by Неизвестный
Julie’s father thought she looked like a crackhead but ‘loved her just the same’. For two years Julie had a positive family experience before her father passed away on an Easter Sunday. He died knowing his daughter, finally able to let go of the hurt that had haunted him for years.
Months later Julie called to say she was pregnant with Elyssa. ‘I don’t think you should have the baby, it could kill you,’ I told her. I said that I was ‘sad but happy for her’.
Around the same time, a woman named Karen called me after finding my website. Karen had adopted Julie’s son Zach (also called Jason Jr) whom Julie and Jason had not seen since birth. That summer Karen, Zach and I made the journey to Alaska. After Zach left, I was doing a video interview and Julie was giving canned answers. I asked her if this was what she wanted her children to remember. We started again. Julie fell apart, her hands trembled and tears that had been trapped for years escaped. I cried.
2009- The last couple of years were the hardest. I watched Julie fade. Her weight was dropping off and her legs could barely hold her. Jason, Julie and Elyssa moved into the wilds of Alaska, near her uncle Mike. To save money, they lived in a small trailer, with no running water or electricity. They lived off the grid in the beautiful wilderness, in a yard littered with broken-down cars and appliances.
Things were bad. Julie was taking thirty-five pills a day. She could not hold Elyssa any more. We sat in the yard and she started to get angry, saying that she did not want a child to see her die, but Jason had just wanted one he could bring home. Julie knew she was dying.
I drove to see her one last time. Every minute seemed like an hour. When I walked in, we held each other. My eyes fought like hers to hold back the tears. I started to speak but she stopped me. ‘You have been in my life the longest and you can do whatever you want.’ All I could say was thank you. I brought Julie pictures from her life, ones I thought she would like, for her to hold, to see.
Days ended up being weeks. I watched her sleep, tanked up on morphine so she would not feel pain, waiting to die. I sat with her for hours and days. Not wanting her to be scared when she saw people in the room who were not there. Not wanting her to be alone. Each night I left in the darkness, alone on the road. Falling asleep, all I would see was Julie gasping for air.
I try to remember her and all I see are my photos in my head.
GRANTA
* * *
PADDLEBALL
Colin Robinson
* * *
Named for an Irish immigrant, a pioneering surgeon who was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement, the Dr Gertrude B. Kelly Playground is located in downtown Manhattan just west of Eighth Avenue. The park is surrounded by high buildings and, in the summer at least, when it is shaded by a canopy of mature plane trees, receives very little sunlight. The few straggling shrubs that survive the gloom are overwhelmed by tarmac pathways and ball courts, a concrete water play area and a children’s playground. At the centre of the park, which at just over half an acre is not large, stands a disproportionately tall flagpole flying the American, New York State and Parks Department flags.
The park is not a salubrious spot. The air is regularly freighted with the diverse smells of cooking from local restaurants; one day it is fish and chips, on another curry and, on yet another, the sweet, sickly smell of wok-seared noodles will saturate the breeze. The office tower across 16th Street emanates a ceaseless low growl that, though not loud enough to impair conversation, reminds one of the park’s pressing urban environs.
Rats are a persistent problem, brazenly scurrying across the paths at dusk. One evening, dismayed at spotting several large rodents under the climbing apparatus and slides in the children’s area, I called 311, the New York City helpline set up by Mayor Bloomberg. It took considerable time and patience to register a complaint to the ostentatiously uninterested woman at the other end of the phone. But I persevered and on my next visit found warnings posted on several trees concerning the presence of poison.
This is not a playground much frequented by the middle-class residents of Chelsea who predominate elsewhere in the neighbourhood. Though located immediately behind the newly restored Maritime Hotel, with its elegant dining terrace, and just a couple of blocks away from the galloping gentrification of the Meatpacking District, home to Soho House and Stella McCartney’s boutique, the park draws a quite different crowd. Just to its north are several blocks of housing projects and it’s the working-class residents of these densely packed and foreboding towers who constitute the overwhelming majority of the park’s patrons. On a warm evening the benches will be occupied by elderly African Americans dozing or reading the newspaper, Puerto Rican youngsters will be laughing on the slides and the playgrounds will be filled with teenagers wearing extravagantly capacious jeans and T-shirts. A couple of boom boxes will be blaring in competition with each other and someone will likely be inspecting the contents of the rubbish bins for collectable tin cans.
My brother and I can’t help but stand out in such a gritty locale. We’ll arrive on our bicycles, elderly sit-up-and-beg models, with rucksacks on our backs and hand towels around our necks. Having propped up the bikes against the inside of the fence that surrounds the hardball area, we will take seats on the adjacent bench to change into our spotless trainers. In summer we will be wearing shorts, probably linen and recently purchased at the nearby branch of Banana Republic, and ankle socks, grey in my brother’s case, white in mine.
Our attire, to say nothing of our physical appearance as white men in advanced middle age, separates us sharply from the other regulars at the playground. So, too, does our purpose for being there. We visit the park specifically to play paddleball, our adopted sport or, perhaps I should say, adapted sport, because we have rewritten the rules of the game substantially so that it more closely resembles tennis, which we played regularly when we were in England. The standard paddleball game is played by four players in teams of two and involves hitting a small rubber ball fast and low against a wall with a bat that is switched from one hand to the other depending on the shot. In the special ‘Robinson’ variation that A. and I have developed, there are just two players, the bat is held in only the right hand and the trajectory of the ball is often an arcing loop, which deposits the ball, with depressing regularity, and at no little cost because it cannot be retrieved, over the twenty-foot-high wall of the court and into a neighbouring backyard.
Only very rarely have we seen anyone else playing paddleball at the park, even in its conventional form. The preferred game here is handball, an older and more widely played sport that requires no bats, but does demand tough hands and a high pain threshold in order to thwack ball against wall with an unprotected palm. Paddleball, as recounted in a history of the game by ‘Maury the K’, president of the One Wall Paddleball Association, was derived from its more popular sister game by a man named Beale in upstate New York over half a century ago. According to Maury, ‘The winter of 1940 was brutally cold and Mr Beale’s hands became too brittle and painful to continue playing handball. [He] substituted a Wooden Paddle with no holes and a taped handle to start the game of ONE WALL PADDLEBALL.’ Subsequent leading practitioners of the sport, according to this account, include Marcel ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Arroyo ‘Shotgun’ Louie and the number-one player of all time, Robert ‘The Ice Man’ Sostre, also known as ‘The Kid’.
There are three adjacent courts, without separating fences, at the Gertrude B. Kelly. It’s unusual to have to wait for any length of time for one to come free but a number of regulars are often there. A group of Puerto Rican teenagers, all bling and biceps, can often be found playing handball or standing around smoking, sometimes both at the same time, an achievement I’ve always admired. A favourite game involves pushing one of their group against the wall and having the others throw the ball directly at him, as hard as possible. Gusts of laughter mark every direct hit.
A distinguished-looking man in his sixties often sits on the bench at the side of the ball area, his
hands stuffed in the pockets of a blue anorak and his shoulders hunched, in a manner that signals deep contemplation. He watches whoever happens to be playing with a vapid expression and a fixed, beatific smile that suggests perhaps he’s not all there. Should the ball roll over in his direction he’ll jump up and retrieve it with the exaggerated nimbleness of someone who remembers what running is but can no longer manage it instinctively.
And then there’s Jimmy. Jimmy is a loner, a young, athletic black man with pale skin and sad eyes that look as though they’re ringed with mascara, like Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp. He’s often at the court slapping a ball against the wall, over and over, always on his own. Despite his evident shyness, he gives a silent nod in our direction when we arrive and on one occasion, when we lost our ball, insisted on giving us his, saying he was about to leave and didn’t need it any longer.
Jimmy is unusual in paying A. and me any heed at all. For the most part, despite our starkly evident differences with the regular crowd, scant attention is directed towards us, and often none at all. When picking up our ball if it strays onto another court (which, given the unpredictability of our game, is quite often), those sharing the courts will sometimes scrutinize it with the curiosity of an archaeologist studying a fragment of ancient pottery, before throwing it back to us with a supple-wristed flick that I’ve concluded must be a baseball throw for it is never seen in Britain. They’ll shout ‘Hey, mister!’ or ‘Sir!’ if they want their own ball back. And on occasion the very young kids will come and stare at us with wide eyes and amused smiles. Once or twice they’ve asked to be allowed a turn with the paddleball bats and we’ve generally obliged, watching anxiously from the bench lest they knock each other senseless with their exuberant swings. But in the main we are simply ignored, and that seems like sufficient acceptance for us to feel very much at home at the Gertrude B. After all, paying no attention whatsoever to someone, that’s family.
In the winter months, when it’s too cold to play outside, A. and I take our bats to the welcoming warmth of the McBurney, a YMCA gym where paddleball can be played inside on Monday and Thursday nights, and in the afternoon on Saturdays and Sundays. The McBurney recently relocated from its previous premises on 23rd Street, down the street from the Chelsea Hotel. The old place was the first permanent home for the YMCA in New York City, opened in 1869 with support from, among others, the financier J.P. Morgan and the merchant philanthropist William E. Dodge. The gloomy exercise halls and broad stone stairways of the old building were more redolent of a church than a gymnasium, echoing a time when godliness and good health were very much part of the same programme, a far cry from the wall-to-wall mirrors and personal trainers of today’s temples to muscled narcissism.
The new McBurney is located just nine blocks further south, on the ground floor and basement of an apartment building on 14th Street. Though its purpose-built premises, with their gleaming white exercise rooms and brightly tiled swimming pool, could hardly be in starker contrast with the previous building, the clientele has remained largely the same. Leaving those dedicated to fitness and physique to the city’s commercial gyms, the emphasis here is more on the sociable than the cardiovascular. The crowd is generally neither young nor fit. These people would rather spend time turning radioactive pink in the steam room than labour on a StairMaster or exercise bike. They converse in high decibel on clusters of stools between the lockers, or watch baseball from sticky plastic armchairs arranged around a small TV in a corner of the room. The scene resembles an exhibit of Lucian Freud’s work, with yards of drooping grey flesh in every direction.
The public display of such physical decrepitude is a source of great comfort to those who, like me, don’t get to the gym as often as we should. Even the briefest exposure to this parade of sagging stomachs, hair-matted backs and varicose veins makes one feel not so out of shape after all, and perhaps not even that old. It’s a psychosomatic workout involving no physical exercise.
It’s rare, too, not to come across a conversation worth listening in on. This is the New York soundtrack as the British immigrant of my age always imagined it, the city of Damon Runyon and Jimmy Breslin, of tough-sounding guys with accents that could cut through steel talking about, well, what on earth are they talking about? On one occasion, perhaps five years after Titanic had swept the Oscars, I overheard two elderly regulars of the McBurney discussing the film as they towelled off after a steam bath.
‘I hear there’s a new movie out about that ship that went down in the Atlantic.’
‘You mean the one that hit an iceberg?’
‘That’s right. What was it called, that ship?’
‘I can’t remember, but it’s a disgrace they would make a film about it. All those poor people who drowned . . .’
It was in the corridors between the grey metal lockers of the Y’s changing room that A. and I first ran into the couple we’ve come to know as ‘the other brothers’. The kinship of this pair is not hard to spot. Though one man is much thinner than his sibling, to a degree that suggests some kind of wasting illness, a characteristic slope of the shoulder and distinctively round eyes with prominent black pupils betray a common genetic inheritance. They are older than we are, probably in their early sixties, and it is difficult to tell who is senior of the two; perhaps they are even twins. They certainly dress differently, as twins often do. The stockier one favours clothes that are far from age-appropriate. With a broad headband pressing his forehead down over protuberant eyes, he looks like a cross between an ageing John McEnroe and the late Marty Feldman. The thinner brother, more conventionally attired but always appearing drawn and tired, projects an air of ineffable sadness, as though in perpetual mourning for his sibling’s lost dress sense.
The brothers are part of a group of men, maybe eight in all, who have been playing paddleball at the Y since long before we started going there. We call them ‘the regulars’. The group demonstrates the sharp disjuncture between aptitude and athleticism that is possible when it comes to this particular sport. Although the standard of play among them is high, the physique of these players is far from impressive. One, a cherub-faced man, is of such enormous rotundity that when he sits naked in the locker room his stool disappears beneath him so that he appears to be hovering above the floor like a levitating swami. He is extraordinarily adept at thwacking the ball low and hard, though the accompanying loud grunts indicate that this prowess is not effortless. Another player, with a rough beard and lank hair retained by a headscarf, has a compact, wiry build, apart from a sharply bulging stomach, an incongruity emphasized by his preference for skintight Lycra tops. He has a curious serving technique where one leg slips backwards while his shoulders fall forwards, so that he appears to be making an effete bow as he hits the ball, a gesture which, given the surprising effectiveness of the stroke, appears to be earned.
The regulars’ approach to their game could not be more at variance to ours. Unlike us, they follow the actual rules and compete in the regulatory group of four. Their garb is characteristically American in its obeisance to the uniform of the specialist. Just as no builder is complete without his tool belt, no cyclist without his Lycra shorts with reinforced gusset, the regulars display all the accoutrements of the dedicated paddleballer: knee pads, wristbands, headscarves and, above all, refulgent plastic goggles, the bigger the better. In contrast, A. and I sometimes don’t even bother changing out of our long trousers. The regulars’ game is conducted with open ferocity, quite at variance with our English politesse. Disputed points and the supposed shortcomings of partners are the source of prolonged bouts of yelling and exaggerated gesticulation. Heads are held, hands placed on hips, eyes rolled; on occasion bats are flung to the ground. I’ve even seen one of the brothers, the bulkier of the two and clearly the more aggressive, on his knees in front of the other, arms akimbo and face scarlet, loudly excoriating his sibling for the incompetence of a misplaced shot.
On those unavoidable and uncomfortable occasions when we’re forced
to share the courts with the regulars, A. and I will cast sidelong glances in each other’s direction during these histrionics, perhaps raising an eyebrow of silent disapproval. We would never conduct ourselves in that fashion, we wordlessly confirm. In our contests, disagreements arise only from a mutual wish to concede points, not to win them. Our verbal exchanges are confined to quiet calls of ‘fine shot’ and apologies when a poorly hit ball goes out of bounds or makes a return impossible.
It’s clear that, over the years, the regulars have come to regard the paddleball courts as their private domain. Whatever time we turn up at the Y, unless it’s late at night, they’ll be there, generally occupying both courts. No matter how long we hover outside the glass doors, or noisily bat the ball against an outside wall, they will leave only when they are good and ready to go. The idea that we might be entitled to a turn is a foreign land to them, beyond even imagination.
This lack of concern for what seems reasonable is a source of great annoyance to us, and to A. especially. As we descend the stairs from the lobby of the Y, he will bend down to look through the windows onto the court to ascertain whether there is a vacancy. Likely as not a bitter declaration will follow: ‘The other brothers are here again.’
The Y encourages membership participation in the running of the facility with a noticeboard in the lobby where written comments and complaints are displayed, together with responses from appropriate members of staff. Though evidently ignored by most of the membership, I find the scrawled paper slips compulsive reading, not least because of the intemperate tone of many of the writers, a group sufficiently exercised to request one of the comment slips available at the front desk. THE SWIMMING POOL HAD A GREASY SCUM LINE AROUND THE WATER’S EDGE TODAY. PLEASE CLEAN THIS IMMEDIATELY! Or, SOMEONE HAS BEEN CUTTING HAIR IN THE MEN’S CHANGING ROOM. THE FLOOR NEAR THE WASHSTAND WAS COVERED! The responses, composed by members of staff on the bottom of the slip before it is pinned to the board, are as solicitous as the complaints are shrill. WE ARE VERY SORRY THAT THE CLOCKS WERE NOT ADJUSTED FOR SUMMER HOURS LAST WEEK AND WILL ENSURE THAT THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN AGAIN.