John Irving - In One Person

IT BECAME, OF COURSE, a source of both comedy and concern—with the women I saw and the gay men I knew—that I regularly attended wrestling practice at the NYAC. My gay friends refused to believe that I had next to no homoerotic interest in the wrestlers I met at the club, but my crushes on that kind of wrong person had been a phase for me, perhaps a part of the coming-out process. (Well, okay—a slowly passing, not-altogether-gone phase.) Straight men didn’t often attract me, at least not very much; that they could sense this, as Arthur did, had made it increasingly possible for me to have straight men for friends.

Yet Larry insisted that my wrestling practices were a kind of high-energy, risky cruising; Donna, my dear but easily offended transsexual friend, dismissed what she called my “duck-under fixation” as the cultivation of a death wish. (Soon after this pronouncement, Donna disappeared from New York—to be followed by reports that she’d been sighted in Toronto.)

As for the wrestlers at the New York Athletic Club, they were a mixed lot—in every respect, not only in how they treated me. My women friends, Elaine among them, believed that it was only a matter of time before I would be beaten to a pulp, but I was not once threatened (or deliberately hurt) at the NYAC.

The older guys generally ignored me; once someone cheerfully said, when we were introduced, “Oh, you’re the gay guy—right?” But he shook my hand and patted me on the back; later, he always smiled and said something friendly when we saw each other. We weren’t in the same weight-class. If he was avoiding contact with me—on the mat, I mean—I wouldn’t have known.

There was the occasional mass evacuation of the sauna, when I made an after-practice appearance there. I spoke to Arthur about it. “Maybe I should steer clear of the sauna—do you think?”

“That’s your call, Billy—that’s their problem, not yours,” Arthur said. (I was “Billy” to all the wrestlers.)

I decided, despite Arthur’s assurances, to stay out of the sauna. Practices were at seven in the evening; I became almost comfortable going to them. I was not called—at least not to my face—“the gay guy,” except for that one time. I was commonly referred to as “the writer”; most of the wrestlers hadn’t read my sexually explicit novels—those pleas for tolerance of sexual differences, as Richard Abbott would continue to describe my books—but Arthur had read them. Like many men, he’d told me that his wife was my biggest fan.

I was always hearing that from men about the women in their lives—their wives, their girlfriends, their sisters, even their mothers, were my biggest fans. Women read fiction more than men do, I would guess.

I’d met Arthur’s wife. She was very nice; she truly read a lot of fiction, and I liked much of what she liked—as a reader, I mean. Her name was Ellen—one of those perky blondes with a pageboy cut and an absurdly small, thin-lipped mouth. She had the kind of stand-up boobs that belied an otherwise unisex look—boy, was she ever not my kind of girl! But she was genuinely sweet to me, and Arthur—bless his heart—was very married. There would be no introducing him to Elaine.

In fact, beyond having a beer in the NYAC tap room with Arthur, I did no socializing with the wrestlers I’d met at the club. The wrestling room was then on the fourth floor—at the opposite end of the hall from the boxing room. One of my frequent workout partners in the wrestling room—Jim Somebody (I forget his last name)—was also a boxer. All the wrestlers knew I’d had no competitive wrestling experience—that I was there for the self-defense aspect of the sport, period. In support of my self-defense, Jim took me down the hall to the boxing room; he tried to show me how to defend myself from being hit.

It was interesting: I never really learned how to throw a decent punch, but Jim taught me how to cover up—how not to get hit so hard. Occasionally, one of Jim’s punches would land a little harder than he’d intended; he always said he was sorry.

In the wrestling room, too, I took some occasional (albeit accidental) punishment—a split lip, a bloody nose, a jammed finger or thumb. Because I was concentrating so hard on various ways to set up (and conceal) my duck-under, I was banging heads a lot; you more or less have to bang heads if you like being in the collar-tie. Arthur inadvertently head-butted me, and I took a few stitches in the area of my right eyebrow.

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.