By Henry Wasserman © 2004
“Nice game last night,” boomed a voice from behind the lockers as John pushed the double doors open.
“Thanks Ced. You too,” said John, falling into the normal Sunday conversation with Cedric Jones, the only other player who consistently showed up on Sunday to get therapy. “Big Ced” was a monster of a man, a star defensive lineman who the pro scouts lost interest in after he blew out his knee his senior year in college.
“How’s the knee?” asked John, marveling at the breadth of Ced’s shoulders as the big man reached for his knee brace. “Sore as usual, but it felt good last night.”
“Yeah, you were killin’ em,” mumbled John, jealous of the big man’s natural ability: “4 sacks would feel pretty good to me too.”
“Yeah, well, you know I hate this game. Just tryin’ to make a living. If I had your education my black ass would be on Wall Street. See ya in there,” Ced said, knees cracking as he walked toward the trainer’s office. Ced grew up in the projects in Bridgeport, and the only real education he ever received was on the football field. He hated running, hated the way the coaches treated him. Most of all he hated God for delivering the knee injury that took away the million dollar contract promised him by the scouts. John avoided blocking him in practice at all times, as Big Ced took out his hatred on anyone who got in his way. John saved his body for gameday—he’d be long gone if he went full steam every practice. He wondered if Ced was right, if football was a kid’s game, and felt a tinge of guilt for his Ivy league education.
He left his wondering in the locker room, and padded in socked feet to the trainer’s room, wearing only a towel and the team issued too-tight shorts. The new trainer was female, and had insisted that the players wear shorts at all times. It was mildly annoying to get out of the whirlpool with wet shorts, but her rule had held up after she refused to treat anyone who came in without wearing them. She was young and pretty, and in her first week, mysterious groin injuries had stricken half the team. But she knew how to control them, and when the players realized she wasn’t amused, their injuries healed as quickly as they’d been created. Earning respect from that bunch of clowns wasn’t easy, and John admired her toughness.
“Nice game last night John,” Deborah drawled as she hooked the electrodes up to Ced’s knee.
“Thanks Debbie. I couldn’t have done it without ya.”
“I told you that Debbie isn’t allowed. That’s a name for girls with big hair and husbands.”
“Sorry Deb. I’ll take the usual, and if you got time to check out my neck, that would be nice.”
“No problem.”
John unfolded the paper and scanned through the headlines on the front page. Priests abusing children, Feds to cut taxes… the bold print blended together and screamed “BAD NEWS”. He hated the news, as it trivialized his life and always made him wonder if the world was as bad a place as the front page said it was. He made one last search for a piece of good news, and on Page 2 a headline caught his eye: “Earthquake kills 10,000 in India.” He closed the paper and opened it again, not believing his eyes. 10,000! And it didn’t even make the front page!
“10,000 people die and India and it doesn’t even make the front page.”
“We ain’t in India John. This is the US of A” Ced smiled. John snapped his eyes to Ced, and decided that the big man was just egging him on.
“I hear ya Big Ced.”
The two men stared at the wall, and John felt slightly comforted by Ced’s smiling acknowledgement of the strangeness of the world.
“Ok big guy, let’s check out your neck first and then I’ll ultrasound you.” John marveled at the efficiency of her hands as the trainer pulled his head forward with her right hand, and immediately found the source of the pain with her left.
“Did you do this last night?”
He felt a tinge of fear when he heard the surprise in her voice. He remembered the first time he’d gotten hurt, seeing the eyes of his high school trainer after he’d heard something in his knee pop. But John felt confident in his self diagnosis—he hadn’t been wrong in years.
“Yeah I guess so. I don’t remember anything serious, but I’ve got shooting pains this morning.”
She pushed and pulled his neck, her fingers prodding around the root of the pain. John thought he might have enjoyed her touch if she hadn’t brought worry into the picture. He recognized the tune Ced hummed quietly while the electrodes buzzed his knee. Deborah told John to hang on a second, and picked up the phone in her office.
“I got the bourgeois blues” John sang quietly, and Ced’s humming stopped.
“You know Ledbelly, John?” Ced boomed, happily surprised. “That’s the man right there.”
“Yeah I know Ledbelly. I know the bourgeois blues.”
“You don’t know nothin about no bourgeois blues. I remember this time in college…”
Deborah came out of her office, with rapid strides and eyes on the floor. She cut Ced off:
“Uhh, we’re gonna send you to get an MRI just to make sure it’s nothing serious.”
Alarm bells went off in John’s head. The fear jolted him awake. “Make sure? Make sure of what?”
Henry Wasserman is a writer from Los Angeles, CA. The Escape Artist is his first novel.
Showing posts with label Henry Wasserman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henry Wasserman. Show all posts
January 30, 2004
December 24, 2003
The Escape Artist: A Novel Excerpt
By Henry Wasserman © 2003
He woke up feeling the usual morning frustration and immediately looked at the clock in the hope that it was too early for him to be awake. But the fatigue grew heavier when he realized he had slept for 9 hours. Most mornings he felt this way, and always wondered if there was something wrong with him, physically or mentally, or if everybody felt this way. It was like a hangover, an aftertaste of too much frustration and boredom, a losing battle against the hope of fulfilling his potential.
Fortunately there were more pressing matters--the frustration quickly disappeared, as John Henry felt the pain spread out from the base of his neck down to his pelvis. The physical pain was better than the hangover, and he was happy to be distracted by the diagnostic process. Last night's game was a good one-only one mistake, a missed block on a play that didn't much matter, and enough memorable good plays to convince him that he'd play well. He tried to remember what the pain had come from, and mentally cued up the game tape and cycled through the hits. A helmet to helmet smash with the monster defensive end… diving for a poorly thrown ball… a perfectly thrown block to clear a path for the running back. But he couldn't remember feeling any pain on any of these plays, and dismissed the pain in his neck as unimportant.
He'd become an expert at diagnosing the seriousness of injuries: having experienced a variety of serious traumas to his body, he was able to determine if the pain would prevent him from playing for a game, a few weeks or a season. In the rare case that the pain indicated that there was something wrong with the function of his body (such as a torn ligament), some defect that a river of adrenaline could not fix, he knew about it. This morning's pain was the good kind, the kind that told him he had given enough of his body to believe he had played a good game.
He wished he could apply his diagnostic skills to his mental condition as well, but the morning frustration always confused him. He remembered some movie in which the hero is told that the measure of a man is how he feels about himself when he wakes up in the morning, and he wished he could figure out what these morning hangovers really meant. The confused unhappiness upon waking up had become too familiar, almost comfortable.
As he began his morning routine of ingesting the 3 legal painkillers, coffee, ibuprofen, and nicotine, he wondered why he participated in these addictions. Maybe like the pain, it was easier to justify the morning frustration as a physical withdrawal, and it provided him with a distraction from the psychological side of the problem. Maybe it was just an attempt to participate in "the common life," a ritual that renewed his membership in the fraternity of the common person. As each year went by, he felt it harder to understand and identify with people. He couldn't imagine himself contentedly sitting in traffic on the morning commute, sitting at a desk meaninglessly punching numbers into a computer, and coming home to stare at the tv with the wife and kids. He hoped in a perverse way that the cogs of society felt that same morning frustration, but was pretty sure that they didn't.
As the coffee dripped into the pot, John wondered what to do with the 5 minutes it took for the brewing to finish. If he couldn't satisfy himself that he was doing something productive, he immediately became frustrated. If time was not full, it was empty. The idea that a minute could go by in which a person was not somehow doing something to better himself was disgusting to him. He picked up the newspaper, annoyed that he'd gotten into the habit of waiting for the brown liquid.
He drank his coffee and waited for the caffeine and ibuprofen to take the edge off the fatigue, and opened up to the sports page. After scanning the first 3 pages, he found the headline he was looking for at the bottom of page 4: "Hartford QB throws to Victory over New York," accompanied by a smiling picture of his team's idiot quarterback. There were a couple paragraphs describing the game, interspersed with quotes from the quarterback about "the dream of every minor league football player is to get to the pros" and various cliches about winning and "wanting it more." John laughed at the obligatory thanks to God, remembering the look on the quarterback's face as he screwed a couple of groupies in the locker room shower after the game.
He downed the last of his coffee, folded the newspaper, and stuck a wad of chewing tobacco in his lower lip. Bounding out the door of his dirty apartment, he squinted against the blinding sun, feeling invigorated by the pain in his leg muscles that each step triggered. He hated going to "work" on Sunday-it was the players' only day off, and he wished his body was tough enough to survive without the help of ice and whirlpools.
The beat up car went into reverse, and as he turned to look out the back window, the pain shot down his neck, sending nauseating waves of pain throughout his body. He turned his head forward and took a deep breath. The pain subsided to a dull ache, but John felt a hint of worry. An oncoming Lexus nearly smashed into him as he backed out without looking, and the angry yuppie face in the rear view caused him a wry smile of satisfaction.
The highway was a sanctuary for him. Gliding along through space, his racing mind relaxed, overjoyed at the idea that until he reached his destination, there was no choice of action: only the music from the CD player and the nicotine flowing into his bloodstream. He reflected on the game: how alive he felt when he was playing, how dead he felt when he wasn't. He wondered if the reason he felt better after the Sunday sessions with the trainer was because of the highway's ability to calm his thoughts.
The blaring music snapped him back into the car, as the singer belted out the lyrics:
"It's a war on war, it's a war on war
You're gonna lose
You have to lose
You have to learn how to die
If you wanna wanna be alive"
The words conjured up images of himself after games, swollen and sore, and thought about being reborn again on the next gameday. A weekly death and rebirth, a distraction from the banality of a life in front of the TV. He pictured Jesus in a football uniform, barking out signals to the apostles before throwing a perfect pass to Peter in the end zone.
Henry Wasserman is a writer from Los Angeles, CA. The Escape Artist is his first novel.
He woke up feeling the usual morning frustration and immediately looked at the clock in the hope that it was too early for him to be awake. But the fatigue grew heavier when he realized he had slept for 9 hours. Most mornings he felt this way, and always wondered if there was something wrong with him, physically or mentally, or if everybody felt this way. It was like a hangover, an aftertaste of too much frustration and boredom, a losing battle against the hope of fulfilling his potential.
Fortunately there were more pressing matters--the frustration quickly disappeared, as John Henry felt the pain spread out from the base of his neck down to his pelvis. The physical pain was better than the hangover, and he was happy to be distracted by the diagnostic process. Last night's game was a good one-only one mistake, a missed block on a play that didn't much matter, and enough memorable good plays to convince him that he'd play well. He tried to remember what the pain had come from, and mentally cued up the game tape and cycled through the hits. A helmet to helmet smash with the monster defensive end… diving for a poorly thrown ball… a perfectly thrown block to clear a path for the running back. But he couldn't remember feeling any pain on any of these plays, and dismissed the pain in his neck as unimportant.
He'd become an expert at diagnosing the seriousness of injuries: having experienced a variety of serious traumas to his body, he was able to determine if the pain would prevent him from playing for a game, a few weeks or a season. In the rare case that the pain indicated that there was something wrong with the function of his body (such as a torn ligament), some defect that a river of adrenaline could not fix, he knew about it. This morning's pain was the good kind, the kind that told him he had given enough of his body to believe he had played a good game.
He wished he could apply his diagnostic skills to his mental condition as well, but the morning frustration always confused him. He remembered some movie in which the hero is told that the measure of a man is how he feels about himself when he wakes up in the morning, and he wished he could figure out what these morning hangovers really meant. The confused unhappiness upon waking up had become too familiar, almost comfortable.
As he began his morning routine of ingesting the 3 legal painkillers, coffee, ibuprofen, and nicotine, he wondered why he participated in these addictions. Maybe like the pain, it was easier to justify the morning frustration as a physical withdrawal, and it provided him with a distraction from the psychological side of the problem. Maybe it was just an attempt to participate in "the common life," a ritual that renewed his membership in the fraternity of the common person. As each year went by, he felt it harder to understand and identify with people. He couldn't imagine himself contentedly sitting in traffic on the morning commute, sitting at a desk meaninglessly punching numbers into a computer, and coming home to stare at the tv with the wife and kids. He hoped in a perverse way that the cogs of society felt that same morning frustration, but was pretty sure that they didn't.
As the coffee dripped into the pot, John wondered what to do with the 5 minutes it took for the brewing to finish. If he couldn't satisfy himself that he was doing something productive, he immediately became frustrated. If time was not full, it was empty. The idea that a minute could go by in which a person was not somehow doing something to better himself was disgusting to him. He picked up the newspaper, annoyed that he'd gotten into the habit of waiting for the brown liquid.
He drank his coffee and waited for the caffeine and ibuprofen to take the edge off the fatigue, and opened up to the sports page. After scanning the first 3 pages, he found the headline he was looking for at the bottom of page 4: "Hartford QB throws to Victory over New York," accompanied by a smiling picture of his team's idiot quarterback. There were a couple paragraphs describing the game, interspersed with quotes from the quarterback about "the dream of every minor league football player is to get to the pros" and various cliches about winning and "wanting it more." John laughed at the obligatory thanks to God, remembering the look on the quarterback's face as he screwed a couple of groupies in the locker room shower after the game.
He downed the last of his coffee, folded the newspaper, and stuck a wad of chewing tobacco in his lower lip. Bounding out the door of his dirty apartment, he squinted against the blinding sun, feeling invigorated by the pain in his leg muscles that each step triggered. He hated going to "work" on Sunday-it was the players' only day off, and he wished his body was tough enough to survive without the help of ice and whirlpools.
The beat up car went into reverse, and as he turned to look out the back window, the pain shot down his neck, sending nauseating waves of pain throughout his body. He turned his head forward and took a deep breath. The pain subsided to a dull ache, but John felt a hint of worry. An oncoming Lexus nearly smashed into him as he backed out without looking, and the angry yuppie face in the rear view caused him a wry smile of satisfaction.
The highway was a sanctuary for him. Gliding along through space, his racing mind relaxed, overjoyed at the idea that until he reached his destination, there was no choice of action: only the music from the CD player and the nicotine flowing into his bloodstream. He reflected on the game: how alive he felt when he was playing, how dead he felt when he wasn't. He wondered if the reason he felt better after the Sunday sessions with the trainer was because of the highway's ability to calm his thoughts.
The blaring music snapped him back into the car, as the singer belted out the lyrics:
You're gonna lose
You have to lose
You have to learn how to die
If you wanna wanna be alive"
The words conjured up images of himself after games, swollen and sore, and thought about being reborn again on the next gameday. A weekly death and rebirth, a distraction from the banality of a life in front of the TV. He pictured Jesus in a football uniform, barking out signals to the apostles before throwing a perfect pass to Peter in the end zone.
Henry Wasserman is a writer from Los Angeles, CA. The Escape Artist is his first novel.
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