The other Allen Ginsberg

A slightly built, undemonstrative man in his early thirties, almost everything about him is implicit. Not much of a reader, Allen prefers to relax by watching programmes about fishing, but were he to read Herman Melvilles’s “Bartleby” he would recognise a lot of himself, particularly as regards his personal interactions. As a general rule, if something is proposed,he would prefer not to. His marriage to Melissa, a teaching assistant, would be regarded by most observers as failing by any of the standard metrics, though that’s not really a surprise to either of them; it's not entirely Allen's fault, his emotional distance is one of the reasons Melissa fell for him, and she is at least partly to blame for their current malaise, they will probably continue in the same listless vein for a few years yet. His main outlet for his emotions is coaching his son Isaac’s under-twelves football team, the North Side Werewolves (a previous cohort of the boys were allowed to pick the name a few years ago, and a film franchise in which werewolves were prominent was popular at the time, when the then coach handed the reins over to Allen he said “remember this: never let them make any decisions”. Allen hasn’t). To his pride and secret surprise, Isaac is an excellent footballer. That Melissa takes no interest in this is a source of hurt and confusion to him, but, as he says "it's par for the course". Those are the sorts of phrases he uses. Every Wednesday night he takes them to a floodlit artificial pitch where he puts cones on the ground and calmly explains the routines that he wants them to go through, running patterns, passing drills, zonal marking. His players are good, keen students of the game, and the Werewolves sit near the top of the local league, often beating more fancied teams by virtue of their tactical cohesion.

Their matches are on a Saturday morning, alongside dozens of other games on a large field which seems to be windswept no matter what the date or the weather. Parents munch grey burgers and drink grey coffee as their children toil away with balls which are slightly too big for them. There is triumph and tragedy, violence and tears, and through it all Allen remains calm and clear, never raising his voice, never shouting at the referee, the only betrayal of emotion a half-pumped arm and clenched fist when his team scores. One time on of his players brought down an opposition striker with a clumsy tackle, and the striker’s dad strode up to Allen screaming, spittle flecked and waving his arms. Allen put one arm around him, drew him aside and very calmly threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut up, he held a knife to the man’s belly that disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. The man never told anyone, as he believed Allen to be quite serious. He lives for those two hours on Wednesday night and Saturday morning, and, though he can never quite work out how to express this, if he thought about it he'd realise that everything else seems quite lifeless by comparison.