by Richard Ford
“I guess I’ll save mine till later.”
“She gave me another one for later.” He gives me his slant-eyed look. He is far ahead of me and will, I know, be a struggle.
“So okay, what’s the problem with you and Charley?” I am maneuvering us past the Hartford downtown, the little gold-domed capital nearly lost in among big insurance high-rises. “Can’t you two be civilized?”
“I can. He’s an asshole.” Paul is watching out his side as a squad of befezzed Shriners on Harleys comes alongside us. The Shriners are big, overstuffed, fat-cheeked guys dressed in gold-and-green silk harem guard getups with goggles and gloves and motorcycle boots. On their giant red Electra Glides they’re as imposing as real harem guards, and of course are riding in safety-first staggered formation, their motor noise even through the closed window loud and oppressive.
“Does braining him with an oarlock seem like a good solution to his being an asshole?” This will be my lone, unfelt concession to Charley’s welfare.
The lead Shriner has spied Paul and given him a grinning, gloved thumbs-up. He and his crew are all big, jolly cream puffs, no doubt on their way to perform figure eights and seamless circles within circles for happy, grateful, shopping-center crowds, then hurry off to lead a parade down some town’s Main Street.
“It’s just a solution,” Paul says, returning the lead harem guard’s thumbs-up, putting his forehead to the window and grinning back sarcastically. “I like these guys. Charley should be one. What do you call them?”
“Shriners,” I say, returning a thumbs-up from my side.
“What do they do?”
“It’s not that easy to explain,” I say, keeping us in our lane.
“I like their suits.” He makes a muffled and unexpected little bark, a clipped Three Stooges, testy-terrier bark. He doesn’t seem to want me to hear it but can’t resist doing it again. One of the Shriners seems to catch on and makes what looks like a barking gesture of his own, then gives another thumbs-up.
“Are you barking again, son?” I sneak a look at him and swerve slightly to the right. An accident here would mean complete defeat.
“I guess so.”
“Why is that? Do you think you’re barking for Mr. Toby or something?”
“I need to do it.” He’s told me several times that in his view people now say “need” when they mean “want,” which he thinks is hilarious. The Shriners drift back in the slow lane, probably nervous after I swerved at them. “It makes me feel better. I don’t have to do it.”
And frankly there’s nothing I feel I can say if greeting the world with an occasional bark instead of the normal “Howzit goin’” or a thumbs-up makes him feel better. What’s to get excited about? It might prove a hindrance under SAT testing conditions, or be a problem if he only barked and never spoke for the rest of his life. But I don’t see it as that serious. No doubt, like all else, it will pass. I should probably try it. It might make me feel better.
“So are we going to the Basketball Hall of Fame or not?” he says, as though we’d been arguing about it. His mind is now who knows where? Possibly thinking he’s thinking about Mr. Toby and thinking he wishes he weren’t.
“We definitely are,” I say. “It’s coming up pretty quick. Are you stoked for it?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Because I have to take a leak when we get there.” And that’s all he says for miles.
In a hasty thirty minutes we slide off 91 into Springfield and go touring round through the old mill town, following the disappearing brown-and-white BB. HALL OF FAME signs until we’re all the way north of downtown and pulled to a halt across from a dense brick housing project on a wide and windy trash-strewn boulevard by the on-ramp to the interstate we were just on. Lost.
Here is a marooned Burger King, attended around the outside by many young black men, and beside it, beyond the parking lot, a billboard showing Governor Dukakis smiling his insincere smile and surrounded by euphoric, well-fed, healthy-looking but poor children of every race and creed and color. No garbage has been picked up here for several days, and a conspicuous number of vehicles are abandoned or pillaged along the streetside. A hall of fame, any hall of fame within twenty miles of this spot, seems not worth the risk of being shot. In fact, I’m willing to just forget the whole thing and head for the Mass Pike, turn west and strike off for Cooperstown (170 miles), which would have us rolling into the Deerslayer Inn, where I’ve booked us a twin, just in time for cocktail hour.
And yet to bag it would be to translate mere lost directions into defeat (a poor lesson on a voyage meant to instruct). Plus not going, now that we’re at street level, would be tantamount to temperamental; and in my worst 3 a.m. computations of self and character, temperamental’s the thing I’m not, the thing that even a so-so father mustn’t be.
Paul, who is ever suspicious of my resolve, has said nothing, just stared at Governor Dukakis through the windshield as if he were the most normal thing in the world.
I therefore execute a fast U-turn back toward town, cruise right into a BP delimart, ask directions out the window from a Negro customer just leaving, who courteously routes us back onto the interstate south. And in five minutes we’re on the highway then off again, but this time at a perfectly well marked BBHOF exit, at the end of which we wind around booming freeway pilings and run smack into the Hall of Fame parking lot, where many cars are parked and where a neat little grass lawn with wood benches and saplings for picnickers and reflective roundball enthusiasts borders the Connecticut, sliding by, glistening, just beyond.
When I shut the motor off, Paul and I simply sit and stare through the saplings at the old factory husks on the far side of the river as if we expected some great sign to suddenly flash up, shouting “No! Here! It’s over here now! You’re in the wrong place! You missed us! You’ve done it wrong again!”
I should, of course, seize this inert moment of arrival to introduce old Emerson, the optimistic fatalist, to the trip’s agenda, haul Self-Reliance out of the back seat, where Phyllis had it last. In particular I might try out the astute “Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.” Or else something on the order of accepting the place providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Each seems to me immensely serviceable if, however, they aren’t contradictory.
Paul twists around and frowns back at the metal-and-glass Hall of Fame edifice, which looks less like a time-honored place of legend and enshrinement than a high-tech dental clinic, with its mulberry-colored, fake concrete-slab façade being just the ticket for putting edgy patients at their ease when they arrive for the first-time-ever cleaning and prophylaxis: “Here no one will harm, overcharge or give you bad news.” Above these doors, though, are cloth banners in several bright colors, spelling out BASKETBALL: AMERICA’S GAME.
As he looks back, I notice Paul has a thick, ugly, inflamed and unhealthy-looking seed wart on the side of his right hand below his little finger. I also note, to my dismay, what may be a blue tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, something that looks like what a prisoner might do and Paul may have done himself. It spells a word I can’t make out, though I don’t like it and decide immediately that if his mother can’t pay attention to his personal self, I’ll have to.
“So what’s inside?” he says.
“All kinds of good stuff,” I say, postponing Emerson and trying to ignore the tattoo while mounting some roundball enthusiasm, since I want to get out of the car, possibly grab a sandwich inside and make a last-ditch phone plea to S. Mantoloking. “They’ve got films and uniform displays and photographs and chances to shoot baskets. I sent you the brochures.” I’m not making it sound spectacular enough. Driving off might still be easier.
Paul gives me a self-satisfied look, as if a picture of himself shooting a basket were a source of amusement. For half a dollar I’d give him a flat-hand pop in the mouth too, for having a goddamned tattoo. Though that would
violate, within our first hour together, my personal commitment to quality time.
“You can stand beside a big cutout of Wilt the Stilt and see how you match up sizewise,” I say. Our air-conditioning is beginning to dissipate at idle.
“Who’s Milt the Stilt?”
This I know he knows. He was a Sixers fan at the time he moved away. We went to games. He saw pictures. A basket in fact is bracketed at this moment to my garage on Cleveland Street. He is now, though, onto complexer games.
“He was a famous proctologist,” I say. “Anyway, let’s pick up a burger. I told your mother I’d buy you a sports lunch. Maybe they’ll have a slam-dunk burger.”
His eyes narrow at me across the seat. His tongue flicks nervously into each corner of his mouth. He likes this. His eyelashes, I notice for the first time (also like his mother’s), have become ridiculously long. I can’t keep up with him. “Are you hungry enough to eat the asshole out of a dead skunk?” he says, and blinks at me brazenly.
“Yeah, I’m pretty hungry.” I pop open my door and let stiff dieselly breeze, freeway slam and the gamy river scent all flood inside in one hot, lethal breath. I am also tired of him already.
“Well, you’re pretty hungry, then,” he says. He has no good follow-up, so that all he can say is: “Do you think I have symptoms that need treatment?”
“No, I don’t think you have any symptoms, son,” I say down into the car. “I think you have a personality, which may be worse in your case.” I should ask him about the dead bird but can’t bring myself to.
“A-balone,” Paul says. I stand and gaze over the hot roof of my car, over the Connecticut, over the green west of Massachusetts, where soon we’ll be driving. I feel for some reason lonely as a shipwreck. “How do you say ‘I’m hungry’ in Italian?” he says.
“Ciao,” I say. This is our oldest-timiest, most reliable, jokey way of conducting father-son business. Only today, due to technical difficulties beyond all control, it doesn’t seem exactly to work. And our words get carried off in the breeze, with no one to care if we speak the intricate language of love or don’t. Being a parent can be the worst of discontents.
“Ciao,” Paul says. He has not heard me. “Ciao. How soon they forget.” He is climbing out now, ready for our trip inside.
Once in, Paul and I wander like lost souls who have paid five bucks to enter purgatory. (I have finally quit limping.)
Strategically placed, widely modern staircases with purple velvet crowd-control cords move us and others, herd-like, all the way up to Level 3, where the theme is basketball-history-in-a-nutshell. The air, here, is hypercleaned and frigid as Nome (to discourage lingering), everyone whispers like funeral-parlor guests, and lights are low to show off various long corridors of spotlit mummy-case artifacts preserved behind glass only a multiple-warhead missile could penetrate. Here is a thumbnail bio of inventor Naismith (who turns out to have been a Canadian!), alongside a replica of the old Doc’s original scrawled-on-an-envelope basketball master plan: “To devise a game to be played in a gymnasium.” (Success was certainly his.) Farther on is a black-and-white picture display featuring Forrest “Phogg” Allen, beloved old Jayhawks chalkboard wizard from the Twenties, and next to that, a replica of the “original” peach basket, along with a tribute to YMCAs everywhere. On all the walls there are grainy, treasured period photos of “the game” being played in shadowy wire-window gyms by skinny unathletic white boys, plus two hundred old uniform jerseys hung from the dark rafters like ghosts in a spook house.
A few listless families enter a dark little Action Theatre, which Paul avoids by hitting the can, though I watch from the doorway as the history of the game unfolds before our preprandial eyes, while the action sounds of the game are piped in.
In eight minutes we progress briskly down to Level 2, where there’s more of the same, though it’s more up-to-date and recognizable, at least to me. Paul expresses a passing spectator’s interest in Bob Lanier’s size 22 shoe, a red-and-yellow plastic cross-section model of an as-yet-unmangled human knee, and a film viewable in another little planetarium-like theater, dramatizing how preternaturally large basketball players are and what they can all “do with the ball,” in contrast to how minuscule and talentless the rest of us have to suffer through life being. In this way it is a true shrine—devoted to making ordinary people feel like insignificant outsiders, which Paul seems not to mind. (The Vince was in fact more welcoming.)
“We played at camp,” he says flatly as we pause outside the amphitheater, both of us looking in as huge, muscular, uniformed black men ram ball after ball through hoop after hoop on a mesmerizing four-sided screen, to the crowd’s rapt amazement and smattered applause.
“And so were you a major force,” I ask. “Or an intimidator, possibly a franchise or an impact player?” I’m happy to have unfreighted exchange on any subject, though I stare at his shorts, tee-shirt and skinthead and don’t like any of it. He seems to me to be in disguise.
“Not really,” he says, absolutely earnest. “I can’t jump. Or run. Or shoot, and I’m a lefty. And I don’t give a shit. So I’m not really cut out for it.”
“Lanier was a lefty,” I say. “So was Russell.” He may not know who they are, even though he’d recognize their shoes. The audience in the jam-o-rama amphitheater makes a low “Ooooo” of utter reverence. Other men with their boys stand beside us, looking in, uninterested in sitting down.
“We weren’t really playing to win anyway,” Paul says.
“What were you playing for? Fun?”
“Thur-uh-py,” he says to make a joke of it, though he seems unironic. “Some of the kids would always forget what month it was, and some of them talked too loud or had seizures, which was bad. And if we played basketball, even stupid basketball, they all got better for a while. We had ‘share your thoughts’ after every game, and everybody had a lot better thoughts. For a while at least. Not me. Chuck played basketball at Yale.” Paul’s hands are in his shorts pockets as he stares at the ceiling, which is industrial modern and shadowy, with metal girders, trusses, rafters, sprinkling-system pipes, all painted black. Basketball, I think, is American’s postindustrial national pastime.
“Was he any good?” I may as well ask.
“I don’t know,” he says, digging a finger into his mossy ear and creasing the corner of his mouth like a country hick. A second loud “Ooooo” comes from inside. Someone, a woman, shouts out, “Yes! I swear to God. Look at that!” I don’t know what she saw.
“You know the one thing you can do that’s truly unique to you and that society can’t affect in any way?” he says. “We learned this in camp.”
“I guess not.” People out here with us are starting to stray away.
“Sneeze. If you sneeze in some stupid-fuck way, or in a loud way that pisses people off in movies, they just have to go along with it. Nobody can say, ‘Sneeze a different way, asshole.’”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Does that seem unusual?”
“Yes.” Gradually he lets his eyes come down from the ceiling but not to me. His finger quits excavating his ear. He is now uncomfortable for being unironic and a kid.
“Don’t you know that’s the way everything is when you get to be old? Everybody lets you do anything you want to. If they don’t like it, they just don’t show up anymore.”
“Sounds great,” Paul says, and actually smiles, as if such a world where people left you alone was an exhibit he’d like to see.
“Maybe it is,” I say, “maybe it isn’t.”
“What’s the most misunderstood automotive accessory?” He’s ready to derail serious talk, alert to the dangers inherent in my earnest voice.
“I don’t know. An air filter,” I say, as the dunk-o-rama film gets over in the auditorium. I have seen no big cutout of Milt the Stilt, as was promised.
“That’s pretty close.” Paul nods very seriously. “It’s a sn
ow tire. You don’t appreciate it until you need it, but then it’s usually too late.”
“Why does that make it misunderstood? Why not just underappreciated?”
“They’re the same,” he says, and starts walking away.
“I see. Maybe you’re right.” And we both walk off then toward the stairs.
On Level 1, there’s a busy gift boutique, a small room dedicated to sports media (zero fascination for me), an authentic locker room exhibit, a vending machine oasis, plus some gimmicky, hands-on exhibits Paul takes mild interest in. I decide to make my call to Sally before we hit the road. Though I have yet to see a legitimate snack bar, so that Paul wanders off in his new heavy-gaited, pigeon-toed, arm-swinging way I hate, to the vending-machine canteen with money I’ve supplied (since his is evidently for some other uses—a possible kidnap emergency) and my order to bring back “something good.”
The phone area is a nice, secluded, low-lit little alcove beside the bathrooms, with thick, noise-muffling wall-to-wall covering everything, and the latest black phone technology—credit card slits, green computer screens and buttons to amplify sound in case you can’t believe what you’re hearing. It is an ideal place for a crank or ransom call.
Sally, when I punch in her 609 number, answers thrillingly on the first jingle.
“So where in the world are you?” she says, her voice tingly and happy but also a voice that’s taking a reading. “I left you a long and poignant message last night. I may have been drunk.”
“And I tried to call you right back all this morning, to see if you’d fly up here in a chartered Cessna and come to Cooperstown with us. Paul thinks it’d be great. We’d have some fun.”