occurred to me. But the damage had been done.

It was the last time I would weigh in. Only a week before the tournament, I'd weighed 138 pounds. At the tournament, I'd weighed 147—in all my clothes. When I weighed myself after Easter dinner, that same spring of ‘76,1 weighed 165 pounds—my “natural” weight. (I weigh 167 pounds today.)

I remember that, 12 days after Brendan won the Class A title at 135 pounds, we were in a gym in Anguilla in the British West Indies. I was riding the stationary bike and Brendan was fooling around with the treadmill, making it go as fast as it could—and then trying to jump on it, and stay on it, while it was running. There were scales in the locker room; before we went for a swim, Brendan stripped down and weighed himself. Only 12 days earlier, I had seen him weigh in at 134V2 pounds—now he weighed 152. That was six years ago. It was only yesterday that I called Brendan in Colorado.

“What do you weigh?” I asked him. (Wrestlers always ask this question.)

There was a pause while Brendan left the phone to weigh himself, and I overheard the O. J. Simpson trial on CNN—all the way from Colorado. (I was phoning from Vermont.) Then Brendan came back to the phone.

“One-fifty-two,” he told me.

(As of this writing, my third son, Everett, who was born in Rutland, Vermont, in October of ‘91, is three-and-a-half years old; he weighs 31 pounds. It is my observation that Everett is tall for his age, and his weight is slightly below average for his height. His hands look large, compared to the rest of him. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say he looks like a future middleweight.)

My involvement with wrestling has been widely misunderstood, even among my friends. John Cheever was a friend to me when we both taught at Iowa; he was a fan of Italian cooking, as I am, and we used to watch Monday Night Football at my house in Iowa City over a dish of pasta. Cheever once wrote a letter to Allan Gurganus in which he said: “John has always struck me as having been saddened by the discovery that to have been captain of the Exeter wrestling team was a fleeting honor.”

Mr. Cheever was terribly correct, and often right about many things: he once warned me that it was a weakness in my writing that I described sexual acts and people consuming food, for these things were best enjoyed when not described; yet he mistook whatever had “saddened” me for the wrestling, the honors of which were never “fleeting” to me. Long after I stopped competing—and after I stopped coaching, too—the discipline remained. (My life in wrestling was one-eighth talent and seven-eighths discipline. I believe that my life as a writer consists of one-eighth talent and seven-eighths discipline, too.)

Nor am I inclined to complain about my wrestling-related surgeries—both knees, my right elbow, my left shoulder. Of the four operations, only the shoulder was major; a detached rotator-cuff tendon is no fun. But even the injuries that led to these surgeries are of lasting (not “fleeting”) honor to me. My first knee (torn cartilage) was injured when I was fooling around with J. Robinson in the workout room at the Meadowlands Arena, during a break between sessions at the 1984 NCAA tournament; my other knee was hyperextended when I was wrestling with one of Brendan's teammates at Vermont Academy in ‘88—a good kid named Joe Black. (Joe was a three-time New England Class A Champion at l60 and 171 pounds.) Sometime between the knee injuries, my elbow was hyperextended at the New York Athletic Club—I was working out with Colin. And my shoulder succumbed, more gradually, to an accumulation of separations and rotator-cuff tears; what finally detached the supraspinatus tendon from the humerus wasn't a wrestling injury at all—rather, I fell off a children's slide with Everett in my arms (he was two), and in an effort to cover him up, and not land on him, I landed on my bad shoulder. Everett, who landed on my chest, was fine. (Had Coach Seabrooke been present to observe the fall, he would have reminded me that my standing side-roll had always been better executed to the right than to the left.)

I have no doubt that I have learned more from wrestling than from Creative Writing classes; good writing means rewriting, and good wrestling is a matter of
redoing
—repetition without cease is obligatory, until the moves become second nature. I have never thought of myself as a “born” writer—anymore than I think of myself as a “natural” athlete, or even a good one. What I am is a good rewriter; I never get anything right the first time—I just know how to revise, and revise.

And for me to continue coaching wrestling, when there was no longer any financial need, was not a strain; coaching was never as time-consuming as teaching. At the prep-school level, where I chiefly coached, wrestling is a seasonal sport; and neither my presence in the gym nor the hours riding on the team bus took anything away from that part of me that was a writer—on the contrary, wrestling was an escape from writing; it was a release—whereas
talking
about writing, as one must to “teach” it, exercised many of the same muscles I needed for my own work.

Another factor, the videocassette recorder, has entered the world of coaching—the coaching of
any
sport. To my knowledge, there is no such handy tool available for Creative Writing classes. For example: my 189-pounder walks dejectedly off the mat, once more a loser, and once again because every time he stands up to escape from the bottom position his elbows are flailing a foot away from his rib cage—therefore, he is easily tight-waisted and thrown to his face. When I would invariably point out to him that even an object as large as his head could have passed through the space left between his elbows and his ribs (during his feeble standup attempt), he would say, “My elbows were tight to my sides, Coach—he just
did
something to them!”

But then would come the next day's film session, where, in front of his snickering teammates, I would show my 189-pounder the footage of his pathetic standup (with his elbows flapping as far from his body as a chicken's clipped wings in mock flight). I would slow-motion it, I would rewind it and slow-motion it again; in later years I could freeze-frame it, too—and that would be the end of arguing with him (until, naturally, he did it again). But I had a backup: the camera made my criticism valid.

There is no such indisputable backup in Creative Writing classes; frequently the student who perpetrates the deeply flawed story is adored and supported by his or her peers. A teacher's triumphs are few. You say: “When the father drops dead with an apple in his mouth while urinating on the front fender of his mother-in-law's car . . . uh, well, I just had trouble
seeing
it.” Whereupon the student breaks into tears and confesses that this actually happened to her own father, in exactly the way she described it; and there then must follow, always unsatisfactorily, the timeless explanation that “real life” must be made to
seem
real—it is not believable solely for the fact that it
happened.
The truth is, the imagination can select more plausible details than those incredible-but-true details that we remember.

This is a tough sell to students rooted in social realism, and young writers without the imagination to move beyond autobiographical fiction—namely, to that host of first novelists who treat a novel as nothing but a thinly masked rendition of their lives up to that point.

Nor are the earliest efforts young writers make to
escape
autobiographical fiction necessarily successful. A student of mine at Iowa—a brilliant fellow, academically; he would go on to earn a Ph.D. in something I can't even pronounce or spell—wrote an accomplished, lucid short story about a dinner party from the point of view of the hostess's fork.

If you think this sounds fascinating, my case is already lost. Indeed, the young writer's fellow students worshiped this story and the young genius who wrote it; they regarded my all-too-apparent indifference to the fork story as an insult not only to the author but to all of them. Ah, to
almost
all of them, for I was saved by a most unlikely and usually most silent member of the class. He was an Indian from Kerala, a devout Christian, and his accent and word order caused him to be treated dismissively—as someone who was struggling with English as a second language, although this was not the case. English was his first language, and he spoke and wrote it very well; the unfamiliarity of his accent and the cadence, even of his written sentences, made the other students regard him lightly.

Into the sea of approval that the fork story was receiving, and while my “but . . .” was repeatedly drowned out by the boisterous air of celebration in the class, the Indian Christian from Kerala said, “Excuse me, but perhaps I would have been moved if I were a fork. Unfortunately, I am merely a human being.”

That day, and perhaps forever after,
he
should have been the teacher and I should have given my complete attention to him. He is not a writer these days, except on the faithful Christmas cards he sends from India, where he is a doctor. Under the usual holiday greetings, and the annual photograph of his increasing family, he writes in a firm, readable hand: “Still merely a human being.”

On my Christmas cards to him, I write: “Not yet a fork.”

(I used to say this to my students in Creative Writing: the wonderful and terrifying thing about the first page of paper that awaits the first sentence of your next book is that this clean piece of paper is completely unimpressed by your reputation, or lack thereof; that blank page has not read your previous work—it is neither comparing you to its favorite among your earlier novels nor is it sneering in memory of your past failures. That is the absolutely exhilarating and totally frightening thing about beginning—I mean each and every new beginning. That is when even the most experienced teacher becomes a student again and again.)

And what about the fork author—where is he today? In Boston, I believe; more pertinent, he's a published novelist—and a good one. I much admired his first novel, and was overall relieved to see that the characters in it were human beings—no cutlery among them.

Alas, these generally pleasant memories should not conceal the fact that I must have played the Nelson Algren role to more than one of my writing students. I'm certain that I've hurt the feelings of young writers who were more serious and gifted than I judged them to be. But just as Mr. Algren didn't harm me by his blunt and (I think) unfair assessment, I doubt that I have harmed any
real
writers; real writers, after all, had better get used to being misunderstood.

When it happens to me, I just remind myself of what Ted Seabrooke told me: “That you're not very talented needn't be the end of it.”

The Imaginary Girlfriend (1995)

AUTHOR'S NOTES

A few pages of this memoir were written as a letter to John Baker, Editorial Director at
Publishers Weekly;
John published parts of my letter to him in an article he wrote for
PW
(June 5, 1995). Portions of my remembrance of Don Hendrie were published in the form of an obituary for Hendrie that I wrote for
The Exeter Bulletin
(Fall 1995). And an excerpt from “The Imaginary Girlfriend” appeared in a fall ‘95 issue of
The New Yorker

I am grateful to Deborah Garrison at
The New Yorker
and to my wife, Janet, for their editorial response to an earlier draft of this autobiography, which was called “Mentors” and (believe it or not) contained fewer than 10 pages about wrestling. Deb and Janet ganged up on me; they said, in effect, “Are you kidding? Where's the wrestling?”

The reason this memoir was written at all is because I had shoulder surgery a week before Christmas, 1994. I was completely unprepared for how many hours a day, and for how many months, I would be rehabilitating my shoulder; I had anticipated an easier recovery. I knew there would be a little bone sawing in the area of the acromion-clavical joint, and I knew I had a torn rotator-cuff tendon; I
didn
^}
t
know that the tendon was detached from the humerus—nor did the surgeon, until he got in there.

With four hours of physical therapy a day, for four months, I didn't feel the time was right for me to begin a new novel, which I'd planned to begin after Christmas; I had about 200 pages of notes for the novel, and a halfway-decent first sentence, but the shoulder rehabilitation was too distracting.

One day in January of ‘95 I was making a nuisance of myself in my wife's office; I was aimlessly bothering Janet and her assistant—poking my nose into the pile of manuscripts that are always waiting to be read in the office of a literary agent. The stitches had only recently been removed from my shoulder and I had just begun the requisite physical therapy; I was still wearing a sling, and I was bored.

Janet doesn't like it when I hang around her office. “Why don't you get out of here?” she said. “Go write a novel.”

Summoning my most self-pitying voice, I said, “I can't write a novel with one arm and four hours a day of rehabilitation.”

“Then go write a memoir, or something,” Janet said. “Just get out of here.”

My goal was to write an autobiography of 100 pages in four months. It took five months, and the finished manuscript was 101 pages—not counting the photographs.

And so the winter of ‘95 was one of recovery (April counts as a winter month in Vermont). I would see the physical therapist first thing in the morning; she would “manipulate” my shoulder and prescribe the stretching exercises and the weight lifting that she wanted me to do in the afternoon. I would write my memoir in the middle of the day; in the late afternoon or early evening I would go to my wrestling room and follow the orders of the physical therapist.