Lovers and rowers.

Robinson, David Moore

It was probably inevitable that Mike and Donna would get together. You hear so often about stroke-coxswain relationships that it's almost a cliche in the rowing world. They spend hours every day facing each other: he the number-one rower at the back of the boat, setting the pace for the seven others with his strength and skill; she steering the boat and shouting commands, her strength hidden under layers of cotton and Gore-tex.

Still, it was disconcerting for all of us to think that the command of the whole crew was in the hands of two mooning lovers back there who would probably be just as happy in a little rowboat in a park somewhere, complete with parasol and seersucker suit. It was racing season--time for the big three-mile head races in Madison and Philly and Boston--and there was no time for messing about in boats, as they say, because to us this was serious business.

It was like that. No "I" in team and that whole thing, of course, but in rowing it went farther. There was no "I," period. Not with the amount of time and energy we spent together. On the water, coach reminded us that we "belonged to him," and that his was the only voice that we should hear up and down the river. Off the water, we knew that we belonged to a small team at a small Midwestern college, far removed from the rowing epicenters of the east coast. At our school, crew was misunderstood and underfunded, so all we had was each other. We were rowers first and students second. The rowing body, after all, was much more important than the student body. Mike and Donna, therefore, were not only selfish, they were dangerous. A thing like that could split up the whole team, and none of us wanted to toy with disaster at this point in the season.

The first time we found out was when Jonesey saw them at the mall together. It was before morning practice when he told us, in that dark, frozen hour just before dawn. The guys showed up at the boathouse on bikes and in cars, and we sat in the frosty grass in a habitual circle, by turns dozing and stretching.

Matt was telling about how he'd woken up this morning, gone to the can, gotten dressed, and left the dorm, just like he always did. It wasn't until he passed the administration building that he noticed that the clock read four, not five, and he could turn around and go back to bed for another hour.

"Coach here yet?" said Frank, just arriving. He shook the metal boathouse door, then pounded on it just ill case.

"Nawwww," drawled a pile of Jonesey, gripping his toes. Then, sitting up, he added, "Iron Mike isn't here either. Probably sleeping in, if you get my drift."

We all looked at him with only mild interest, because Jonesey was given to saying stupid things like that.

"With Donna, I mean," he said, straightening up.

We all laughed appreciatively.

"That's all we need," said Frank, leaning on the door and pulling an ankle to his ass. "A fucking cox-stroke drama."

We laughed at this, too, because it sounded dirty, and because it was true.

"You didn't hear?" Jonesey said, enjoying his privileged knowledge. "Those two are an item now." tie told us about how he saw them at the mall together, and how they were holding hands when they didn't know he was looking.

"Shiiiit," said Frank, who rowed at seven-seat, and probably believed that he himself should be stroke, as all seven men do. Tall and lean, Frank could get a lot of power out of an oar. But he rowed on the starboard side, and as the stroke oarlock is generally on port, the seven man lives forever in humble frustration. "This is all we fucking need," Frank continued, dropping his stretching leg and kicking the door with a loud metallic thwang. This time none of us laughed.

We all looked for signs during practice. The two showed up separately, Donna with her blond hair hanging down to her ass, as always, her tiny frame hidden inside three or four layers, as always, smiling equally to all the guys as she strapped on her hat and headset, as always. Mike was quiet and business-like as he entered the boathouse, where by now we were playing an old lock Rock CD on the boom box and slapping each other to get psyched up. He didn't seem to notice how we stopped and watched him while he hung his keys on the rack and pulled a jacket from his thick, stout frame.

Nor were there any signs during the row itself. We went through the reliable routines: lifting the smooth, cool white shell to waists, then shoulders; carrying it over heads down to the dock, sharing the heft of its weight along our forearms; sensing the unsteady balance of the boat as we drifted from the dock, started up our strokes and sought that elusive synchronicity called "swing"; smelling the detergent of the water treatment plant and the sweet grease of the doughnut shop at their respective turns along the river; seeing the pink, yellow, blue light come up over the stern.

After practice, at the dining hall, we compared notes over our eggs and waffles. Murph and Sully, who at five- and six-seat made up what some rowers call the "engine room" at the middle of the boat, both agreed there was nothing going on, and gave Jonesey a hard time for confusing his wild sexual fantasies with reality.

"Did you hear anything from where you were, Frankie?" asked Ditto, who, as bow-man, was the first to catch a cold wave or a strong wind and the last to catch onto what was going on in the boat.

"I don't know," said Frank. "Everything seemed normal. Maybe a bit too normal."

Not that he would have heard anything, anyway. The first rule of rowing is that there's no talking in the boat--rowers are eyes and ears and muscles, but never mouths.

"Fuck it," said Sully. "Anyway, remember the last party at the crew house, when Mike had his tongue down that troll-lookin' girl's throat?"

"Yeah, and she started grabbing his junk." Murph said, "So Sully and I started rubbing his ass, sticking our hands in his pockets, and he couldn't figure out how this girl had grown three hands?" We were all laughing with the memory by the time he got it all out, and laughed again when he started saying, "I've got pictures! I've got the pictures to prove it!"

Then we decided to find a copy of a "Billy Goats Gruff" children's book and scan and Photoshop all the pages, superimposing Mike's and the girl's faces onto the illustrations in the book.

None of us were really involved with girls then, which may have been why we were so interested in the whole Mike and Donna thing. Or maybe it was because we had all thought about going for Donna. She was beautiful, with her long blond hair and big eyes and ready smile, and the little fragile shoulders that you just wanted to put an arm around and protect with all that strength you built in the gym and at practice.

On the other hand, we all hated her. There's an unspoken resentment that every rower harbors for his coxswain. Rationally, you know that the boat would go nowhere without this little person at the back to keep time and cadence, to shout orders and to keep the boat on course. But something inside you, some human quality that won't subject itself to discipline or reason, still rebels. We have all, when singled out for sloppy technique one too many times, formulated unspoken, smart-assed responses to the cox's naggings. We have all, in private moments during a sprint, envisioned pulling so hard on the oar, stomping so hard on the foot stretchers and slamming so wildly through the drive that her neck might snap in whiplash and her little head might roll clear off her body into the river, floating off in our wake.

The crew works in part because of these flashes of hatred and the motivation they give. And ill another, greater part, it works because these moments are forgotten a few strokes after they appear. In the same way, we all forgot about the rumors of Mike and Donna. We needed to, in order to keep following their lead; in order to keep believing in our team and ourselves. The whole thing managed to stay forgotten until the next crew party.

Crew parties were the self-proclaimed wildest parties on campus. When you're up at 5 a.m. every day practicing, you don't lead much of a social life. We would commiserate about this before practice everyday, griping about why do we do this damned sport, anyway. Frankie had two roommates who were big fat party animals, and would often stumble in from the bar smelling like warm whisky and puke, just as Frankie was yawningly stepping into his running shoes. Those guys were doing college, we'd sometimes say. What we were doing was something different entirely.

So we only had parties every so often, after a big race or when coach promised us an extra rest day. And like practices, the parties were fairly scripted.

Sully and Murph, along with a few of the lightweight guys, lived in the Crew House, which was just your average dump of a college town house that they rented from some sleazy landlord. But to us it was a home base, and we knew the place like we knew the way the night itself would go. The parties would always start out slow: guys clustered around the keg, gulping down Nattie light or some other cheap beer from plastic cups; the women's team arriving in twos and threes, having traded in sweats and spandex for skirts and makeup; awkward conversation that rarely strayed far from talk of upcoming races or practice schedules. Then, as the party gathered size and momentum, these warm-ups would give way to full-on partying. Boat races, in which the same lineups from practice engaged in a tournament-style chugging contest. The Yacker, an old gallon-size pickle jar filled with ice, lemons, sugar and vodka. The guys would all chant "Yack-er! Yack-er!" and pass it from man to man until the entire thing was gone. This would lead directly into the Penis Dance, where we'd all drop trough and mosh around the living room, slamming one another into walls, breaking down doors. It was at this point that most of the hangers-on--friends brought by crew members and people who had wandered in from the neighborhood--would quietly and disquietedly make for the door. Interspersed with all this scripted madness were the body shots and the butt-biting that the girls just loved.

There was something in that script that kept us coming back, some kind of predictability that allowed us to feel like we were cutting loose. As if by following the rules, we were all breaking them together.

We had lust such a party the night after the I lead of the Wolf in Green Bay. The lightweights were psyched because they'd placed third. The women had a few solid placings, too, and even though we heavyweights placed near the bottom, we'd beat Wisconsin's "D" boat, and for us, any small victory over Wisconsin was huge.

It was a hilarious night. We hadn't followed through on the troll pictures, but we made up for it by telling everyone about the idea. At one point, a few of us were in the kitchen laughing about it.

"I still have the picture," Murph said. "We can still do it."

The laughter died off, and our tiredness from the trip had begun to slow things down.

"Why do we row?" said Frank, addressing no one. He was prone to philosophical moods when he got drunk. "I mean, we could be partying like this all the time--no weekends traveling. We could study, get good grades...."

"We're masochists," Ditto said, "We can't get enough of that good lactic acid burn."

We all laughed.

"Because there's nothing better than rowing," said Donna, just entering with an empty cup. "We love it!" and we all smiled meaninglessly.

"She's right, though," said Sully. "I mean, there's no money in rowing. No glory--how many people outside this house could even name the top rowers in the world? The Olympic Medal winners? The only reason to do this ridiculous sport is for the sake of rowing itself," he pronounced, grandly. And we all agreed.

Some guy that no one knew came stumbling into the middle of the conversation. "You guys are on the crew team, right?" he said. "Why do you guys get up so freakin' early in the morning for that shit?"

Dirty Sanchez, a tall, skinnyTexican on the lightweight squad, hiked up his jeans and stepped right up to the guy. "Listen. I do more before eight a.m. than you do all day, bitch." We all laughed, secretly jealous that he'd beat us to the punch in using our favorite line. The guy looked around, peeved, but backed out of the room upon finding that he'd have a hell of a struggle fighting us all. We felt proud and happy.

It was toward the end of the night, the hour when everyone grabs someone and starts hooking up in a dusty corner, that Murph came running down the stairs, red-eyed and laughing wildly.

"Guess who's upstairs gettin' tea-bagged!?" he shouted to anyone who would listen. He had passed out in the bunk bed in his room, and woke up to find Mike standing against the dresser and Donna on her knees in front of him. No one did much about it that night--we were all too fucked up to care--but no one forgot it either.

With the secret out, and confirmed by someone more reliable than Jonesey, practices took on a whole new emotional pitch. At every break between pieces, the boat's speaker system picked up giggles and unintelligible whispers that were intended only for Mike. Guys would start flipping their oars around, throwing their weight way off to one side or taking a few errant strokes, just to stop the two from their little courtship. Then Donna would scream for us to cut it out and we'd laugh at the anger in her little elfin voice.

During the down times--after practice, before meetings, during breakfast--the desire to get it all out on the table was almost unbearable. One day, Frankie finally succumbed. After a full three hours of pointing out every common double entendre in the rowing lexicon ("Hands on my what, now?" " 'Way nough?' You've had enough of what, now?" "Come on, boys. Hit it hard through the drive, coach says. I tell you who else likes it hard through the drive ..."), he wrapped an arm around Mike's shoulders as they left the boathouse and said loudly, "So how's your cox, Mikey?"

We all heard, and we couldn't suppress a round of chuckles.

"Get your fucking hands off me," Mike murmured, shoving Frank away.

Frank started hopping around like a boxer. "You wanna go? You wanna go, big boy?" and turned it all into a joke. Mike shook his head, half smiling, and walked off to his car. It was like that on the team. Nothing serious could stay serious for long.

After Frank started it up, it became open season on Mike for the rest of us. The sex puns, the irreverent questions. He didn't blow up again, but only gave lame retorts about us being jealous. Even Murph and Sully got into the act, not saying much, but they would laugh along. For some reason, though, no one ever gave Donna any shit. Maybe it was the fear that she could retaliate during practice. Or maybe just the fact that in the boat, she was the surrogate coach, and this association set her out of the bounds of our jocularity. Either way, there was a kind of reverence for the cox--or, at least, for the cox's authority--that kept anyone from giving her a hard time.

Our fall season was to be capped by a big regatta in Boston. The Charles River is one of the few places where rowing regattas draw actual spectators, and everybody wants to row there. Although the race was an invitational, as a non-Ivy-League, non-National-Team crew we'd had to petition for a berth, and we'd somehow just squeaked in this year. It had been decided, after a great deal of griping and moaning and politicking among our team's boats, that the one bid would go to us heavyweight men.

Thursday morning, after a brief practice, we loaded up the trailer and took our places in the rental van while the lightweight guys and the women's team waved us a hero's farewell. The whole vehicle buzzed with excitement as we rolled out onto the highway.

Somewhere around hour eight of the trip, when we'd tired of playing "Goal Line Stand" and wrestling over the seats, someone decided to start a round of "Who'd You Rather Do." We traded questions back and forth, comparing sexy Hollywood actresses, passable members of the lightweight women's team, and occasionally making cruel judgments between Susan Gifford, heaviest of the heavyweight women, and your mother.

"I got one, I got one," said Frank, waiting for the laughter and heckling to die down. "Mike. Who'd you rather do. The troll from The Billy Coats Gruff," he paused while everyone had a chance to laugh, "or Donna." We all fell silent. For one, the jokes about Mike and Donna were kind of played out by now. But more than that, Donna was right there in the van, and no one knew how she'd take it.

"Dude," said Mike, looking around at all of us to gauge our support, "Not cool. Donna's my girlfriend, dick." He laughed incredulously, but blushed a little all the same.

"You guys are such assholes," said Donna, and looked out the window. Frank tried to play it off with a "No, I was just checking. That's all. Just making sure that you guys are, you know, solid." He reached up and shook Donna's shoulder, but she shrugged him off, laying her head against the window.

It was evening when we stopped at a diner in Western New York somewhere. We were having lots of fun making sex puns about the menu items and harassing the waitress with witty remarks. By the time she got around to Frank, we were all hanging on what he might say. "And to drink?" she asked.

"Do you have any teabags?" he said, his long face tightened in a wise-assed smile. "I'll take one teabag, if you have it. Thanks."

We all stifled our snickering when we saw how Mike was glaring at him.

The next day was a light practice on the jam-packed river, more to get Donna used to the course than to work the rest of us out. The Charles, truth be told, is a terrible river for a race. It's got narrow spots and hairpin turns. Every year there are more than a few clashes of oars--sometimes even an accident or two--and no one ever comes away with a time that they're really happy about. Throughout the practice row, Frank kept piping up and saying things like, "See that, Donna? That's the Weeks Bridge. Try not to hit it." She only replied by snapping at him to keep quiet in the boat.

It was apparent that the trip had been rough on Donna, and it seemed that Frank's taunting had finally worn her down. She called out commands and made a few corrections of form here and there, but she no longer pointed out competitors and whispered things like, "There's so-and-so. That's another team whose asses we're going to kick!" She was just going through the motions, and the weight she carried seemed to slow all of us down.

That night, Mike called a team meeting in his hotel room. We all filed in and sat around for a while, comparing quad muscle size and bantering about nothing--trying to dispel our unspoken nervousness about the next day's race. Finally, someone asked where the hell was Frankie, and Mike got quiet and pissy.

"Fuck him. We'll start it without him," he kept saying, but he kept waiting nevertheless.

"And where's Donna?" someone said, and we all looked around and noticed her missing.

"Dammit," Mike mumbled, but not like he'd just realized it, as the rest of us had. More like he'd hoped we wouldn't notice so he wouldn't have to explain. "Look," he said, sighing heavily. "Donna's not real happy right now. She feels like--well, like the team's not coming together. And if she's not happy, then ..."

Just at that moment, Frank pushed loudly through the door. He was stumbling a little, and with him wafted in the smell of booze.

"Where the fuck you been, man?" said Mike, staring dead at him.

"Where've I been? Where've you been? I thought the meeting was at ..."

"Are you drunk? We have a race tomorrow. The fucking Charles."

"Race? Shit. We're seeded forty-seventh. Out of fifty. You can't win a race when you're seeded three from the back, right behind goddamn Little Sisters of the Poor." He flopped onto one of the beds, next to Murph and Sully. "Who gives a shit, man?"

This was not what we had wanted to hear. We'd been spending the day pumping ourselves up with talk of shocking the field, making a name for our school, and now Frank, just by stumbling in, had let all the air out of the room. We all stayed quiet, and Frank, obviously feeling the loss of our approval, got up and left. Mike dismissed the meeting, and we were all left to grumble about what a son-of-a-bitch Frank was for letting us all down.

The race went on the next day, and we started in our 47th spot, but in the end we DFL'ed, Dead Fucking Last, in rowing parlance. Frank failed to show up, so coach put Murph in seven, and Tony, who had come along as an alternate, rowed at five. Within the first minute of the race, Murph caught a crab, his oar blade catching water and the handle hitting him so hard in the gut that it pulled him up out of his seat and knocked him back into Sully's lap. The forty-eighth boat passed us then, and we swerved too far out on the last stretch and clashed oars with the forty-ninth as they crawled past us. We crossed the last buoy, far from the bridges and the crowds, and no gun or horn sounded our finish.

Afterward, on land, we were flushed and still out of breath as we shouldered the boat back to our trailer. The guys who carried oars from the dock were ashamed to show the colors on the blades, lest someone recognize us as the 47 boat that had crawled so awkwardly down the course.

Mike was giving a half-hearted "good effort" speech back at the trailer when Frank wandered over with an open beer and that old cocky smile.

"Thanks for all the help, asshole," said Mike.

"You guys couldn't suck enough out there," Frank grinned. "I knew you needed me." Everyone ignored him, so he leaned closer to Donna and whispered in her ear, "And I know you need me."

"Fuck off, Frank," she said, pushing him away. "I don't want anything to do with you. Just get that through your thick fucking head."

"It's cool," Frank said, backing up a step, holding up both hands and his beer can between two fingers. "It's cool."

"No it isn't. No more passes at me, no more late night phone calls. Give it up. Just leave me the fuck alone!"

Frank looked around at us, trying to laugh casually. "What are you talking--"

"Don't you want the guys to know? Big man? Big seven seat?"

We all watched as Frank fell into a reflective stupor. Mike shoved him as he walked past and toward the van. "Leave my girlfriend alone, asshole." Turning back, he repeated, "She's my girlfriend, got it?"

"Got it," said Frank, still looking down. "Your slampiece. No, it's good. You two have fun. Never mind the rest of us," he said. He raised his head and looked around for support, but from the rest of us he found none. We all saw how his was not the flash of rower-coxswain hatred we had all silently felt at some time in our embarrassed past. Nor was it the righteous indignation we all felt at Mike's violation of the rule against dating the cox. This was a guttural, animal hatred: that of the pack member against its leader, of the mate-less male against his territorial rival. Frank's bestial anger suddenly showed us all our own baseness, the ignobility that we bad sought, through all our bravado and banter, to overpaint with self-importance. We could do nothing but turn away from Frank, as we already had from Mike.

It was sunset by the time we got the trailer loaded and everyone was changed and ready to go. There was no football in the parking lot this time, no joking or playing. Frank stumbled back to the fold at some point and passed out, stinking, in the very back of the van. The ride home was quiet: no games, no shouting, barely any talk at all aside from Mike and Donna's occasional whispered bickerings.

Coach cancelled practice for the next few weeks, giving us a chance to catch up on homework and give our bodies a rest--to be students again, instead of rowers. One day I ran into Ditto on the quad. But we didn't reflect on the grace and power of the sport, or remember all the things about rowing that made us larger than ourselves--the true answers to that question someone once asked in that drunken kitchen. Rather, we fell into the natural exchange of gossip.

"Did you hear?" Ditto said, nearly salivating with the news. "Mike and Donna split up. And Frank says he might not come back for the Spring season."

I shrugged, not surprised. Nor did I really care.

David Moore Robinson was born in Long Island, New York and is currently in his last semester of the MFA program in creative writing at Colorado State University. After graduation, he will be married and live with his bride, Judy, in Miami, Florida, where he hopes to begin rowing again.