W.W.

At a party during those first weeks at Harvard, a menacing blond of Homeric proportions happened to turn to me, ran his eyes over my small frame in skeptical appraisal, and matter-of-factly asked me my weight, just as a policeman might demand one's driver's license. Submissive as always, I gave him intelligence of my one hundred and seventeen pounds. This, apparently, was precisely the answer he was hoping for. Grabbing me by the back of the neck, he led me to a clique of similarly mountainous youths, interrupting their conversation and announcing, "What do you think this guy weighs? One hundred seventeen pounds!" They all bared their teeth in an access of hilarity. One of my new friend's companions pointed a Michelangelan finger at me and said, "You, boy"—he literally addressed me as boy—"are going to be a cox." This mysterious proclamation filled me with alarm, and as I can conceal nothing, the confusion written on my face provoked a fresh round of raucous, invincible laughter. I seemed to have stumbled into the midst of an archaic cult, strangely destined to play some unimaginable part in their primitive rites. My original captor, an upperclassman, then explained that they were all rowers sent out by their crew coach, a legendary figure on the campus, to scour the freshmen mixers for the slight, the weak, the malleable, who were needed to replenish the critically diminished stable of coxswains--"the ones who steer the boat," he considerately told me in layman's terms. The Michelangelo now handed me a calling card from an engraved silver case that he seemed to have conjured from the air. With this gesture he seemed to transport us from the arena to the drawing room. The card read, "Leavitt and Pierce—Tobacconists". While he explained to me that daily assignments were posted by eleven in the windows of this establishment (in obedience to hoary custom), the blond Patroclus took down my vital statistics in a small, leather-bound notebook, covering the page dedicated to me with what looked to be a fine, eighteenth-century hand. Noting my interest in his penmanship (as I said, I can conceal nothing), he concluded his interrogation by asking if I could write with a fountain pen, holding up his own as if in illustration of what he feared might be a new term to me. When I told him I could not (another fatal error, like my ignorance of Latin), he said simply, "Learn. A man's penmanship is no joke." On the sheet taped to the tobacconists' window the next morning I found my name, to which was appended a single word: "Ergs". No further explanation was offered, and I had only a half-hour to get there—if, indeed, the word denominated a place; for all I knew it was a dismissive curse. "Perhaps I have already been tossed aside," I thought in some relief. I stopped people randomly in the street, asking if they knew where I could find Ergs. I was wearing my old gym uniform, a droopy ensemble indelibly suffused with the recollection of multiple humiliations. Most of those I addressed continued on as though I had not breathed a word. Some eyed me with suspicion, as if I had just issued a lecherous invitation. Others appeared delighted for the same reason, although they were soon disappointed. People streamed by endlessly on errands of life, faces marked with contemptuous certainty. Panhandlers shot me the disgusted glances reserved by professionals for the dilettanti. I darted into a bookstore and made my way to an open dictionary, from which I learned that an erg is either a unit of work, equivalent to 10-7 joule, or a vast waste land covered with sand, as parts of the Sahara Desert. Still in ignorance of the Ergs, and harassed by the signs of my own incompetence I read in the terrible purposefulness of all around me, I made for the river, where I had resolved to lay bare my stupidity to the hearties at the boathouse. As I approached its precincts, walking over the Anderson Bridge, I noted that some of the usual types one sees on the street—the maimed, the deformed, the halt—had unaccountably dropped away, and I found myself falling in with a gladiatorial procession. A brisk jog set the pace, several men marched with spearlike oars, there were bared torsos, rhythmic chants and huzzahs, frolicsome taunts and challenges. I was carried helplessly along on the shoulders of this merry testosterone tide, which broke against the whimsically turreted, slate-roofed structure that was my destination. Just inside the massively hinged door I put my question to an exhausted rower, fresh from the water, leaning on his oar as if it were a pilgrim's staff. Without a word, like a Turkish mute, he pointed to a gloomy flight of stairs leading to the second storey. Having mounted these, I stood at the entrance of a spacious hall, lit only by the stray sunbeams penetrating the windows far above, many of stained glass. Deployed along both of the longer walls was a line of rowing machines (called ergometers—or "ergs" as they are known in that jolly boathouse argot whose impenetrability had already brought me such pain). Upon each erg was tenanted one of a company of young colossuses, whose combined exertions filled the air with a whirring ostinato, punctuated by rowers' grunts and the barking encouragement of coaches and smaller fry marching up and down the lines. Here was a scene for which my education up to that point had little prepared me. I felt like one who in the course of an afternoon ramble stumbles on a troop of monks, exalted in their self-mortification, whipping themselves in tormented parade stretching to the horizon. The men were intent, endlessly coiling and uncoiling themselves, first explosively extending their legs while pulling the grip to their reclining chests, then hurling themselves forward into the fetal position, alternately resisting and submitting to the force of the chain to which they were voluntarily bound, enduring a continual cycle of violent assertion and extinction, an oarsman's yin and yang. They showered their ergs with joules as if there were no tomorrow. Like spinners of thread they kept the rotors of their machines constantly whirling, ceaselessly spinning their own sinew from hissing cables of steel and grease. An older man with a clipboard and a whistle in his mouth appeared beside me. After determining my identity he started instructing me on my duties. The main thing he wanted to impress upon me was that under no circumstances was I to mount the ergs myself, or engage in any other kind of resistance training, no matter how sore the temptation. I could run and swim all I wanted, but never was I to do anything that might lead to an augmentation of my flesh. If my weight exceeded one hundred twenty pounds I would be instantly dismissed. For the likes of me an increase in muscle mass was fatal. He never removed the whistle from his mouth, skillfully limiting its emissions to tiny, intermittent musical bursts. He gave the impression of some strangely intelligible bird. Above all I was to stay clear of free weights, even an innocuous-looking dumbbell could spell the end. He had known cases in which coxes were ruined by their biceps alone. He had been around, seen it all, and I had better learn to listen. I was going to take my knocks, toe the line, fly right. I told him I understood. He raised his eyebrows, as who should say, "No, I did not." With a soulful trill of his whistle he seemed to suggest he knew my kind, that at first it was going to be all obedience and sweetness and light, but that sooner or later I would be lured into the weightroom and destroyed. "Coxes," he told me, "are a special breed." To me they looked like a pampered race of eunuchs rushing among the columns of a phalanx, scurrying to and fro, clinging to their precarious biological niche. I was given a stubby megaphone.