Read Online Teacher by Mark Edmundson - Free Book Online Page A

was good at everything; I, at nothing. Rourke, I surmised, believed that you either were born top-flight or should do the world a favor and cut from the nearest bridge.
    I went at football with a novitiate’s devotion. The coaches told us that before practice we were to do a set of exercises with an absurd device called an Exer-Genie, an isometric contraption that must have cost a good five dollars on the open market. The drill was excruciating, and though almost everyone else ignored the machines, I did double the amount. I never dogged it on the field. I filled every minute there, in accord with the Kipling poem that someone had posted on our bulletin board, with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. In fact, I worshiped that poem, “If,” with its muscular, colonialist faith (and I was being groomed as a lower-echelon colonialist, wasn’t I? For beyond the stadium walls there was Vietnam, and all the other American adventures abroad that were to come). I threw myself into every drill like a fiend hopping into the fire, hoping to ascend another degree of flaming rectitude.
    I never did the one thing that would have made all the difference. I never contrived to go out and get myself some contact lenses or some sports glasses. No, I simply stowed my everyday glasses in my locker—they wouldn’t fit under the helmet—and went out to practice. So I stayed nearly stone-blind. But other than that, I was close to transformed over time. From a disoriented, buttery boy in mid-August I had become, by late November, a pretty solid, pretty reckless head banger. Rourke, my devilment, had taught me a technique for flipping my forearm and sending the blocker coming at me spinning, and I practiced this one motion more than a dancer does her pas de deux. I can do it fluently still. (Come at me; come on!) Step with the left, flip with the right; step right, flip left, with no trace of wasted motion, as though your forearms are the moving bumpers on a pinball machine. If you can move your forearm fast enough, you can make a sound like a bass drum in a cathedral inside your opponent’s helmet. Other players saw what I could do and began to duck me when we lined up to scrimmage.
    One day, Mace Johnson presiding, Rourke attendant priest, we lined up for tackling drills. Two large blue tackling dummies, smelling of sweat and sawdust, are placed five yards apart. In the middle is an offensive lineman; back behind him, a ballcarrier. Nose-up to the blocking lineman, crouched in his stance, football’s Zen meditative position, is a defender, with forearms poised if he’s a linebacker or an end, down, in three points, if he’s a tackle.
    I step into the defensive slot, get my forearms—seal flippers, they look like in their thick, laundry-scented pads—into place. In front of me, blocking, is Tommy Sullivan, a nice, nice kid, my year, a junior, who plays a lot in the games, at linebacker and at guard. (“You ain’t never never gonna play,” says Rourke aloud, of me, while the team is watching my filmed self blitz the quarterback at the behest of J. T. Tedesco, senior, thus leaving my slot open over the middle and getting us burned for a touchdown pass in a scrimmage with Salem.) Tom is a freckle-faced kid with a great shock of Woody Woodpecker–red hair.
    Behind him is Frank Ball—built, in Medford parlance, like a brick shithouse. Ball is actually a cowardly lion, a Baby Huey. He is a rich kid (by Medford standards); his father owns a used-car dealership. He is also a handsome one—in the off season, he wears a carefully tended mustache.
    I can tolerate Frank Ball; Tom, I like a lot. But right now I am filled with a rage that simply pours through me like fast-rushing water; I can hear it move. For on the human map, and on the Homeric map of football, I am simply an unequivocal nothing, a flunky in school, of less than no account socially, with no money, no connections; I’ve got zip and zip-minus listed in every account book