Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip

by Jordan Sonnenblick

San nodded.

  “OK, then,” I said. “What about beauty? Isn’t photography an art form? And shouldn’t art be beautiful?”

  Danielle chimed in. I’d figured she would, being the layout editor of the yearbook and all. “I think sometimes a piece of art can be beautiful because of the way the elements in it are arranged. Even if the individual elements aren’t pretty, they can make a beautiful whole. That’s why I like doing layouts so much. It’s all about the composition.”

  Danny said, “I think there’s no right answer. Sometimes a photo is for truth, sometimes it’s for beauty, and sometimes … it’s for something else.”

  “Something else?” San asked. “What else is there?”

  There was a long pause then, which lasted until I blurted out, “Doesn’t the subject get a say in how the photo gets used? I mean, what if that kid who got his shoulder banged into is embarrassed about it? Or what if one of those people from the front steps has, like, a religious objection to being photographed? Is everything and everyone fair game?”

  Don’t you hate it when teachers act like they’re talking about one thing, but really they’re twisting the direction of the conversation so they can make a point about something totally different? Mr. Marsh said, “That’s debatable in a public place like a school, where the subjects haven’t consented to having their pictures taken. But I think there’s an implied contract when someone agrees to pose for a portrait — like in the case of Peter and Angelika. Don’t’cha agree, Angelika?”

  Wow, the only thing worse than the conversation-twisting gambit is when the teacher completely puts a student on the spot. Angelika kind of squirmed, picked a hangnail, and said, “I don’t know. I guess … I mean, I kind of ambushed Peter with … um … an object so I could get his reaction on film. And he didn’t agree to that in advance, because he didn’t know I was going to do it. Obviously. So I think it should be up to him.”

  Mr. Marsh said, “Well, Peetuh?”

  I generally try to be patient with people, but this was starting to get me mad. “Do we really have to discuss this in the middle of class? Now even if I don’t say yes, I’ve already been dragged over the coals in front of everybody.”

  Mr. Marsh said, “Sorry, Peetuh. Yer right. I just got all excited to have a real-life example of an ethical argument popping up right before my eyes. You can totally do whatever ya need to do with the pictures.” Then he winked. He actually freaking winked. Ugh. “And who knows what might, uh, come up if you two have another session together?”

  Angelika said, “I’m sorry, too, Pete. I wasn’t trying to … uh, well … Look, I’ll destroy the prints and delete the files, OK? It’s not worth all this.”

  I looked at the prints that were still on the table between Angelika and me. They were really good. Then I looked at Angelika. She was looking right back at me, and her eyes just seemed so sad all of a sudden. I sighed, and slid the portraits across the table into her hand. “Hand ’em in,” I said. I still wasn’t too sure I wanted the whole world to see them, but on the other hand, they definitely captured some kind of moment of truth. And if the truth was good enough for Henri Cartier-Bresson, I supposed it was good enough for me.

  San stopped on the way back to his seat and patted me on the shoulder. Mr. Marsh smiled, and swept the photos out of Angelika’s hand. The class burst into semi-mocking applause. And my ears turned really, really red.

  But on the way out of class, Angelika bumped her hip against mine and smiled.

  For a while there, you’d almost think I’d totally adjusted to my new life as a nonathlete whose childhood idol was slipping down the tubes. I mean, for a couple of weeks, life almost rocked: Angelika and I were bonding — and not just flirty-bonding, but really talking about life stuff. I was still clueless about how to make a move with her, but I figured if I just stood close enough to her, for long enough, eventually we’d accidentally stumble into an empty Hebrew school classroom or something. I talked with Grampa on the phone a couple of times, plus I stopped by his house one day unannounced, and each time, he seemed to be on topic and focused. Plus, I was even getting semi-popular at school.

  With my new sports-photographer gig, whenever a new biweekly issue of the school newspaper came out, at least one person would always come up to me and compliment me on my work. Then this one issue came out with two of my shots on the back page: one was AJ poised in the air for a slam dunk, and the other was the super-hot Linnie Vaughn arched halfway backward in the air, pushing off at the start of a backstroke race. I was sitting at lunch with AJ that day, and tons and tons of people came over to high-five him.

  This one guy we knew from middle school walked up to our table and said, “AJ — that was such a cool picture of you in action. You are the man!”

  AJ said, “Thanks, Tim. It was no big deal. I was just playing my game. Pete did all the work. I mean, he’s the one that took the picture.”

  Tim glanced over at me, clearly not impressed. “Uh, that’s cool,” he muttered.

  “AND he took that suh-mokin’ picture of Linnie Vaughn,” AJ added.

  Now I had Tim’s attention. “Really? You took that picture, too? That one is awesome! I’m totally going to put it up in my locker!”

  Some random kid walking past stopped and said, “You’re the guy who gave the world Linnie Vaughn in a bathing suit? In color? Dude. I’m in awe. Thank you!”

  Well, that was awkward. Is it better to be ignored, or to be the hero of hormonally challenged geeks everywhere? Anyway, when it was just me and AJ again, he said, “By the way, thanks. I’m hoping the varsity coach might notice me, and he’s gotta see that picture around, right? I know I still have to build up my stats, get more playing time, work on my D — but every little bit helps.”

  He stopped to take a huge bite of his pizza, then gulped it down and said, “You know, hoops is cool and all. But what I really can’t wait for is baseball. You and me, together again, showing everyone what we can do — it’s gonna be sick. Sick! Hey, only a few more months, right? Then you can get in front of the camera for a while!”

  I didn’t say anything; I just kept chewing my extremely greasy pork barbecue sandwich. It was one of those times when I’m really glad AJ never notices whether I reply or not. He rambled on, through another round of guys stopping by, some additional Linnie Vaughn innuendo, a thorough dissection of his basketball season to date, and finally … mercifully … the bell.

  Speaking of dissection, it was a dissection lab in biology class that smacked me back to reality. My bio teacher was an ancient crone named Mrs. Singley, who knew a ton about the subject and was a pretty entertaining speaker. Unfortunately, she was also kind of blind and deaf, which meant that labs got a bit out of hand. Imagine a room full of nervous freshmen with scalpels, smelly dead animals soaking in formaldehyde, very little supervision, and thirty other freshmen to impress, and you kind of get the idea of how those sessions went.

  This was a pretty major lab. We had already cut up worms, fish, and frogs, but today was Mammal Day. I walked in from my lunch with AJ, and found fifteen preserved fetal pigs in sealed plastic bags, one on each table in the room. My partner was a kid named Matt, who had the same kind of oblivious charm that made AJ so beloved by all. He was also immensely hyper, which didn’t bother me most days but wasn’t so comforting when he had a razor-sharp scalpel in hand.

  Mrs. Singley gave us some basic directions and handed out the packet we all had to fill out. Then she stepped aside and let us start slicing up our piggies. “Dude,” Matt said as he started using a bone scissors to split open the rib cage of our unfortunate new pet. “D’you think they purposely planned this for a day when we were having pork for lunch? Because, I mean, I could see getting really nauseated if you thought about that too hard. Not that I plan to think about it much. Oops, watch out for the bloody fluid there! Wow, who knew one pig could be so, um, drippy? Anyway, check out this stringy part here behind the ribs. I think that would have made one tasty sandwich niblet, don’t
you? Hey, hand me a pencil. I think we’re supposed to draw this artery thing here. Ugh, I got some guts on the handout. Could you do me a favor and just wipe that off? Or maybe we should switch places for a while. You have to be neater than I am.”

  So we switched places. I was a pretty good pig eviscerator, too. I cut out the heart with no problems. The lungs followed. The liver? Check. The stomach. The intestines. The undeveloped reproductive system. Check, check, check. But then Mrs. Singley stopped everybody.

  “Excuse me, class, but I seem to have left a page out of the packet. The last thing you need to do is dissect one forelimb of your pig and draw a detailed diagram of the elbow joint….”

  Suddenly, I felt light-headed. I staggered a couple of steps sideways, and somehow managed to stop gagging long enough to ask Matt to take over for me. He stepped in, grabbed up the tools, and started cutting. Which I might have been OK with, but of course the operation came with narration:

  “Hey, hi! Wave to our friends, piggie! Good job, piggie!”

  “Uh, Matt,” I said, trying not to retch, “do you think we could just, like, get the work done? There’s not much time left in the period, and —”

  “Don’t worry, Pete. I can bond with our piglet and work at the same time. Hey, Pigster, I like the way your joint articulates when you wave! Look how nicely your ulna and radius pivot together! Pete, check this out! If I pull his arm back, it’s almost like he’s getting ready to throw a ball or something. Just … gotta … get it back a little … farther —” I heard a sickening wet snap. “Oopsie! Guess Porky here is out for the season!”

  I felt a lurch in my gut, and instantly, my mouth was full of half-digested pig parts.

  I almost made it to the door.

  By the time the mess was cleaned up, I was in the nurse’s office. I kind of felt better — at least physically — after my massive projectile hurling spasm, but I played it up like I was dying so I wouldn’t have to go back to class and see people. So the nurse called my mom, but my mom couldn’t come to get me. Naturally, my dad was away on business, which left only one relative in town: Grampa. The nurse called him, and he said he would keep me at his house until my parents got home from work.

  I climbed into Grampa’s huge Goldberg Photo SUV, which he had always needed for hauling around his cameras, lights, tripods, backdrops, and assorted other tools of the trade. Now, with nothing in the back, it felt cavernously hollow inside. I was on the edge of my seat, waiting for him to blank out, swerve off the road, and smash me into a tree. Grampa had always been a fairly impatient driver, so I could only imagine how scary he would be if his mind was going. He was in total control, though. In fact, he was alert enough to grill me about what had happened.

  I told him the whole lab story, and then he said, “So, forget about your stomach troubles. What I really want to know is, how are things going with your new girlfriend, whatshername?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend, Grampa,” I said, gritting my teeth as he slowed down at the last minute for a red light. “Her name is Angelika. But she’s just my partner in photography class.”

  “Partner, huh? Promising.”

  “No, we didn’t even choose each other.”

  “But she modeled for you. Photographers and models: I’ve seen it a million times. I could tell you stories from my younger days….”

  Between Grampa’s famously heavy accelerator foot, my pig experience, and now the thought of my grandparent having a love life, I was about to roll down my window and heave. But when I actually turned to look out the window, I noticed that we had completely driven past Grampa’s house. “Uh, Grampa? Where are we going?”

  He looked almost scared for a second, but then recovered so fast you almost could have missed the whole thing. “Oh, I just wanted to stop by the drugstore and get you some Pepto-Bismol. Why?”

  Pretty smooth cover-up, Grampa, I thought.

  When we got to his house, he set me up on the couch with a pillow, a blanket, and a remote control, and told me I could nap or watch TV — whatever I wanted. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Out. Now get some rest,” he said. I tried to press him for details, but he just shrugged me off and walked out of the house. I flicked on the TV, and channel surfed for as long as I could stand it. I was incredibly thirsty and had the world’s single worst pig-barf-and-formaldehyde aftertaste in my mouth, so eventually I was forced to get out from my couch-nest and make my way down the hall to the bathroom. I splashed some water in my face, brushed my teeth with a finger, and then noticed something I hadn’t seen before. There were Post-it notes all over the place. Next to the toothbrush holder, a yellow note said, in shaky block letters, “BRUSH AM + PM.” On the top of the toilet tank, there was a hot-pink one: “FLUSH!”

  I went into the kitchen for a glass of juice and found the same scenario there. Grampa had notes to remind him to turn off the oven, the stove, and the coffee-maker. There was even a note posted behind the toaster oven with directions for making toast. This scared me. My grandfather had been cooking his own meals for as long as I could remember — and now he needed step-by-step instructions for heating bread?

  I heard the rattly click of Grampa’s key in the front door, and scrambled back to the couch. I covered myself all up with the blanket and pretended to sleep. Really, I thought there was no way I could take a nap while I was so freaked out by the dissection and worried about my grandfather and his newly annotated existence. But somehow I dozed off, because the next thing I knew, my mother was bent over me with her hand on my forehead.

  “Mom, I’m fine,” I said. “I just got a little sick before, but I’m all better now.”

  Mom gave me her special don’t-question-the-doctor look — not that she’s actually a doctor, but she definitely picked up the look from somewhere. “Peter, the school nurse said you looked awful. I believe the exact phrase was, ‘Your son’s face is the color of oatmeal.’ I was worried all afternoon, and now you say you’re fine? I don’t know: I think you’d better stay home tomorrow.”

  “Whatever. But I’m telling you, I don’t have some funky virus or anything. I just ate a really disgusting lunch and then … well, there was this pig … and … can I just tell you the whole thing later?”

  She nodded.

  “And besides,” I added, “who says that being the color of oatmeal is a bad thing? Maybe the nurse meant it in a flattering way. I mean, oatmeal is a delicious, low-fat food, rich in fiber. In fact, I’ve heard that eating oatmeal actually lowers your bad cholesterol.”

  She rolled her eyes and prodded me off the couch. “OK, Mr. Handsome Oatmeal Face. Go say thank you to your grandfather.”

  I found Grampa in the bathroom, just standing there. At first, I thought he must have been in one of his spaced-out trances, but then I noticed what he was holding in one hand: a bunch of Post-its. I realized then why I hadn’t seen any little notes around his house before: He must have been in the habit of taking them down every time we were supposed to come over. We almost never showed up unannounced there, and the one time I had recently — when he had fallen down — I hadn’t exactly been conducting a home inspection.

  Anyway, Grampa noticed me looking at his handful of little papers, and held the pointer finger of his other hand to his lips. “Shhh,” he said, and winked. I gulped and nodded. What else was I supposed to do? He gave me a brief, fierce hug, and pushed me toward the door.

  On the way home, Mom asked, “Hey, did everything go all right with your grandfather today? I know you’ve been worried about him lately, but he seemed fine to me just now.”

  Well, at least I could tell the complete truth in response to that. “He sure did, Mom!” I said, forcing myself to smile. “So, what’s for dinner?”

  “Ham,” she replied.

  That night, after I had (barely) survived my third dead-pig encounter of the day, done all my homework, and fielded the obligatory phone calls from Angelika (“Ooh, Peter, are you all right? Because Linnie Vaughn is going to
be really bummed if you, like, die….”) and AJ (“Dude, did you really hurl all over the classroom door? I heard it was pretty graphic!”), I sat up in bed for hours.

  Have you ever looked around your room and suddenly noticed something about your decorations that’s never hit you before? Because it happened to me that night: I realized that almost everything that mattered to me in there had come from my grandfather. He had painted the walls in Yankee pinstripes as a surprise for my seventh birthday. Then he had taken me to a game, and brought along a gigantic telephoto lens and his super-professional wide-angle one, too. That’s why I had huge blowup prints of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and Jorge Posada on one wall, and an even bigger one of the view from the upper deck on another. As if that weren’t enough, he had also taken the family portrait on my dresser and bought me the airplane models that lined the top of my bookcase.

  Plus, half of the books were from him. And a bunch of old rhythm and blues CDs that he had probably made me listen to a million times in his truck, and then finally given to me when I happened to mention one day that one of them had a couple of catchy songs on it. Believe it or not, although I wouldn’t have admitted it to friends or anything, I had actually copied every single track of those CDs onto my hard drive.

  I had to be the only teenager in America who owned the complete recordings of Ray Charles AND B. B. King. In a strange mood just then, I found the Ray Charles collection on the MP3 player next to my bed (yet another Grampa gift), and pressed PLAY. Even at low, midnight volume, Ray’s gravelly voice filled every inch of the room:

  “You know the night time, darling, is the right time, To be with the one you love, now …”

  Which goes to show you how incredibly depressing it is to listen to music when you have insomnia. I mean, pretty much by definition, if you’re under the age of seventy, and you’re listening to a fifty-year-old recording in the middle of the night, you are obviously not curled up with the one you love. Unless the one you love happens to be either as geeky as you, or deaf. Of course, AJ always says there’s no such thing as love anyway. In his poetic words, “It’s all just hormones, my friend. You might as well just say you’re in testosterone with somebody. And if you’re really lucky, she might be in estrogen with you.”