Safety Last
by Robert Nersesian
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
An apartment on Elm Street, Manchester, New Hampshire
Yes, there are windows in 1B, basement level, Chateau D’If. The light peeps across the living room through teensy-weensy louvered windows whose cranks froze long ago. Dawn? Dusk? Wouldn’t matter. It’s the second week of October in New England, and you just wouldn’t want to spare a moment hoping for that climate event that turns Mt. Washington into Bali.
What the afternoon light reveals: an ancient Aubusson carpet ripped clear across its florets and medallions by hands much stronger than yours or mine; a coffee table anointed with dozens, nay hundreds, of rings left by sweating summer tumblers of iced Johnny Walker Black; six Britain’s Napoleonic lead cavalry soldiers on the kitchen counter with broken lances and missing steed heads courtesy of our hero; various salty snacks unknowingly — knowingly? — shared over the week with an assortment of tiny visitors (residents?); two upturned heavy red club chairs; fanned-out, scattered Wednesday editions of The Union Leader perused for the “Our Gourmet” reviews of steak houses and brew pubs; a floor lamp from Target jammed across the width of the apartment’s door like a castle drawbar; ash trays, heavy glass, filled to spillage by a man who has taken up Chesterfields at sixty-two.
Armen Bedoyan, Jr. In his prime. A giant. Glorious in his chins, ragged haircut, mid-life acne. Underwear model extraordinaire. Slurping, choking, rousing himself from an unintentional afternoon nap. Those damn windows. That light. Wondering where he was. Realizing it. Reaching round and round in a wide radius, like the minute hand of a clock gone cuckoo, for a Chesterfield.
The pack secured, stick-lit, Bedoyan muttering to the south wall, “Something about today.”
What was it?
Something.
Huh...
“Tommy Scatback.”
He exhales little smokey rings. Tommy Scatback, this day, in 1982.
* * *
St. Sarkis Armenian Apostolic Church, Douglaston, New York, Spring 1975
“What’s he saying, Pops?”
“Shut up. Listen.”
Let none of the catechumens, none of little faith, and none of the penitents or the unclean draw near to this divine mystery.
“Pops, how do you do that?”
Do what?
“Talk in my head.”
Pops does that every once in a while.
Pops maintains strict hierarchy in the Bedoyan home. Pops tops the food chain. Armen scrounges the bottom. The boy gets dragged, literally, to services. He understands nothing said in the sanctuary. But, after three years of boredom and incense, he has learned to pray.
Right now, sitting in the pew, he’s praying for size. Size means everything.
From twelve on, he’s buried himself in books, sports magazines: anything about shot-putters, weightlifters, and fullbacks, especially fullbacks. These are the respected, the chosen. Failing at the language of liturgy, Armen can worship his own idols: Jim Brown, Jim Taylor, Cookie Gilchrist, Larry Csonka.
Especially Csonka, who can brush off tacklers the way a dandy brushes off lint from his tuxedo. Opponents fear him. Even his own teammates give him a wide berth. That means something.
Armen is five-nine, one hundred forty-five pounds. Not a promising start.
He wants to take the physical for the Douglaston High team. He announces this to Pops later in the week. Pops stares at him, unreadable. Pops has commanded men in the old country, killed enemies, been revered in the diaspora though relegated to the life of a shopkeeper.
The thing is: Pops isn’t Pops. And Armen isn’t Armen. Pops is actually Grandpops, seventy-six years old. Fifty years before, he escaped from the Turks and then the Bolsheviks. He ran for his life with a wife and infant daughter to Jerusalem, to Marseilles, and then to Boston. He rummaged around America, a warrior looking for a decisive battle. Finding none, he opened up a hardware store in Queens and plotted against the Turks from his adopted borough. His wife died. Their daughter one day married the son of a fellow exile. They produced a boy, Alan.
The parents both work. Each day, baby Alan is dropped off with Pops at the store. One day, the daughter is late for pickup. Ten minutes become an hour. No daughter. Pops calls the husband. No answer. Pops takes Alan back to his house and continues calling.
The daughter and husband are gone. Vanished. Swallowed up into the heartland. The NYPD makes a small attempt to find them. Nothing. Gone.
These things happen.
Pops is stuck with baby Alan. A year later, the adoption papers finalized, Alan becomes Armen Bedoyan, Jr.
Over the next fourteen years, the feeling he forever gets from Pops is neither love nor hate. It’s ambivalence. A parched, gamy-tasting neutrality in all things Armen.
No matter what Armen says or does, achieves or fails at, it’s met with a cool gaze from Pops. You could infer anything you desire or don’t from that gaze.
Anyway, when Armen announces his intention at taking the physical, Pops doesn’t respond, as usual. And, as usual, Armen plans and plots. How can he transform into Larry Csonka?
Bill Starr has the answers. He’s the prophet in the wilderness. The author of one of the few books on training for football, “The Strongest Shall Survive.” Starr the Baptizer.
It begins with metal basics. Armen promises Pops to work weekends in the store if Pops will buy him a barbell, plates, and a pull-up bar. He builds himself a bench from scrap plywood so he can do the all-important chest presses.
His menu, a transfiguration special, includes squats, presses, and deadlifts; pull-ups, sit-ups, rows, cleans. Heavy days with hundreds of pounds, light days with dozens of repetitions, three sets, five sets, pulling weight, pushing it, keening, grunting, grinding.
Two weeks into his regimen and no muscle, no weight gain. Back to the scripture of Starr. Pawing through the pages. What has he missed?
“Chapter 7: Diet and Nutrition.” Starr implores Armen to eat more. Lots more. So: Breakfast, three poached eggs with some toast, a bowl of cereal with banana and milk, two hard-boiled eggs, a piece of fruit, more milk mid-morning. Lunch, a couple of sandwiches, fruits, more eggs, and milk.
Mid-afternoon, more fruit, eggs, and milk. Actually, a gallon of milk a day. After lifting or sprinting, a milkshake with yogurt and ice cream. Dinner, a steak, rice, veg. With milk. Before bed, another milkshake.
At first, he upchucks nearly as much as he ingests. But, one week in, his body begins to absorb the calorie avalanche.
By mid-July, he has gained an inch and a half in height and seven pounds. Not flab.
Two more weeks. Another half inch. Ten more pounds.
* * *
Douglaston High School, August 10, 1975
The growth spurt continues. He takes and passes the team physical. He reports for his first school football practice in the late August heat and humidity. Six foot, one hundred seventy-six pounds.
To start, he must pay tribute to Coach Colangelo in his office. Colangelo hates the freshman at first sight.
“You ever played organized football before?”
“No.”
“You in our summer practices?”
“No.”
Despite his new muscles, the kid seems soft, unfocused. His eyes, like a lamb’s, wander around the room while Colangelo interrogates him.
“Are you a dork?” Colangelo wants to know.
“Uh.”
“A dork. You a dork? You know what a dork is?”
“Uh, no.”
“I think you’re a dork. A dork is a future football star. I’ll let you practice with the team, but you let the others know you’re a dork. They’ll appreciate it.”
Armen does as instructed and wonders why his new teammates think this is so hilarious.
Colangelo puts Armen on the bottom of the roster. He’s assigned the position any new dork merits: right tackle, the place where he can do the least damage to the team. If he misses a block and a defensive end blows past him, at least the quarterback can see it and perhaps avoid the tackler.
Comes the Oklahoma Drill, Armen’s audition as third-string tackle. The quickest, cruelest way of seeing whether a kid has a scintilla of talent. Two players, a blocker and a tackler, line up against each other in a corridor bounded by blocking bags. A third kid is the runner, lined up behind the blocker. A whistle blows. The runner runs. The two opponents go at each other until one hits the dirt, the ball carrier is tackled, or he runs out of bounds. Three seconds, triumph for one, humiliation for the other.
He observes a couple of sets of players go at it. It’s frightening. The sounds of crushing car fenders. Desperation. One animal putting down another.
The dawning: I don’t know how to play football.
The panic: Think! Think! What? TV. What have I seen on TV?
He thinks about the last game he watched. Giants against Redskins. Blocking technique. Watching the front line. Something about... Huh. A wedge. Wedge my head and shoulders underneath the guy’s pads. Stay on him.
The rest of the team forms a circle around the three to watch. Armen, fright-flight-dizzy, faces a senior defensive end named Lloyd. Lloyd is six-five, two hundred twenty, looks bigger. The running back is another senior, Beluso. Beluso lines up behind Armen.
Lower your hips into the stance. Wedge... wedge...
In the sliver of time between Colangelo yelling, “Set!” and blowing his whistle, Armen hears the giggles of anticipation from the circle around them. Realizing the coach hated him. Hating himself for trusting the man. Leave? Stay?
Tweet! Go! Elbows in tight. Helmet into his chest, then rise up. Drive with your legs. No separation. No separation. No...
Lloyd is on the ground. Flattened. Armen splays over him, unsure, wondering what’s next. Belusso scampers past, untouched.
Tweet!
Colangelo: “Do it again.”
Explode. Don’t let him slide off. Use his momentum to bring him down.
Tweet!
Now, no giggling from the pack.
“Do it again.”
Armen drives Lloyd backwards. However, Lloyd creates enough space between them to, perhaps, tackle Beluso. Armen remembers a picture of a crack-back block from one of his books. He launches himself full body across Lloyd’s knees, hears him cry out as Beluso’s feet skip along in a cloud of dust.
Colangelo keeps the drill going, replaces the whimpering Lloyd with another bruiser, Garson.
Coach wants to break me.
Garson becomes Colangelo for Armen. Each time the whistle blows, Armen explodes with more fury, uses Garson as a plush toy. Give me more guys.
The Oklahoma Drill is designed to cull the herd. Armen wants to destroy the herd and Colangelo. He gives the coach his best baleful stare.
Colangelo takes the hint. Tweet!
“Okay, dork. Take a rest.”
“No. Wanna run.”
“You hear me? Take a rest.”
“I wanna run the ball.”
“You’re not a runner!”
Armen doesn’t move, doesn’t get out of the way for the next pair of players to do the drill.
“Get on the sideline.”
Nope.
The team, already deep into the drama of the new super freshman, watches this set-piece. Rebellion against the adults. Always good fare.
“Okay, dork. Ya wanna run? Here’s the ball. D’Allesandro and Higgins, you’re defense on this one. Harold, you’re the blocker. New dork wants to run!”
The two defenders are the team’s alpha linebackers. The wolfpack leaders. Harold is a quiet second-string center who can’t afford contact lenses, often misses his blocks.
Armen tucks the football into himself tight. Very tight. He tries to remember how Csonka does it. Nothing’s coming to him.
D’Allesandro and Higgins are whispering to each other, plotting. Higgins chuckles.
“Ready!”
They want me.
“Set!”
Grind them. Hurt them. Kill them.
Tweet!
Armen pushes off his left foot and churns. Between that and first contact, he watches the linebackers’ intentions. They easily brush aside Harold. They’re quick but Armen’s eyes and reflexes are quicker. He sees what’s coming. D’Allesandro is going for his torso, Higgins the knees in the hope of cracking one of them.
Armen’s shoulder pads crash into D’Allesandro’s. D’Allesandro pancakes to the turf. Higgins launches himself at Armen’s left knee, helmet-first to strike the patella.
Armen jukes so that his angle deflects Higgins’ helmet and throws off his grasp. His legs drive as Higgins struggles to hang on to his right ankle. Armen keeps moving. Higgins resembles a hooked marlin reeled up and down. He surrenders, rolls, empty-handed, onto the grass.
Tweet!
Armen keeps running.
Tweet!
Keeps running. Twenty yards, fifty yards, across the field to the goal line.
Tweet! Tweet! “You dumb dork! Stop when I blow the whistle!”
But Armen can’t hear this from the other end of the field. He trots back to the quiet horde.
Colangelo shouts, “Again!”
For the next fifteen minutes, various sets of tacklers try to bring Armen down. They can’t. He’s inexhaustible. Colangelo can’t believe what he’s seeing: the gift he’s been waiting for in twelve miserable years as a coach. Is the kid for real?
Maybe not. Armen collapses after the twelfth consecutive drill. Unconscious. Spread-eagled. It must be the heat, Colangelo thinks. They don’t do water breaks at Douglaston.
* * *
Copyright © 2024 by Robert Nersesian
