Nonfiction

DISMANTLING THE PIANO

by Jonathan Fink

Almost a year to the day before my wedding, I find myself spacing tools (wire cutters, gloves, a drill, pliers, and a sledgehammer) across a blanket in the soon-to-be guest bedroom or sitting room of my house. An aging upright piano rests along one wall. The piano’s height is almost to my shoulder. A four-inch-high mirror spans the front of the piano so that when someone sits and plays, he sees his face above the sheet music. In the mirror, my image resembles the henchman from every B movie interrogation scene. Unshaven and wearing a white tank top, I am only missing a blowtorch or lead pipe in my right hand to complete the ensemble. The mirror is the first piece I remove. Two small screws, one at each end of the mirror, attach it to the piano’s frame. They twist out easily. The flower-shaped metal washers drop like rose petals into my cupped hand. When I lift the mirror free, it warbles like a crosscut saw, and my image ripples. I carry the mirror into the hallway and lean the mirror carefully against the wall. I am unsure how to proceed. What I know for certain is that the piano cannot stay.

When offered a free piano two years ago, I leapt at the chance. I had lived in my home for three years at the time, and it was still sparsely furnished. Whenever I talked on the phone, my voice echoed off the wood floors and plaster walls, and the person with whom I was speaking frequently asked me if I was standing in some kind of tunnel. In addition, I have always wanted to have a home filled with music. In high school, I scoured pawnshops every weekend to find unappreciated instruments: a 1970s Ludwig drum kit (my mother’s good china jumped with every thump of the bass drum), a 1950s National lap steel guitar, a harmonium. “All you have to do is pick it up,” the girl at the party had said. She wrote her address and number on my arm with a pen. She was moving and couldn’t take the piano with her. She just wanted it to go to a good home. The next day, a local piano store quoted me $200 as the fee to pick up and deliver the piano to my house. Too expensive, I thought. I called my friend Greg (he owed me for when I helped him assemble a grill), and, for $25, we rented a truck with a retracting loading ramp.

In virtually every endeavor there is a moment of no return. Sometimes this moment presents itself not so much as a choice, but as a feeling, like the feeling of your car first starting to spin when it hits a patch of ice. I hadn’t seen the piano before I agreed to take it, and when Greg and I arrived at the house the girl led us past her roommate smoking on the steps, through the kitchen and into a small bedroom. The piano filled the entire wall. Smoke from an incense stick rose from the top of the piano as the ash drooped onto the thin wooden holder. I had imagined a small spinet-sized upright. “It has wheels,” the girl said tentatively. Greg stood with his arms crossed as the girl recognized my hesitation. “It plays well,” she said, striking a chord. She turned the bench upside down on her bed then started clearing the knickknacks off the piano, lifting the incense slowly without breaking the ash.

I should have said, “No.” Instead, Greg and I positioned ourselves on each end of the piano, and once it moved the first two inches the girl sighed (or at least in memory I remember her sighing) as if the piano were already gone from her home. The piano probably weighed close to 700 pounds, but I wouldn’t have been able to estimate the piano’s weight accurately at the time. Only after we had moved the piano into my house did I look online to find information to approximate the piano’s weight. When you are moving something that large, the exactitude of weight shifts from specifics to generalities—700 pounds simply becomes “heavy”—and it is in that shift from the specific to the general where all trouble begins.

The move took us over an hour. We eased the piano through the house, past the smoking roommate (who had now moved to the couch and wrapped her arms around her shins like a child lifting her feet as her mother vacuums), onto the ramp of the truck (we had parked on the lawn at the girl’s insistence), and into the cargo area. I tied the piano to the wall of the truck and lowered the cargo door. When I eased the truck from the lawn to the street, the back wheels lowered over the curb and the whole truck rocked slightly, creaking like a Spanish galleon, as the strings chimed from the cargo area and the girl, growing smaller in the side-view mirror, waved from her front steps.

When Greg and I reached my house, I parked on the dirt of the neighbor’s empty lot, and we extended the ramp like a pirate’s plank from the truck to my front porch, bypassing the front porch steps. We hadn’t anticipated the problem of the small lip at the entryway of my house, but Greg and I eased one end of the piano at a time over the small ridge, both of us wheezing and panting, until the piano stood in my hallway. I turned on the light (the sun had set in the time it took us to move the piano), and the wood floors of the hallway gleamed. When Greg asked me where the piano was supposed to go, I pointed to the room down the hallway on the left.

I should have stopped. I should have considered the floors, the piano’s weight, even the very relationship between needs and wants. Instead, I pushed forward, bearing down against the piano as if it were a high-school-football blocking sled. I didn’t look down until Greg and I had maneuvered the piano into the side room. Grooves as wide as my thumb ran along the floor all the way back to the front door. The soft pine boards were over one hundred years old, cut from the same trees that the Spanish, French, and British harvested in the area from the 1600s onward. I bent down and studied the grooves closely. They weren’t cuts in the wood, but compressions. What nature couldn’t do over the course of a century, I had done in a few minutes. I could have rolled a marble down the grooves and it would have followed the path unerringly.

*

There are hundreds of free pianos listed on Craigslist. A representative entry, posted under the title, “Free Piano for Catapult Artisan,” contains these lines: “If you don’t care about technicalities like, say, notes being in tune or fully functioning black and white keys, I have your instrument,” “I bet it’ll make a wonderful thunk/plong/crash noise when it lands,” and “You must bring some strong folks to help you load it into your catapult. You must aim the catapult away from my apartment as I am hoping to get my deposit back.” A section from another entry, entitled “Free Upright Piano,” reads, “The first person to show up and take it gets it. This piano was listed once before, and you wouldn’t believe the number of homeless dying one-legged Mongolian orphans that just needed a piano to make life better. I heard some great sob stories (probably all true!) about why I should hold this piano for this person or that person. Well, I ended up holding it for the first caller, who never got it. Then I held it for someone else, and they never got it. Then everyone was gone, and I still had a piano. I don’t really want the piano. It came with the house when I bought it. I play the flute, which I can carry in one hand.”

Virtually every entry mentions that the pianos are extremely heavy, unwanted, and out of tune. The out-of-tune problem soon became an irritant. The girl who gave me the piano had been telling the truth when she said the piano played well in the sense that its large size projected sound well, yet the piano clearly didn’t “play well” in any harmonious way. I started noticing several dead keys; they thumped whenever I depressed them, sounding to me as if each song I played had a limp. I have never been an especially good player anyway. My most notable performance was playing Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” (aka “Here Comes the Bride”) for a wedding that took place in a West Texas restaurant in which I worked during a summer home from college. When asking me to play at the wedding (his third), the manager of the restaurant (with heavy twang) said, “We’ll pay you $40 and buy you the instructions.” The wedding train was short—passing the bathrooms in the restaurant and extending to a side room where the Justice of the Peace waited, flanked by two cages of preening live doves. I missed notes frequently, stumbling through the first few measures as the bride grimaced and the restaurant patrons (the manager hadn’t closed the restaurant for the ceremony) looked up from their plates.

Un-tunable, monolithic, the piano in my home was played less and less until I began to regard it as more of a statue than an instrument. If not for my impending wedding, the piano most likely would have sat unused for years to come. “Way leads on to way,” Robert Frost says, and the union of marriage permeates all aspects of the bride and groom’s new life together. Choices must be made, and the vestiges of youth (not unlike the caged doves I helped the busboy liberate behind the restaurant after the wedding) must be released.

*

After I lay the mirror in the hallway, I return to the room and lie down on my back at the base of the piano. When my father was in Vietnam years ago he heard a story of a pilot transporting a helicopter piece-by-piece back to the states—disassembled in Vietnam, mailed across the ocean, then reassembled in America. I imagine a suburban scene of a family lounging by the pool when, next door, a helicopter lifts from the yard, overturning lawn chairs and tables, churning the grass and trees in a whirlwind as the mother screams and the children cheer. My plan is similar, except for the reassembly. Removing the piano piece by piece from my home accomplishes two goals. First, I do no more damage to the floors. Short of sanding, staining, and varnishing, there is no remedy for the grooves I made. I fruitlessly tried “ironing” out the grooves (as suggested on the Internet) by using a damp towel and iron. The only effect was to create a small steam room in the hallway. Second, like the POWs in the movie The Great Escape who distribute the dirt from their escape tunnels handful-by-handful down their pant legs, removing the piano piece by piece will allow me to dispose of it sequentially in the garbage can or recycling bin. In its entirety, the piano would never be picked up by the trash service. But in fragments, who’s the wiser?

Surprisingly, the first substantial piece of the piano—the “bottom door” that extends between the pedals and the base of the keyboard—removes easily. Two screws and a simple latch hold the board in place. With the piece removed, the bottom half of the piano’s harp is accessible. The top of the piano and the “top door” (the board between the keyboard and the top) remove easily as well. Like the hood and trunk of a car, these pieces are designed to integrate seamlessly into the piano when closed, but also to offer easy access to the inside of the piano for maintenance and tuning. With these pieces removed, the inner workings of the piano are clearly seen. That the piano is a percussion instrument seems counterintuitive. Its predecessor, the harpsichord, produces sound through an elaborate system of quills (contemporary ones are made of plastic) that pluck the strings when each key is depressed. Unlike a piano, the volume on a harpsichord cannot be varied depending on how hard the keys are struck. When a key on a piano is depressed, a felt hammer strikes the strings with a velocity proportionate to the musician’s force on the key. The piano’s full name, “fortepiano,” which means “loud-soft” in Italian, virtually crows about this design innovation.

The “loud-soft” nuance of the piano is the source of its expressiveness, yet what the fortepiano initially gained in expression it lost in volume. To produce volume, the size of the instrument grew, string tension increased, and (unlike the plucked strings of the harpsichord) each hammer in the fortepiano descended on up to three strings. The three-string structure is painfully relevant to anyone who currently owns an un-tunable piano. When a piano is tuned correctly, the three strings sound in unison. When the piano is out of tune, a single keystroke produces two or three approximately similar pitches. Like poorly matched voices in an amateur choir, the dissonance is unsettling. Science reinforces this discomfort. Two close but not identical pitches produce vibrations in a sound wave like the tremolo effect of an electric guitar. When the pitches are significantly out of tune, the sound wave fissures.

I run my fingers down the keyboard, and the hammers rise and fall in a small wave. With each piece I remove, the piano chimes in response. The next step is to remove the keys. Each key lifts out individually. The keys pile like kindling in the middle of the room. A metal bar helps hold the strings to the harp, and after I remove the bar with a drill, I notice a ribbon interwoven in the strings. I draw it out from the strings, and it ripples back and forth, reminding me of a trout darting in a creek. Strangely, there are a few small objects in the body of the piano: a playing card with the image of a cartoon samurai, a plastic green army man, and a few random nickels and pennies. There is no indication if these things were placed in the piano intentionally. They are small tokens of the lost ephemera of the world—playing cards, plastic army men, homes, cities, entire civilizations consumed by sand.

At this point in the process, all of the pieces I have removed from the piano were designed to be removed, which, for me, produces a false sense of accomplishment. Until now, I have been working with the designer of the piano. I must now work against the designer. With the drill, I extract the bolts that attach the apparatus with the hammers to the harp and place the apparatus off to the side. The shelf on which the keys rested also unbolts, and I remove it, revealing the full harp of the piano. Cast iron and painted gold, the harp reveals itself like something from a dream—otherworldly. “Cleveland, OH” is engraved in the plate, and I image the harp’s construction in the early twentieth century with iron ore transported across Lake Erie as factories billowed on the Cuyahoga River. The same river would catch fire decades later when sparks from a rail car ignited oil and chemical-soaked debris floating on the river. Cause the Cuyahoga River goes smokin’ through my dreams. Burn on, big river, burn on the musician Randy Newman composed on a piano that might or might not have been from Cleveland, Ohio.

The Internet suggests removing the strings with wire cutters, rather than attempting to unwind them. Cutting the strings feels like my first act of violence against the piano. I can’t decide whether to begin with the highest-pitch string or the lowest. The lowest-pitch strings are thickest and could writhe when cut. The highest-pitch strings seem to have the most tension and could break free at the snip, piercing me in an eye or testicle. I decide to begin with the low strings. The pieces on which the strings wind are uniform across the piano. The low strings resemble cattails where the thick wire rounds off and attaches with a thin wire to the piano. I place the wire cutters at the top of the lowest-pitch string, look the other way, cover my crotch with my free hand for good measure, and squeeze. When the wire snaps, the string shivers, then falls, striking the other strings before coming still. I snip the bottom of the wire and then place it in the middle of the room next to the pile of keys. With the removal of each string, I grow bolder, more methodical. Every snip produces an incrementally higher pitch until the harp stands barren, and the pile of wires equals the size of the pile of keys.

Initially, the soundlessness of the piano is disconcerting (I feel like the piano has abandoned its argument and withdrawn into itself), yet its silence soon emboldens me. No longer an instrument, the piano is merely a block of wood and steel. I extract as many bolts from the harp as possible, but several, either from rust or inaccessibility, refuse to budge. The harp, now only partially bound to the piano, flops back and forth against the soundboard like a giant, loose, cast-iron tooth. I wedge the sledgehammer between the harp and soundboard and attempt to break the harp free, but it resists. To better leverage the harp, I decide to turn the piano ninety degrees so that both the front and back of the piano are accessible.  The piano is significantly lighter, but it still retains approximately sixty to seventy percent of its original weight. The piano’s center of gravity shifted with the removal of the parts, and, perhaps in an act of retribution, the piano falls backwards towards me. I press my entire weight against the piano, and it pauses mid-fall, balancing against me and pressing into my forearm and shoulder so that a thin-lined bruise begins to form at the crease of my forearm along the piano’s edge. I cannot right the piano. I start to sweat, and I can feel my heart throbbing even in my ear canals. My legs tighten. In middle school, the coaches, for punishment, made us hold ourselves in seated positions against gym walls as our thighs burned and gravity bore down. Every kid eventually dropped. It was just a matter of time. I image my fiancée, like Dorothy, finding me under the piano, only my legs protruding out into the room.

My fiancée. Would she forgive me, crumpled beneath the piano? Would she ever believe that all of this is for her? Though she has asked for nothing, expected nothing, my fiancée is at the center of my every thought. Yet pianos cannot be bench pressed by thoughts alone. As best I can, I swipe my back foot around me on the floor to clear off anything that might be crushed. Like a frightened cat, I leap back (I imagine my arms and legs splayed out in all directions) and when the piano (thankfully missing me) hits the floor the whole house jumps as if it is a chambered heart and above us someone has applied electric shock. Amazingly, the floor seems to absorb the force without splintering (or even scratching), and the shockwave (as I imagine it) moves like a pulse through the beams, the earth, and dissipates through the neighborhood.

On its back, the piano is at my mercy. I rub my arm and circle the piano slowly. The bruise is already starting to purple, but the skin isn’t lacerated and no bones are broken. I lift the sledgehammer from the ground and place one foot on the piano. I have enough foresight not to wield the sledgehammer like an ax over my head down onto the piano.  Using the sledgehammer like a crowbar, I pry the harp, tearing out the large screws. Each removed screw increases the leverage I can apply to the harp until, like the loose tooth, the harp breaks free and I am able to separate it from the soundboard. The harp weighs more than I anticipated. By itself, it probably weighs close to a hundred pounds.

The final stage involves removing the soundboard and separating the wooden posts that form the piano’s structure (and give the piano much of its weight). The soundboard is thin, but because the piano is lying on its back, I cannot break through the soundboard without harming the floor. I stand like a lumberjack over the piano and knock the bottom of the piano loose by swinging the sledgehammer between my feet. When I knock the posts loose, each one creaks and groans. The soundboard eventually splinters, and I work my way through the posts, removing each one until the piano is finally divided into multiple piles around the room.

When I carry the pieces outside, I place the smaller ones in the garbage can and the larger ones by the curb. The trash pickup comes once a week, and I imagine waking up and finding everything gone, the only trace of the piano in the pieces’ outlines on the sidewalk from the falling buds of the crape myrtles. Spring is in full bloom, and my neighbor Amos, surveying the piles, waves to me from his driveway. He’s just come from work, his name embossed on a patch above his breast pocket. I’ve only ever seen him wear two outfits: his work clothes or the pin-stripped suit he wears to church. When I explain to him my project, he laughs and places his hand on my shoulder. His wife Jeanie has built a greenhouse in their yard as well as a garden. A pergola with purple bougainvillea hanging from the latticework creates a shaded walkway from their driveway to back door. I know that times have been tough for them lately. Jeanie explained to me recently that the business for which she works cut back not only on hourly wages, but also cleaning staff. Now she and the other workers must take turns scrubbing toilets and mopping bathroom floors.

Amos asks me if I care if he takes the piano’s harp for scrap metal. “You’ll be doing me a favor,” I say, and help him carry the harp across the street. When I tell him about my engagement, he smiles and nods, still focusing on the weight of the harp. “Let’s put it over here,” he says. We lean the harp against the side of his house, and I walk back towards the pergola. Light filters through the latticework. I pause under the arch. The bougainvillea flutters in the early-evening breeze, and the scent is like the dusting of powder my fiancée applies after a bath, her fair skin blooming from the water’s heat, my hand at the small of her back.

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Jonathan Fink is an Associate Professor and the Director of Creative Writing at University of West Florida, where he also edits Panhandler. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Slate, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He has received the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review and fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Emory University, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, and Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, among others. More of his work is available at jonathanfink.com

THE BURNING

by David Salner

I had been stacking forty-pound ingots in the heat, working to the point of exhaustion. I walked to the open furnace, attracted by the way it shone in the darkness, fascinated by the peaceful appearance of the liquid, so ordinary, like a pool of water.

This was my first shift in the foundry, my first view of a furnace of magnesium at 1300f.

A waist-high rim of bricks was all that separated me from the glowing pool inches away. As I stared, a change took shape in the depths of the furnace. The core was now suffused with a faint rose shadow that deepened before my eyes, as if the metal had come alive, blushing.

I stood over the furnace as my face baked, my skin a crust of heat. I was transfixed by the flux, now blood-red, but changing again, rising, blooming from the depths of the coloration, swelling until the silver skin of the metal began to split. An open wound, then another, another. Dozens of strawberry blisters riddled the sheen.

“Turn that fucking furnace down,” a voice boomed. “The damn metal’s burning.”

Someone in another room dialed the furnace temperature down, and the blush began to subside. That individual was not a doctor but, I later discovered, a metal refinery operator, an MRO. Meanwhile, someone else ran to the rim of bricks and sprinkled a dust of lemon-colored sulfur on the blisters, choking the burns, healing the skin.

Magnesium is not so much a metal as a creature that needs to be nursed.

The furnace was peaceful again. A silver sheen covered it, hiding its suffering flesh.

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David Salner’s second book, Working Here, was published by Minnesota State University’s Rooster Hill Press. His poetry appears in recent issues of The Iowa Review, Poetry Daily, and Threepenny Review. He worked for 25 years as an iron ore miner, magnesium plant worker, and general laborer.

INSTINCT IN THE ABSENCE OF THOUGHT

or THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DROWNING CATERPILLAR

by Joey Poole

Recently, in the midst of a brutal July heat wave, I noticed that my azalea bushes were being absolutely skeletonized, eaten right down to the stems. A closer inspection revealed that the bushes were crawling with a horde of large (over two inches long) black caterpillars with striking yellow spots and bright red heads, tails, and feet. I’d been sent the pestilence of the Lord in the form of the red-headed azalea caterpillar, a notorious pest throughout the Southeast and parts of the Midwest.

Figure 1. Azalea caterpillars assume this pose when they’re harassed by predators or nosy gardeners. It’s not exactly the most threatening defense mechanism around.

I was a bit torn about what to do. I value insects—except for fire ants, which are invasive anyway—in my yard, and try to encourage native plants that some might consider weeds in hopes of attracting them. Figuring that caterpillars were at least as desirable as azaleas, a notion my pesticide-happy neighbors with prettier shrubbery understandably don’t share, I decided to leave them be. But when I checked in on the scourge the next day, the considerable amount of damage they’d done overnight made it clear that they would decimate the azaleas if left unchecked. Something had to be done.

Luckily for a few of the caterpillars, there was someone standing between me and total annihilation. Although she was revolted by the fact that I picked them off the bushes with my bare hands, my girlfriend’s nine-year-old daughter didn’t like the idea of killing the caterpillars, reminding me that they were baby butterflies (actually, the adult form of these particular caterpillars is a rather undistinguished, drab-looking moth, but that didn’t seem important). We decided that we’d keep a handful of them indoors and destroy the rest. Playing god by deciding which of the babies lived and which died, I plucked three of the caterpillars, one of whom was chosen because it looked like it might bear a parasitic wasp egg, off of the bushes before committing genocide against their brethren. We set our new pets up in an empty terrarium with azalea sprigs to munch on, waiting for them to spin cocoons and turn into moths, which we planned to release far, far away from our own beleaguered azaleas. Little did we know that our moth nursery would soon provide a fascinating glimpse into the power of instinct in the absence of the capacity for true thought in the form of a seemingly suicidal caterpillar.

In order to keep the azalea sprigs fresh for our new house guests, we put them in a glass of water, thinking the caterpillars would hang out on the leaves, safely high above danger of drowning. For a couple of days, they did. Then one of them started doing something that seemed to defy all logic, as if captive life had driven it insane. It started marching right down the branch, sometimes pausing at the water line as if trying to decide what to do, but more often simply charging on into the water. Underwater, it continued right on down the branch all the way to the bottom of the glass and then fell off, writhing hopelessly in the water because caterpillars, it turns out, can’t swim. Over and over the same caterpillar did this, and we saved it from drowning several times. No matter how many times we fished it out of the water and sat it back on the leaves, eventually it would get the same foolish notion and trudge headlong into danger.

Perplexed, we tried to figure out what was driving this caterpillar to attempt suicide. Depression was the obvious answer, but it’s an anthropomorphic mistake to assign human emotions to animals, especially insects. A little research on the life cycle of the azalea caterpillars revealed that, unlike many caterpillars, which make cocoons right on the leaves or branches of their plant hosts, Dantana Major burrows into the soil to pupate. This solved the mystery of the drowning caterpillar. Obviously, it was ready to get on with the metamorphosis—enough with the endless crawling and munching, munching and crawling! It was time to rest and then, if only briefly, to fly. The instinct woven into its DNA through a mechanism still largely unknown to science was driving it ever downward, even when that direction meant certain death.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Insects—and, arguably, all of us in the animal kingdom—are essentially biological robots, programmed to react in certain ways to certain stimuli. Like a moth driven to burn off its wings, Icarus-like, in a candle’s flame, this little booger was determined to find the ground, no matter what stood in the way. French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre famously demonstrated that processionary caterpillars, those who march in lines, nose-to-tail, will walk endlessly in a circle when their leader is removed and the line circles back onto itself. The caterpillars will continue to trudge around in a circle until they die of starvation or exhaustion, even when food items are placed nearby. The instinct to follow the line overpowers the drive to eat, and ultimately, the will to survive. Even mammals exhibit similar behavior, like the proverbial horse running into a burning barn or lemmings driven to mass suicide by population density and herd instincts.

Luckily, as primates, we’re a little better equipped when it comes to problem-solving. Some of the more regrettable aspects of the human condition notwithstanding, it generally pays to have a frontal lobe capable of critical thought, something that can override instinct when things get dicey. You wouldn’t, for instance, march calmly underwater, not even realizing that you were drowning as the water filled your lungs (or spiracles, as with the caterpillar) just to get to where you knew deep down in the very fiber of your being, way down in your DNA, that you were supposed to go, if your house were flooded. You’d stop at the edge of the water, scratching the skull covering your huge brain, and think about where you could spend the night.

The caterpillar that seemed bent on drowning itself didn’t have the luxury of thought, which never would have mattered in its natural habitat, where there would be no standing water at the bottom of the world. Pausing to question its instincts or other such dawdling on the way to make a cocoon in the ground would be a good way to get eaten by a bird or a lizard, rendering its brief life a genetic failure.

It’s easy to look down our noses at such mental simplicity. But let’s not get too high and mighty here, because our huge frontal lobes don’t always protect us from ourselves. If they did, we wouldn’t smoke tobacco knowing that it might give us cancer or call our exes in the middle of the night, knowing that it can only result in heartache.

Figure 2. Only a tiny fraction of the horde eating our azaleas.

As for the caterpillars, who might not be able to ponder their own fates but will also live out their lives without ever tasting heartache? Well, we couldn’t exactly kill them after we’d gotten to know them, so we decided to set them free to eat the azaleas in a local park. My apologies to the municipal landscapers.

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Joey R. Poole is a writer and strictly amateur naturalist from Florence, South Carolina. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in places like The Southeast Review, Adirondack Review, Clapboard House, and Bartleby Snopes. Like everyone else, he’s hard at work on a novel.

EXCERPT FROM THE CARTEL

by Taylor Branch

This is an excerpt from Taylor Branch’s Byliner Original The Cartel 

CHAPTER TWO

Founding Myths

FAME AND CONTROVERSY have been constants since the birth of organized college sports. A newer factor, relatively speaking, is the institutional control of wealth by adults. In 1859, players from Williams College accused Amherst of sneaking in a blacksmith ringer to pitch (and win) the first recorded contest of intercollegiate “baseball,” a game being adapted from British rounders. Under makeshift rules, students challenged rivals from other schools to ad hoc matches of stunning popularity. In 1869, Harvard’s intrepid four-oared crew raced the champions of Oxford through London on the Thames River, losing by three lengths before a gargantuan crowd of 750,000 that included Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill. Eleven years later, President Rutherford B. Hayes joined 100,000 people massed along the Potomac River to watch the world’s best single-scull rower, a Canadian, defeat an upstart American from Cornell.

Students themselves sponsored sporting events through a formative era marked by two Victorian obsessions of the nineteenth century: amateurism and manly virtue. The new American games were developed consciously by and for young gentlemen centered in the elite eastern colleges, within a broader celebration of amateur ideals powerful enough to revive the Greek Olympics after a hiatus of two thousand years. In 1888, alumni groups established the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) to promote off-campus sports, especially yachting, with a charter modeled on aristocratic British clubs that excluded mechanics, artisans, and others “engaged in any menial duty.” A neutral definition of the word amateur later proved difficult, if not impossible, but class-based notions suited colleges back then. Unseemly behavior in competition would be confined among peers, and fun acquired serious purpose because the sports arena simulated an impending age of Darwinian struggle.

While the United States did not hold a global empire like England’s, nor profess to want one, its leaders warned of national softness once railroads conquered the last continental frontier. As though to oblige, ingenious students turned variations on warlike rugby into a toughening agent and tonic sensation. The amateur code ennobled football. Today a plaque on the New Jersey site commemorates every participant from the first college game, on November 6, 1869, when Rutgers beat Princeton 6–4 in a scrum-like game without coaches.

Fittingly, at Yale, the “father” of American football married a sister of the world’s leading social Darwinist, William Graham Sumner. Walter Camp, class of ’80, finished six undergraduate years so intoxicated by primitive football that he devoted his life to the game without pay. His forceful arguments persuaded other schools to reduce chaos by trimming each side from fifteen players to eleven. It was Camp’s idea to paint measuring lines on the field. He conceived functional designations for players, coining terms such as quarterback, and invented a scrimmage line to restart paralyzed entanglements. His game remained violent by design. Crawlers could push the ball forward beneath piles of flying elbows without pause until they cried “down” in submission. John L. Sullivan, the perennial heavyweight champion, called bare-knuckled boxing comparatively tame, because in the ring he faced only one opponent at a time. “There’s murder in that game,” he said of football.

In an 1892 game against archrival Yale, the Harvard football team was the first to deploy the “flying wedge,” based on Napoleon’s surprise concentrations of military force. In an editorial calling for the abolition of the play, The New York Times described it as “half a ton of bone and muscle coming into collision with a man weighing 160 or 170 pounds,” noting that surgeons often had to be called onto the field. The flying wedge swept into dictionary usage even though it lasted only two seasons. (There is a statuary tribute with diagrams at the Hall of Fame.)

Continuing mayhem prompted Harvard’s faculty to take notice in 1895 with the first of three votes to abolish football, which touched off prominent dissent. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes told his alma mater that he regarded sports casualties “not as a waste but as a price well paid for the breeding of a race fit for headship and command.” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge seconded Holmes. The Harvard sage George Santayana, in his essay “Philosophy on the Bleachers,” perceived a natural union between physical and intellectual hegemony: “Only the supreme is interesting.”

Harvard’s governing board vetoed the legislated ban, whereupon president Charles Eliot tried to rally his faculty’s cause. “Deaths and injuries are not the strongest argument against football,” declared Eliot. “That cheating and brutality are profitable is the main evil.” Still, Harvard football persisted. Its armchair strategists schemed to counter Princeton’s “revolving tandem,” and fervent alumni built Harvard Stadium in 1903 with zero college funds. After yet another loss to Yale, Harvard waived a key amateur practice: Bill Reid, the team’s first paid coach, started in 1905 at nearly twice the average salary for full professors on campus.

One newspaper story from that year, illustrated with the Grim Reaper laughing on a goalpost, counted twenty-five college players killed during football season. A fairy-tale version of the founding of the NCAA holds that President Theodore Roosevelt, upset by a photograph of a bloodied Swarthmore College player, vowed to civilize or destroy football. The real story is that Roosevelt maneuvered shrewdly to preserve the sport—and give a boost to his beloved Harvard. After McClure’s magazine published a story on corrupt teams with phantom students, a muckraker exposed Walter Camp’s $100,000 slush fund at Yale. In response to mounting outrage, Roosevelt summoned leaders from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to the White House, where Camp parried mounting criticism and conceded nothing irresponsible in the college football rules he’d established. At Roosevelt’s behest, the three schools issued a public statement that college sports must reform to survive, and representatives from sixty-eight colleges founded a new organization that would soon be called the National Collegiate Athletic Association. A Haverford College official was confirmed as secretary but then promptly resigned in favor of Bill Reid, the new Harvard coach, who instituted rules that benefited Harvard’s playing style at the expense of Yale’s. At a stroke, Roosevelt saved football and dethroned Yale.

The fledgling NCAA gained no significant authority for nearly fifty years. It did not hire any staff employees until the 1940s, when the largest universities still paid annual dues of twenty-five dollars. In 1906, with great fanfare, the new rules committee introduced a novel forward pass to “open up” football’s knotted ground clashes, but inhibition hampered the experiment. Incomplete passes were penalized, or ruled turnovers, because purists considered progress by air to be cowardly and soft, if not immoral. Players resisted protective equipment for similar reasons, which prolonged carnage on the field. Princeton’s Tigers, having spurned all but the natural padding of their long “chrysanthemum” haircuts in the 1890s, gradually accepted moleskin “head harnesses.” Not until 1939 could the NCAA mandate helmets.

Rules changed slowly, but college sports stayed chic. Thomas Edison tried out his new “moving camera” at a football game. Cole Porter wrote “Bingo Eli Yale” and many other songs for his alma mater. Scott Fitzgerald, a three-day failure at Princeton football, pestered coaches all his life with suggested plays, and Jack Kerouac was a star college running back until he expressed his maverick impulse in 1942: “Scrimmage, my ass.”

Meanwhile, entrepreneurial coaches made amateur supervision extinct, and people soon forgot that students had scheduled their own games for decades. Although coach Bill Reid did not succeed at Harvard, he set a professional example with his clandestine trip to investigate how Yale outfitted its superior teams. (“I will begin with the shoes,” he recorded meticulously, “and tell what I learned.”) Overbearing coaches wielded a chieftain’s command. At Notre Dame, where his presence eclipsed the players, Knute Rockne extracted large corporate retainers in the 1920s. In 1930, after his Penn Quakers lost 27­–0 to Wisconsin, coach J. R. “Lud” Wray decreed that his training table would serve only cream puffs.

The NCAA enshrined amateur ideals for college players while remaining helpless to enforce them. When two small midwestern towns put up $50,000 in a spectacular 1922 football wager, civic leaders bought secret reinforcements from Notre Dame and the University of Illinois. In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation made headlines with a report, “American College Athletics,” which concluded that the scramble for players had “reached the proportions of nationwide commerce.” Of the 112 schools surveyed, eighty-one flouted NCAA recommendations with inducements to students ranging from open payrolls and disguised booster funds to no-show jobs at movie studios. Fans ignored the uproar, and two-thirds of the colleges mentioned told The New York Times that they planned no changes. In 1939, freshman players at the University of Pittsburgh went on strike because they were getting paid less than their upperclassman teammates.

Embarrassed, the NCAA in 1948 enacted a “Sanity Code,” which was supposed to prohibit all concealed and indirect benefits for college athletes; any money for athletes was to be limited to transparent scholarships awarded solely on financial need. Schools that violated this code would be expelled from NCAA membership and thus exiled from competitive sports.

This bold effort flopped. Colleges balked at imposing such a drastic penalty on each other, and the Sanity Code was repealed within a few years. The University of Virginia went so far as to call a press conference to say that if its athletes were ever accused of being paid, they should be forgiven, because their studies at Thomas Jefferson’s university were so rigorous.

This chapter is excerpted from Taylor Branch’s The Cartel, a Byliner Original available for $3.99 as a Kindle at Amazon, a Quick Read at Apple’s iBookstore, and a Nook Snap at BarnesAndNoble.com.

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Taylor Branch is best known for his landmark trilogy on the civil rights era, America in the King Years. His latest book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President (2009), is a memoir of his unprecedented eight-year project to gather a sitting president’s comprehensive oral history secretly on tape. Aside from writing, Taylor speaks before a wide variety of audiences. He began his career as a magazine journalist for The Washington Monthly in 1970, moving later to Harper’s and Esquire. taylorbranch.com