Playing Fields

Tony Nailles went out for football in high school and made the second squad in his junior year. He had never been a good student--he got mostly Cs--but in French his marks were so low they were scarcely worth recording. One afternoon, when he was about to join the squad for practice, it was announced over the squawk box that he should report to the principal. He was not afraid of the principal, but he was disturbed at the thought of missing any of the routines of football practice. When he stepped into the outer office, a secretary asked him to sit down.

"But I'm late," Tony said. "I'm late for practice already."

"He's busy," the secretary said.

"Couldn't I come back some other time? Couldn't I do it tomorrow?"

"You'd be late for practice tomorrow."

"Couldn't I see him during classtime?"

"No."

Tony glanced around the office. In spite of the stubborn and obdurate facts of learning, the place had for him a galling sense of unreality. A case of athletic trophies stood against one wall, but this seemed to be the only note of permanence. Presently, he was let into the principal's office and given a chair.

"You've failed first-year French twice," the principal said, "and it looks as if you are going to fail it again. Your parents expect you to go on to college and you know you have to have a modern-language credit. Your intelligence quotient is very high and neither I nor Miss Hoe can understand why you fail."

"It's just that I can't say French,.sir," Tony said. "I just can't say any French. My father can't, either. It sounds phony."

The principal switched on the squawk box and said into it, "Could you see Tony now, Miss Hoe?"

Her affirmative came through loud and clear. "Certainly."

"You go down and see Miss Hoe now," said the principal.

"Couldn't I see her after class tomorrow, sir? I'm missing football practice."

"I think Miss Hoe will have something to say about that. She's waiting."

Miss Hoe was waiting in a room whose bright lights and pure colors did nothing to cheer him. It would soon be getting dark on the playing field and he had already missed passing and tackle. Miss Hoe sat before a large poster showing the walls of Carcassonne. It was the only traditional surface in the room. The brilliant fluorescent lights in the ceiling made the place seem to be a cavern of incandescence, authoritative in its independence from the gathering dark of an autumn afternoon; and the power to light the room came from another county, well to the north, where snow had already fallen. The chairs and desks were made of brightly colored plastic. The floor was waxed Vinylite.

"Sit down, Tony," she said. "Please sit down. It's time that we had a little talk."

She might have been a pretty woman--small-featured and slender--but her skin was sallow and coarse and in the brightness of the light, one saw that she had a few chin whiskers. Her waist was very slender and she seemed to take some pride in this. She always wore belts, cinctures, chains or ribbons around her middle and she sometimes wore a girlish ribbon in her brown hair. Her mouth, considering the strenuous exercise it got in French verbs, was very small. She wore no perfume and exhaled the faint unfreshness of humanity at the end of any day.

She lived alone, of course, but we will grant her enough privacy not to pry into the clinical facts of her virginity or to catalog the furniture, souvenirs, etc., with which her one-room apartment was stuffed. As a lonely and defenseless spinster, she was prey to the legitimate anxieties of her condition. There were four locks on the door to her apartment and she carried a vial of ammonia in her handbag to throw into the eyes of assailants. She had read somewhere that anxiety was a manifestation of sexual guilt, and she could see, sensibly, that her aloneness and her virginity would expose her to guilt and repression. However, the burden of guilt must, she felt, be somehow divided between her destiny and the news in the evening paper. It was not her guilt that had caused the increase in sexual brutality. She had come to feel that some disorganized conspiracy of psychopaths was developing. Weekly, sometimes daily, women who resembled her were debauched, mutilated and strangled. Alone in the dark she was always afraid. Since she frequently dreamed that she was being debauched by some brute in a gutter, she had to include guilt along with terror.

"When were you born, Tony?" she asked.

"May twenty-seventh."

"Oh, I knew it," she said. "I knew it. You're Gemini."

"What's that?"

"Gemini is the constellation under which you were born. Gemini determines many of your characteristics and, one might say, your fate; but Gemini men are invariably good linguists. The fact that you are Gemini proves to me that you can do your work and do it brilliantly. You can't dispute your stars, can you?"

He looked past her through the window to the playing field. There was still enough light in the air, enough color in the trees to compete with the incandescence of their cavern; but in another ten minutes, there would be nothing to see in the window but a reflection of Miss Hoe and himself. He knew nothing about astrology beyond the fact that he thought it to be a sanctuary for fools. He supposed that she might have read in the stars (and he was right) that it was her manifest destiny to be unloved, unmarried, childless and lonely. She sighed and he was suddenly conscious of her breathing--its faint sibilance and the rise and fall of her meager front. It seemed intimate--sexual--as if they lay in each other's arms, and he moved his chair back suddenly, scraping the legs on the Vinylite. The noise restored him.

"I've talked this over with Mr. Northrup. Tony, and we've reached a decision. Since you seem unable to manage your own time with any efficiency, we are going to give you a little assistance. We are going to ask you to give up football."

He had not anticipated this staggering injustice. He would not cry, but there was a definite disturbance in his eye ducts. She didn't know what she was saying. She knew, poor woman, much less about football than he knew about French. He loved football, loved the maneuvers, the grasswork, the fatigue and loved the ball itself--its shape, color, odor and the way it spiraled into the angle of his elbow and rib cage. He loved the time of year, the bus trips to other schools; he loved sitting on the bench. Football came more naturally to him than anything else at his time of life, and how could they take this naturalness away from his and fill up the breach with French verbs?

"You don't know what you're saying, Miss Hoe."

"I'm afraid I do, Tony. I've not only talked with Mr. Northrup, I've talked with Coach."

"With Coach?"

"Yes, with Coach. Coach thinks it would be better for you, better for our school, better, perhaps, for our football team if you spent more time at your studies."

"Coach said this?"

"Coach said that you were enthusiastic but he doesn't think that you're in any way indispensable. He thinks that perhaps you're wasting your time."

He stood. "You know what, Miss Hoe?" he asked.

"What, Tony?" she said. "What, dear?"

"You know, I could kill you," he said. "I could kill you. I could strangle you."

She stood, hurling her chair against the walls of Carcassonne, and began to scream.

Her screaming brought Mr. Graham, the Latin teacher, and Mr. Clark (science) running. She stood at her desk, her arm outflung, pointing at Tony. "He tried to kill me," she screamed. "He threatened to kill me."

"There, there, Mildred," said Mr. Graham, "there, there."

"I want a policeman," she screamed. "Call the police."

Mr. Graham called the office through the squawk box and asked the secretary to call the police. Mr. Clark picked up Miss Hoe's chair and she sat in it, trembling and breathing heavily, but stern, as if she were about to upbraid an unruly class. Then, in the distance, they heard the sound of a police siren that seemed, excited and grieving, not to come from the autumn twilight but from some television drama in which they were the actors or combatants playing out nothing so simple as poor French marks and a mistaken threat. Tony was Miss Hoe's long-lost brother who had just returned from his travels with the news that their beautiful mother was a well-known Communist spy. The Latin teacher would have been Miss Hoe's husband--a dreary failure whose business misadventures and drinking bouts had brought her to the brink of a nervous breakdown, and Mr. Clark came from the FBI. Thus, juxtaposed for a moment by the sound of the siren, they seemed about to have their dilemma interrupted by an advertisement for painkillers or detergents, until the police came in, asking: "What's up, what's going on here?" Vandalism had been their guess, although it was the wrong time of day--but vandalism was the usual complaint. Why did kids want to rip the lids off desks and break windows?

Miss Hoe raised her head. Her face was shining with tears. "He tried to kill me," she said. "He tried to kill me."

"Now, Mildred," said Mr. Clark. "Now, Mildred."

"Don't I have any protection at all?" she cried angrily. "Are you all going to stand around and defend this murderer, until I'm found some night with a broken neck? How do you know he doesn't have a knife? Has anyone searched him? Has anyone even asked him a question?"

"You got a knife, sonny?" one of the police asked.

"No," said Tony.

"You try to kill this lady?"

"No, sir. I got angry at her and said that I'd like to, but I didn't touch her. I wouldn't ever touch her."

"I want something done about this," Miss Hoe said. "I'm entitled to some protection."

"You want to file charges against him, lady? Felonious assault, I guess."

"I do," Miss Hoe said.

"All right. I'll take him down to the station and book him. Come on, sonny."

The corridor was crowded by this time with teachers, secretaries and janitors, none of whom knew what had happened and all of whom were asking one another what it was. Tony and the police had gotten to the end of the corridor and were about to turn out of sight when Miss Hoe cried: "Officer. Officer." It was a frightened voice and they turned quickly.

"Could you take me home? Will you drive me home?"

"Where do you live?"

"Langeley Gardens."

"Sure."

"Just a moment."

She got her coat, turned off the lights and locked the door to her classroom. She came swiftly down the hall, through the crowd, to where they waited. She got into the back seat of the car and Tony sat in front between the two police. (continued on page 84) Playing Fields (continued from page 78) "It's very kind of you to take me home," Miss Hoe said. "I do appreciate it. I'm terribly afraid of the dark. When I go into the cafetorium for my lunch, the first thing I think of is that it will be dark in four hours. Oh, I wish it would never get dark--never. I suppose you know all about that lady who was mistreated and strangled on Maple Street last month. She was my age and we had the same first name. We had the same horoscope and they never found the murderer...."

One of the police walked her to the door of her apartment and then they drove to the police station in the center of town. Tony explained that his mother was in the city but that his father usually came out on the 6:32. "Well, the judge won't be here until eight or later," one of the police said, "and we can't try you without the judge, but you don't look very desperate to me and I'll remand you in the custody of your father as soon as he comes home. The lady seemed a little hysterical...."

It was, of course, the first time Tony had been in the police station. It was a new building, not in any way shabby but definitely grim. Fluorescent tubing shed a soulful light and an extraordinarily harsh and unnatural voice was coming from a radio. "Five foot, eight," said the voice. "Blue eyes. Crooked teeth. A scar on the right side of the jaw. Weight, one hundred and sixty pounds. Wanted for murder...."

They took Tony's name and address and invited him to sit down. The only other civilian in the place was a shabbily dressed man who wore a stained white-silk scarf around his neck. His clothing was greasy and threadbare, his hands were black, but the white-silk scarf seemed like a declaration of self-esteem. "How long do I have to stay here?" he asked the lieutenant at the desk.

"Until the judge comes in."

"What did I do wrong?"

"Vagrancy."

"I hitched a ride on Route Twenty-seven," the vagrant said. "I asked this guy to stop the car so I could take a piss and as soon as I got out of the car, he drove off. Why would he do a thing like that?" The lieutenant coughed. "Well, you don't have long for this world," the vagrant said, "not with a cough like that. Ha-ha. A doctor told me that twenty-eight years ago and you know where the doctor is now? Six foot under. Pushing up daisies. He died a year later. The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that, and it makes you feel old. You fish in the river?"

"Some," said the lieutenant, putting as much uninterest into the sound as he could. The vagrant offended his nose, his sight and his sense of the fitness of things, not because of his manifest eccentricity but because he had heard the story so many times. They were all alike, the roadside vagrants; they suffered a sameness greater than the intellectual and sumptuary sameness of the businessmen who rode the 6:32. They all had theories, travels, diets, colorful pasts and studied conversational openings, and they usually wore some piece of soiled finery like the white-silk scarf.

"Well, I hope you don't eat the fish," the vagrant said. "That river's nothing but an open toilet. All the shit from New York comes up the river twice a day on the tides. You wouldn't eat the fish you found in the toilet, would you? Would you?" Then he turned to Tony and asked: "What you here for, sonny?"

"Don't tell him," said the lieutenant. "He's not here to ask questions."

"Well, can't I be friendly?" the vagrant asked. "Perhaps if we had a little conversation, we might discover that we have some interests in common. For instance, I've made a study of the customs and history of the Cherokee Indians and a great many people find this interesting. I once lived with them on a reservation in Oklahoma for three months. I wore their clothing, observed their customs and ate their food. They eat dogs, you know. Dogs are their favorite food. They boil them mostly, although sometimes they roast them. They--"

"Shut up," the lieutenant said.

At a quarter to seven they called Nailles, who said that he would be right over. When he strode into the station and found his son there, his first impulse was to embrace the young man, but he restrained himself. "You can take him home," the lieutenant said. "I don't think much will come of this. He'll tell you what happened. The complainant seems to have been a little hysterical."

Tony told his father what had happened as they drove home. Nailles had no counsel, advice, censure or experience to bring to that crazy hour. He understood his son's deep feelings about being dropped from the squad and he seemed to have shared in his son's felonious threatening of Miss Hoe. A little wind was blowing and as they drove, leaves of all colors--but mostly yellow--blew through the shaft of their headlights, and what Nailles said was: "I love to see leaves blowing through the headlights. I don't know why. I mean, they're just dead leaves, not good for anything, but I love to see them blowing through the light."

• • •

Miss Hoe never pressed charges and went on sick leave the next day. Tony was transferred to a French class taught by a man, but he was not allowed to return to the squad.

It was an autumn afternoon. Saturday.

Below Nailles' house, near a grove of dead elms, there was a swamp where a flock of red-winged blackbirds nested each spring. According to the law of their species, they should have turned south in the autumn; but the number of bird-feeding appliances in the neighborhood, overflowing with provender, had rattled their migratory instincts and they now spent the autumn and winter in Bullet Park in utter confusion. Their song--two ascending notes and a harsh trill, like a cicada--was inalienably associated with the first long nights of summer, but now one heard it in the autumn, one heard it in the snow. To hear this summery music on one of the last clement days of the year was like some operatic reprise where the heroine, condemned to death, hears in her dark cell (carcere brutta) the lilting love music that was first sung at the beginning of act two. The wind that day was westerly, and after lunch one could hear the thump-thump of a bass drum from the football field, where the band was warming up for a home game.

Tony, after having been dropped from the squad, did not, of course, spend his spare time studying irregular verbs. Instead, he read poetry, as if he shared with the poets the mysterious and painful experience of being forced into the role of a bystander. He had not read poetry before. Nailles was not so obtuse as to protest, but he was uneasy. He might say that poetry was one of the most exalted of the arts, but he could not cure himself of the conviction that poetry was the demesne of homely women and morbidly sensitive men.

As soon as Tony heard the bass drum that afternoon, he went upstairs and lay down on his bed. Nailles was worried and called up the stairs: "Tony, let's do something, shall we? Let's go for a ride or something."

"No, thank you, Daddy," Tony said. "I think I'll go into the city, if you don't mind. I'll go to a movie or maybe see a basketball game."

"That's fine," Nailles said. "I'll drive you to the train."

At three the next morning, Nailles woke. He got out of bed and started down the hall toward Tony's room. He felt very old, as if, while he slept, he had put down the dreams of a strong man--snow-covered mountains and beautiful women--in exchange for the anxieties of some decrepit octogenarian who feared that he had lost his false teeth. He felt frail, wizened, a shade of himself. Tony's bed was empty. "Oh, my God," he said loudly. "Oh, my God." His only and dearly beloved son had been set upon by (continued on page 164) Playing Fields (continued from page 84)thieves, perverts, prostitutes, murderers and dope addicts. He was, in fact, not so much afraid of the pain his son might know as of the fact that should his son endure any pain, he, Nailles, would have no resources to protect himself from the terror of having his beloved world--his kingdom--destroyed. Without his son, he could not live. He was afraid of his own death.

He went back down the hall, closed the door to the room where Maryellen slept and went downstairs, where he telephoned the Bureau of Missing Persons. There was no answer. He then called the central police office, but they had no record of anyone like Tony. He gave them his number and asked them to call back if there was any news. He drank half a glass of whiskey and then wandered around the living room, saying, "Oh God Oh God Oh God." Then he went upstairs, took two Nembutals, got into bed and lost consciousness a few minutes later.

Nailles woke at half past seven and went back to Tony's room, which was empty. He then woke Maryellen and told her the boy was missing. He telephoned the Bureau of Missing Persons, but there was still no answer; and when he telephoned the police, they had no news. The next train from New York was the 8:10 and, having absolutely nothing else to go on, he settled for a kind of specious, single-minded hopefulness. He felt that if he hoped strenuously enough for the boy's return, the boy would return. He drove to the station and when the train came in, Tony appeared, surrounded by that mysterious company of men and women who travel on Sunday mornings and who invariably carry paper bags. Nailles embraced his son, embraced him until his bones cracked, and asked: "Oh, my God, why didn't you telephone, why didn't you tell us?"

"It was too late, Daddy. I didn't want to wake you up."

"What happened?"

"Well, I was feeling blue about football and I thought I'd buy a book of poetry, so I went into a bookstore and there was this nice lady--Mrs. Hubbard--and we talked and then I asked her if she'd have dinner with me and she said why didn't I come to her apartment--she called it her flat--and she'd cook me dinner, and so I did."

"Did you spend the night with her?"

"Yes."

Nailles knew that his son was a mature male and he had no reason to protest that Tony had acted as one; but what sort of a woman would pick up a young man in a bookstore and hustle him home to bed?

"Was she a slut?"

"Oh, no, Daddy, she's very nice. She's a widow. She graduated from Smith. Her husband was killed in the War."

This irritated Nailles. She had given her husband to her country and, thus, he must give his son to her. He somehow thought it the responsibility of war widows to remarry hastily and not to parade their forlornness throughout society, stressing the inequities of war. If she was attractive, intelligent and clean, why hadn't she remarried?

"Well, we can't tell your mother. It would kill her. We'll have to make up some story. You went to a basketball game and it went overtime and you spent the night at the Crutchmans'."

"But I've asked her to lunch."

"Who?"

"Mrs. Hubbard."

"Oh, my God," Nailles said. "Why did you have to do that?"

"Well, she's lonely and she doesn't seem to have many friends and you've always told me that I should ask people to the house."

"All right," Nailles said, "this is our story. You went into a bookstore and you met a lonely war widow and you asked her to lunch. Then you got some dinner somewhere and you went to a basketball game and you spent the night at the Crutchmans'. Right?"

"I'll try."

"You'd damned well better."

Maryellen embraced her son tenderly and Nailles explained that Tony had been to a basketball game, invited a lonely war widow to lunch and spent the night at the Crutchmans'.

"How are the Crutchmans?" Maryellen asked. "I haven't seen them for so long. Do they have a nice guest room? They've always urged us to use it, but I always like to come home. I suppose we ought to send them something. Do you think we ought to send them flowers? I could write them a note."

"Oh, don't bother," Nailles said. "I'll send them something."

After breakfast, Nailles asked Tony if he wanted to cut wood, but the boy said he thought he'd do his homework. The word homework touched Nailles--it seemed to mean innocence, youth, purity, all simple things--all lost in the bed of a sluttish war widow. He felt sad. He cut wood until it was time to bathe and dress and then he made a drink. Maryellen was cooking a leg of lamb and this humble and innocent smell filled the kitchen. He looked at Maryellen for some trace of suspiciousness, reflection or misgiving, but she seemed so unwary, so truly innocent, that he went to the stove and kissed her. Then he went into the living room and waited.

Tony parked the car in the driveway and opened the door for Mrs. Hubbard, who got out laughing. She wore a gray chesterfield with a brown-velvet collar and carried an umbrella, which she swung in a broad arc, striking the ground like a walking stick. Her right arm was hooked rakishly in Tony's and she seemed propelled forward partly by Tony, partly by the umbrella. She was shorter than he and looked up into the young man's face with a flirtatiousness that enraged Nailles. She wore no hat and her hair was a nondescript reddish color, obviously dyed. Her heels were very high and this made the calves of her legs bulge. Her face was round and flushed and Nailles wondered: Indigestion? Alcohol? He opened the door and welcomed her politely and she said: "It's simply heavenly of you to take pity on a poor widow."

"We're delighted to have you," said Nailles. Tony took her coat.

"How do you do," said Maryellen. "Won't you please come in." She was in the living room to the right of the hall, where a fire was burning. The pleasure she took in presenting her house, her table to someone who was lonely shone in her face.

"What a divine house," said Mrs. Hubbard, keeping her eyes on the rug. Nailles guessed that she needed glasses.

"Can I get you a manhattan?" Nailles asked. "We usually drink manhattans on Sunday."

"Any sort of drinkee would be divine," said Mrs. Hubbard.

"Did you find the train trip boring?" Maryellen asked.

"Not really," said Mrs. Hubbard. "I had the great good luck to find an interesting traveling companion--a young man who seems to have some real-estate interests out here. I can't remember his name. I think it was Italian. He had the blackest eyes.... Hmmm," she said of a novel on the table. "O'Hara."

"I'm just leafing through it," Maryellen said. "I mean, if you know the sort of people he describes, you can see how distorted his mind is. Most of our set are happily married and lead simple lives. I much prefer the works of Camus." Maryellen pronounced this Camooooo. "We have a very active book club and at present we're studying the works of Camus."

"What Camus are you studying?"

"Oh, I can't remember the titles," Maryellen said. "We're studying all of Camus."

It was to Mrs. Hubbard's credit that she did not pursue the subject. Tony got her an ashtray and Nailles looked narrowly at his beloved son and this stray. His manner toward her was manly and gentle. He didn't at any point touch her, but he looked at her in a way that was proprietary and intimate. He seemed contented. Nailles did not understand how, having debauched this youth, she had found the brass to confront his parents. Was she totally immoral? Did she think them totally immoral? But his strongest and strangest feeling, observing the boy's mastery, was one of having been deposed; as if, in some ancient legend where men wore golden crowns and lived in round towers, the bastard prince, the usurper, was about to seize the throne. The sexual authority that Nailles imagined to spring from his marriage bed and flow through all the rooms and halls of the house was challenged. There did not seem to be room for two men in this erotic kingdom. His feeling was not of a contest but of an inevitability. He wanted to take Maryellen upstairs and prove to himself, like some old rooster, that the scepter was still his and that the young prince was busy with golden apples and other impuissant matters.

"How did you lose your husband, Mrs. Hubbard?" Maryellen asked.

"I really can't say," said Mrs. Hubhard. "They don't go in terribly much for detail. They simply announce that he was lost in action. Oh, what a divine old dog," she exclaimed as Tessie, the setter, wandered into the room. "I adore setters. Daddy used to breed and show them."

"Where was this?" Nailles asked.

"On the Island," said Mrs. Hubbard. "We had a largish place on the Island until Daddy lost his pennies; and I may say, he lost them all."

"Where did he show his dogs?"

"Mostly on the Island. He showed one dog in New York--Allshire Lassie--but he didn't like the New York show."

"Shall we go in to lunch?" asked Maryellen.

"Could I use the amenities?" asked Mrs. Hubbard.

"The what?" said Maryellen.

"The John," said Mrs. Hubbard.

"Oh, of course," said Maryellen. "I'm sorry...."

Nailles carved the meat and absolutely nothing of any interest or significance was said until about halfway through the meal, when Mrs. Hubbard complimented Maryellen on her roast. "It's so marvelous to have a joint for lunch," she said. "My flat is very small, as are my means, and I never tackle a roast. Poor Tony had to make do with a hamburger last night."

"Where was this?" Maryellen asked.

"Emma cooked my supper last night," Tony said.

"Then you didn't spend the night at the Crutchmans'."

"No, Mother," Tony said.

Maryellen saw it all, seemed to be looking at it. Would she rail at the stranger for having debauched her cleanly son? Slut. Bitch. Whore. Degenerate. Would she cry and leave the table? Tony was the only one then who looked at his mother, and he was afraid she would. What would happen then? He would follow her up the stairs, calling: "Mother, Mother, Mother." Nailles would telephone for a taxi to take dirty Mrs. Hubbard away.

Maryellen, her lunch half finished, lighted a cigarette and said: "Let's play 'I packed my grandmother's trunk.' We always used to play it when Tony was a boy and things weren't going well."

"Oh, let's," said Mrs. Hubbard.

"I packed my grandmother's trunk," said Maryellen, "and into it I put a grand piano."

"I packed my grandmother's trunk," said Nailles, "and into it I put a grand piano and an ashtray."

"I packed my grandmother's trunk," said Mrs. Hubbard, "and into it I put a grand piano, an ashtray and a copy of Dylan Thomas."

"I packed my grandmother's trunk," said Tony, "and into it I put a grand piano, an ashtray, a copy of Dylan Thomas and a football."

"I packed my grandmother's trunk," said Maryellen, "and into it I put a grand piano, an ashtray, a copy of Dylan Thomas, a football and a handkerchief."

"I packed my grandmother's trunk," said Nailles, "and into it I put a grand piano, an ashtray, a copy of Dylan Thomas, a football, a handkerchief and a baseball bat."

"They got through lunch and when this was over, Mrs. Hubbard asked to be taken to the station. She thanked Nailles and Maryellen, got into her chesterfield, went out the door and then returned, saying: "Oops. I nearly forgot my bumbershoot."

Maryellen cried, after they had gone. Nailles embraced her, saying: "Darling, darling, darling, darling." She went upstairs, and when Tony returned, Nailles said that his mother was resting. "You've got to go out for something else," Nailles said. "Wrestling or hockey."

"It's too early for hockey," Tony said, "I'll try basketball."