Mugsy the Ivy Leaguer

 A Profile of Bob "Mugsey Myles" by Don Drott ('59)

(Note from Wallace:  Bob Myles, class of '58, played varsity ball during our years.  I asked Don Drott if I could post his profile of Bob as part of our discussion of athletes and he generously said yes.)

 

           There was a story about Bob that I heard on two occasions, which I considered to be probably apocryphal, and not that meaningful. Until later. After the transmogrification. Then I wondered. Could that have caused it?

           The story was that when he had been playing football for Brown, he had almost died. An undersized secondary defenceman, he had been struck quite hard on the head while diving into a running back. Despite the helmet, he had spent several weeks in the infirmary, in a darkened room, and they had been concerned about him. He was a big-man-on-campus — class officer, football star, and a bit of a hellraiser. He was noticed, as he had been in high school, where I had played with him. Baseball. Bob played four sports, the classic football, basketball, baseball trinity, and track and field, where the really gifted where given a chance to shine despite not practicing much because of the overlap with the other more important sports. I played at the games, and sometimes did rather well, but Bob was an athlete. Despite being small. Really small. That was what made him special. He performed against bigger boys throughout, and he was a star. Not at cross country, or soccer, the traditional refuges of the vertically challenged, but in the arenas where the big guys hung out.

           When I returned to the home town, as some of us do, after my obligatory cavort with the more adult games of Manhattan, he was pushing forty. We got together for some beers and double dating. Nothing is quite as large later, as it had appeared in high school, including the stars, for we, the normal kids, have grown. In terms of experience, and sometimes success, certainly with the self-confidence, unless you’re simply not making it. Still, being with Bob Myles, that Bob Myles, was always a bit different. On my smaller scale, the parochial one that we always carry with us, I was quaffing one with a legend.

           And the legend had continued to impress. At least that was the initial impression.

           After Brown, where he had done well, it had been off to Stanford Law. Now we in the East tend to think that if it wasn’t Yale or Harvard, or possibly Columbia, it wasn’t that prestigious. But it was. So Mugsy had Brown University and Stanford Law under his belt, and was now a practicing attorney. I remember sitting there with him, feeling the warm hospitality of the beer filtering in, and thinking “Not bad for a shanty Irishman from the home town.”

           Perhaps I should explain “shanty.” Oh, and “Mugsy..”

           I never met his parents. But everybody had met his brother. And if you met Frankie Myles at the wrong time and place, especially in a bar, you might never forget that meeting. Frankie was one of the tough guys that every small town has. Fighting was his forte, and the foundation of his persona. Apparently the only foundation worthy of comment, for he was not an athlete like his brother, and he didn’t give two hoots about education, and who knows what became of him, or cares. Based on Frankie, and a few rumors, I always imagined that Bob’s father was the type that would sometimes come home with a snootful, haranguing the neighborhood with IRA songs, and scaring the bejesus out of his wife, as they say. Perhaps unfair to the father, I admit, but if shanty did not fairly apply to the paternal influence, it certainly did to the hard fisted, hard drinking, trouble pursued older brother. And the Ivy Leaguer, Stanford Law guy, my friend, had inherited at least a bit of it.

           My junior year, Bob’s senior, a high school party in a suburban home with no parental oversight visible.  I watch as he measures a big kid from a rival town, unpleasant looking brute who seems to have the same reputation and attitude as brother Frankie. The brute is unaware that the small guy next to him is pissed.. Pissed at what?, who cares. He’s had a few, and he’s small, and if he were bigger he would be headed for the Major Leagues, and this is what you do when the social inhibitions are released by the ethyl alcohol in certain circles, and who gives a shit anyway. I see him adjusting his position just to the side of and out of the peripheral vision of the brute, and then looking down at a large knobbed ring on his right hand, swiveling it slightly so the knob, the striking knob, is centered just above the knuckle. I know what’s going to happen. I can still see, so vividly, the blood flashing up towards the ceiling, a slashing cut appearing magically on the brute’s forehead, just the size of the knob, and that large kid toppling backward towards the deck. Cold-cocked by a midget. Bob had jumped upward as he threw the punch, to make up the foot difference in height. And therefore Mugsy.

           So there I am, ordering another round with Mugsy the Ivy Leaguer, reminiscing about our double play combination and the girls who did and the less interesting ones who did not, and at some point I become aware that something is not quite as it should be with him. Subtle. Shielded by what he was, and the present accouterments of normality. Successful normality? I didn’t probe, but the signals came. A nervous flick of the eye. He seemed wary, like the guy who hasn’t paid his bookie and the bookie drops in here sometimes. A lower order nervousness. Not that of a Stanford lawyer. And the legal matters that he discussed seemed, surprisingly, rather trivial. At this stage in his career, with his background, he should be talking of big-time business deals, or cause celebre trials, or judgeships. Bob appeared to be an ambulance chaser. And not the chaser who flies his own jet to the next mass tort meeting. I remembered my first start at second base. The consummate shortstop next to me had fielded four groundballs with that easy aplomb of his and hit the pivotman chesthigh each time, long before the runner had a chance to disembowel me, as I had feared, and I had completed four double plays. I was a starter for the rest of my high school career. What’s wrong, Bob?

 

           He was riding a bike. Bicycle, not a Harley. And he was going to work.

           The courthouse was ten miles away, through a lot of traffic. Automotive traffic. And the tan suit, although clean, was like the ones you see on a retarded kid attending a wedding. The suit should not be on this person.

           I pulled up alongside and stopped, stepped out of the car. It was summertime, and the suit which should not have been there was soaking down with sweat. Large black splotches assaulting the tan. Want a lift, Bob? A certain embarrassment, but he did not quite understand his own embarrassment. There was a fog between he and I. During the brief conversation I realized that the fog interceded not just between the two of us. It was cutting him off from the world.

           “Business in Mineola, Bob?” The county courthouse.

           “Yeah. I pick up DWI cases there.”

           With a saturated suit that rides up above your socks, and a bicycle, and eyes that look like a headlighted deer. I looked away. “Where you living now, buddy?” The next day I paid a month’s rent in advance for him at a place where people live who other people don’t want to be visible.

 

            The next time I saw him, probably half a year, although I had inquired to no avail, was at  night, on a heavily wooded road. Secluded. And he had a car. I caught sight of his small but distinctive figure bent over the opened hood of a relic pulled off into the brush. I turned around and stopped with my lights shining into the engine compartment, helpful I hoped. But as I approached I saw him tense into the attack receiving attitude, and I hesitated.                                                                                                                                            

           “It’s me, Bob. Don. See you replaced the old bike with some wheels.” Big smile, reassuring I hoped.      

           In truth, I don’t know if he knew who I was. He had aged impossibly. I was staring into the eyes of an old man. I didn’t recognize the eyes. They were not actually vacuous, although that word leapt out at you. More accurately, they lacked that full sense of awareness, of intelligence, that defines a human being. A sane human being.

           “They’ve been following me.”

           “Who?”

           Unlike now, when America’s bete noire is an Islamic fundamentalist, these were

Cold War years. “Russians.”

           I didn’t know how to respond to that.

           “And the fucking niggers.”

           Now coming from Frankie Myles this might not have surprised me. But Bob Myles had embraced gentility, in part I’m sure to separate himself from his brother. The sophistication of the Eastern establishment, and Brown had become the institution of choice for the Kennedys, did not permit this.

           “Can I help you get it started, Bob?”

           Driving home, I considered the concept of atavism.

 

           From time to time over the next few years, I saw him. Walking along the sidewalks of my suburbia. No car. No bicycle. But an increasing assortment of things. Stuff. You noticed the bums in Manhattan with a lot of stuff.  I tried, but he would never make eye contact. Except when I would turn suddenly, and catch him stating at me.

           Did he know me? Do people like Bob know what is happening to them? Is there a Reaganesque retreat, measured, with an unbearably heroic stoicism, that elevates them beyond what they seem?          

           And what causes such a thing to happen to a man like this? A small man who never seemed small. Whose life was, until it happened, anything but small. Did God do it? The same God who gave Ireland the priests and the alcohol and the potatoes that failed? Or simply a cellular thing that happens sometimes, and bad luck to you as you decline into cerebral chaos?