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Well, you should have heard Larry and Elaine--and all the others.
"Macho Man," Larry called me, for a while.
"You're telling me everyone's friendly to you--is that right, Billy?" Elaine asked. "This was just a cordial kind of head-butt, huh?"
But--the teasing from those friends in my writing world notwithstanding--I was learning a little more wrestling. I was getting a lot better at the duck-under, too.
"The one-move man," Arthur had called me, in my earliest days in that wrestling room--but, as time went on, I picked up a few other moves. It must have been boring for the real wrestlers to have me as a workout partner, but they didn't complain.
To my surprise, three or four of the old-timers gave me some pointers. (Maybe they appreciated my staying out of the sauna.) There was a fair number of wrestlers in their forties--a few in their fifties, tough old fellas. There were kids right out of college; there were some Olympic hopefuls and former Olympians. There were Russians who'd defected (one Cuban, too); there were many Eastern Europeans, but only two Iranians. There were Greco-Roman guys and freestyle guys, and strictly folkstyle guys--the latter were most in evidence among the kids and the old-timers.
Ed showed me how a cross-leg pull could set up my duck-under; Wolfie taught me an arm-drag series; Sonny showed me the Russian arm-tie and a nasty low-single. I wrote to Coach Hoyt about my progress. Herm and I both knew that I would never become a wrestler--not in my late thirties--but, as for learning to protect myself, I was learning. And I liked the 7 P.M. wrestling routine in my life.
"You're becoming a gladiator!" Larry had said; for once, he wasn't teasing me.
Even Elaine withheld her near-constant fears. "Your body is different, Billy--you know that, don't you? I'm not saying you're one of those gym rats who are doing it for cosmetic reasons--I know you have other reasons--but you are starting to look a little scary," Elaine said.
I knew I wasn't "scary"--not to anyone. But, as the old decade ended and the eighties began, I was aware of the passing of some ancient, ingrained fears and apprehensions.
Mind you: New York was not a safe city in the eighties; at least it was nowhere near as "safe" as it's become. But I, personally, felt safer--or more secure about who I was--than I'd ever felt before. I'd even begun to think of Miss Frost's fears for me as groundless, or else she'd lived in Vermont too long; maybe she'd been right to fear for my safety in Vermont, but not in New York.
There were times when I didn't really feel like going to wrestling practice at the NYAC, but Arthur and many others had gone out of their way to make me feel welcome there. I didn't want to disappoint them, yet--increasingly--I was thinking: What do you need to defend yourself for? Whom do you need to defend yourself from?
There was an effort under way to make me an official member of the New York Athletic Club; I can barely remember the process now, but it was very involved and it took a long time.
"A lifetime membership is the way to go--you don't imagine yourself moving away from New York, do you, Billy?" Arthur had asked; he was sponsoring my membership. It would be a stretch to say I was a famous novelist, but--with a fourth book about to be published--I was at least a well-known one.
Nor did the money matter. Grandpa Harry was excited that I was "keepin' up the wrestlin' "--my guess is that Herm Hoyt had talked to him. Harry said he would happily pay the fee for my lifetime membership.
"Don't put yourself out, Arthur--no more than you already have," I told him. "The club has been good for me, but I wouldn't want you alienating people or losing friends over me."
"You're a shoo-in, Billy," Arthur told me. "It's no big deal being gay."
"I'm bi--" I started to say.
"I mean bi--it's no big deal, Billy," Arthur said. "It's not like it was."
"No, I guess it isn't," I said, or so it seemed--as 1980 was soon to become 1981.
How one decade could slide unnoticed into another was a mystery to me, though this period of time was marked by the death of Nils Borkman--and Mrs. Borkman's subsequent suicide.
"They were both suicides, Bill," Grandpa Harry had whispered to me over the phone--as if his phone were being tapped.
Nils was eighty-eight--soon to be eighty-nine, had he lived till 1981. It was the regular firearm season for deer--this was shortly before Christmas, 1980--and Nils had blown off the back of his head with a .30-30 carbine while he was transversing the Favorite River Academy athletic fields on his cross-country skis. The students had already gone home for Christmas vacation, and Nils had called his old adversary Chuck Beebe--the game warden who was opposed to Nils and Grandpa Harry making deerhunting a biathlon event.
"Poachers, Chuck! I have with my own eyes seen them--on the Favorite River athletic fields. I am, as we speak, off to hunt down them!" Nils had urgently shouted into the phone.
"What? Whoa!" Chuck had shouted back. "There's poachers in deer season--what are they usin', machine guns or somethin'? Nils?" the game warden had inquired. But Nils had hung up the phone. When Chuck found the body, it appeared that the rifle had been fired while Nils was withdrawing the weapon--from behind himself. Chuck was willing to call the shooting an accident, because he'd long believed
that the way Nils and Grandpa Harry hunted deer was dangerous.
Nils had known perfectly well what he was doing. He normally hunted deer with a .30-06. The lighter .30-30 carbine was what Grandpa Harry called a "varmint gun." (Harry hunted deer with it; he said deer were varmints.) The carbine had a shorter barrel; Harry knew that it was easier for Nils to shoot himself in the back of the head with the .30-30.
"But why would Nils shoot himself?" I'd asked Grandpa Harry.
"Well, Bill--Nils was Norwegian," Grandpa Harry had begun; it took several minutes for Harry to remember that he'd not told me Nils had been diagnosed with an inoperable cancer.
"Oh."
