Flight of the Peacock

By Gerald Myers

When rookie sportswriter Roy Berman, covering at his first intercollegiate meet, observed varsity swimmer Marty Katz strut around the pool, he thought the undergraduate seemed a little too full of himself. That impression was later reinforced a dozen years later when the athlete reinserted himself into the now cardiologists life as a pacemaker salesman driving an expensive German sports car while engaged to the niece of Gregs partner. It was only when, a few years later, the two unexpectedly engaged in a tell-all conversation that the cardiologist realized that the arc of his life had closely mirrored Martys and the two of them could have been twin sons of different mothers.

This realization sparked a friendship that spanned almost thirty years and included a series of activities, adventures, and experiences that solidified a relationship that ended abruptly when Marty, at a relatively young age, succumbed to complications of an elective surgical procedure. This is their story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543442151

Gerald Myers

Gerald Myers, a native of Northeast Philadelphia, spent twenty-five years practicing cardiology in Pittsburgh and another fifteen in Colorado. But if medicine is his vocation, creative writing has always been his passion. The award-winning author of Muted Colors and The Frame, both of which have been made into screenplays currently lives in the Vail Valley with his wife, Renee where he continues to do both.

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CHAPTER 2

The Peacock by the Pool

O N THAT BRUTALLY cold mid February afternoon, I grabbed the navy blue down jacket my parents had bought me for Chanukah and slipped out of the frat house, heading to the McCoy Natatorium. After spending a couple of months getting oriented to State College’s campus life, it was in November of my freshman year that I finally decided to expand my horizons into some extra-curricular activities and joined the staff of the student run newspaper, the Daily Collegian.

The field of sports journalism was familiar territory for me, having written columns and game stories for The Megaphone, our high school paper at Northeast in Philadelphia. Eventually I worked myself up to the position of sports editor, which I held for both my junior and senior years. At Penn State, in January of 1969, I also moved into the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity house.

Which brings us up to that frigid Friday in February when I embarked on my first away assignment for the paper, a varsity swim team meet hosted by the Bucknell Bisons, a university located about sixty miles east of State College. This would constitute the first time I’d be traveling to an event with a team, my previous articles covering late fall soccer matches in Beaver Stadium and then, in January, my first home swim meet that took place in McCoy’s Olympic-sized pool.

With the mid winter temperatures in the single digits, and the wind howling in from the northeast at a twenty mph clip, the trek to the Natatorium to catch a ride to the meet was an adventure in and of itself. Tacking like a sailboat in a storm, I pressed on. And to make things worse, I’d forgotten my gloves. But I finally made it to the curb outside the building’s Bigler Road doors where the team bus was still idling.

Basically a shy, somewhat introverted, freshman, I headed for a seat near the rear of the bus and cracked open my Introduction to Anthropology textbook. While reviewing Margaret Mead’s arguments in favor of the effects of nurture over nature in primitive societies, I glanced up and noticed the first group of swimmers stepping on board, soon to be joined by their head coach, Chip Anderson, his assistant and a trainer. Everyone seemed upbeat and in a good spirits, engaging in the obligatory trash talking and joke telling. I chalked the mood up to a mixture of excitement and pre-meet jitters. Since this was only my second official swim meet I, too, was anxious, the experience amounting to a bit of ‘on-the-job’ training.

Having reviewed it during the meet I covered a month earlier, this time I felt more confident with the competition’s specific order of events. During that contest the home team had been destroyed eighty-two to thirty-one by Ohio University. The semester before, while struggling through my mandatory freshman phys ed swim class, I’d become familiar with the basic swimming strokes; freestyle, breast, butterfly and backstroke. In addition to those basics, I also mastered diving off the three-meter board, swimming underwater on one breath across the twenty-five-yard wide pool, snaring a brick off the bottom at a twelve foot depth and jumping off the ten-meter platform.

Before the bus pulled away, Coach Anderson worked his way to the back of the bus and greeted most of his competitors. As he approached where I was sitting, he must’ve recognized me from the Ohio U match and gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder.

Hey there, Roy, he saluted. Welcome aboard. I hope you have something better to write about this time.

Me, too, I replied with a wry smile.

The seventy-five minute drive took us northeast out of State College on Route 26. We soon merged onto US Route 322 toward Lewistown and about four miles later eased onto PA Route 45. From there it was a fifty-mile straight shot, passing through a series of small north central Pennsylvania towns before reaching Lewistown, the home of Bucknell University.

At that time, having only been in State College for less than six months, and without a car of my own, most of these routes, roads and towns were completely foreign to me. Up until then I’d found my way around by walking around campus or riding regional buses, the latter while on dates with girls living on farms outside of campus.

As the Collier Coach Line bus ground its gears up Route 45, I soon lost interest in what Margaret Mead was now reporting on the coming of age in Samoa and began staring out the window. What greeted me was farm after meadow after farm after small town. I soon dozed off. When the bus turned onto US Route 15 I suddenly awoke.

Glancing at the digital Timex my high school girlfriend, Lynn Labovitz, had presented me with as a birthday/going away gift in August, I saw that it was a little after four p.m. The meet was scheduled to get underway at five-thirty. This would give the swimmers plenty of time to change and warm up. It took us another ten minutes to weave around campus before finally stopping in the parking lot in front of Davis Gymnasium. This connected to the Freas-Rooke Pool. A sign outside revealed that this facility had been constructed in 1955.

The team trooped off the bus. I followed. Once in the diminutive pool area, I noticed an elevated set of bleachers overlooking one entire side of the pool. After climbing up a narrow flight of steps, I parked myself in the middle of the first row. It was there that I awaited the festivities.

The room that encompassed the pool was nothing like I’d expected. My only frame of reference, however, was McCoy Natatorium with its four-story high ceilings and massive glass windows. In contrast, this enclosure was a narrow rectangle with recessed lights embedded in the twelve-foot tall ceilings. Beige painted walls gave the setting an old, weary ambiance. The pool, regulation in length, contained six swimming lanes separated by bobbing roped floats. The area around it appeared both narrow and cramped. The grey mozaic-tiled perimeter was about five feet wide on three of the sides. The fourth included my bleachers, wooden and rickety, seven rows high and stretching nearly from endwall to endwall.

While jotting some preliminary notes on my writer’s pad, I was interrupted by the clamor of some two dozen competitors, all buck naked except for black Speedo swimsuits, streaming out of the locker room area. After standing around slapping of themselves under the armpits with open palms, then randomly calling out to each other, they all, almost simultaneously, leapt into the aquamarine water, creating a shimmering cascade of overlapping splashes.

This boisterousness persisted for the next few minutes. Then, around five-twenty, a stocky young man with dark glasses and a polo shirt with Bucknell Bisons Swim Team’s logo embossed on the breast pocket strode purposefully toward the bleachers. Addressing me directly he asked, Are you press? For a second I had to think to what he was referring. Then I realized, I was.

Yes, I replied. Why?

Here, he said handing me a clip-on badge and two pieces of paper.

After that he left to return to a poolside table. I, in turn, glanced down at his mimeographed sheets. One apparently listed the order of the meet. The other was a roster of the host swim team. Realizing that the competition was about to begin, I extracted my own piece of paper from the folder I’d brought with me, setting all three on my lap. This last one listed the PSU swim team’s roster, thoughtfully provided to me earlier that morning by Margaret Haller, our paper’s associate sports editor, while she prepped me for my assignment.

Margaret, who I’d met a few months earlier, was a short, blonde-haired, no-nonsense junior classman, who seemed ambitious and extremely bright. On the pre-law track, she would go on to graduate from Harvard Law School in 1973, teach at Duquesne’s Law School in Pittsburgh for a few years before joining Reed-Smith in the mid eighties. As a PSU alumnus, I recall receiving an email in early 2010 from the school’s public relations department announcing that Margaret Haller Conway had been appointed to the University’s Board of Directors. As a flood of memories had washed over me, I recall saying to myself, ‘Good for her’.

But in the winter of 1969 Margaret was merely indulging her dual passions of sports and creative writing by working for the school paper. On the roster with which she provided me were highlighted the names of some of our more talented competitors. Our diver, Dave Wesleyan, she had noted, was the only one who’d probably qualify for the Nationals in Bloomington that spring. He, in fact, did, but ended up performing poorly.

From the scoring sheet I also noticed that in this two-team, non-championship meet there would be only thirteen events, eleven swimming and two diving. First on the docket was the four hundred-yard medley relay. As if on cue, eight swimmers made their way to my end of the pool and lined up behind a pair of starting platforms. The quartet in PSU trunks queued up behind lane two. The Bisons were above lane three. A pair of judges with hand-held stopwatches positioned themselves at our end of the pool. ‘How primitive,’ I decided, recalling the digital counters that tracked the times at McCoy. A third official, apparently the referee, clad in a striped shirt and a black cap, had a whistle clamped tightly between his front teeth. Perched between the two teams, he raised what looked like a foghorn above his head.

After a staccato blow from his whistle the first two swimmers jumped into the pool, turned and faced the starting platform. From what I recalled from Ohio U, the medley started with the backstroke. After a second whistleblow the competitors grabbed the rim of the gutter and walked their feet up to a point between their outstretched arms. The instruction, ‘Take your mark!’ came next. When the pair of backstrokers appeared completely stationary it was the foghorn that blasted. An instant later they were off.

Since the pool was only twenty-five yards long, each competitor needed to complete four lengths. According to my cheat-sheet, State’s first swimmer was a tall, blond-haired boy named David Caplan. Nearly exploding off the wall, Caplan had a three-stroke lead by the time he made his first flip turn against the far side of pool. By the time he completed his leg, it had reached fifteen yards.

With its gliding motion, chest out of the water, arms parallel to it, the breaststroke came next. PSU’s entry, Gary Brexit, proved up to the task. During his football field-length stretch he was able to maintain the half-pool lead.

Next came the butterfly. A broad-shouldered, freckle-faced guy by the name of Marty Levy was set to deliver this particularly challenging leg of the medley. Once Bexit touched up, Levy appeared to have gotten off to a good start. Unfortunately he then progressively lost ground to the hometown entry and by the time this leg of the race was over the two swimmers were neck and neck.

This left the freestylers. Our contestant was a freshman by the name of Ted Louis, the team’s youngest and brightest non-diver hopeful. Poised and ready to enter into the fray, Louis curled his toes around the platform’s edge, flexed slightly at the knees, leaned over on the balls of his feet, reached his fingertips down to the front edge of the riser and waited. His rival from the host squad did the same. When the two butterfliers touched up almost simultaneously, the freestylers dove into the pool, breaking the surface in unison. A controlled splash ensued.

The next fifty-five seconds proved exceedingly exciting. The two competitors streaked through the water like supercharged dolphins, completing the first two lengths in identical fourteen-second splits. Continuing neck and neck down the third, I noticed how Louis had dipped into his final turn off the far wall a full half-second before his opponent.

Then came the last twenty-five leg. As he sliced through the water, Louis seemed to sense a mounting superiority and pushed to lengthen his lead. When he touched up against the near wall, it was a full two seconds before his rival. Appreciating his accomplishment, the PSU squad, along with their coaches — and me of course — erupted with an outburst of cheers and whistles.

‘What a start!’ I marveled. As the point designations dictated, the good guys were in the lead by a score of seven to nothing.

Unfortunately, things deteriorated rapidly from there. Apparently, reverting back to the lackluster pace so evident in the Ohio U match, in rapid succession the squad dropped the thousand-yard freestyle, the two hundred-yard freestyle and hundred-yard backstroke events. Only permitted to compete in three events, Louis did keep the meet competitive, managing to record a first in the fifty-yard freestyle and helping the team also take the two hundred-yard individual medley. Finishing out the first half of the program was the first of two diving events. Since the Bucknell Pool didn’t have a three-meter board, both trials were delivered from the one. As anticipated, a sleek, technically flawless, Nationals-bound Dave Wesleyan won this part of the competition with grace and ease.

As I followed the progress of the meet, my engagement as a journalist along with my excitement as a spectator seemed to merge. True to my craft, I jotted down notes while trying to discern some subtle differences in the individual performances that could assist me in conveying to my readers the thrill and beauty of the competition. When instances arose during certain events that interested or confused me, I composed questions to ask Coach Anderson or the players, designed to intensify my understanding of the sport and ultimately infuse my reporting with depth, color and nuance. Before long it became clear to me that an assignment I’d initially approached with a fair amount of trepidation had won my appreciation and imbued me with a sense of self-confidence.

After Wesleyan’s impressive performance in the diving competition, the State squad faltered again. This slippage started with the next event, the two hundred-yard butterfly. Glancing up from my notepad, I noticed that the same redheaded freshmen, awash with freckles on his face, arms and back, was strolling up to the starting block by lane two. Here was this Marty Levy guy again, head held high, gait ridiculously exaggerated, doing what I would later describe as a peacock-like strut around the perimeter of the pool. Although I can’t say for sure, I may have involuntarily reacted to his approach with an audible groan.

After mounting the platform, Levy leaned forward and, in a vacillating motion that reminded me of a pair of overlapping sine waves, shook loose his upper limbs. Then, while checking his waterproof cap, he glanced over at the judge who confirmed that the event was about to begin. With his toes flexed over the front of the riser, he assumed a flat-footed, forward starting position, his upper body jack-knifed so that his fingertips could grasp the edge. Suddenly the foghorn sounded. The race was on.

In retrospect, I have to concede that his form was flawless, demonstrating an amalgam of power, fluidity and rhythm. He combined an oscillating, wave-like dolphin kick with a forceful upper extremity pull that propelled him through the water in a sleek, effortless motion. Watching closely, I noticed how he bobbed his head out of the water every second stroke in order to capture a breath. The problem was that his rival, in this exquisitely demanding event, appeared to be the strongest swimmer in the Bison herd. Just as had transpired during the butterfly leg of the relay, Marty rapidly fell behind. And since the race was twice as long as in the medley — entailing a full eight lengths of the pool — the distance became exaggerated with every leg.

Relentlessly, the home team’s competitor widened the gap. And by the time the two swimmers entered the final segment, Marty was a full thirteen yards behind. He ended up losing by eight seconds.

While clinging to the edge of the pool, looking exhausted and crestfallen, Marty was given his time by one of the judges. Upon hearing the number his countenance darkened further. Wearily, he hoisted himself out of the pool. Then, in the next instant, he seemed to shake off the disappointment. Turning to view the crowd, he shrugged his shoulders and flashed an expression that seemed to say, ‘You can’t win ‘em all’. Finally, before returning to the bench, where his nearly naked teammates were all seated in a staggered row, he treated us to one of those broad toothy smiles I would later come to know as uniquely his.

Notwithstanding the sixty-three to forty-nine loss, the bus ride home was still an upbeat affair. Despite being weary and spent from the intensity of the competition, the swimmers managed to compensate for the sting of their loss by sharing bawdy stories and raunchy jokes. Some even bellowed out a silly song or two. The incongruously cheerful mood persisted through a dinner stop we made at The Horn of Plenty Buffet Restaurant on route Route 45 just northeast of the State College campus.

Many years later I would recall how, while seated among a few of the friendlier team members, I marveled at the amount of sustenance these athletes were capable of consuming, each making several trips down the serving line to pile plate after plate with meats, vegetables, pastas and bread. They even left room for dessert. Then, back at the table, they all interacted with me in a casual, familiar manner.

As for me, there was a dichotomy at play here, feeling part of the group while, simultaneously, sensing an awkward distance. I was, after all, merely a rookie sports writer, a mildly competitive intramural athlete, immersed among these accomplished varsity lettermen. So, for the time being, I remained merely present to the experience, fielding a personal question or two, but mostly keeping to myself, listening and watching, as these bigger than life jocks kibitzed and goofed around. Eventually, however, after I had several meets and a few tournaments under my belt, I would finally feel comfortable enough in my own skin and confident enough in my own ability to become more engaged.

CHAPTER 3

Party to the Future

T HE SEASONS, SEAMLESSLY overlapping, came and went. The time that passed included college graduation, four intense years of medical school, one of internship, two each of residency and fellowship, totaling slightly over a decade that effectively set my life’s course for the next three and a half in motion.

Through those corridors of space and time passed girlfriends and a wife, the cities of State College, Philadelphia then Pittsburgh. I lived in fraternity houses, rental apartments, my spouse’s childhood house and eventually my own home. There were cats then dogs, friends and a few neighbors, schoolmates and fellow hospital house officers. And finally, with more relief than regret, following a mostly barren marriage, there was divorce.

The lyrics of Peter Yarrow’s, The Great Mandala, seem relevant to my labors, loves, sorrows and joys:

Take your place on the great mandala

As it moves through your brief moment of time.

Win or lose now, you must choose now.

And if you lose you’ve only wasted your life.

While my life has had dramatic passages and milestones, when viewed in a more expansive retro-perspective, these events now appear as blips on the infinite radar screen of time, mere random bits. And riding that metaphorical train from stop to stop, it wasn’t until a point in the early eighties that I took a moment to pause, step out onto the platform and take a look around. Glancing back now to the fall of 1982, it seems that one particular station, a random Halloween party in the small Westmorland county town of New Kensington, radically altered the course of my life. In fact, it became the nexus, the intersection where a number of individuals that eventually would play both major and minor roles in my life appeared.

The party was hosted by a pair of recent acquaintances, Joy Donovan and Michael Clapton, a married couple with a seven-year-old son by the name of Corey. My connection with Joy and Michael came by the way of Bonnie Redfield, a registered nurse I’d met at Northside General Hospital’s annual Christmas Party the winter before, then dated for nine months afterward.

It’s safe to say that Bonnie was one of the few loves of my life. Almost a year after I’d separated from my wife, Pat, in the winter of 1981, she became my first girlfriend. Bonnie, you could say, was my muse, my tease, and most of all, an all-consuming obsession. She was everything I wasn’t; outgoing, gregarious, fun loving and drug seeking, a social butterfly who attracted people — mostly men — like moths to a flame. Although she’d been dating a second-year internal medicine resident, a guy named Jack Brockman at the time, she had no compunction about joining me and a few dozen other hospital-associated personnel in January of 1982 on a bus trip to the ski resort of Smugglers Notch, nestled north of Burlington in northern Vermont. It was there that we spent an idyllic week on the slopes, in hot tubs, bars and restaurants. We almost made it into bed. That milestone would soon occur after returning to Pittsburgh.

Early in, what turned out to be a tumultuous relationship, at a raucous party hosted by none other than Jack and his two housemates in their three-story rental in lower Oakland, Bonnie introduced me to Joy. While my new infatuation held court in the second level drawing room, dressed to the nines in an eclectic Bohemian outfit highlighted by outrageous makeup and dime store jewelry, I sat on the porch with her oldest and dearest friend from ‘New Ken’. Months later, after Bonnie dumped me for a younger, cooler Internist from Squirrel Hill, a physician who made his living testifying as an expert witness for medical malpractice attorneys, it was Joy and I who still remained friends. I even spent my thirty-first birthday in her small house in New Kensington. If I recall, she was the only person that actually acknowledged my special day.

Having completed my cardiology fellowship at Northside General Hospital in June of that year, I was now working for a pair of cardiologists whose practice served patients residing in a broad swath of eastern and southern Allegheny County. The group was appropriately entitled Allegheny Cardiology Associates. My bosses were Larry Porter and Seymoure Kravitz.

Truth be told, as late as December of 1981, during the final semester of my two-year fellowship, taking a job in the Pittsburgh area was the last thing I imagined myself doing. As the time approached for me to explore options for my fledgling professional career, my intention was to abandon Pittsburgh and its bittersweet memories and secure employment much closer to my native Philadelphia. I had, in fact, interviewed for an interventionist position in Reading, PA and for a clinical cardiology practice in Toms River, NJ. Then perky, little Bonnie came along and everything changed. After making an abrupt about-face, I began exploring work-related options right there in Allegheny County.

The irony was that by the time I took the job with ACA, Bonnie and I were well on our way to being history. This was just another example of how, over the first third of my life, every major decision I’d ever made