The Imaginary Girlfriend Read Free Page A

weren’t timing my nose bleed; when the trainer finished stuffing enough cotton up my nostrils to stanch the flow of blood, my dizziness had abated and I looked at the time remaining on the match clock—only 15 seconds! I had every confidence that I could stay off my back for another 15 seconds, and I told Ted Seabrooke so.
    â€œIt’s only the second period,” Seabrooke said.
    I survived the 15 seconds but was pinned about midway into the third period—“With less than a minute to go,” my mother lamentably told me.
    The worst thing about being pinned in the pit was the lasting image of all those faces peering down at you. When you were winning, the fans were loud; when you were on your back, they were quiet, and their expressions were strangely incurious—as if they were already distancing themselves from your defeat.
    I was never pinned in the pit again; the only other loss I remember there was by injury default—I broke my hand. When the trainer offered me the slop bucket—I needed to spit—I saw the orange rinds and a bloody towel in the bottom of the bucket, and I promptly fainted. Aside from that misfortune, and my first-ever match—with Mount Pleasant’s Vincent Buonomano—I associated the pit with winning; my best matches were there. It was in the pit that I wrestled New England Champion Anthony Pieranunzi of East Providence High School to a 1-1 draw. I was not so lucky with Pieranunzi in the New England Championship tournament, where he beat me two years in a row; despite two undefeated dual-meet seasons, I never won a New England title.
    My years at Exeter were the final years when the winner of the New England tournament won a truly
All
-New England title; 1961 was the last year that high schools and prep schools competed together in a year-end tournament—I was captain of the Exeter team that year. After that, there were separate private-school and public-school tournaments—a pity, I think, since high-school and prep-school wrestlers have much to learn from each other. But, by ‘61, the New England Interscholastic tournament, as it used to be called, had already grown too large.
    I remember my last bus ride with the Exeter team, to East Providence—to the home mats of my nemesis, Anthony Pieranunzi. We’d checked our weight on the scales in the academy gym at about 5:00 in the morning; we were all under our respective weight classes—in some cases, barely. The bus left Exeter in darkness, which near Boston gave way to a dense winter fog; the snow, the sky, the trees, the road—all were shades of gray.
    Our 121-pounder, Larry Palmer, was worried about his weight. He’d been only a quarter of a pound under at Exeter—the official weigh-ins were at East Providence. What if the scales were different? (They weren’t supposed to be.) I’d been a half-pound under my 133-pound class; my mouth was dry, but I didn’t dare drink any water—I was spitting in a paper cup. Larry was spitting in a cup, too. “Just don’t eat,” Coach Seabrooke told us. “Don’t eat and don’t drink—you’re not going to gain weight on the bus.”
    Somewhere south of Boston, we stopped at a Howard Johnson’s; this is what Larry Palmer remembers—- I don’t remember the Howard Johnson’s because I didn’t get off the bus. A few of our wrestlers were safely enough under their weight classes so that they could risk eating something; most of them at least got off the bus—to pee. I’d had nothing to eat or drink for about 36 hours; I knew I didn’t dare to eat or drink anything—I knew I
couldn’t
pee. Larry Palmer remembers eating “that fatal piece of toast.”
    Just the other day, we were remembering it together. “It was plain toast,” Larry said. “No butter, no jam—I didn’t even finish it.”
    â€œAnd nothing to drink?” I