All I Wanted to Do Was Play Hockey

In 1980, Cleo Birdwell’s first and only book, Amazons, was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. It displayed the wordy, cursive subtitle An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League, and the cover artwork included a locker-room bench draped with a jersey (on which the letters ANGR could be seen) and surrounded by a helmet, one black skate, a pair of high heels and panty hose, and some lacy women’s undergarments. The back cover was graced by a poster image of what looked like a model in a hockey uniform (between her long, brown, wind-blown hair and over-the-shoulder black skate were the letters ANGE, and her sleeve bore the number 1). A 2008 Bookforum essay by Gerald Howard claims this woman appeared in uniform at the American Booksellers Association convention to sign galleys and cause a stir.

The memoir itself is funny and wry and immediately engaging, belying the ANGER letter-play on the jacket. It begins: “If a man’s name sounds right whether you say it forward or backward, it means he went to Yale. Sanders Meade, class of ’67, was the Rangers’ general manager when I made my first appearance under the smoky lights.” Those smoky lights suggest memory’s haze, but they also hint at the veils Birdwell plans to lift in her story. Amazons couples the casual violence of hockey with candid descriptions of Birdwell’s sexual escapades and binds them with hilarious send-ups of ritualized homoeroticism in sports. Birdwell’s presence on the ice, in the locker room, and on the road in the perpetual winter of the NHL brings sexual tension to the surface, making it seem white hot and obvious:

I was still dressing and undressing by myself. After another victory, this one at home against the Sabres, Bruce McLeod sort of skittered, accidentally, into my area, nude, in the midst of some horseplay with a bunch of other guys, and I got caught up in the merrymaking and took a friendly little swipe at his cock.
            “What are you doing?” he said. “Hey!”
            “Just playing around.”
            “Hey!”
            “Don’t be so touchy.”
            “That’s my penis.”
            “I know it is. It’s from the Latin.”
            “Well, you can’t do that.”
            “It’s locker-room stuff,” I said. “Fergie’s always grabbing your penis.”
            “He doesn’t grab it; he grabs at it. There’s a world of difference.”
            “He grabs at it, okay. And Dougie grabs at Fergie’s. It’s locker room.”
            “Well, if you don’t know the difference between their grabbing at it and you’re (sic) grabbing it, I don’t know what to tell you.”

Birdwell, delightfully, doesn’t know the difference, or isn’t troubled by the difference, as she thoughtfully details every kink of her exploits. The physicality of hockey is unmoored in her presence, as when she discovers, on what she calls “Kill Cleo Birdwell Night,” that her opponents on the ice are coming after her, and that the crowd is whole-heartedly backing them: “It was not only all right to watch it, it was all right to want it, it was all right to call for it.” Bemused but unflappable, Birdwell transforms a disturbing realization into slapstick, just as she skates free of mere objectification with the grace and speed of her self-awareness and wit.

Life can be beautiful when a whole bunch of people get together and agree that something that was not all right for three thousand years is suddenly all right. A veil has been parted. Men who wear lip gloss must know this feeling.

But who is Cleo Birdwell? If this is a memoir, why haven’t we heard of a female National Hockey Leaguer? Perhaps the best clue arrives on page 42, in the form of Murray Jay Siskind, one of a “new breed of adult sportswriters” who hates the sports he covers. “I talk about your downy white thighs in this piece,” he tells her, then bemoans her locker-room segregation (“She gets beat up like the other players, she scores goals, she contributes”). Siskind pops in and out of the book, usually toting his hush-hush 800-page manuscript (which he insists is not about sports), as he becomes increasingly but politely infatuated with Birdwell. His creepiness is awkward and sort of touching, as when he appears crouching next to her in the locker room as she licks her wounds on Kill Cleo Birdwell Night. He tells her “I have no right being here,” then assures her that “I am permanently available” to talk. Then, this:

He looked into my eyes and began nodding, as if he’d just made a major decision. Nod, nod, nod, nod.
            “It’s good to be with you right here, right now,” he said. “These are the moments no one sees, even the people close to the club, the day-in, day-out people. The intimate, unguarded moments. I feel privileged, Cleo. These are the good moments, aren’t they, despite the hurt and pain. You are fully aware of your body. The hurt will go. The hurt always goes. The important thing is that you fully inhabit your body. This is what makes athletes different. This is why athletes are so revered today, such heroes and paragons and champions. You inhabit your body and I don’t inhabit mine. The rest of us have no bodies. Isn’t that what the twentieth century is all about? People wandering around searching for their bodies. This moment is special, believe me. It is an existential moment, as the grown-ups say. You are inside yourself, and I am nowhere, I am wandering.”
            Nod, nod, nod, nod.
            “You have a place to be,” he said. (155)

Wait a second. Who writes like that—stilted but sort of lyrical dialogue, like a narrator injecting pop-infused pseudo-profundity into characters’ somewhat aloof monologues? And where else have we seen this Murray Jay Siskind guy?

If you haven’t already figured it out, dear reader, the answers are within the grasp of your search engine. Unfortunately, the book itself is more difficult to obtain, since its author, who achieved wide renown in 1984, discouraged its republication after the paperback edition went out of print in the mid ’80s. If you enjoyed that 1984 landmark novel, this more playful precursor ought to please you. Amazons is worth tracking down as a piece of literary ephemera, but it’s also worth reading.

 

 

Jeff T. Johnson was a founding editor of *Kitchen Sink* magazine. He is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, including *The Record Room*, and he is a co-creator of the zine *I Think We Should See Other People* (http://www.myspace.com/itwssop).