by Josh Wilker
It thrilled me. So much so, in fact, that I tightened up and missed the second free throw. This miss has bothered me ever since. All the time I put into studying free throws, all that monastic, pure-hearted practice, and in the end the best I could do was 50 percent, the kind of percentage that gets certain NBA players mocked as millionaire layabouts, too lazy to try. The truth was that it wasn’t just the thunderous sound of the cheering that caused me to miss. Even when I practiced alone I was usually able to hit only about 65 to 70 percent of my attempts, which was one reason I kept practicing—out of the sheer frustration of not being able to master the simplest task on the basketball court, a place where I’d spent more time in my life than any other place on earth besides my childhood bedroom.
After the game a blond guy I knew from keg parties came up and told me that he and his friends, two unpretty girls, had gone nuts when I put in that first free throw. This explained the cheer. The slit-eyed sardonic look on his face made me understand that it had been a cheer built mostly on irony and humor and that I was the butt of this joke or, more accurately, the foundation upon which the joke of imitating cheering in a situation long past cheering could be built. He also mentioned something about my form. I had indeed constructed for myself during all the hours of practicing free throws a methodical ritual before each shot, which was to bounce the ball four times and squat down on the fourth bounce, pausing briefly, readying for release. It was a solemn thing to me—the four bounces was not arbitrary but rather my earnest tribute to the Buddha’s four noble truths. Life is suffering, etc.
“Fuckin’ hilarious,” the guy said. “We were dying.”
I’d thought, to that point, that my form was smooth and satisfyingly “textbook,” like watching an instructional video or an American bald eagle in flight. But my fan, or whatever you want to call him, made me understand that all the hours of practice had resulted in a comical display of beady-eyed ostrich-like jerkiness, the comedy residing primarily in the naked sincerity with which the head benchwarmer went about his tasks: as if they mattered.
So anyway, twenty-five years later, shooting free throws in gray late November on the hoop in the parking lot of the corporate complex, I was thinking back to my labored free throw form, all that work wasted, and for whatever reason, perhaps laziness, I altered my usual release point, bringing it lower. I started hitting every free throw. All those years ago I was doing it wrong. The solution had not been in ever-stricter adherence to some four-bounce ritual, to some notion that I could turn free throw shooting into a holy sutra recital, but simply in exerting slightly less energy by way of lowering my release point a little.
I hit shot after shot for a while, then put my collared shirt back on and clipped my ID back onto my belt, my fattened prechild face grinning out from the magnetized rectangle. I crossed the enormous parking lot and entered the building and spiraled inward through a pasteboard maze to my cubicle. Tacked to the inside of the cubicle were phone lists and project schedules and a piece of paper showing editing symbols, all the marks to make to note mistakes. My body was buzzing inside my business-casual clothes, my fingers still feeling the true shots, one after the other, decades too late. A red tack held up a photo of my wife not long after we’d first met, rowing me in a rowboat in Central Park, the beauty at the center of my life, always rowing us forward. I looked at my computer. There were e-mails to respond to, tasks to carry out, quality-control standards to uphold. Just to the right of my computer a yellow tack held up a big Xerox printout of a photo of my son. He stared out at me, looking stunned, beautiful, impossibly new. What was this strange victory I’d been called into?
I
Implode
I dreamed I was back in high school, way behind, a test coming up in a class I hadn’t been to all year. I woke from this dream feeling trampled and clammy. I tried to tiptoe out of the bedroom, but there was a cardboard box and vacuum cleaner barrier in the doorway. We’d constructed this barrier to battle our cats’ latest concerted attempt to ruin our lives. They’d started pounding on the bedroom door all night long, waking the baby, so we’d begun pushing a scare-cat mechanism, a vacuum cleaner, up against a slab of cardboard that spanned the length of the doorframe to try to keep them away from the door. It didn’t really stop them, especially after they figured out the vacuum cleaner wasn’t going to turn on, so its eventual effect was to give us a faltering illusion of control over the situation and to add another obstacle to me getting out of the bedroom in the morning without smashing loudly into something. So on this morning I knocked over the whole thing, Jack woke and started crying, and my wife loosed a sigh so deep and cutting it could have pierced titanium.
I fled downstairs “to write.” Instead, I just sat there trying to ignore the crying through the floorboards. Someday, I mused in a perverse attempt to comfort myself, the sun will implode. But then I wasn’t sure whether implode was the correct term to use for that inevitable event. Explode? I did a Google search and almost immediately got sidetracked, listing as usual toward the wide world of sports, namely an article titled, “Broncos Rally as Chargers Implode.”
“It’s bad,” Chargers linebacker Takeo Spikes said about his team collapsing from within to blow a twenty-four-point halftime lead. “Every adjective you can come up with as far as disappointment, it covers it.”
You could sit and name every term that could ever have its own entry in a complete encyclopedia of failure and it still wouldn’t provide the healing satisfaction that language is intended to provide, that feeling of having something named, pinned down, known. All words that related to disappointment, to the atomization of sense and meaning, could be drawn into the implosion and disappear, and still there will be a black hole, a cosmic absence. Someday the sun will implode, or whatever. There are no words we can say that will carry beyond the implosion. Or is it the explosion? I still don’t know.
I finished reading about the Chargers’ implosion and moved on to another article about the subject of implosion, namely the bungled implosion of a defunct coliseum, the O-rena, which resulted in a piece of debris striking and injuring the leg of a bystander. Unaccountably I began fantasizing about being a bystander. They’re always innocent. When I grow up I want to be an innocent bystander. I willfully omitted from the fantasy any injurious consequences, such as having your leg gashed by a plummeting chunk of rebar from the former home of the Orlando Magic. This absence from the fantasy was ludicrous, as innocent bystanders exist as such only in retrospect, after they have been lucklessly maimed. Eventually I went to work, found out that several coworkers had been let go, that we who remained now had to get supervisor approval to use the printer, that we were running out of pens.
Incomplete
When I think of life, of all that will be seized in midmotion, incomplete, in the inevitable all-ending implosion or explosion, I think of Bubby Brister, not when he was a college star or a reasonably functional member of a decent Pittsburgh Steelers team or, at the end of his NFL days, as a clipboard gripper on a two-time Super Bowl–champion Denver Broncos squad, but instead in the middle of his athletic career, when he came up against his limitations, when he was called upon to carry the New York Jets, when he was pressed into duty on a moribund mid-1990s version of that team that toiled in the shadow of another team in a stadium not even located within the borders of the supposed home state of the team; specifically I think of him dropping back in a hurry, knowing his offensive line will not be able to hold back the blitz, and I think of him throwing downfield, of the ball wobbling in flight and nosediving at the feet of the intended receiver. I think of the football bounding and rolling to a palsied stop on the artificial turf.
Is there any happening in sports more disenchanting than the incomplete pass? You have to be in the stands at a game, preferably a game that doesn’t matter, preferably in the freezing rain, to really experience it. On TV there will be no lingering whatsoever on the football as it lays on the tu
rf incomplete. Replays will run instantly from many angles, showing, for instance, the surge of defensive lineman toward the quarterback or the faulty footwork of the passer as he faded back or the imperfect route of the intended receiver, and then as the clock stoppage between plays continues there may also be hurried, urgent sideline reports or in-studio updates from other games, everything presented with a staccato seriousness.
There are always versions of this scramble of reportage and instant replay and analysis after every play in football, which is the game with the most fractured connection to the notion of continuousness of any played in the world—and also is, perhaps relatedly, by far the most popular sport in the most powerful nation the world has ever known—but the void between plays reaches its unbearable nadir with an incomplete pass. Part of this has to do with the feelings of fluidity that come from the game clock. A running play or a completed pass will keep the clock running, whereas an incomplete pass will stop it. Even when a running play or a completed pass ends with the ball carrier going out of bounds or scoring, which also stops the clock, the clock stoppage seems different from the stoppage caused by an incomplete pass. In those plays, even when the ball carrier is stopped for a loss, time seems not as if it has been broken but rather as if it is at a pregnant pause.
I haven’t been to a lot of live football games, but I did go see the Jets when they had Bubby Brister at quarterback, and so I’ve seen an incomplete pass for real. Jack Kerouac suggested the title of William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch thusly: “The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” I’ve seen Bubby Brister through freezing rain miss his intended receiver. The ball wobbling on the artificial turf, time not just stopped but snapped, that primary imprisoning illusion, its comfort, for one naked instant gone.
Infinity
Reference books lay strewn around the condo. The type of book was dependent on its location in the home. Encyclopedias and almanacs occupied the dim basement level, on and near the table where I would sit, in the early morning, and fail to write, these books open to pages featuring one or another of a small group of major league pitchers through history who had allowed one or more runs and never recorded an out. They had the briefest of entries in the list of names beginning—in my beloved outdated tomes—with Aaron, Hank, and in each of the entries, among the other stats, was what looked like a numeral in defeat, a flattened, toppled eight, the sign for infinity.
Upstairs it was all partially read parenting books, old baseball cards and grocery lists inside each one, marking the location of my surrender. Sometimes I’d run aground on step-by-step directions, which I’d never been able to follow in any situation, let alone one involving an infant wailing into my brain. Other times I’d be thwarted in my attempt to use the books to gain some sense of order and time. I wanted to know, like every other lemming flocking to the parenting aisle for the best-selling series of books, “what to expect.”
The series of books using that phrase began with a titular twist on a meaning of the word “expecting,” but because of that manual’s juggernaut success—tapping as it did into a vast middle-class Caucasian anxiety in this new disconnected age when no one has any idea what to expect and everyone has to figure everything out on their own in scattered anomic isolation from village lore and wise elders and all that other kind of shit from the warm vanished days of yesteryear—the brand was soon expanded into both prepregnancy and postpregnancy directions. I often turned to the one on what to expect the first year. It had little sections on each portion of weeks throughout the first year, with bullet points of what the baby should be doing and might be doing at each stage. It turned parenting into an ongoing barracks inspection.
“It says he’s supposed to ‘squeal in delight,’” I said to Abby one night. It was a day or so after I’d been told at the office about the pens shortage, the firings. I was still shaken by the defining element of the departure of former employees, which was the speedy seamlessness of the removal. It was the same way each time one of these waves occurred. You’d see a few new blank slots in the black placards on the outside of emptied cubicles. You’d see a box of tissues in one of the conference rooms. Often I didn’t know those who’d been removed. This time the people laid off included my friend who’d given me his Bill Bene card. He had kids.
“Fuck,” I said, looking down at my kid. “Is he ever going to squeal in delight?” I looked back at the book of expectations.
“I don’t know,” Abby said.
“It’s in the ‘probably be able to’ section.”
“Stop reading that shit.”
“What do they mean by that anyway—delight?”
“Exactly.”
“It says to check with a doctor. ‘The delay could indicate a problem,’” I recited. We both looked down at him squirming on the carpet beneath this contraption with bells and little cloth animals hanging from it. It seemed impossible that he would ever be able to do anything.
“He’s never going to be delighted,” I said. I had to bite the inside of my mouth to keep from crying. I’d succeeded in transmitting my saddened worry to Abby, who peered down at Jack looking like she might be verging on tears too. I had the urge at that moment to tell her about the layoffs at work, about how I worried that the wave of eliminations would empty my cubicle too. This was the kind of thing I was usually able to keep to myself, but now I had to fight to keep from confessing that this whole thing, providing for and presiding over a helpless child, was beyond me. To remain silent, I just bit down on the inside of my mouth a little harder. The next day I went to work, and my name was still on my cubicle. While I was at work Abby texted me with some news.
“HE ROLLED OVER!” she wrote. This skill was, I remembered, in the vaunted “may possibly be able to” bullet list. Later, when I got home, we tried to get him to recreate the precocious feat, but he just lay there.
Over the weekend we walked to the park by the lake to take a family picture in the sun. Still brooding over the layoffs at work, I ended up snapping at Abby about her impatient remarks as I fumbled with the camera and Jack began to jerk and whine. After that flare-up I pushed Jack in the stroller across a wide grassy area of the park, moving quickly to get him to stop crying, and because Abby was mad at me or I was mad at her or both, she lagged back instead of racing to keep up, so she ended up walking alone past another in the neighborhood’s endless series of young homeboy woman-harassing packs and was duly harassed, and it was my fault in that I should have been beside her or, more generally, should have found some way at some point in my life to be a sturdy middle-class adult capable of providing an oasis of security and calm, if not delight, and a white picket fence and serenity far from our seedy environs. But these times are bad, and I’m forever distracted from attempting to make a sturdy middle-class living by my ruinous attraction to forging some impossible order through the act of writing, and anyway, there is no middle class anymore, and I’m barely clinging to a job that barely covers or does not cover the costs of a family, and so one wrong move, one accident, one bad day, and into the imploding abyss we go. We’re headed there anyway, with our new condo in a neighborhood fraying into poverty, which was the only place we could afford a condo, which means my son remains unprotected by me from a breakdown in humane social custom, if not in the form of bullets then in a tangentially related series of crises, one after another, some humiliating, others worse. There was nothing in the parenting books about any of this.
Still, that evening I was playing on the carpet with Jack when he rolled over. It was something to see. I put a check mark next to “roll over” in the parenting book. The 1975 Bill Hands baseball card marking my place in that book is still there, as if the feat of rolling over, the first complicated motor skill plateau, signaled a point beyond which words could not offer any ordering. Things began to develop more quickly after that, it seemed. Soon after
learning how to roll onto his stomach, he learned how to roll from his stomach onto his back. At first he did this in a way that caused him to tumble down too quickly and bump his head on the carpet, but then he started doing it more smoothly. The development staggered me, as it revealed a process of trial and error, of refinement, and showed that he was not simply being moved along through various bullet-point stages of development by instinctual evolutionary imperatives but was instead turning things over in his whirring little mind. He was experimenting, asking, growing.
A new, deeper vulnerability set in. My son was charging forward through time. Someday he would get to his feet. Someday he would walk. Someday he would run. The possibilities, suddenly, seemed endless, a scary new version of everything beyond our ability to know what to expect. I stopped reading the parenting books. I couldn’t stop looking at my encyclopedias.
Someday my son, it stands to reason, will ask me about infinity. This is a concept that used to frighten me as a child. It still does, in some ways: the idea that time and space go on forever, that within this forever we are tiny, finite, without any permanence whatsoever.
If my son asks, maybe I’ll tell him about how in baseball earned run average (ERA) is used to show how many earned runs a pitcher would give up in any given nine-inning span. Though the mathematical formula used to determine ERA cannot produce infinity as a result, it does allow conceptual space for what may become of a pitcher who gives up runs but does not record any outs. Math be damned, it is agreed that in such cases the player’s ERA is infinite. As far as ERA is concerned, that pitcher will never record an out. The game will go on forever, run after run after run crossing the plate until the end of time.