A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

Wrestling Eddie Dutzler

76 Wrestling Eddie Dutzler I was clicking through channels the other night, and I happened across one devoted to Big Ten sports. They were showing a wrestling match between the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois. A pair of corn-fed, land-grant heavyweights overflowed their singlets and circled and pawed at one another, looking for an opening, while their cauliflower-eared coaches, ill-fitting sport coats off, ties loosened, elbows on knees, yelled instructions from the bench. I am not a wrestling fan and never have been. The NCAA could hold the national finals on my neighbor’s front lawn, and I wouldn’t bother to haul myself up off the sofa, cross the living room, and peek through the drapes. Sitting there the other night, watching those two young behemoths for a moment, I was drawn back to the beginning of my aversion to wrestling—to high school gym class where, every day for a couple of weeks in the dead of each winter, I had to wrestle Eddie Dutzler. Dutzler was a big, quiet, gentle, not especially athletic kid with a head full of dark peasant hair that stood up on its own. We’d gone to school together for twelve years, and over all those years, I don’t think I heard him volunteer ten sentences. He carried himself with a heavy, deliberate precision—with a comportment that was not so much above the rest of us as off to one side somehow. Eddie Dutzler was never near ground zero when classroom trouble struck. W RESTLING EDDIE DUT ZLER 77 He was an only child born to a devoutly Catholic older couple . As best I can remember, his father was a large, very quiet man who looked like he worked as an office clerk somewhere. Or maybe a loading dock supervisor. His mother was high-waisted and a bit on the heavy side. I can still see the three of them on their knees at Sunday mass, big-boned, ample fore and aft, an introverted family unit in the dim light of the tall old church. Sitting there with my parents and my four brothers and four sisters, I used to wonder what life might have been like chez Dutzler—so quiet, so orderly. I envisioned the three of them eating dinner at the kitchen table, spooning their soup in—cabbage soup—without speaking a word. I imagined a pendulum clock tock-tocking on a wall in some other room. It was soup slurps and tocking, soup slurps and tocking, Mrs. Dutzler’s canary in its cage in the living room having clocked off for the day at sunset. As I imagined it, Eddie Dutzler came by his taciturnity genetically. He was always a nice enough guy. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of whatever the stuff is that kids use to make friends with other kids. He was big, bordering on ponderous, and somehow it seemed like any friendship with Dutzler would have bordered on ponderous, too. From my interactions with Eddie on the playground and in class, I’d say he was smart but naively puritanical the way only children tend to be—the kind of kid who could help you solve for x but who would cover his eyes and go straight to confession if you showed him Miss March. It felt as if he were keeping the guys at arm’s length for some reason. There was a gap there. That’s all, just an unspoken gap. There was no gap during gym class wrestling season. Not for me. Five days a week, two weeks every year, we would adjourn to the wrestling room, line up from smallest to largest and count off by twos. No matter how the counting went, year after year, it was Eddie Dutzler and me, always Eddie Dutzler and me. The wrestling room was a windowless space, maybe forty by forty, with neoprene mats on the floor and a huge heater, sus- 78 W RESTLING EDDIE DUT ZLER pended from the steel rafters overhead, with a massive blower pointing straight down. The way high school wrestling worked, they would crank up the heat in the wrestling room to help our gladiators lose weight before their next matches. If it was good enough for the wrestling team, it was good enough for gym class, and Coach would crank...