Dead Languages

by David Shields

  I shut up and just watched, but I kept reading about basketball until I found an even better book, A Sense of Where You Are, which was about Bill Bradley, who attended Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship, then played competent if unspectacular professional basketball for several years. During halftime of the Harvard game, while Coach Van Breda Kolff was explaining how to handle the Crimson’s full-court press, the future Rhodes Scholar was off in a corner with a towel draped around his neck and his Converse high-tops unlaced, reading Donne’s Holy Sonnets. At halftime of the Harvard game, in Cambridge, trailing by six, he was slouched against an open locker, scanning “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you/As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;/That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend/Your force, to breake, blowe, burn, and make me new.” He put the book away, laced up his shoes, and scored thirty-six points in the second half, including a left-handed hook from behind the basket to win the game in double overtime.

  A sense of where you are. I wanted an unalterable compass of my position, not this other, disgusting feeling, this childish apprehension that wherever I was I was hopelessly lost, wherever I stood was quicksand. I stopped going into the Mission district, had Father nail a hoop to the garage door, and started practicing—with Nicky when he was around, by myself when he wasn’t.

  Although I was the fastest twelve-year-old boy in San Francisco, I had what in basketball circles is known as white man’s disease: as a vertical leaper, I had feet of lead. I couldn’t do tricks around the basket, hang on the rim, hold the ball in one hand, dribble it through my legs, pass it behind my back, spin it on my finger counterclockwise, but Father said all of that was only fancy-dan foppery. He said, “Let me show you how Joe Lapchick used to shoot them at the Garden in the thirties.”

  I didn’t especially care how Joe Lapchick used to shoot them at the Garden in the thirties, but Father parked the car, slammed the garage door, and trotted onto the court, clapping his hands and calling, “Pass the old apple over here, Jeremy.” Maybe Joe Lapchick used to call the basketball the old apple, but I didn’t want to be seen playing with someone who did and who was standing at the edge of the driveway wearing suede Hush Puppies, mismatched socks, checked pants, a striped shirt, a navy blue blazer, and tinted sunglasses; clapping his hands; requesting that I pass him the old apple.

  Our house was at the top of a hill. If your shot was short, it would hit the handle of the carport door, take a crazy bounce, and roll all the way down the hill into a crowded cable car. I thought most of Father’s shots would fall short, and I’d spend the hour before dinner chasing the ball down the hill into various crowded cable cars, so I didn’t pass him the old apple. I just stood there, dribbling it idiotically against one particular crack in the pavement. Father rushed at me, putting on the press, so I handed him the ball and took a seat on a little wooden fence that divided the driveway from the front porch.

  He dribbled around the driveway, slapping at the ball with his right hand while holding his left arm straight out to the side. He threw the ball against the carport door a few times, using the old-fashioned two-handed chest pass. It looked ludicrous. Then he ran to the top of the slope, cradled the ball in both hands as if it were a baby or pumpkin—something immense, heavy, and round in only a general sense—knocked his knees together, rotated his wrists, and let fly from the waist a flatfooted, two-handed, arching set shot very much in the style of Joe Lapchick. It looked even more comical than his chest pass against the garage door. The net danced. I clapped, more out of surprise than admiration, but Father barely managed a smile. He retrieved the ball, jogged to the top of the driveway, and threw up another set shot. The old apple barely rippled the cords. For a solid hour he ran around the court in his Hush Puppies, wiping sweat off his bald brow, taking his belt off at one point, putting it back on at another, always adjusting his sunglasses, sinking Lapchickian set shots from every angle. Occasionally he missed. The wind probably came up on those attempts or maybe he was just trying to show he was human. When Mother rang the dinner bell, he finally stopped.

  “You’ve got to forget about the fancy-dan tricks,” he reiterated. “Just get the two-hand set shot down and they won’t be able to touch you. Joe Lapchick used to shoot them like that in the Garden during the thirties and was unstoppable. Put a little English on it, a little backspin, follow through, and listen to the crowd roar. Knees together, wrists cocked, right over the top. That’s all there is to it. Get that shot down, Jeremy, and you’ll be dynamite.”

  Then he went inside and listened to Mother ask why he’d forgotten to post her letter on his way home. In this important epistle addressed to the superintendent of schools, Mother had outlined her plan for receiving the right kind of publicity on the multimillion-dollar bond issue. At that moment, I think I felt for Father something like love. Immediately after dinner, I went outside and, by the light of the street lamp, worked on the rudiments of the two-handed set shot. For two months I did nothing else. I played an hour before school, usually with Nicky; all afternoon; all evening when Father installed a floodlight on the balcony above the court. I’d play until Mother waltzed outside in her nightgown and said, “Okay, hon. That’s enough. The bounce of that damn ball is driving me crazy. I have to get up early tomorrow.” I’d go inside and squeeze a hard rubber ball until my fingers itched and my palms turned red, run up and down the stairs with sand bags tied to my legs, do sixty sit-ups a minute on the hard floor of my bedroom.

  Not surprisingly, I became extremely adept at the two-handed set shot. Father was still a little more accurate than I was, but I could shoot from farther distances. Sometimes, exhausted and all alone in the floodlight, I’d make a basket and look up; there would be Father, standing on the terrace, thrusting his fist triumphantly into the night sky, and yelling, “Listen to the crowd roar.” I listened. The crowd wasn’t roaring. Other times, I’d be dribbling in the driveway at four o’clock in the afternoon, Beth would bring a few of her theatrical friends home with her, and by way of introduction and dismissal she’d say, “This is my brother. He plays basketball.” I had a fine, tight, little body. That summer, when we visited Father’s Relatives and Historical Landmarks Back East, the prettiest actress at Jack London Preparatory Academy asked Beth to snap a photograph of me in shorts, standing next to the Lincoln Memorial, and Beth had to oblige.

  One Saturday morning, after having been away for quite a while, I ventured back into the Mission. I was hoping they’d remember who I was, but when I arrived at the court no one was there. The fog was in, the wind was up. I figured they’d all decided to stay home or had jimmied the lock on some gym. I’d grown accustomed to a straight basket, a mesh net, and a half-moon backboard with an orange square in the middle. At first all my shots were falling short and to the left. A sense of where you are, I kept telling myself, a sense of where you are, and soon enough my touch returned. I moved all over the court, farther away from the hoop, and became more accurate as the morning lengthened. It wasn’t unlike playing in the driveway, only without the sound of the net swishing and, instead, the rusty clang of loose metal as the ball wriggled through the rim.

  Around noon, someone came to keep me company—a little guy wearing a wool cap and black tennis shoes laced every other eyelet with a kind of light rope. He was no older than I was, but he had a goatee. His name was Jupiter. I never knew his real name. I think it was something like Howard Morrison. His nickname was derived from the fact that, although he was very short, he could jump to Jupiter. The only other thing he was known for was setting Siamese cats on fire. I felt a little self-conscious shooting two-handed set shots while a leaping pyromaniac leaned against the pole, chomping on a toothpick, combing his goatee, and drinking chocolate milk. I stopped shooting and said, “Hey, Jupiter, where’s everybody else?”

  “Don’t know, man. They’s probably at home watchin’ the Saturday morning comics.”

  Jupiter held out his carton of chocolate milk and asked, “Want the
rest, man?”

  I was thirsty from playing all morning and went over to take a sip. Jupiter threw the empty carton onto the cement. I went back to shooting baskets.

  Jupiter asked: “What’s this girlish-lookin’ gunk you throwin’ up, man?”

  I heard him but didn’t know how to reply, so I said, “I’m sorry, Jupiter. I didn’t catch that. What did you say?”

  He hit the ball out of my hands, did an extremely poor imitation of the shot Joe Lapchick did so much toward making legend at Madison Square Garden in the 1930s, and said, “I says, Mr. Zorn, what’s this two-handed, knee-knockin’, flat-footed, fairy-wristed, double-backspin booshit?”

  Jupiter had a way with words and I didn’t. I banked a few shots from the right side, then said, “My father showed me how to shoot.”

  “I’m sure he did, man. But that shit don’t wash here. I mean, you shoot that shit: it get knocked back. In your face, man, down your drawers.”

  I had to reply or go home early. I said: “You want to go a l-l-little one-on-one, Jupiter, just until everyone else shows?”

  At first, Jupiter thought my challenge was too funny for words and leaned against the pole, laughing like one of the crueler dogs on the Saturday morning cartoon shows. Then he said, “Shit, man, I ain’t got nothin’ else to do. I’ll play you to twenty-one and spot you five, man.” I refused the advantage, thanking him graciously. That got him mad. “Okay, Zorn, I’m playing for real now,” he said, sticking his steel comb in his hair, removing his jacket to reveal a purple tank shirt that said in silver Cunning Linguist, stepping out of his black dancing pants into cutoffs slit to the waist. “Take it out, man,” he said.

  In the Mission they played Make It–Take It; if you scored a basket you remained on the offensive. I must have made four or five shots from twenty feet before Jupiter even got his hands on the ball. When he did, he dribbled through his legs for the longest time, executed eye fakes, shook his shoulders, wiggled his hips, stopped, started, twisted, turned, spun, jumped high, but he couldn’t shoot to save his life. I’d grab the rebound, dribble to the top of the circle or into either of the far corners, and arch my antiquated set shot cleanly through the rim.

  “Come inside on me, man, and you’ll eat a leather sandwich,” Jupiter kept saying.

  I stayed outside. I didn’t go inside. I didn’t do what’s called penetrate the key, and the sexual analogy is apposite because it’s always been my philosophy, as the inauguration poet observed in another context, to back out of all this now too much for us, to stay away from the center and perform some archaic, immaculate feat where no one can touch you. That, such as it is, has always been my philosophy. Jupiter, whatever else he had, did not have a philosophy. He had springs in his legs, and philosophy wins out every time over springs in the legs. Or, if that isn’t quite true, it was true this time. I won going away.

  “Let’s play again and this time I’ll give you a little lead,” I suggested.

  Jupiter threw his box of toothpicks at me—little cinnamon spears—and said word better not get out what the score and who the victor was of our little encounter, or he’d murder my mother. Word didn’t get out, but it didn’t have to. I was the surprise sensation of the Bayshore tryouts. I was the only white player on what had traditionally been an all-black team, the only virgin in the lineup, the only starter under five feet tall. The coach was white and thought white people should be coaches and captains, so he made me captain, which meant I shook hands with the other team’s captain before the game and called our plays during the game. I panicked when I had to shout in a packed gym. We worked out a system by which I simply held up a certain number of fingers to indicate what play we were supposed to run. Play number four entailed everyone else standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the left baseline, me dribbling behind them, and taking my shot. I signaled number four a disproportionate percentage of the time. The coach didn’t mind since I never missed. He’d approach me in the locker room—the marching band’s storage space—put his arm around me, and say, “My job depends upon your performance.” I didn’t know what he meant and wasn’t sure I wanted to; I took him to mean he liked my Lapchickian style of play.

  Each starter had his own specialty. One rebounded mightily. Another dribbled well. Someone else passed beautifully. The fourth played extraordinary defense. So when we needed a rebound we looked to Michael. When we needed to prevent the opposition’s hero from scoring we looked to Kenny. When we needed a basket, though, when we needed two points in a hurry, they looked to me and stood back and watched.

  “Listen to the crowd roar,” Father would yell as I ran up and down the court, tossing in set shots. He never missed a game—home or away—and sat in the front row, taking home movies so I could study minor problems in form. Mother showed up once with Nicky and said she thought it quite beautiful the way blacks and whites worked in harmony on the basketball court. He gave her a look, stepped away, and said, “Black and white can’t work together off the court?” Mother, mortified, said she only meant she felt there was a feature story here, some good publicity for the junior high school district. Another time, Beth came and said the arena reminded her of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s stage set for Troilus and Cressida. I was the basketball correspondent for the Bayshore Recorder. While playing, I would hear in my head phrases to describe the momentum of the game, the shot I just made, the pattern of the other team’s jersey. This seemed to me pretty much the culmination of existence: living and triumphing, then going home and writing about it in detail.

  We won the city championship by such a wide margin that our substitutes played the entire fourth quarter. After receiving congratulations and various cheap trophies and having dinner at an A&W Root Beer stand with the rest of the team, I went home, sat down at my desk, and began my narrative. The Recorder was planning to play it in the top right-hand corner of page one as the March issue’s lead story, but it had to be in the following morning, so I stayed up late finishing it, then brought it upstairs to get Mother’s corrections. She was sitting at her desk in the den, tape-recording the eleven o’clock news because there was supposed to be a report on an interracial rock-throwing incident in San Jose. The house was asleep. Bruin was snoring on the sofa like the shadow of Mother’s psyche. The room was dark. The only lights I had to guide me were coming from Mother’s white nightgown, the blue radiation of the television screen, the slice of moon and ball of street lamp glowing through green-tinted windows. I sat on the floor and watched the news with Mother. The rock throwers never made their appearance. Mother sighed, shut off her tape recorder, and was drifting off to bed when I held her hand and requested that she read quickly through my account and mark any mistakes.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  I insisted.

  She returned to her desk, switched on a lamp, took out her glasses, and examined the story:

  BOBCATS CLOBBER REDWOOD IN CITY FINAL

  Zorn Scores 36 Points on 18–18 from Field;

  Redwood’s Highly Touted Center a Washout;

  Baxtrom Snatches 22 Rebounds;

  1200 in Attendance

  The Bayshore Bobcats bombarded the Redwood Forest, 71–45, for the 7th grade public school championship of San Francisco Wednesday, March 12, at the Cow Palace.

  It really was no contest. The Bobcats (your Fighting Lynx!) outhustled, outshot, outplayed, outeverythinged Redwood from opening tip to final buzzer. Jeremy Zorn scored the first two points of the game on a set shot from straightaway, Michael Carr scored the next two on a left-handed drive down the lane, and from there on the Bobcats were not to be stopped.

  The score at the end of the first quarter was 19–8. In the second quarter the Bobcats put on their full-court press, which left Ward Riley, Redwood’s highly touted center, a fumbling fool. The second half was just silly….

  The story continued—with summary, then analysis, then quotation, then poetic outpour—for twenty-seven triple-spaced pages, but Mother quit halfway through the third parag
raph and broke into laughter, which sounded eerie so close to midnight.

  I was standing over her as she read. I stepped back into the lamplight and asked, “What’s so funny?”

  “Well, for one, honey, the clichés,” Mother said. “Every sentence is a tissue of sportswriting platitudes.”

  I’d thought sportswriting was a wonderful convention and the best you could do was follow its formulae. I made a mental note to exploit the convention next time I wrote a sports story. I sat in a chair across the table from her and asked, “What else?”

  “Well, the immodesty is not very becoming. Will your by-line appear on this article?”

  “Yes.”

  “Won’t people object to such self-publicizing?”

  “No. Everybody already knows how good I am.”

  This last remark struck her—this last remark struck me—as a little too proud. She handed back the article, saying the rest of it seemed fine. She put Bruin in her basket and I was a good boy: I didn’t kick her in the rib cage. Mother turned off the lamp and walked with me down the dark hallway, carrying the rough draft of a book she was writing called Every Generation Must Win for Itself the Right to Be Free: Civil Liberties for Young People. It was Mother’s hope that “some of the readers of this book will be the lawyers and judges and legislators who will help make the Bill of Rights stronger for the next generation.” Nicky was just pulling into the carport. At the end of the hallway the stairs to my bedroom began and a white door gave onto the bedroom. Father was snoring. Beth was reading, oh, I don’t know, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Mother whispered: “Sometimes when people ask me if all you do is play basketball I want to tell them, ‘At least he’s devoted to something, at least he has an activity which he loves and at which he excels,’ but other times I wish you were obsessed with something a little more permanent, that you had a devotion which was a little more dignified.”