The Basketball Expatriate

by C. Bradford Eastland

  I'd been asleep for all of ten minutes.

  I turned back south, headed for Armadale. Christ almighty, I thought. This is starting to get kind've weird....at the very least, it was beginning to look pretty obvious that I wasn't going to get much sleep as long as I was on this stupid island. Between Sconser and Dunan I made a point to look for the farmhouse, but it was a little darker by now and I was nodding off a little while I was driving and I think it must've blended into the dark hillside because I missed it completely. I did see a few of his sheep, though. The only way I knew to stop in time was the reflection of my headlights in their eyes. I had to slow down, because I was always seeing their blue and orange eyes in the faint light and it was making me nervous. They were like marbles, purees. Orange and blue. I convinced myself that the Suffolk sheep had blue purees and the Blackfacers were the orange. Just a little game designed to keep me awake and alert. Without the color in those beady little eyes, they could easily have been mistaken for large white stones lying there, lying so trustingly that way in the road.

  They made me so damn mad, though. The sheep I mean. They wouldn't get out of the way! Stupid lazy things. You'd come up on them and slow down and you could tell they expected you to slow down and roll carefully around them, and you do, you do goddammit, dammit to hell. This one time I decided I would honk my horn, just to see if I could get one of them to jump a little, y'know? But he didn't. Just stared back at me with those beady little orange eyes. Wasn't scared at all. Scared me, though. That car horn was about the only real noise I'd suffered in over an hour! It was that kind've night. At Broadford I took the B-851 south-by-southwest.

  Pulled into Armadale about four a.m. I got out and checked the schedule of ferries. The first one was at nine. Five hours to kill. When I got back in the car it started to rain. And did it rain. Buckets. Eventually it thinned out, but it never did actually stop. I was finally getting tired enough to sleep but my mind was racing. I started thinking about Jane again, what she would say when I got back, what to do about her, that sort of thing, but wouldn't you know that after a while Sam's perfect face popped into my head again. What a pain in the ass. I swear, you'd be friggin' surprised as hell the things I thought about as I sat there like an idiot in the rain. Everything was circles in my mind, like chasing an imaginary tail....I tried to replay some of my best college games in my head, including the time I scored 47 points the night we lost to Washington State my junior year, but I just couldn't concentrate.

  So I tried to get a little work done. I even started a couple letters, which I then decided not to finish. I think I finally fell off to sleep maybe as early as around, oh, seven a.m., because the tuba-horn jolt of the ferry woke me up out of a fairly deep slumber. So I figure I must've gotten at least a couple hours, right? Hell, I don't know. The last thing I remember before nodding off was these gulls. They were circling out over the Sound of Sleat, where the ferry crosses over from Mallaig. I hated them. They were some noisy birds, holmes. And I remember thinking how much, at that moment, I wished I could just up and fly away like one of those stupid gulls, so I could at least get off that stupid rock forever. And all the while it rained. Tired as I was I remember listening, listening to the soft rain, softly finger-tapping the roof of my car, the gulls cawing, cawing and shrieking, shrieking louder and louder, as if trying to talk, as if actually expecting somebody to answer.

  * * *

  I took my time getting back down to Sussex. I was just so happy to be able to go up to any B&B and have the lady of the house say there were rooms available, that I made it a point to catch on my sleep and spread my return out over several days. I didn't run into any nice old B&B ladies to compare with Frieda, but there probably aren't any, so at least I wasn't disappointed. When I got down to the southwest I spent a couple days in the county of Wiltshire, in this town called Salisbury, which even though it's as chocked full of Americans as trouts in a pond it's still a pretty cool town. In fact, I actually talked to one've these Americans for about three hours. It was some fairly tall older guy, definitely deep into his thirties, with circular John Lennon type glasses and a moustache, who was just bumming around the country like me. I met him in this little pub on Castle Street, north edge of town. And it was a welcome change-of-pace, I'm telling you! He was really the only American I've actually sat down and talked to in months. So we must've had about a dozen different kinds of beers together, swear to God. Just two comparatively giant human beings sitting on a couple of barstools in a pub nestled in a land of relative midgets, both of us a million light years from home. Just to be nice I let him pay. But don't misunderstand me, this guy was no pillar of society. Far from it. He said he was over here "getting some work done", but frankly to me he just looked every inch the typical blue-jeans-flat-broke drifter; except he kept pulling money out of his wallet, of course. I don't have to tell you he was travelling alone. Pretty smart guy, though. I could tell for sure that he was a college man, because he used ridiculous words like "visceral" and "problematic", words that college crams into a guy's head to be employed later in life for no good reason other than to piss ordinary people off who don't know what they mean. But I was so tickled by his lack of an English accent that I let him do most of the talking. He did seem to know his shit. For instance, he acted like he probably knew everything there was to know about American History and American Literature, I guess he must've been a college professor on Sabbatical or something, and he wound up giving me some neat tips on various books and even a couple of specific short-stories that he recommended---no, insisted---I should read////In fact it just hit me! He's the guy who told me about the story about there being exactly 50 women in the world for every man! Man, I can't believe I almost forgot to tell you about that! He prattled on and on about that story, like he'd practically memorized the damn thing, even quoting a couple passages verbatim, man he was obsessed. Anyway, when I told him about some of the things that happened to me up in Scotland, and that I actually had a contract to write about it, the eyes behind those round glasses got big as saucers. No kidding. He was suddenly a totally captive audience, and he agreed that there was some good stuff there. He loved the stuff about the weird sheep. He said he "understood it", or some stupidly mystical thing along those lines. But he wasn't exactly bowled over by my being a fledgling writer. Said he "felt sorry" for me. I remember it struck me as sort of a bizarre thing for him to say, seeing as how he seemed to be so well-educated and such a big fan of, well, literature and everything. I don't know why, but getting literary advice from this down-and-out, dime-store intellectual actually made me feel pretty good. Even though he wasn't very encouraging. Even though I generally hate all college professors. (Like when he started trying to give me advice on women, told me to "quit taking them seriously, before it's too late for you", or something like that, and that's when he started to remind me of Sam's friggin' college professor, which forced me to change the subject.)

  So we wound up just bullshitting mainly, if you'll excuse the expression, just talking about sports, politics, Anglo-American historical parallells, that sort've stuff. God, was it great to be able to talk to an American about American sports! Being from L.A. himself, this guy could speak fluently in Raiderese or Dodgerese or Lakerese, heroes past and present, about anything that had to do with local athletics. Made me sort've homesick. I tried to tell him I used to play for the Clippers, but he wasn't impressed.

  He left the bar before I did. But it wasn't because I stayed late. Rather, he said he was staying at this crummy B&B on the outskirts of Salisbury, and that the landlady was a real pain in the butt and that she would actually lock him out of his own room if he got back too late. What a town. Made me appreciate Frieda even more. So we shook hands (his hands were as delicate as a girl's, so I took it easy on him) and he wished me well. Told me that talking to me got him thinking, and he thanked me for it! Told me again how sorry he felt for me, and that he thought all writers were fools. Strange. He didn't seem very happy for a rich egghead on va
cation.

  Typical of me, I forgot to get the guy's name. Sorry. I figure there's really no point in me trying to make one up.

  So what's the point of all this? Hell if I know. Hell, maybe the point is just that it was great to be back in The South again, back to civilization. Back from the "auld coontry", and I mean for good. Once is enough. No, I'm afraid that outside of the Spey Valley I can not in good conscience recommend Scotland. Too damn creepy. And thinking back, I can't figure out why everybody had such nice things to say about the Isle of Skye. It was depressing as hell. In fact, I was never in so big a hurry to leave a place in my whole friggin' life. I remember what a relief it was to see the little blue rectangles pop up on the grainy-gray rectangle, just to know that my goddam phone was working again.

  { Entry #43: [dated 12-25-87]

  Something just occurred to me, dude. That neat little old white- haired man, the one I met while I was wandering around on the Isle of Skye? in Scotland? Anyway, I just realized he was the only human being I actually saw the entire time I was trapped there. The whole time. Can you beat that? For all I could tell you, the whole god damned island is deserted!

  hell. some day I really should go back

  there

  }

  Six

  When I split from Salisbury and finally got back down to Sussex, I guess I didn't call Jane for about two weeks. Yeah. I didn't want to hurt her feelings. For some dumb reason I still wasn't in the slightest hurry to be with her, I was all screwed up inside, and I knew if she knew I was in the area and didn't want to see her, well, I knew that it would only've bummed her out and there might've been a big ugly scene and I just wasn't in the right mind-set to deal with shit like that. If you'll excuse my language.

  What I did do, though, was head straight for Frieda's B&B. Back home! Seriously, after what happened on the Isle of Skye, I suppose I felt more than a little safe there. Luckily Frieda had a room available, and, amazingly enough, it was my regular old room, and, even more amazingly, I was again her only guest in the house. She did say she was expecting this nice London family at any time---a member of the House of Lords and his wife and kids, she said---but lucky for me they hadn't arrived in the area yet. Anyway, I barely had the car stopped before Frieda's running up to me and giving me this big old hug. I remember I could barely get my friggin' arms around her! But you wouldn't believe how good a meaningless hug made a tired, worn-out guy feel....And of course she immediately sat me down, practically forced me to gulp down a couple quarts of tea and scarf a bunch of surprisingly tasty prawn-and-cucumber sandwiches. I let her. There was no point in trying to fight Frieda when she had feeding you on her mind. And I figured the sooner I threw down the chow the sooner I could gracefully excuse myself and finally get on up to my room. Which I did. And just about the first thing I did then, after hanging up some clothes and laying out my toiletries and stuff on the counter, was take a perfectly righteous piss in my old private sink. One of the best goddam pisses of my life, if you follow my drift.

  I took off my shirt flopped down and went right to sleep. Didn't even bother to get under the duvet. I was beat.

  I don't know how long I'd been asleep but it couldn't've been very long, because I'm a notoriously light napper and because it was still light outside, and anyway I knew going in I was kind've restless from the trip and finally being back home, that is to say being back in Sussex, and, well, everything. I mean I was muscle tired and nerves tired but not actually sleep tired, y'know? Well anyway. As it happens I'd been sleeping on my side, facing the door, and as it also happens when I woke up and my eyelids opened my eyes were already pointed, purely coincidentally, at the six inches of open daylight between the door and the doorjam.

  I was groggy, naturally, so I had no immediate reaction to the door being open, but within a few seconds my mind finally got the message; which was that I never sleep with the door open. I never have, ever since I was a kid on the southside. I think I even remembered closing it when I entered the room, I mean I was always conscious of it in B&B's, because I was always careful to make sure that nobody ever caught me pissing in a damn sink! The human head is an amazing thing, the things it thinks of. And so lying there, still motionless, as my scattered thinking slowly hardened my brain into alertness, I allowed my eyes to focus.

  And there in the dark hall, the two eyes bright like a fat nosy rodent's, was Frieda Mannheim's unmistakably round face.

  I probably over-reacted. Remember, Frieda was my friend. But it's just that I'd just endured sort've a bad experience up there in Scotland, what with that old woman in that pub trying to lift my dough and that weird old beady-eyed dwarf and all those stinking sheep of his looking at me all the time. Not to mention being virtually denied sleep when I was there. I guess I was still a little jumpy. And she was just staring at me, with glassy eyes and her mouth sort've open. Just like a sheep. I had a roll of bills on the sink counter, which was closer to her than to me, and that only made it creepier. What I did was sort've shout, scream really, "Hey! What the hell ya think yer doin'?" Poor gal. Scared the snot out of her. She kind've tumbled into the room and said something like "Aahheee!", shaking like a naked eskimo, man I thought she was going to fall down.

  (The thing is I usually sleep naked, except this time I'd luckily left my jeans on because I was so tired. But I hadn't remembered it right away, so here I am scrambling to get under my duvet when it turns out I was only naked from the waist up. I suppose I can be an awfully modest fellow at times.)

  "Frieda....what in the name of....what were you doing out there for godsake? You scared me."

  "Ah-ahm-uh....oh! So sorry! Sorry 'bout that, ducks, really I am. I was just gon' see 'fyou....i'fi could make you 'pot o' tea....fancy some tea?"

  Sure. Americans'll believe anything, right? Shit, I hadn't even completely pissed out the last pot! The old gal was spying on me, for some dumb reason, she didn't have to lie. Why did she have to lie? Why do they always have to lie? But at the time I was groggy and I decided it was no big deal. Must get kind've boring living alone all the time. No real harm done. I don't know.

  "Tea? Yeah, sure. Can't force down too much tea. I'll pop down in five or ten minutes and you'n I'll have a couple quarts." No harm done.

  She smiled and her cheeks puffed up, obviously grateful for me not blasting her to kingdom come for snooping around my room. Had me a little worried, though. I didn't take any sink-pisses for a couple days, just in case.

  "Ver' good, luv---see you in five!" she said, and closed the door behind her.

  * * *

  Day after day I just hung out in my room. I wish I had a more exciting account of those two weeks with which to entertain you but I don't. Sorry. It was pretty obvious (even to me) that all I was doing was putting off the inevitable, calling Jane. But at the time I wasn't doing very well, aches and pains and stuff, perhaps even a slight case of depression (that's what all this is about, right? athletes and their depressions?), and so I decided that I wouldn't've been much fun to be around anyway. Like I said, it was a couple weeks before I actually called her.

  I had a pretty solid routine going. Up at nine, a spectacular fit-for-a-king breakfast with Frieda (She'd finally loosened up to where she would actually sit down and eat with me; almost like we were this weird married couple or something!), then back to my room for six or seven hours of reading and thinking and writing and sleeping, and then off at five-thirty for THE BADGER & THE HONEYJAR where I would drink myself wacky till eleven p.m. Then back to the B&B for a little reading and a

  { MISC. ENTRY [dated "summer of '87"---*ed. note]

  Awhile back I sent in a wonderful little essay of about 35 pages critique-ing some've my favorite fiction writers. Famous guys like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Salinger, Steinbeck, Saul Bellow and Kurt Vonnegut, people like that. I even threw in a few of the dudes I studied in school, like Vol Taire, Jim Cooper, Tony Chekhov, and Ed Poe. I knew it would be real important for you to know what I think about people l
ike that, not to mention somewhat entertaining, so I made sure to send it off in one of those insured "Federal Express" envelopes to make sure it didn't get lost on the way to New York. Remember? I'm sure you've seen it by now. It's probably the best thing I've sent in, sort of my personal manifesto on the subject of good writing (which reminds me, I also threw in Mr. Marx even though he wasn't into fiction). Anyway, one writer who at the time I left out is this guy you probably haven't heard of called Exley. Fred Exley. One of the guys on the team recommended him to me a long time ago, I guess because he writes about sports. I didn't include him in that original critique because I didn't know anything about him, but I wanted to mention him now because I just got done reading this book of his a couple times and I've decided that Fred is as good an example there is of how a writer can jazz me and royally tick me off at the same time.

  Okay. It seems Fred wrote this so-called "fiction" book I'm talking about a few years back, about himself, in the first-person (which, as you know, I absolutely hate), about how much he loved the New York Giants football team in general and their star halfback, Frank Gifford, in particular. Actually, he was rather psychotic about his love for Gifford, but that's what made it a good book. I don't think I've ever read anything where I could really tell how much of the author's personal private sorrow went into it. I mean this guy was shattered. He wanted (like all you non-athletes want) to be a big star, to be a great runner and pass catcher like The Giffer, but naturally he couldn't and so he was reduced to being a pathetic drunken compulsive spectator his whole lousy life. It ripped me up to listen to him. And he drones on and on forever, pulls no punches. Righteous storyteller. Such nerve-fraying emotion. But maybe---and here's the thing---maybe he lets us have too much of his emotion. The way he delves dagger-deep into how Gifford's gridiron greatness got to him and affected him and defined him made me just want to grab him (Exley, I mean) and shake him bald-headed and just say "get a grip, asshole!". I mean a little hero-worship is fine, but to have it dominate your life can be downright unhealthy. Remember, Fred lets you know right off the bat that this thing is about him. Of course being a pretty highly-skilled athlete myself I think sports are great, and I can understand Fred's temptation to pick an athlete for a co-protagonist. So I'm prepared to cut him a little slack on that particular issue.