The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

by David Shields

  On an Army transport ship taking my father and 5,000 other soldiers from Seattle to Okinawa in May 1945, my father played in a poker game that continued for three days and nights; players left only to use the bathroom or get food or sleep. They’d all read about the bloody Marine invasion on Okinawa a month before, so there was, according to my father, a fatalistic feeling about the game of “Tomorrow we die” and “Hell, it’s only money.”

  On the third day, my father was ahead $1,000. They were playing Seven-Card Stud. The first two cards he drew were kings. He immediately bet the $2 limit, trying to drive out as many of the other players as he could—a poker strategy his father had taught him. My dad drew a third king on the fourth card, giving him what was now an extremely hard-to-beat hand.

  By the fifth card there were only two people left—my dad and a young private from Georgia, “Rebel.”

  When my father bet $2, Rebel said, “Ah raise you, Sarge. It’s two dollars and two dollars better.”

  My father, figuring that Rebel had maybe a pair or a possible straight, threw in $2 to see him. Another poker lesson learned by my father from his father: never let anybody bluff you, especially when you and the other player are the last two in the game. “You’ve got to keep them honest,” he told him, “even if you have to put in your last dime to ‘see’ them. Remember that.”

  On the sixth card, my father began with a bet and Rebel again raised him $2. My dad now had four kings and, looking at the cards Rebel was showing, he couldn’t imagine what he might have that would beat four kings. My father “saw” Rebel’s raise.

  When the seventh card was dealt “down and dirty,” my father said, “It’s up to the raiser. Up to you, Rebel.”

  “It’ll cost you four dollars to see me, Sarge,” he said, which got a laugh from some of his buddies.

  My father saw Rebel again and asked him what he had.

  “I got me a little old straight,” he said and started to rake in the $75 pot.

  “Not good enough, Rebel,” my father said, showing his four kings.

  Rebel slammed his cards down on the table and said, “You play like a Gahdamned Jew!”—stretching the word “Jew” out, according to my father, as if it had several syllables, making it sound like “Jooo-ooo.”

  The chow whistle sounded, the game broke up, and my father asked Rebel, “Why did you use that expression, ‘play like a Goddamned Jew’?”

  Rebel said that his father told him that all Jews were sharp poker players. My dad said that some of his friends back in Brooklyn were poor players, almost as bad as Rebel and his friends. (Whenever my grandfather got good cards, his entire manner would change. He’d pull his chair up closer to the table and say in Yiddish, “Ubber Yetz,” which, loosely translated, means “But, now…”: the battle was joined and my grandfather was ready for action. The other players would laugh and say, “Well, it looks like Sam has one of his ‘Ubber Yetz’ hands. Who’s going to see him?” “Enough with the jokes,” he’d say. “Are you here to play poker? I bet a quarter for openers. Is anybody in?” One or two would stay in and my grandfather would usually win the pots, which were never very big.) Then my father told Rebel he was Jewish. Rebel didn’t believe him; my father had blue eyes, blond hair, and a deep tan. My dad said that he’d provide proof if he’d just step into the latrine, where he’d show him that he was circumcised. Rebel said he believed him.

  The comedian Danny Kaye and my father were classmates at P.S. 149. In the mid-1950s, shortly before I was born, Kaye gave a one-man performance at the Hollywood Bowl, which my father and mother and half a dozen of their friends attended. At intermission, Kaye walked to the front of the stage and asked how many in the audience were from Brooklyn. Quite a few hands went up. He asked how many had gone to P.S. 149. About 10 people raised their hands. Then he asked if anyone remembered the P.S. 149 fight song. My dad’s was the only hand still up. Kaye said, “Great, let’s do it,” and gave the band the beat. My mother tugged at my father’s coat, saying, “Milt, you’re embarrassing me. Please sit down.” My parents’ friends urged my mother to relax. Danny Kaye and my father sang their alma mater’s fight song:

  149 is the school for me

  Drives away all adversity

  Steady and true

  We’ll be to you

  Loyal to 149

  RAH RAH

  Raise on high

  The red and white

  Cheer it

  With all your might

  Loyal all to 149.

  The crowd went crazy.

  My new dream goes like this: In the middle of the desert, my father takes off his boots and shakes out pebbles, dirt, dead leaves. Lizards crawl around, looking for shade under rocks and short shrubs. When he untwists the top of the canteen, he finds nothing inside.

  You drank all the water, he says.

  Yes, I say, I was thirsty.

  That’s all we had left, he says. We won’t be able to survive.

  A quarter mile away stands a giant cactus plant.

  I’ll race you for the water in the cactus, I say.

  He unstraps the canteen from his belt, takes the backpack off his shoulders, and gives both the canteen and the backpack to me. After stretching his legs by touching his toes and doing deep knee bends, he builds up sand to serve as a starting block and crouches down in a sprinter’s position. With his feet buried in the sand, his shoulders hunched over and shaking, and his head pointed straight ahead as if he’s a bird dog, he rocks until he’s set. He’s serious.

  Who’s going to start us? I ask.

  Runners, he says, spitting into the dirt, take your marks.

  Are you sure—

  Get set.

  I’d hate for you—

  Go, he says. He gets off to such a good start that I think maybe he’s jumped the gun. I chase after him, calling out that in order to be absolutely fair to both parties involved we should at least think about starting over again, but he ignores me, clenches his fists, and lengthens his stride, kicking up pebbles. Bounding over the desert, avoiding rocks and brush, we approach the cactus plant, which is huge: four stems curve up from the base and one major stem sticks straight up into the air thirty feet like a thick green finger.

  I can hear him gasping for breath when I edge up on him, but I have nothing in reserve: my head’s bobbing up and down; my neck muscles are straining. He brings his knees up higher, all the way to his chest. He sprints away from me, shouting, racing for the cactus, really hitting his stride, his arms and legs working together smoothly and powerfully.

  My knees buckle and I tumble into the dirt headfirst, arms stretched out flat to break my fall. I scrape my hands on rocks. My dad takes the knife out of his pocket, cuts a low stem of the cactus, cups water in his hands, drinks. He wins. He wins again. He always wins—except in the sense that in the end he’ll lose, as we all do.

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  The Immortality Institute: Excerpt from “Nanomedicine” by Robert A. Freitas Jr., J.D., from The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans, edited by members of The Immortality Institute (Buenos Aires: LibrosEnRed, 2004). Reprinted by permission of The Immortality Institute.

  London Review of Books: Excerpt from “Holy Disorders” by Hilary Mantel (London Review of Books, March 4, 2004, vol. 26, no. 5, www.lrb.co.uk). Reprinted by permission of London Review of Books.

  New Directions Publishing Corp. and David Higham Associates: Excerpt from “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and David Higham Associates.

  The Wylie Agency: Excerpt from “The School” from Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme, copyright © 1976 by Donald Barthelme. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

&
nbsp; David Shields is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (winner of the PEN/Revson Award), and Dead Languages: A Novel (winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award). A senior editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in dozens of periodicals, including The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Believer. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor of English at the University of Washington.

  ALSO BY DAVID SHIELDS

  Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine (2004)

  Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography (2002)

  “Baseball Is Just Baseball”: The Understated Ichiro (2001)

  Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season (1999)

  Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (1996)

  Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories (1992)

  Dead Languages: A Novel (1989)

  Heroes: A Novel (1984)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2008 by David Shields

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  My deep gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Artist Trust, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities for fellowships that enabled me to complete this book.

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Shields, David, 1956–

  The thing about life is that one day you’ll be dead / by David Shields.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Shields, David, 1956–2. Shields, David, 1956—Family. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Authors, American—20th century—Family relationships. 5. Fathers and sons—United States. I. Title.

  PS3569. H4834Z46 2008

  813'.54—dc22

  [B] 2007040145

  eISBN: 978-0-307-26849-5

  v3.0