Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  So there you have it, sports fans: The Official Caveman’s Guide to Sports Photography.

  That night, I found myself sitting on the top row of the bleachers next to Angelika, lined up with the volleyball net. I was weighed down with enough cameras, lenses, and other assorted gear to collapse the whole structure. Before heading out, I had called my grandfather for advice, and he had told me all I would need was one specific lens. But he had also once told me that it’s better to carry three extra lenses, have a tired shoulder, and get your shot than to have a nice, light camera bag and miss the moment.

  Angelika was going to be shooting, too. She was all set up with a pretty nice camera of her own. It was a Canon, which meant we couldn’t share lenses, but it looked like she would do fine. The game started, and I learned something really fast: If you don’t know the sport, you can be the freaking Michelangelo of photography, and you still won’t get what you need. My camera was always pointed in the wrong direction; I missed every key play by a split second; I couldn’t get the shutter speed fast enough to keep the pictures from getting blurred in the dim light. I felt completely overwhelmed. After one game, I was ready to quit. “What I really need,” I said to Angelika, “is a pause button.”

  Angelika smiled, pointed to her camera’s viewfinder, and said, “No worries.” Then she said, “Keep shooting, though, partner. Try to get at least one good shot of Number Nine spiking the ball, OK? She’s the captain. I’ll be down there for a while.” Angelika pointed to an area right behind the back line of the court and a little bit off to one side. She took the long telephoto lens off of her camera and put on a much shorter one. Then she was off.

  I watched her walk around the edge of the gym floor to her chosen spot, kneel down, and start shooting. Wow, I thought. She called me “partner.” I got back to shooting, but as soon as I got a picture of the captain girl jumping and spiking, I switched subjects and took maybe forty shots of Angelika in profile. I don’t know why exactly. I just did it.

  After the match, in the middle of packing all our gear away, Angelika asked me for the memory card I had been using so she could go home and process the photos on it. Without thinking, I handed the card over. I called my parents on my cell phone for a ride, and it wasn’t until I was halfway home that I realized Angelika would see all the footage of her.

  Great, I thought. There’s nothing as thrilling for a girl as finding out her new coeditor is a stalker.

  Freshman year rolled along, kind of. Well, parts of it rolled along, parts of it lurched along, and parts of it scraped and screeched along in the manner of scrap metal being dragged across a chalkboard. For me, class was easy. I aced all of my academic courses without too much sweat, and the extra time demands of my sudden editorial gig weren’t anything compared to all the sports practices I’d always had before — between the lack of indoor baseball workouts and the fact that I wasn’t playing basketball, I had more time than I knew what to do with. Home was a little weird, though. Mom still didn’t want to hear there was anything wrong with her father. Dad was still working a million hours, and with Samantha off at college, the house was wa-a-ay too empty and quiet most of the time.

  The scraping and screeching mostly came from inside my own head. I was still having nightmares about surgery, pitching, and my grampa all tumbled up together. Plus, I kept wanting to tell AJ I wasn’t going to be his teammate ever again, but I was still chickening out. He was networking like a madman with a lot of the older athletes, especially once he made the JV basketball team, and he kept introducing me to everyone as “Peter Friedman, Future Star Pitcher.” I wondered what he would call me if he learned the truth: “Peter Friedman … Uh, Some Kid with a Camera”? Or even worse, “Peter … Uh, Your Name Is Peter, Right?”

  One Saturday, I went to Angelika’s house so she could redo my portrait shots. Of course, I had tormented myself over what to wear, until I just gave up and threw on jeans and a New York Yankees T-shirt over a white long-sleeved Under Armour — which was basically my default outfit anyway. I met her mom, who had this smirk on her face the whole time, like Oh, you’re the boy that takes forty random pictures of my daughter, huh? Nice T-shirt, Stalker Boy!

  By the time I had smiled and bluffed my way through the maternal interview, I realized it had been a mistake to wear the Under Armour, because I was sweating bullets. AND I couldn’t take it off, because then my jacked-up elbow would be on full photographic display.

  Angelika had set up a little studio area in the dining room, with a gray backdrop pinned to the wall, and a wooden chair next to a row of north-facing windows. I sat in the chair, and even without any direct sunlight, I was cooking. Angelika sat on a stool about ten feet away, and picked up her camera. Then she put it down again, and said, “Hey, Pete, I’ve thought a lot about what was wrong with the shots we got last time, and I think I have it. You know how Mr. Marsh said I needed to come up with a concept?”

  Angelika picked up a brown paper lunch bag that had been next to the stool, and looked away from me. Obviously, she was going to surprise me with something from the bag. I tried to work out what could be in there — Shades? Hair gel? A really, really tiny leather jacket? None of those things would be weird enough to make her break eye contact, though. As she so often did, Angelika had once again made me really curious and just a tad terrified at the same time.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said.

  “Well, I think the problem is that I don’t know what my concept is, because I don’t know you.”

  “What do you mean? You’ve been to my house. We have class together every day. We’re coeditors and everything.”

  She looked up from the bag, right into my eyes. “And you take lots of pictures of me when I’m not looking.”

  Whoa. I’d been wondering for weeks whether she was ever going to bring that up. Looked like this was my lucky day!

  If you’ve noticed so far that I had been doing a lot of blushing and sweating in my ninth-grade year, you haven’t seen anything compared to what was happening to me in that moment of Under Armoured bustedness. Plus, now I added stammering to my list of socially awkward panic symptoms. “Uh, I, um, I was just checking out the — the — the white balance setting on the camera. So I …”

  Wow, Angelika’s smirk looked remarkably like her mom’s. “It’s OK, Pete. I like it that you wanted to take pictures of me. I like you.”

  Good God.

  “But,” she continued, “I still don’t know anything about you. And no offense, but you don’t really, um, express your feelings much.”

  Sure I do, I thought. I express my feelings by slowly drowning in my own undergarments.

  “So I went to your friend Adam.”

  Double good God. Adam is AJ’s real name. I could only imagine what AJ might have told her about me.

  “And I asked him for some ideas.”

  “Ideas about what?”

  “Ideas for objects I could pose you with. Objects that are important to you.”

  Triple good God. What had he suggested: My old Rescue Heroes action figures? My childhood Buzz Lightyear night-light? A stack of dirty magazines? I was going to have to kill him.

  She reached into the brown paper bag and pulled out something worse than all of those. I’ll give you a hint: It was round and white, with curves of red stitching, and said OFFICIAL YOUTH TOURNAMENT APPROVED on the side. OK, so it would have been bad enough if AJ had just given her any old baseball, but he hadn’t. This was an incredibly special baseball. It was the game ball from the best game AJ and I had ever had together.

  “I can’t believe you never told me what a super-star pitcher you are, Peter!” she said.

  Were, I thought.

  “Adam told me all about how you and he pitched a no-hitter together in the championship game two years ago. That must have been amazing! He even brought me a copy of the newspaper article. And he told me all about how you played hurt last year, and you were too brave to tell anybody.”

  Brave or moronic, I thou
ght.

  “He told me not to say anything about this, but he said you were training really hard to get back into playing condition for this spring, even though the doctors said you might not be able to play yet.”

  Kill me, I thought.

  “So, umm, I had this idea that maybe I should take your picture holding the baseball. What do you think?”

  I had no idea what to think.

  “I mean, my mom said she thought it was a sexist idea for a photo shoot: Man with Tools. She said you didn’t pose me with, like, a Betty Crocker baking set. But I wasn’t trying to be like that. I just thought the baseball would show something deeper about who you are … that is, if you don’t mind … Peter, would you please talk to me?”

  I started to talk, but there was a catch in my throat. I cleared it, and tried again: “Gimme the ball.”

  “Really? You don’t mind?”

  I shook my head and held out my hand.

  Angelika gave me the ball. I turned it over in my fingers, and a huge lump grew in my throat. Suddenly, in my own head, I was back on that field, two years before. We had been playing in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, in a big park, and there were train tracks passing maybe a hundred feet away, parallel to the third base line. As a pitcher, the line of sight was pretty strange, too, because there was a parking lot directly behind the backstop. It was a blindingly sunny, baking-hot day, and a horrible glare was coming off this one white SUV parked right over the umpire’s left shoulder.

  The grass had just been cut, and the whole place smelled a little bit like onions.

  When I came back to reality, I realized Angelika had been clicking away. Also, that she had stopped. “Oh, my God, Pete,” she said. “Are you crying?”

  It wasn’t long after that when I got the first of Grampa’s scary phone calls. I was on my way home from school when my cell started vibrating. I assumed it would be AJ, or my mom. Or Angelika. Nobody else ever called me. I made a guess that I was talking to AJ, so I answered, “Sup!”

  The phone clicked, and the line went dead. That was a little unusual, but not so crazy. Our town is kind of hilly, so we get a lot of dead spots. I shoved my phone back in my pocket and kept walking. About ten steps later, I felt the buzz again. This time I just said, “Hello?”

  There was a long enough pause that I almost hung up. Then I heard Grampa groaning, followed by, “Peter? Peter?”

  “Grampa? What’s wrong? Are you OK?”

  “I … I … can you come over here?”

  Grampa only lived about a mile from our house. “Why? What happened?”

  “I fell.”

  Oh, geez. “Grampa, are you hurt? Let me hang up and call 9-1-1.”

  “No! I’m not dying. I just fell.”

  “Let me call my mom. She can get there much faster than —”

  “Peter, please — don’t tell your mother. Just come over here. Please?”

  Grampa never said “please.” Twice in one breath had to mean that things were pretty bad. But what was I supposed to do? It’s not like they train you for this in Grandparent First Aid 101. “OK, I’m coming,” I said. “But it’s going to take a while. I’m about a mile and a half from you, and I’m walking.”

  “Just … please … hurry.”

  “Grampa?” I said. But he had already hung up. I started running.

  If you ever find yourself a mile and a half away from an emergency, carrying a backpack full of heavy textbooks and camera equipment, that’s probably not going to be a good time for you to realize that for the first time in your life, you are woefully out of shape. Within a couple of blocks, I was gasping for air, and my bad arm was throbbing. Every step felt like an eternity, like I was running through Jell-O. The only part of me that was racing successfully was my train of thought. I was in a complete panic. What would I find at my grandfather’s house? Was he in a heap at the bottom of his basement stairs? Did he have broken bones? Was he lying in a pool of blood?

  I know it couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes for me to get over there, but I also had time to worry about all the things that could happen in fifteen minutes. Plus, of course, the whole way there I kept thinking, Call Mom. You have to call Mom. You’re a kid. This is too deep for a kid!

  But I never, ever disobeyed Grampa. I kept running.

  I didn’t know whether my grandfather could make it to the front door, so I went charging around to his back porch, where he had always kept a key hidden under a ceramic planter full of long-dead flowers. My hands were trembling, but I got the key into the door and pushed my way in.

  “Grampa?” I shouted.

  Nothing.

  “GRAMPA?”

  Still nothing.

  I looked around the whole kitchen, then the living and dining rooms. By this point, I wasn’t running. In fact, I was tiptoeing, even though that made no sense. I mean, I knew it was urgent for me to find my grandfather, but I was also terrified of what I would see.

  Grampa had to be near a telephone, so I tried to think of where all the extensions were in the house. I realized then that, before my grandmother’s death when I was in fifth grade, she had convinced my grandfather to get a phone installed next to the toilet. He had put up a big fight (“Why do we need a special toilet phone? Who do we know that needs an update from there?”), but eventually the line had gone in.

  I crept up the hallway toward the bathroom, and stuck my head around the doorframe. Grampa was sitting on the floor, with his eyes shut and his back against the wall. There was no blood, which might have been a good sign. Plus, he was breathing — loudly. If I could hear his breathing over all of the gasping and heart pounding that was coming from me, you knew it had to be loud.

  I knelt in front of him, put my good hand on his shoulder, and said, “Gramp?” I hadn’t called him that since I was little, but somehow the time seemed right for it. His eyes opened, and for a moment, I got the feeling he wasn’t seeing me at all. Then they sort of snapped back to life, and he said, “Peter, can you help me?”

  Not “Can you help me up?” Just “Can you help me?”

  This was deeply, deeply not good. How was I supposed to know what to do? I asked if he could move, and he said, “I think so.” With what looked like a lot of effort, he braced each hand against the floor, then pulled his legs in so that if he straightened them, he would be standing up. He added, “I don’t know what happened, but nothing hurts. Can I stand up? I want to get up.” I asked him to lock forearms with me, and together we managed to get him leaning upright against the cold tile of the bathroom wall. After a pause there, he was able to walk out, down the hallway, and into his kitchen, where he slumped down in a chair.

  I got him a drink — I don’t know what a drink was supposed to do, but it seemed like something one might do in a grandfather-rescue-type situation. He gulped it down and asked for a refill, so score one for Peter Friedman, Boy Untrained Paramedic. Then he locked eyes with me and said, “Pete. Don’t get old. Don’t ever get old.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll be sure to step in front of a bus on my sixty-fifth birthday.”

  He let out a little snort-laugh, and then we just sat there for a while. Eventually, I got myself a water, too; I couldn’t believe how wiped out I was just from getting over to Grampa’s house. I was really going to have to do something about my fitness in a hurry. Then I asked my grandfather how he had ended up on the floor, and he said, “Slipped.”

  Yeah, I hadn’t really needed a detailed memo to figure that one out. “No,” I said, “I mean, why did you slip? Is something” — and here I felt that same stupid lump building up in my throat, just like when I had held the baseball for Angelika — “really wrong with you?”

  He sipped some water, and then said, “Peter, sometimes people fall. I’m fine.” Then he winced, and added, “Except now my back hurts. Can you go get me some aspirin from the bathroom?”

  When I came back with the pills, Grampa’s head was slumped forward and his eyes were closed. I put my hand on his
shoulder, and he jumped. His head whipped around, and then he said, “Pete — wha — I mean, thanks.” He took the aspirin bottle, opened it without fumbling around, got out two tablets, and swallowed them with no problem. But for a moment there, I could have sworn he had been someplace else again.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Pete. I know how to fall. I fell out of a helicopter under fire in Vietnam — this is nothing. I’m fine.”

  Was I supposed to believe that? Did he believe it?

  “And just like I said before, you can’t tell your mother about this. She’ll just worry, and she has enough on her mind, with bills, and taxes, and jobs, and your sister’s college …”

  “B-but,” I stammered, “if there’s a problem, you have to tell her. I mean, you will tell her, right?”

  “I’ll make you a deal, Big Man. I promise I’ll tell her if I think I’m in any danger, OK?”

  I figured that was about as good as it was going to get, so I nodded. I made sure my grandfather didn’t need anything else, told him I’d be calling to check on him later, and left. All the way home, I kept thinking how ironic it was that my grandfather, who said he wasn’t worried, had begged me not to tell my mom he had fallen. Meanwhile, Mom actually wasn’t worried. And me? I was basically having a cow over this.

  I remembered something Grampa had said a few days after my grandmother’s funeral. We were back at my house, sitting shivah, which is this Jewish ritual where you sit around for a week and everybody comes over to tell you how sorry they are for your loss. By the middle of the week, you aren’t really in a total sorrow crisis anymore, and people sort of start chatting normally. Anyway, Samantha and I had been sitting with Grampa, snacking on deli food, and she had asked him if there was anything we could do for him.

  “Eat a knish, Sammie.”

  “No, I mean, can’t we do anything to help you?”

  He had sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and said, “Sammie, Petey, remember this: There are going to be times in your life when you can’t really do anything for anybody. So you might as well eat a knish.”