In One Person

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