Everything on the Line

by Bob Mitchell

  And here comes some man alongside her and the man is a normal man except that a pair of short horns extrude from his forehead and oh no! on closer inspection this man is none other than Ira Spade and now he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a single piece of straw and slowly, meticulously, and with malice aforethought places the straw carefully—as if he were competing in the Pick-Up Sticks World Championships—onto the top of the other straws resting precariously on top of Avis the Camel’s overburdened back and Jack her son is by Ira’s side watching the deed’s perpetration as an eyewitness and throwing a conflicted look of guilt and affection to his humped mother and a conflicted look of obedience and resentment to his horned father and the careful placement of the single piece of straw on her back is just too much for Avis the Camel to bear and with a crack that can be heard for miles the spine of the camel snaps like a twig and all the pieces of straw that she has been straining to bear disperse here and there and everywhere and the camel drops to her front knees, propelled downward by the most excruciating pain, and this look of terror and panic and suffering is painted on the camel’s open-mouthed face—precisely the same look as the one on Lee Harvey Oswald’s face when Jack Ruby’s bullet pierced his body from close range—and now all four knees have crumpled to the ground and the horned Ira Spade is laughing his head and his butt off and the camera in the dream slow-zooms to Avis the Camel’s hurt and terrified face, closer, closer—

  Avis Spade awakens with a start and her eyes are filled with tears and fears and her entire body and her sheets are drenched with sweat and her hands are trembling from both the dream and what lies ahead for her down the proverbial road.

  It is midnight at 200 East 57th Street, and Jack Spade is lying in bed alone, wondering where in the hell his life is going. Through his open window wafts a cacophony cobbled together from two simultaneous boisterous arguments, the sound of a police siren, a cabbie yelling at a pedestrian, and a crazed lunatic homeless person down there on the south side of East 57th cursing the day he was born.

  Jack’s eyes are glued by sleep brought on by six hours of intense physical workouts with his father, and, like his mother, he is having an unusual dream, this one based on a Greek myth he discovered just last week:

  King Midas was a very kind man who ruled his kingdom fairly, but he was not one to think very deeply about what he said. One day, while walking in his garden, he saw an elderly satyr asleep in the flowers. Taking pity on the old fellow, King Midas let him go without punishment. When the god Dionysus heard about it, he rewarded King Midas by granting him one wish. The king thought for a second and said, “I wish for everything I touch to turn to gold.” And so it was.

  The beautiful flowers in his garden turned toward the sun for light, but when Midas approached and touched them, they stood rigid and gold. The king grew hungry and thin, for each time he tried to eat, he found that his meal had turned to gold. His lovely daughter, at his loving touch, turned hard and fast to gold. His water, his bed, his clothes, his friends, and eventually the whole palace was gold.

  King Midas saw that soon his whole kingdom would turn to gold unless he did something right away. He asked Dionysus to turn everything back to the way it had been and take back his golden touch. Because the king was ashamed and very sad, Dionysus took pity on him and granted his request. Instantly, King Midas was poorer, but richer, he felt, in the things that really count.

  Except that in Jack’s dream, his father is playing the role of Midas and he the role of Midas’s offspring:

  King Ira was a very kind man who ruled his kingdom fairly, but he was not one to think very deeply about what he said. One day, while walking in his garden, he heard a voice from somewhere deep down beneath the earth’s surface, from a place way down there in the distant bowels of the planet. As the voice was gruff and muffled, King Ira put his ear to the ground and screwed up his eyes and listened intently. “King Ira,” the gruff voice began, “you are a man who knows what he wants, and I like that. And so, I am rewarding you with one wish. And what would your wish be?” And King Ira answered to the gruff voice from deep within the ground, “I wish for everything I touch to turn to gold.”

  And the gruff voice answered, “There is one condition to your wish. Since I deem you not to be worthy of having this grand a wish granted, you shall have to wait until you bear a son, and then you can, through him, have your wish come true.”

  And King Ira was at first sad, and then angry, that he himself was not worthy, but he went to Queen Avis and told her about what had happened and ordered her to have a son with him. And in time, she conceived a child but it was soon determined to be a girl and King Ira became angered and made his queen terminate her pregnancy. And again they tried, but alas, this time it was again determined to be a girl and again King Ira ordered his queen to terminate her pregnancy. And on the third try, it was indeed a charm and Prince Jack was born, to the delight of King Ira.

  And when the child turned ten, it was apparent that Prince Jack was destined to be a great tennis champion and so King Ira desired to make his one wish come true and everything he touched soon turned to gold. He touched business deals and they turned to gold and he touched investments and they turned to gold and he touched tennis trophies and they turned to gold and then when Prince Jack was reaching the pinnacle of his career, King Ira touched him, too, and his son instantly turned into a stiff, rigid golden statue, never again to breathe the fresh air or to smell the sweet flowers or to see the rising sun—

  Jack Spade awakens with a start and his eyes are filled with tears and fears and his entire body and his sheets are drenched with sweat and his hands are trembling from both the dream and what lies ahead for him down the proverbial road.

  It is 1:02 A.M. at 200 East 57th Street, and Ira Spade turns the key in the door of his spacious East side duplex and walks past his bedroom toward his son’s, the stink of Wild Turkey preceding his every step.

  Ira never knocks before entering Jack’s room because privacy is against his religion and now is no exception, and Jack is sitting up in his sweaty PJs and under his sweaty sheets and the four lifeless eyes meet and without a word Ira staggers over to Jack’s bulletin board and pulls out a folded sheet of laser paper from his breast pocket and pins it up and looks at his son and grins that demonic grin and stumbles out of the room muttering under his foul, bourbony breath.

  The 25 Greatest Tennis Players Ever

  1. JACK SPADE!

  2. Ugo Bellezza

  3. Pancho Gonzalez

  4. Roger Federer

  5. Rod Laver

  6. Rafael Nadal

  7. Pete Sampras

  8. Jaden Gil Agassi

  9. Don Budge

  10. Bill Tilden

  11. Björn Borg

  12. Ellsworth Vines

  13. Jack Kramer

  14. Lew Hoad

  15. Fred Perry

  16. Jimmy Connors

  17. Andre Agassi

  18. John McEnroe

  19. Roy Emerson

  20. Ivan Lendl

  21. Ken Rosewall

  22. Frank Sedgman

  23. Bobby Riggs

  24. René Lacoste

  25. Henri Cochet/John Newcombe

  Jack rises and walks to the bulletin board and reads the list and at first feels a flush of ego and self-importance and filial appreciation but then just as suddenly feels that old familiar surge of unbearable stress and filial resentment and has a sudden urge to yank the taped list, devised so skillfully by King Ira, from its mooring and rip it up into a hundred, no, a million, no, a quintillion pieces. And he lifts his sweaty, trembling hand toward the list, then stops, shakes his head, and bites his tongue until it bleeds.

  10

  Win or Die

  “PANKRATION!” IRA SPADE WHISPERS OMINOUSLY into his son’s ear.

  It is late August, 2047, the eve of the U.S. Open men’s finals in New York City. Unsurprisingly, tomorrow’s match will feature Jack Spade and Ugo Bellezza, in their
third encounter this year in the finals of the main draw of a major tournament. Already, at the age of seventeen, Ugo is the reigning Australian and French Open champion and Jack has won at Wimbledon (an injured Ugo did not compete), and the two phenoms are now dominating men’s tennis and the writing of tennis history is indelibly on the wall.

  “Huh?”

  “Pankration!” Ira repeats from the comfort of his $7,000 Arne Vodder Danish teak armchair in his East 57th Street living room, then, “I learned about it last year at the Athens Olympics, remember, when I went over there for the 150th anniversary of the first Athens Olympiad? Anyway, the word literally means ‘all power,’ but what it really means is ‘win or die’!”

  Jack gives his father a quizzical look.

  “Y’see, long ago, pankration was a Greek Olympic sport, a vicious mix of boxing and wrestling first introduced in 638 B.C., or almost 2,700 years ago. Contestants were allowed to do virtually anything—choke holds, joint locks, no holds barred, except for eye gouging and biting. So they either had to win or else be killed by their opponents. It was a literal ‘fight to the death,’ where there were two choices when push came to shove—submission or death—and for these fierce competitors, submission was definitely not an option.”

  Another puzzled look.

  “Don’t you see?” Ira says. “I’m telling you about this the night before your important final against that deaf Italian kid. I’m telling it to you because for us, it is a fight to the death, where submission is not an option. I want you to go out there and show no mercy and fight with all your might until you have choked that little Italian sonuvabitch to death, until he has stopped breathing and you are the only survivor left on that goddam court!”

  The vein on the left side of Ira Spade’s neck fills to capacity and bulges out, and he is gasping for breath, like a pankration contestant whose head is being subjected to a lethal choke hold by his merciless opponent.

  “Okay, I get it,” Jack answers, “now, calm down, okay?”

  “Calm down, my ass,” Ira retorts, busting out of his chair like a sprinter out of the starting blocks. Before Jack can react, he finds his head in a lateral vascular neck restraint performed with pinpoint accuracy by his father, his carotid arteries and jugular veins being compressed on both sides of his neck.

  Jack Spade can’t believe that his father is seriously doing this. It’s a joke, right?

  Wrong.

  Ira isn’t letting up, because this is serious stuff here. This is about Darwin and survival and life and death and all he has struggled for and sacrificed for and all his blood and sweat and tears. And there is fury in his eyes and terror in Jack’s and who knows what might have happened were it not for a key in the door? and here comes Avis Spade in from a trip to the market and just before she enters Ira knows it is she and he loosens his grip and Jack knows it, too, and he coughs quietly and does his best to recover unobtrusively from the assault.

  “How you boys doin’?” Avis inquires as she places a Gristede’s bag loaded with groceries on the kitchen counter.

  There is no response, aside from one final, barely suppressed cough from her offspring. Finally, Ira says everything’s okeydokey and Avis smiles and enters the living room and things look normal to her except for this bright red mark on Jack’s neck that wasn’t there before she went out and once again Avis’s worst fears bubble up and once again the scab of healing is violently ripped off her marital wound.

  * * *

  Talk about a romantic setting.

  Ugo Bellezza, Antonella Cazzaro, Gioconda Bellezza, and Giglio Marotti are sitting at a table in The View, a restaurant cozily sequestered beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Never was an eatery so aptly named: The view from any of the window seats almost competes with the view of San Francisco Bay from just south of the Waldo Tunnel or the view of Rio de Janeiro and Sugarloaf from above Corcovado Mountain or the view of the entire planet from the summit of Maui’s Haleakala Mountain.

  On this eve of the U.S. Open men’s finals, the four are gawking at the water sparkling on the East River and the lights twinkling on one of America’s oldest and most revered bridges and the glittering stars illuminating an imposing concrete panorama spreading from Gotham’s Lower Manhattan to its majestic skyline.

  The tranquil beauty of the scene is searing into the souls of the Italians, and their souls are singing, in much the same way the soulful American poet, Hart Crane, sang upon penning this glorious dithyrambic quatrain in his “To Brooklyn Bridge”:

  Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

  Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

  Beading thy path—condense eternity:

  And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

  The two teenagers gaze at each other, and Antonella smiles at Ugo, smiles at him with those gorgeous periwinkle eyes that in here reflect the sparkling of the water and the twinkling of the lights and the glittering of the stars out there.

  The two adults gaze at each other, lovingly as always, but this time the mood and the setting and the just being here with their two young lovebirds are rendering their gazes a trifle more intense, a hair more penetrating.

  And when Ugo’s mother and coach turn their heads and look once more into the beckoning night outside the window, the immensely talented tennis prodigy mouths and signs to his girlfriend two little words, and these for the very first time.

  Ti adoro.

  * * *

  If you walk past any of the outside courts at Flushing Meadows during the opening rounds of the U.S. Open, your ears will tell you in no uncertain terms that this is not a tournament for the faint of heart. They will be ruthlessly assaulted by the cruel sounds of physical and mental agony—the staccato squeaking of soles against green concrete-hard acrylic, the gasping for breath and the grunts and the groans and the moans of the combatants—that differentiate the brutal ambiance here in the country’s roughest city from, say, the stylish schussing on the clay of Roland Garros or the elegant thumping of little cat feet on the grass of Wimbledon. This late-summer classic is, above all, a supreme test of attrition, where more players than in any other tournament are forced to default their matches in medias res due to blisters, exhaustion, dehydration, nausea, dizziness, back spasms, or a tear in any one of the some 4,000 tendons in the human body.

  Today, following two seemingly interminable weeks of agony and pain, two players are left standing, two seventeen-year-olds whose ages belie uncommonly profound reservoirs of fortitude, stamina, and toughness clearly superior to those of the other 126 combatants.

  As predicted, and eerily similar to the scores of the two other majors finals between them so far in this year of 2047, Ugo Bellezza and Jack Spade have split the first four sets, all in tie-breakers, with Jack’s wins palindromically bookending Ugo’s, 7-6, 6-7, 6-7, 7-6. The gritty New Yorker has momentum slightly in his favor now, but unbelievably, yet to no one’s surprise, each player has precisely the same number of points won (128 apiece), the same number of winners (89 apiece), and the same number of unforced errors (11 apiece).

  Hold onto your hats, because here comes the much-awaited fifth and final set, which, because of a recent ruling, will not be a tie-breaker but rather, like the other three Grand Slams, a fight to the finish after 6-all until a player wins by two games.

  Ira Spade has been trying everything today with his charge, including the kitchen sink, and now, at crunch time, it’s time to play the jingoism card.

  “Goddammit!” Ira screeches into his son’s face on the sidelines at 2-1, Jack’s, in the fifth. “Now’s the time to break this kid’s goddam will! It’s win or die, remember? Pankration! And one more thing. These are low-life people, these Italianos. I mean, what have they ever produced? A bunch of painters, a few sissy singers, and the Mafia! So you gotta beat him not only for yourself, but also for the good ol’ red, white, and blue!”

  Ira’s face is as flushed as it would have been had he swallowed half a bottle of
niacin tablets, and his left eye is twitching something wicked. Jack places a towel over his own sweat-soaked head, more to tune out his father’s tirade than to dry off.

  On the other side of the umpire’s chair, Giglio Marotti looks lovingly at his protégé and says, “I’m so proud of you, ragazzo. You okay?”

  Ugo nods, but he is hiding the fact that something is terribly wrong.

  He is hiding it because he doesn’t want to worry Giglio, not here, not now. And besides, his mentor had always taught him about per aspera ad astra, that in order to achieve something there is always a need to deal with and overcome obstacles, and how to take the high road and display sprezzatura and sublimate the struggle and not let it show and not wear his feelings on his short tennis sleeve.

  What is so impressive about compensation in nature is that it reflects a constant balance in the universe, that when one entity dies another is born, that when one part of the body breaks down or is disabled another one makes up for the loss. And so Ugo Bellezza, deaf from a very early age, was also blessed with a visual acuity that, especially on the tennis court, has always made up for his infirmity.