Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  “After my mother died, my dad and I watched thousands of basketball games on television and in person. Sometimes, on cold Saturday nights, he and I would drive for hours to watch small-town high school teams, not because we knew any of the players but because they were playing a small-town version of basketball, and it was ragged and beautiful and passionate and clumsy and perfect. Davenport Gorillas. Darrington Loggers. Selkirk Rangers. Neah Bay Red Devils. Toutle Lake Fighting Ducks.

  “And now my father is gone, and my mother is gone, and they’re gone together, and I’m a thirty-nine-year-old orphan. I didn’t even say good-bye to my father before I left the house on the day he died. I never really said good-bye to my mother before she died. I will have to live the rest of my life with a failed son’s regrets. I don’t even know what I’m going to do now.”

  As he drove off Mount Rainier and through the park, Frank knew his eulogy was inadequate, incomplete, and improvisational. He knew he would have to sit and write a real eulogy. He would fill a dozen notebooks with draft after draft. Every word would perfectly capture how much love and pain he felt for his father and mother. Harrison and Helen Snake Church deserved poetry, not the opening monologue of an indigenous talk show. Mr. Death, Frank thought, you are a funnyman, but I will not laugh. Frank sped out of the park. Ignoring the risk of speeding tickets, he drove west on two-lane highways, north on Interstate 5 through Tacoma into Seattle, east off the James Street exit, and ran red lights twenty blocks into the Central District, where he and Harrison lived on Thirty-seventh Avenue. Frank drove his government truck onto the front lawn, leaped out and raced up the front steps, struggled with the front door, threw it open, rushed into the kitchen, and saw his father sitting at the table. Harrison was drinking coffee and eating Grape-Nuts. He ate breakfast for every meal.

  “You’re alive,” said Frank, completely surprised by the fact.

  “Yes, I am,” Harrison said as he studied his bloody, panicked son. “But you look half dead.”

  “I had a vision,” Frank said.

  Harrison sipped his coffee.

  “I saw you in my head,” Frank said. “You’re supposed to be dead. I saw you dead.”

  “You have blurry vision,” said Harrison.

  One year and four days later, Harrison died of a heart attack in the QFC supermarket on Broadway and Pike. When he heard the news, Frank wondered if his previous year’s vision had been accurate, if he’d foreseen his father’s death. But there must be a statute of limitations for visions, Frank thought, there must be an expiration date for ESP. Beyond all that, Frank didn’t believe anyone could predict the future. His supposedly psychic vision of his father’s death bore some general resemblance to his real death, but the details were different. Harrison was shopping in the produce department when he coughed once, rubbed his tingling left arm, and died. “Probably dead before he hit the floor,” the coroner had said. When Harrison fell, he knocked over an artfully arranged display of bananas, which was appropriate and funny, since Harrison had always hated the taste of what he called “the devil’s evil yellow penis.” Frank buried his father beside his mother’s grave in the same Seattle graveyard where Bruce and Brandon Lee were also buried. So, hey, Frank figured his father was lying with damn good company, and if there was an afterlife, then Harrison was probably learning jeet kune do and making love to his wife, Helen, for all of eternity.

  At his father’s graveside, overlooking Lake Washington, Frank stood to give the eulogy he’d carefully written but found he couldn’t read the words on the page. Grief turned him into an illiterate. He tried to remember what he’d written so he could recite his eulogy by memory, but he discovered he couldn’t speak at all. Grief turned him into a mute. Finally, after five minutes of silence, as the assembled mourners shook with collective embarrassment, Frank finally remembered how to say four words: “I love my father.”

  Afterward, Frank shook the hands and accepted the hugs of dozens of his father’s friends and family. He couldn’t remember any of their names. Grief turned him into a stranger in his own tribe. Finally, Frank recognized an older woman, his mother’s aunt Margaret Marie, who kissed him hard on the lips. She tasted like salt.

  “Your father was a ballplayer,” she said. “He could have played in college, you know? You should have said something about that.”

  Frank laughed. What kind of person offered constructive criticism at a funeral? What kind of literate mourner had the nerve to deconstruct a eulogy?

  Harrison had been a very good basketball player, but he’d never been good enough to play college hoops, not even at the community-college level. He’d been a great shooter but was never much of an athlete—too short and slow and tentative—but Frank, a genetic freak at six feet six (making him the seventeenth tallest Spokane Indian in tribal history), had always been a truly supernatural baller, the kind of jumper and runner who ignored physics when he played. He’d averaged forty-one points a game during his senior year at Seattle’s Garfield High School and had received 114 scholarship offers from colleges all over the country. He’d signed a letter of intent with the University of Washington and had planned to major in environmental science. But then his mother died. To honor her and keep her memory sacred, Frank knew he had to give up something valuable. He had to bury with her one of his most important treasures. So he buried his basketball dreams. On the morning of her funeral, Frank walked to the local park and shot one hundred jump shots and made eighty-five of them. He left the ball at the park, helped bury his mother that afternoon, and had not played the game since. For the first few years, Frank had almost died whenever he thought about basketball, but the acute pain turned chronic, and then it was a dull and distant ache, and then it was the phantom itch of an amputated limb, and then it was gone.

  Now he was forty years old, and his life could be divided into two almost equal halves: He’d been a star basketball player for eighteen years—he was a hooper right out of the womb—and a non-basketball player for twenty-two years.

  After his father’s burial, Frank went home alone and stood in the quiet house. He had not yet cried for his father, and he wondered if he would ever cry, but his grief grew so suddenly huge that it pushed him to the floor. He lay on the living room carpet and wept huge and gasping tears. He screamed and wailed for ten minutes or more. He didn’t know how to sing and drum, but he pounded the floor and wailed tribal vocals: Father, way, ya, way, ha, Father, way, ya, way, ha, Father, way, ya, way, ha. He sang himself hoarse and fell asleep on the carpet. When he woke, he crawled upstairs to his father’s bedroom and lay in his father’s bed. The sheets still smelled like Harrison. Frank pressed his face into the pillow and breathed in his father’s scent. And then Frank gathered his father’s hair, so different than Frank’s graying crew cut. His father’s hair was still black and two feet long on the day he died. Frank found long black hair on the pillow, in the sheets, tangled in a comb, stuck to the bathtub porcelain, clumped into a wet ball in the drain stops, and scattered in every corner of the house. Frank gathered all of the hair, rolled it into a ball, and ate it. He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father’s life. He felt like he was building a museum of pain, a freak show, where he was the only visitor viewing the only mutant screaming the only prayer he knew: Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy.

  Frank howled. He slept. Woke and howled again. Slept again. Woke and howled until his lips and tongue were bloody. Slept again. Woke and wondered if his grief would ever end. He didn’t know what to do, but he
needed to love and be loved, so he opened his father’s closet and stared at the basketball waiting inside. A couple times a week for many years, Harrison had gone alone to the neighborhood park to shoot baskets, so the ball was worn and comfortable, low on air. Trying to move exactly like his father, to honor his father through muscle memory, Frank picked up the ball, dribbled it around his back, between his legs, bobbled it, and knocked over a chair. Clumsy and stupid with grief, he grabbed the ball, left the house, and walked then ran to the neighborhood park. Once there, he stood at the free-throw line on the northern end of the basketball court. He stared at the iron rim with its chain net. He had not taken a shot in over two decades. He’d given up this game to honor his mother, and now he was reclaiming it to honor his father. He wanted both of them to rise from the dead. Frank dribbled the ball once, twice, three times, stepped back to the three-point line, and rose into the air for a jump shot. He missed the basket completely. Frank watched the sacrilegious air ball bounce away from him and roll quickly across the manicured grass, until it finally slowed to a stop at the tennis court on the other side of the park.

  A week after he buried his father, Frank quit his job as a forest ranger. He’d saved tens of thousands of dollars over the years, and the house was completely paid for, so he wasn’t worried about money. But he was worried about being alone. For most of his life, he’d loved solitude. Walking through the deep woods, he often imagined he was the only person left in the world, the only survivor of a nuclear war or a smallpox epidemic. During these fantasies, Frank lived alone for fifty years until the day when he curled into a ball at the base of a beautiful pine and died like an old dog, whereby the human race ceased to exist. Inside and outside of this fantasy, Frank knew he was guilty of arrogance and misanthropy, but he compensated by being kind to strangers and tipping really well at restaurants. He didn’t have any close friends and had probably shared more conversations with the redheaded clerk at the university bookstore and the blond cashier at the QFC supermarket than he did with anyone other than his father. As for romance, Frank had dated a few women over the years but found them to be too inconsistent and illogical, so he dated a few men and found them to be even more random and frightening. For a while, he had paid for sex with men and women, then women only, but he eventually grew disgusted with the desperation of such acts and, for many years, had lived as chastely as his father had lived. All along, Frank understood that he was suffering from a quiet sickness, a sort of emotional tumor that never grew or diminished but prevented him from living a full and messy life. At the end of every day, Frank thoroughly washed away the human funk of the world, but now, with his father’s death, he worried that he would never feel clean again. He needed to take control of his life. He needed to organize his grief; he needed to compose a mournful to-do list: Bury your father, visit your mother’s grave, cry, eat hair, play basketball again, lose weight. Of course he felt banal. In a time of extraordinary pain, why was he worried about something as ordinary as his body-fat percentage? He only knew for sure that he needed to keep moving, get stronger, build, and connect.

  So he picked up the Yellow Pages, looked up personal trainers, and dialed the first one on the list.

  “Athletes, Incorporated, this is Russell.”

  The next day, he walked thirty blocks into downtown Seattle (why not start training immediately?) and met with Russell, a thin and muscular black man who looked more like a long-distance runner than a weight lifter.

  “So,” said Russell as he sat across the desk from Frank.

  “So,” Frank said.

  “What can we do for you?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never done this before.”

  “Well, why don’t we start with your name.”

  “I’m Frank Snake Church.”

  “Damn, that’s impressive. A man with a name like that is destined for greatness.”

  “If my name was John Smith, you’d tell me I was destined for greatness, right?”

  “Well, I’m supposed to help you be great. That’s my job. Stronger body, stronger mind, stronger spirit. That’s our motto.”

  Frank stared at Russell. Silently studied him. A confident man, Russell was comfortable with the silence.

  “Are you a serious man?” Frank asked him.

  “I’m not sure I understand your question.”

  Frank stood and walked around the desk. He knelt beside Russell and spoke to him from inches away. Russell didn’t mind this closeness.

  “Listen,” Frank said, “I know this is your job, and I know you need to make money. And I know a large part of what you do here is sales. You’re a salesman. And that’s okay. You need to make a living. We all need to make a living. And hey, this job you have is a great way to make money, right? You get to wear T-shirts and shorts all year long. And you’ve probably helped a lot of people get healthy, right?”

  Russell could feel Frank’s desperation and sense of purpose, the religious fervor that needed to be directed. Russell had met a thousand desperate people, all looking to rescue or be rescued, but this Indian man was especially radiant with need.

  “I keep a scrapbook of the clients who’ve meant the most to me,” Russell said. He’d never told anybody about that scrapbook and how he studied it. If exercise was his religion, then the scrapbook was his bible, and every one of his clients was a prophet. Russell never spoke aloud of how proud he was of the woman who lost five hundred pounds and kept it off, of the man who recovered from a triple bypass and now ran marathons, of the teenager paralyzed in a car wreck who now played professional wheelchair basketball. Russell fixed broken people, and sometimes the repairs lasted a lifetime. But he could not say these things aloud. In order to be taken seriously, Russell knew he had to pretend to be less than serious about his job, his calling. He could not tell his clients that he thought his gym was a church. He’d sound like a crazy fundamentalist, an idiot parody of a personal trainer. He couldn’t express sentiment or commitment; he was forced to be ironic and cynical. He couldn’t tell people he cried whenever clients failed or quit or trained too inconsistently for the work to make a difference. So he simply repeated the tired and misleading mantra whenever asked about his work: It’s better than having a real job. But now, after all these years, Russell somehow understood that he could tell the truth to this sad and desperate stranger.

  “I remember everybody I’ve worked with,” Russell said. “I remember their names, their weights, their goals. I remember the exact day when the quitters quit. I keep a running count of the total weight my clients have lost.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you that. It’s just for me. It’s a sacred number.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “I think it’s good to remember things that way. Very good. I admire that. So, with my admiration clearly expressed, I want you to answer my question. Are you a serious man?”

  “If I said this aloud to most of the world, they’d laugh at me,” said Russell. “But I think I have one of the most important jobs in the world. That’s how serious I am about what I do. So yes, in answer to your question, when it comes to this work, I am a very serious man.”

  Frank stood and looked out the window at the Seattle skyline. With his back to Russell, he spoke. It was the only way he could say what he needed to say.

  “My father died a week ago,” Frank said.

  Russell had often heard these grief stories before. He knew five people who’d come directly to the gym from funerals and immediately signed up for full memberships.

  “What about your mother?” Russell asked.

  “She died when I was eighteen.”

  “My mother died of sickle cell last year,” Russell said. “My father was killed when I was twelve. He was a taxi driver. Guy held him up and shot him in the head.”

  Frank honored that story—those tragic deaths—with his silence.

  “How did your father die?” Russell asked.

  “Heart attack.”

  Fran
k and Russell were priests and confessors.

  “Listen to me,” Frank said. “I used to be a basketball player, a really good basketball player, the best in the city and maybe the best in the state, and maybe I could have become one of the best in the country. But I haven’t played in a long, long time.”

  “What do you need from me?” Russell asked.

  Frank turned from the window. “I want to be good again,” he said.

  Russell studied the man and his body, visually estimated his fitness levels, and emotionally guessed at his self-discipline and dedication.

  “Give me a year,” Russell said.

  For the next twelve months, Frank trained five days a week. He lifted free weights, ran miles on the treadmill, climbed hundreds of stories on the stair stepper, jumped boxes until he vomited from the lactic acid buildup, and climbed ropes until his hands bled. He quit smoking. He measured his food, kept track of all of the calories and the fat, protein, and carbohydrate grams. He drank twelve glasses of water a day. Mr. Death, Frank thought, I am going to drown you before you drown me. Frank’s body-fat percentage, heart rate, and blood pressure all lowered. Every three months, he bought new clothes to fit his new body.

  During the course of the year, Frank also cleaned his house. He removed the art from the walls and sold it through want ads and garage sales. Without ceremony, he piled up all of the old blankets and quilts, a few of them over eighty years old, and gave them one by one to the neighbors. He gathered financial records, wills, tax returns, old magazines, photograph albums, and scrapbooks, and stored them in a large safe-deposit box at the bank. After that, he scooped all of the various knickknacks and sentimental souvenirs into cardboard boxes and left them on the corner for others to cart away. One day after the movers carried away all of the old-fashioned and overstuffed furniture, other movers brought in the new, sleek, and simple pieces, so there was only one bed, one dresser, one coffee table, one dining table, one wardrobe, one stove, one refrigerator freezer, and four chairs in the entire house. He pulled up the rugs, hired a local teenager to haul them to the dump, and sanded the hardwood until the floors glowed golden and sepia. Near the end of the year, he found enough courage to give away his father’s clothes and the boxes of his mother’s clothes his father had saved. Frank gave away most of his clothes as well, until he owned only black T-shirts, blue jeans, black socks, black boxers, and black basketball shoes.