The Basketball Expatriate

by C. Bradford Eastland

  (I'm finishing this up, by the way, in a grungy little hotel room that probably looks more like a prison cell than anything else. If I occasionally say something worthwhile it's because I happen to've actually been working very, very hard. See you later.)

  ~~~ The expatriate American athlete captained his rented red sportscar with a twisting, deliberate slowness up the A-283. Air rushed wind-like through the cracked window, but not hard enough to ruffle the tight curls of his short, blue-black hair. It was after nine at night, finally dark enough for headlights. The shadows of dusk played havoc with his vision, already somewhat compromised by six slowly swallowed pints of bitter ale.

  To say the American was in a melancholy mood would be misleading in the word's mild tone. He was leaving Sussex forever. He was---in the very process of driving away--- breaking it off with his girlfriend, a wonderful girl named Jane, whose last name he'd never bothered to ask and if she'd ever mentioned it he'd forgotten. In step with his ridiculous abandonment of her, he was also fleeing the only place in Britain he felt truly comfortable, a bed-and-breakfast high up on a hill, leaving behind yet another woman (an older one) who had been unusually kind to him. Worse yet, he found himself heading inexorably in the direction of London, a city he had always linked symbolically with depression. He did not know why he was leaving this girl Jane, abandoning this girl Jane. Hurting her. All he knew was that he had to. Melancholy....there are too many big words, thought the American, that just don't say as much as their too-many letters say they should....

  He gazed rigidly forward as he drove. He wasn't actually, that is technically, focusing on anything; not clearly or consciously anyway. His eyes were merely vague sensors for his right hand, managing the wheel, for his left hand, periodically jerking the stick, for his feet that instinctively slowed and accelerated the vehicle in and out of turns. Why was he here....why this stupid far-away country....oh, yeah. He was here to work on a story....that's right....some annoying creature in New York convinced him that people would care, would truly care what ultimately happens to their "beloved" professional athletes, post-rejection.... sure. And he was also here because they said he couldn't cut it, because too many people told him they didn't want him anymore....or not enough people said they did want him, what's the difference. He would get even with his pen. Sure. As he wound his way up the blackening A-283, ten miles north of Petworth now, none of it seemed reason enough. But what did he know. He tried to think as he drove, tried to reason, but only stray, fragmented thoughts could manage to fight their way through the six pints of beer, which still surrounded the trance-like moat of his mind.........................................

  His aching heart cramped in his throat, as suddenly there was frantic movement in his windshield. As these things always do, the one-second scene played out before him in an agonizing slow motion. The thrashing moving parts of the vague, spidery form slowly convinced his mind they were limbs, long fragile limbs, gray-brown limbs; animal limbs! One reflexive stride into the headlights the limbs flapped, then no more than two frantic strides the other way. It was an old home movie, and his headlights were the beams of the projector. The choppy movements of the fleeing form, reaching into black, were the screen itself. His mind was now conscious of the cottontailed hind end that fled before him. Too close....His right foot almost didn't bother to slam the brake. That second retreating stride was surely the animal's last, ending in glass-crunching, pelvis-shattering explosion. The American immediately pulled over to the road's dark shoulder. There was a sickening, weightless---yet at the same time solid and exhilarating and almost satisfying---feeling in his chest.

  "God damn it," he said.

  He waited for about fifteen seconds before he got out of the car. He was paralyzed. He didn't pretend to know why. Maybe, he thought, if I just sit here the whole thing will go away, like it never happened. But he finally got out, walking slowly into the cold night. He was conscious of the cold puffs of breath in his eyes. It bothered him that everyone is always conscious of when he can see his cold breath. What difference does it make if you can see your goddam cold breath! As he sprinted, now, back to the approximate scene of impact, all he could think about was a winter day in 1964, in Chicago, when his father, after ditching his wife at a party full of relatives, after grabbing his son, and after stopping at a dimly-lit bar on Wacker Drive containing an equal mix of white people and black people (for a couple of bad-smelling drinks with the 4-year-old boy attentively by his side) took him, the boy, to see a Walt Disney movie called Bambi....But when he got to where the broken glass glittered the moon-splashed asphalt there was no animal there. He looked around. Nothing....but he didn't venture into the dark woods lining the road. It was cold. Nothing....The broken glass meant he didn't dream it, but there was no evidence of an animal, nothing. Maybe I didn't hit him that hard, he thought. Maybe it just sounded bad, felt bad....felt good! Either way, there was no dead carcass to clean up. Or to look at. He was never more relieved and glad of anything in his life.

  He inspected his wounded sportscar. The right headlight was indeed shattered, blind. A little grill damage. But nothing he felt compelled to do anything about now. Nothing the rental car company couldn't clean up after he was gone. There isn't much in this shit-upon world a few dollars, a few pounds, doesn't clean up....

  The shaken auto started up right away. The American more than likely smiled from his relief, the way Americans do.

  He continued again up the A-283, very swiftly at first, gradually slowing down to about 35 mph. The weightless, good-bad feeling in his chest gradually hardened into just bad, an almost-painful sort of pressure. The roadsign to his left said:

  CHIDDINGFOLD- - -2

  Two miles to the next village. He'd driven this route many times before during the previous couple months. He knew there was a pub up ahead. The thought produced a craving. He had to go there. He didn't know exactly why, but knew that it had something to do with an intuitive, instinctive feeling a man sometimes gets, when he knows he needs more alcohol in his system.

  He parked his sportscar directly in front of the quaint, open-shuttered pub. It looked like a Swiss ski lodge. The words WINTERTON ARMS were lettered across the top. He'd visited many other pubs up and down this road, places that he had staked out specifically for his nightly drinking, but for no good reason he had never been inside this one before. He went inside.

  The great single room was crowded. Perhaps the whole tiny village was in attendance. He did not look directly at any of them.

  He could not find a seat at the bar, but managed to secure reasonable standing room between two old men on barstools who were not facing each other and thus had not been talking. He wanted the alcohol to get into his system quickly. Bitter was best for that assignment. He knew it wouldn't taste so bad if he cut it a little.

  "Bitter shandy, light on the lemonade," he said to the bartender.

  "Pint bitter shandy," the man replied.

  The bartender was good at his job. He made the drink quickly, even though two spigots were required. "Here you are, mate," the Englishman said, placing the caramel-filled glass on a hand towel. The American swallowed half of it in one quick suck. "Don't go anywhere," he said. He killed it with the second swallow, and slammed the empty vessel down hard on a part of the bar the towel did not cover.

  "Again," he said.

  "Well! Another pint bitter shandy, then, for the big American."

  When the second glass was in front of him the American finally looked the bartender over. He was a tall, elegant man; slim, well-dressed, well-groomed, about forty. It was obvious he was the owner. There were two other bartenders servicing the customers at the square bar's flanks, but, although roughly the same age, they carried themselves like the servants they were. The owner had graying black hair, slightly slicked back. Sort of like that annoying gent in the publishing business the American knew back in The United States.

  "These first two are on my ticket, mate! Just carded a luv'ly little
seventy-five up at West Surrey this afternoon. Celebrating a little. Feeling a bit generous, even to Yanks!" The American sipped his shandy while he looked at his host. He glanced above the bar at an old wooden golf club, horizontally displayed. He couldn't quite make out the brass engraving below it. He didn't like the Englishman. He didn't like his cashmere sweater or his black-and-white hair or his stupid wooden golf club. He also didn't like the fact that the Englishman had an English accent, but still pronounced all portions of his words. He didn't leave off any h's or t's or g's or anything. He wasn't a real Englishman. He was hiding something....

  "No more goddam free beer," the American said angrily, pulling out a light blue five-pound note and slamming it into the Englishman's well-manicured hand. "Keep it," he said.

  "Well! That's mighty sporting of you, mate! But I really can't take it, can I. Not today, and not from a guest in our country, no. I shot a bloody seventy-five, I tell you---it's not every day a bloke can say that. Ho, Pat!" he then yelled, to a tall, rust-haired young man standing and drinking alone at the other end of the long bar. "Patrick, do you recall the grand feeling you achieved when you shot your first seventy-five, lad?"

  "I don't remember," the younger man said coldly. His accent rang different from the others.

  "I don't care if you shot a thirty-five," the American said. "I wanna pay for my own drinks for once."

  "Well perhaps you can buy the next one---"

  "I'm a fucking multimillionaire," the American said.

  The expression on the Englishman's face was actually unfriendly for a second, but rebounded quickly in an elegant smile. He accepted the fiver, and fished two one-pound coins and a few other coins out of the cash register.

  "As you like, mate. But tips I will not accept."

  "Fine."

  The beers cost one pound eleven pence each. The American's change, accordingly, was two pounds seventy-eight. He didn't pick it up.

  "Arthur, you inhospitable lout! Don't you know this American bloke doesn't have a chair? Get off your bum, for God's sake!"

  "Siddown," the American said.

  "Nonsense, guv'! Nonsense! Michael's right, 'e is. Take this poxy stool me-bum's bin warmin'!"

  The American sat down. He would've argued with the fat old man who relinquished his seat, but a knee he had injured slightly not too long ago was telling him to sit down, and so he sat down.

  "Thanks, man."

  "Nuthin' of it."

  Soon the American had consumed four pints of lemonade-cut ale. He paid for them all. It was a festive crowd, and soon it seemed everyone close to the bar had introduced himself or herself to him. Each had asked him questions of his travels, which he answered with less and less patience.

  "Aaayy, lads!" someone squealed, to the far corners of the establishment. "We 'avva bloody American in our midst!" Several fresh locals, of all ages, sizes, and sexes, drew closer.

  "And the bloody sport won't even let me sell him a free pint!" Michael the pub owner said, laughing at his own joke.

  "Maybe 'e'll sell us soomthin'!" an ugly, skinny man said. "I 'ear Americans are roight big on sellin'!---"

  "An' give the bloody profits t'those less fortunate!" a faceless voice added.

  "Sell me a bloody pistol, Yank!" came a third voice, "Me-ruddy neighbor's ruddy dog's bin pissin' on me-front yard!"

  "Hee-hee!"

  "I go' piles o'loot, laddie---'ow 'bout a bloody bazooka t'fix me-trouble? She gets a might randy when she's alone at 'ome an' I'm 'ere drinkin'!"

  The American was truly drunk. He had stopped answering questions. The regular crowd continued to hammer him with exclamations about things he didn't understand, and he was far too fuzzy-headed to fight through the slang. His skin became hot from all the attention. There were too many bodies, and some of them smelled bad. If they would just all go away, he thought, maybe I'll be alright....but they continued to solicit his company, offer to buy him beer, offer to buy the clothes off his back, continued to laugh and pay loud compliments to his country. His head spun. He was drunk and in a bad mood and didn't know exactly where he was headed, and it was a bad combination.

  Then came, finally, the moment when he sprang from his chair, pushed people away from him, and shouted at the top of his lungs (the local newspaper reported two days later), "WILL YOU PEOPLE STOP BEING SO GODDAM NICE TO ME!"

  And when everybody laughed he could only hurl his glass with all his strength into the mirror and liquor bottles behind the bar. He'd always wanted to throw a glass into a mirror behind a bar. Like on television. He grabbed a neighbor's glass and threw that too.

  The American spent his last two nights in Sussex resting in the local jailhouse. It wasn't much of a jail. Half the time the door was left unlocked, because when they subdued him in the pub they had to hit him on the head a little bit and then they took his wallet because they knew Americans never go anywhere without their wallets. It's too much trouble getting a new driver's license and having all the credit cards replaced. They knew he wouldn't leave without his wallet. (Besides, they'd made him promise not to go anywhere until everything was sorted out.) As if nothing happened, everyone continued to be nice to him. The good people of Chiddingfold came by at odd intervals to visit him to make sure he was alright. One lady brought him a mince pie for lunch. It was strange and wonderful. They even called a boy at a local garage to have the American's rented sportscar repaired, gassed up, and towed over. All for free. And during the day the acting deputy sheriff, whether or not that was his actual title, helped him pass the time by teaching him a popular English type of poker called "three-card brag", where the main rule is you have to bluff on every hand. It was a stupid game. The only reason the American kept on playing was that the guy seemed kind've lonely.

  The bar owner did not press charges. The American paid for the damages in traveller's cheques. American Express. ~~~

  Seven

  I have a confession to make.

  I hereby declare (in other words, I humbly admit) that I have spent the last three months in a grungy West End hotel off Gloucester Road run by a bunch of crazy grinning Arabs.

  Sorry about going back on my word. I know I told you that I wasn't planning on spending one damn day in London, let alone three shitty months, but it's just sort've worked out that way. Don't ask me why. Fact is, just about every single one of my spellbinding sports "dispatches" has been dribbled up and scribbled off from within the grungy confines of this stupid room. I guess I might've been too embarrassed to mention it earlier. Sorry again.

  But I really think you all should cut me some slack, okay? After those last few days in Sussex I just didn't feel like driving around anymore, and I'm just so sick of my stupid rental car and its worthless carphone, and I just have no fucking desire to wander all over the goddam U.K. anymore and pretending to actually enjoy mingling with the most nauseatingly JOLLY members of all the members of my own worthless species just because they happen to be the ones who speak English, you follow what I'm saying?---it's called being sick to death of everything and everybody. And man, it's so bloody convenient parking the car for ten pounds a day in one of those big underground parking lots some of the larger London hotels have. I've got the MG stabled at this big hotel right across the street. What a relief, not to have to drive around all the fuckin' time! It's funny, but the only fucking time I've taken the fucking car out for a spin during these three whole shitty months the flippin' phone actually rang. Really. And get this, it was a fucking wrong number! I said "hello" and all the guy said was "y'roight-bloody mis'ribble tourist Yank bastard", and hung up. Real pleasant guy. The truth is, most Englishmen really are pretty damned nice, unfortunately, but I guess some've them actually do get pissed off when they hear an American's voice. thank god

  But at least it's one more good goddam reason to stay holed up in here.

  What else....oh, I wanted to be where I could get ahold of lots of different newspapers. And I wanted a hotel where I wouldn't feel obligated every god damned mo
rning to drag myself down to breakfast. And I wanted to be near the airport. You know, for a quick getaway. Anyway, that's how I wound up inside The Orbital.

  But I didn't intend to stay here nearly as long as I have. Maybe I was lonely and I thought it would help to be in the middle of a big burgeoning sprawling teeming metropolis. Shows you how dumb I can be. Truth is I hardly ever leave the god damn hotel, except maybe to grab some chow or pick up a newspaper or something, so that can't be it. Could be that I just wanted to lose myself here, just lose myself in the crowd, and with 20 million people in London proper that's easy enough. But it would've made more sense to've gotten out of The South entirely, away from any chance of running into Jane or any've her friends. Or Frieda, for that matter. Would've made more sense to've headed north again. Maybe even head right back up to stupid fucking Scotland, just friggin' disappear. But I didn't. Why not, I don't know. I don't know why. Hell, sometimes I think I don't know anything.