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OLD LADY ON THE TEN-SPEED
It had been a usual day in the life of an administrative director of a small, progressive educational nonprofit — preparing our professional development institutes, following up on a thousand details from 403(b)'s to reserving parking to unjamming the photocopier to answering the phones. I admit that on this day I resented all the effort and easily descended into an all too-usual "Oh Poor Michael", nurturing an untoxic but sticky self-pity.
I had just left the office and was walking down Convent Avenue to the subway stop when a little old African-American lady on a ten-speed, drop-handled touring bike slowly eased past me, her seat set so low that her knees churned high like the two piston arms on a paddlewheeler. A cane, aluminum, tipped by grey rubber, dangled off the left handlebar. Her back was S'd by scoliosis and pitched forward by osteoporosis, and a thatch of white hair riffled like a reed tuft in a breeze.
I stopped short and watched her with a mixture of compassion and astonishment, as if someone had slapped me in the face and said, "Shape up!"; and my self-pity dissolved in an instant. Not because I felt the smug reassurance of "There but for the grace of God go I." No, I can only describe what happened as my heart cracking open: an immediate, right-between-the-eyes respect for how much energy this human being was expending in keeping her own heart intact as she made her inexorable way north.
Living is a tough business; to paraphrase what Betty Davis said about old age, life is not for sissies. And because living can produce so much struggle and dismay, we often wear a thick hide of self-misery and "Oh poor me" around our hearts for both medicine and barricade, especially when daily evidence reiterates how easily we can lose everything in a flash of fire or clash of armies. But as the paraplegic cartoonist John Callahan says, self-pity is like wetting your pants: at first it's comfortably warm, and then it turns very cold. The old lady on the ten-speed reminded me how cold and unearned my self-pity was, how important it is to make the struggle even if I didn't immediately understand why I should or where I will end up.
But her image did not just say, in some grim puritanical tone, to suffer adversity because it will improve the character. When my heart cracked at seeing her, I also had to smile at the pure "Yes" of her paddlewheeling down the street. Against age, against rusting knees, against pedestrian traffic, she steamed home. Certainly I, with mobile knees and half her age, could do the same. I got to the station just as the train I needed to take pulled in, and I sat in the rackety subway car converted for the rest of the day into light and patience.
EROS ON THE ESCALATOR
At the Port Authority bus station on 42nd Street, you get from the bus drop-offs to street level (or vice versa) down somewhat long, rickety escalator rides. During the morning rush hour, most arrivers (including myself) don't really "ride" the escalator but instead diligently scurry down it, impatient to get to the bottom so that we can scuttle to the subway station in the Port Authority's bowels and jam ourselves into the train when it clatters to a halt and the doors open and close like scissors cutting us into strings of bland silhouettes. We herd along like nervous little drones.
But occasionally, just to defy the morning's careen, I actually ride the escalator down, and it's then that I sometimes receive one of those gratuities that make life in the city worthwhile: I fall in love — briefly, safely, tinged with the sharp cocaine of innocence and a full license for dreaming. Because as I ride I take the time to watch the contra-flow of people coming up, and often among them is a person who makes my heart yammer and my skin squeeze. The person may not be classically lovely, may not always be a woman — but something about this person sweetens the eye the way excellent chocolate or the acid sugar burr of a balanced lemonade suddenly turns taste into rapture. Usually our eyes don't connect, which is fine — the visual gift of the person's person, given and taken away by the opposite flow of the escalator, shakes color out of the bland usual, which is gift enough on most days. But sometimes we do connect, and one of two things happens — either the person looks away, genuinely uninterested or slightly embarrassed or dulled by preoccupation, or a flirt blossoms, an ephemeral slip of lightly tinged erotic permission, where the eyes connect like kite and wind and the face relaxes, caught in the bowl of the lips curving upward in a smile. The flirt never lasts longer than the time it take to pass each other by — any longer, and it would require action, decision, commitment, detail. But in that convective moment boundaries get erased, pleasure engaged, fantasy revved, and the mundane clank of the metal stairs is the sound of the ship's retracting anchor freeing the vessel into the wind.
Haven't you ever felt this momentary pang which is both sexual and something other than sexual, where the fair face or hard body on some slant path that crosses yours makes your nerve endings fizz, makes you breathe in sharply enough to bring your skin to red-alert? It's sexual because the physical response to the person coming my way is the purest distillate of lust. I don't want to know names and histories and things that would require discrimination and therefore etiquette. Instead, I want to shuck off all rules and restraints with my clothes, paying homage to nothing but sensation — and then leave, carrying nothing more with me than sensation's aftermath, selfish and sated. Union without an address and phone number.
But that something other than sexual — much more complicated. When that face accosts me and my body flushes and my mouth runs dry and I imagine flesh rubbing the sulfur of flesh into flame, something else also gets added, like copper filings that turn a fireplace flame green, straightforward carnality distracted into beauty. The sexual makes the flesh magnetic, the slap and dash of coupling, but the erotic restrains the gluttony, wants to extend the pleasure of the pleasure. If the sexual involves the high arc of climax with the inevitable little death that comes afterwards, then the erotic meets a full hunger with a full meal several courses long, each sense simmered open along a gentler curve.
This erotic is difficult to put into words because it works best wordless. In a book written many years ago about eroticism and property, the author talked about how economics treats objects as things composed of material physics and only good for exchange. But when that same object becomes the focus of erotic appreciation, becomes a thing of love rather than lucre, the owner infuses the object with self, as if the body's capillary system extended itself to the object, feeding it oxygen, bringing it into orbit. Making property erotic meant bringing it out of the anonymity of physics and naming it, making it domestic. In fact, as Norman O. Brown pointed out, the whole basis for what we would call "life" (not just biology but everything we mean when we name ourselves human) is built on a substrate of eros, of love, play, pleasure, that childish permeability of boundaries which Freud called "polymorphously perverse." Only as the ego and superego take over their conservative roles does the original free-wheeling eros get whittled down into the reality-principle, into economics and exchange, the sobriety of reason, the genitalia of sex, and the dronish little scuttle from the bus arrival to the train platform.
So what does this mean for the flirt on the escalator? A satisfying flirt has both qualities to it, the sexual jump-the-bones desire and the erotic linger, materiality and spirit, haggle and invitation, attraction and beauty. With only the sexual, the flirt becomes lechery; with only the erotic, it becomes just ghostly appreciation, like museum-going. With both, the flirt pushes the blood to high tide and gives the mind ballast. So when that singular face or body reaches out of the flow and hooks me, as I pass by and feel that double flush, I carry away the little bit more of life that the flirt gives me, no sure antidote against the ravages but enough to lighten and lift, to erase any of the routine growing its scales on me. Such flirts widen the moments and help me wear my mortality with something like comfort.
And the day will tender endless opportunities: as I move through this city of strangers, I will meet scores on the sly, my heart saluting them, my eyes dancing, rarefied for a moment by the dark hair framing a face or the tight swash of denim across solid legs. Flirt alert, flirt alert! The day makes promises it can keep.
JUMP, PASS, SHOOT: PLAYING HOOP
The pass is just at my fingertips, looped crosscourt by the guy racing down the right wing. It's not the right pass for a fast break — the classic pass is a bounce pass, timed perfectly to match the stride of the man cutting down the lane so that it eases into his hands just as he launches himself for the lay-up.
But I have to stretch for this one, and the winch of muscle up from my ankles through my thighs across my abdomen along the length of my arm seems to create a magnetism just beyond the fanned tips of my fingers that draws the ball down into my palm. My left palm. I can't shoot left-handed. So I land with a chunky slap of rubber on wood, pivot, and fire a short fade-away jumper, the hand of the defender just a microsecond and millimeter late and under. It totters on the rim, then silks through the net. We win, 7 to 6.
This is pick-up basketball as it's played twice a week in what I call the "Over-50 Lunchtime Basketball League," a bunch of guys who get together on Tuesdays and Thursdays to run reasonable facsimiles of fast breaks, three-pointers from "down town," and post-ups down low. We play not only for the exercise and camaraderie, but because basketball is such a sweet, musical, and jazzy game, an occasion for even slightly balding, paunch-building men to pirouette, practice grace, and receive a brief flash of glory and commendation.
We all played pick-up basketball, in one form or another, as we grew up, and we can all walk onto this court from our different lives and know instantly how to mesh and blend. In this way basketball is like rhythm-and-blues. If you know certain chord patterns, guitar riffs, and harmonica slides, you can sit down with anyone from anywhere and jam. Basketball has the same portability, the same universal lingo. Bring a basketball to a playground hoop, ask a few total strangers if they'd like to play, and within minutes the group will be weaving and picking as if they'd been playing together since peach baskets and medicine balls.
This occasional and fluid comradeship might appear effortless, but it's learned in an apprenticeship that carries its share of knives and insult. I saw a good example of it not long ago at the playground just down the street from my house. At one end of the court were four black college-freshmen-aged kids singing the basketball back forth among themselves, showing off, mock-insulting each other. At the other end were two white kids, about seventeen, doing the usual get-a-jump-shot-in-get-another-shot routine. Occasionally they would look at the quartet wheeling and smart-cracking as if they expected a request from that end for a three-on-three game. None came. Finally, after three or four longing stares, one of the white kids walked the length of the court and asked if they wanted to get a game started. A short pause as the four looked at each other, then a round of nods. They played for an hour.
Meanwhile, a few other kids had wandered up to the court and watched the game. It was obvious to me that they wanted to play, but as the sextet finished one game, then another, and then another, and no emissary came bearing a summons, they gradually stopped their aimless dribbling and melted away.
The apprenticeship for pick-up basketball really has only one short and clear rule: you don't get anything unless you ask because no one will ask you. But you have to ask in a way that makes it clear that you assume you're going to play unless someone tells you differently. You don't walk up to a game in progress, especially if the guys on the court all know each other from the neighborhood, and say, politely, "May I have the next game?" Such civility is akin to Oliver asking for more gruel, with about as much chance for success.
Instead, you have to say, "Whose got winners?" If someone is sitting out the game and says, "I do," then you say, "Okay" and pick up a ball to warm up. You don't say, "Need anybody?"; you just assume that you're going to play in the next game and you put yourself in the presence. If no one's got winners, then you declare that winners is yours, with the same assurance that you own the designation until someone tells you differently.
The etiquette is simple and basic: ask, and you usually get. A few other rules apply as well. Everyone calls his own fouls, and the call is always honored, even if it seems stupid, unjust, or bogus. Games are short so that no one has to sit for long, and everyone who sits out gets to play the next game, even if it means the winning team has to shoot for players. Such democracy works for an hour or so because it's full of quid pro quo, and while there are hotdogs and whiners in every game, no one ever tries to lord it over because what you do will get done back to you if you're not careful. It's the game that regulates the ego, the brio and craft of the game that reins in pettiness.
The game: patterned and fluid, risky and deliberate, full of scoops, dish offs, alley oops, and body-bending picks. It offers the body grace and power, flight and strategy, attack and dance. Some of my friends don't like basketball; they see it as chaotic, or at least formless, a bunch of guys running up and down the court, and usually they prefer the more sedate pleasures of baseball or the designed violence of football. But the "formlessness" of basketball is only surface, only apparent; underneath are elegant patterns that govern flow and weave, patterns that can suddenly spring a player free from a forest of bodies for an arcing jump shot, or end in a slicing slam-dunk as three players at full tilt fill the lanes on a fast break.
The beauty of basketball also comes from how it brokers a few simple fundamentals — jump shot, lay-up, pass, dribble — into continual variation. Each time a team comes down the court using these fundamentals it creates something that didn't exist before. There's an endless menu of ways five players can get the ball into the basket. Because conditions on each possession can't always be predicted, so much of the game's energy depends on intuition, on a "court sense" that lets the mind see more than the eye registers. There is constant calibration and re-calibration, constant amendment of intention and expectation — which means constant surprise without wrench, innovation without decay.
And each of these fundamentals has its own delicacies. On the dribble, player and ball have to move as if there's no divorce between skin and leather; each exerts control over the other, animate and inanimate briefly wedded. The shot is most prominent because it produces the final tally, the game's end. But it has beauties of its own beyond utility: a long high parabolic 23-foot jump shot hitting an opening no larger than a fair-sized trout is a marvel of physics and symmetry, as golden as any mean devised by ancient philosophers.
But where the shot finishes and the dribble prepares, it's the pass that, like a shuttle, carries the knit of the game. In a basketball game the swirl of bodies opens and closes like branches in a high wind, and a good pass finds that caesura in the action where, for a breath, there are no hands or legs or sprint. But it's not just vectors and geometry. A player must wait for a good pass, wait for the flow to eddy in the right way, and this patience is zen. A good pass seems to navigate of its own accord, to find that sweet gap that, a breath later, snaps shut..
Basketball is a lot like quantum mechanics. It's a game composed of probabilities. Each trip down the court is unique in its form and entropy, and while the general positions of all the players can be known, place and velocity keep changing. But out of this continual mixing and kneading of variables comes the slashing dribble, the gentle touch of the fade-away jumper, the pass finessed through the vortex, the solidified game.
None of us in the lunch-time league are extraordinarily good, but that doesn't matter. We like to be in touch, no matter how imperfectly, with the energy and companionship of basketball, and so we run for an hour and a half twice a week to clean out our hearts and lungs and fill our bodies with delight. And every once in a while one of us under incredible pressure shoots the game-winner with nonchalant grace, or throws a pass that smacks of greatness. We talk about it afterwards in the locker room, and then go on to our outside lives. But we'll be back soon.
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