Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  Their match, dubbed The Battle of the Sexes, was arguably the biggest public spectacle in a decade unsurpassed before or since in terms of hyped, bombastic extravaganzas. Held in the Astrodome in front of the largest audience to ever see a tennis match, it reached a worldwide television audience of 90 million people. King showed no sign of being adversely affected by this gargantuan crush of attention. She had studied how Riggs had frustrated Court with lobs and drop shots, and instead of aggressively attacking the net and dictating the action, as she normally did, she stayed on the baseline, intent to calmly swat bland, serviceable returns to everything Riggs sent her way. The strategy initially seemed passive, womanly, but it gradually conveyed a steely, unbeatable determination: I can outrun you, outhit you, outlast you. King understood that all she had to do to beat Riggs was show up, to say and keep saying Here I Am. Riggs unraveled, crumpling in the presence of an athlete who was stronger, faster, smarter, and far more poised than him. One of the largest convergences of public attention on earth to that point witnessed a woman trouncing a man in straight sets, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. One large portion of this audience exulted in Riggs’s defeat.

  “Women are better than men!” crowed one woman on an NBC news report.

  Meanwhile men attempted to shrug off the whole contest.

  “What does it prove anyway?” wrote AP columnist Will Grimsley the day after the match, characterizing Riggs as not an exemplary top male player but rather an aging con artist with “joints creaking and reflexes slow.” This dismissal missed the point, which was not Riggs’s relative ranking among male tennis players but that King had waded into a tremendously pressurized situation and prevailed, outperforming a highly skilled man. The immediate attempt by Grimsley and others to downplay King’s victory reads in retrospect as desperation. The world was shifting in a way that was bound to provoke anxiety in the segment of the population that had to that point enjoyed every competitive advantage. Now more women than ever were entering the work force, competing with men.

  “[Riggs] said that women should stay pregnant or something didn’t he?” said another woman interviewed after the match by NBC news. “He said that they should be kept home and pregnant so you know, I’m glad that a woman beat him.”

  Pregnancy, of course, is the front line of the battle of the sexes. At the time of the match between Riggs and King, it was seen at least in part as a negative, the restrictive defining factor of a woman’s identity, the anchor that would (and should, said Riggs) always keep a woman bound to the home, away from all competition with men. Of course, that hasn’t happened, and not just because Billie Jean King beat some blowhard at tennis. Women left the home, joined the workforce, and, despite persisting inequalities in compensation and opportunities, proved time and again to be equal to men.

  As Abby embarked on her new calling as a breastfeeding advocate, I learned from her that the battle of the sexes didn’t end with Billie Jean King’s victory or with the ensuing gains in workforce equality that King’s victory symbolized. For instance, the most primal human connection, of a mother to her newborn baby, is fucked with from moment one as American hospitals operate under the principle that the mother is not the active authority in her birth but a passive subject, powerless, to be shuttled through invasive and often traumatic medical intervention during labor. I learned that what had happened to us with Jack reflected the norm of pummeled new mothers being stitched up and sent home from the hospital with abundant “complimentary” bottles of formula, a multinational pharmaceutical conglomerate’s marketing scheme designed to physiologically undercut a woman’s resolve to breastfeed. Doctors at these corporate-funded hospitals support this disempowering idea, with the full weight of their authoritative recommendations, that formula can be used to “supplement” breastfeeding, but there’s no such thing as supplementing breast milk with formula, as the use of formula will, without exception, decrease the supply of breast milk, which will in turn increase the need for the formula, and on and on until the “supplementation” has become complete. As Abby learned this and passed it along to the community growing up around her work, I searched for my own role amid a growing awareness that the most powerful and important people in the world are the ones with the wombs. Men have importance too— everyone does—but, come on: put a man against a woman in the greater scheme of things, and it’s no contest. So what is a father? What is a man? All inherited definitions are reeling, rigid hoaxers flailing at untouchable baseline truths.

  Roadkill

  Near the end of my season as the most marginal player on the weakest team in the least competitive conference in college basketball, we had a road game that we’d identified as our best remaining chance at getting a win. The opponent had also been struggling mightily all year. The drive to the game was unusually tense. While we were stopped for gas, I bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk, and I wolfed it down before we’d even gotten back onto the Interstate. In the locker room I felt like I was pulling my uniform onto a mannequin. I logged ninety seconds or so of playing time and got free for an easy shot at the hoop, a layup, and missed it so badly it was as if I’d never played a second of basketball in my life. We lost by twenty.

  On our way back we stopped for a late spaghetti dinner at the home of the team equipment manager. His family lived on a farm. Before dinner I stood with our team’s soulful, suffering leading scorer, the Grateful Dead fan, Nick, by a fence that had some sheep on the other side. Nick reached over and gently patted the head of a lamb.

  “This is God, man,” Nick whispered. The lamb looked at us with dumb dark eyes.

  Nick was some years older than the rest of us. He had bounced around for a while between high school and college. He had a mustache, two jobs, his own apartment several miles off campus. He drove a rusty Datsun hatchback with an AA slogan on the bumper: Easy Does It. Because it hadn’t been my turn to be an alternate, I hadn’t been present at his greatest moment, the early-season triple-overtime road loss where he poured in forty-six points in a thrilling mano-y-mano duel with the opposing star, a black guy (see losing streak). After that peak Nick fell in line with the team’s general down-sloping malaise and became increasingly less sure of himself, less assertive, less focused, and alternately more agitated and adrift. He stared off into space, he raged, he shrugged, he blamed. I have a general memory of his skills, his fine balance, his wiry strength, his methodical poise, but I also have a general memory of all these things fraying as the season went on, and my clearest singular on-court recollection of him is a moment when his long solemn face was twisted into the sour passivity of complaint. He was running back up-court after failing to keep his man from scoring off of an offensive rebound. He yelled at the nearest presiding authority and pointed at his own arm.

  “He’s raking me with his ’bows, ref! He’s raking me with his ’bows!”

  We lost that game. We didn’t have many left. Before our second-to-last home game Nick, wearing only a jockstrap, scrawled some lines from the Jerry Garcia song “The Wheel” on the blackboard in our locker room. He underlined the last of these lines several times: Won’t you try just a little bit harder?

  “That’s poetry!” he declared, sounding both angry and as if he might cry. I nodded because I was the team’s other Grateful Dead fan. Nick missed this assent. He had picked up his white home-uniform shirt and was frowning down at it like it was a limp, complicated map.

  “I don’t get poetry,” announced the jovial backup forward, Lundy. He was a weightlifting enthusiast and a very good offensive rebounder. Whenever I was pitted against him in practice he was able to get by me to the offensive glass with such ease that it pained him, my weakling frame offering him no resistance whatsoever. Girls liked him.

  “And, like, especially people who do poetry readings . . . why in the world would you do that? Where would it ever get you?”

  He was smiling broadly as he said this, as if the idea of po
etry readings was laughable. I sat there in my white home uniform smoldering. Unbeknownst to Lundy I had not only participated in poetry readings but had elevated them to a place capable of defining what I was meant for (see bust), and though Lundy bellowed his oblivious rhetorical question over twenty years ago, I still fantasize about delivering some ingenious rejoinder, as only a true poet could. I know the general parameters of my response: an achingly eloquent celebration of everything beautiful in the world that would pivot at the end into a barbed, adamantine insult confirming that all this beauty would remain forever beyond the meat hooks of muscle-bound, girl-plowing Lundy and his stupid good-natured smile and offensive rebounding prowess. But the perfectly worded damnation always eludes me, so I instead resort to fantasies of physical violence. But because Lundy was far superior to me in every physical way, these fantasies always end with him pinning me on the cold locker room linoleum, Stradlater-style, with a barely straining half-smile on his face.

  “Hey buddy? I don’t want to hurt you,” he says.

  Fucking Lundy (which isn’t even his real name; see tainted). Fucking everything. Anyway, we lost that game too, as by that point we were for every opposing team nothing but roadkill, that term for a team so terrible as to be defined only by its inability to offer any resistance, any challenge whatsoever, this inability so pronounced as to signify lifelessness.

  I stopped writing poetry eventually, not because I came around to Lundy’s feelings on the matter but because it was too difficult. I retained some personal claims on it, however, such as when a few years after college I stated aloud to my friends as we drank away our sorrows as lonely young men that all I wanted from life was to hook up with a poet with big tits.

  “Is that so much to ask? Just a poet with big tits?”

  All your dreams will come true. Yes, all your dreams will come true, but you’ll still be you in the middle of them. The last woman I ever had sex with before meeting my wife was a poet with big tits. We met while I was in retreat from my lonely city life. I was back at the college where I’d been the backup to the backup forwards, now working as an adjunct professor. I was thirty, which seemed old at the time. I had an apartment on Route 100 with no blinds on the windows, a mattress, a card table, and two plastic lawn chairs. I was like someone prepared to flee in the dead of night, but from what, and to where? We weren’t together very long, me and the poet with big tits. For one thing, our chemistry was off, which manifested most clearly when we had sex. Except for one time at the very end, I came almost instantly.

  “You’re just so hot, I guess,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  We went out to dinner one night and drank wine, and as she was driving us home in her little blue pickup truck the police stopped us. She failed a Breathalyzer. I had recently gotten my driver’s license—finally—and felt a glowing, nearly ecstatic sense of utility when the cop said that he’d let the whole thing go if I just drove the rest of the way home. A few weeks earlier I wouldn’t have been able to take the wheel. I would have had to say that I didn’t have a license.

  My satisfied feeling of being a capable, fully vested member of society was brief, but for a moment it was there. I was at the wheel, a poet with big tits in the seat beside me. We were singing along to the radio, which was playing an old rap hit, “White Lines,” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. We were sailing down a long dark road, the sky full of stars.

  “Dang dang diggety dang de dang!” we sang.

  There was some motion to our left. Limbs, antlers, dark flashing eyes. I swerved a little and felt a minor, glancing clatter.

  “Oh God no,” the drunk poet whispered.

  “He’s okay,” I assured her. I pulled the truck over and looked back to see the deer lying on the road. His antlered head was flailing around. He was still alive. But by the time we got back to him he was dead.

  We fucked for the last time that night. We were lit by a streetlamp through my unblinded windows. For once I lasted. She wasn’t as into it as I was. Every once in a while a car tore by. She was shaken by what had happened. I didn’t want it to matter.

  S

  Sasser, Mackey

  I didn’t want to matter. So I was in the passenger seat, and Abby drove, her big belly almost touching the wheel. This was back when Abby was several months pregnant with Jack. We were driving downtown to a lawyer’s office to finalize the purchase of our condo. By then she should have been ushered protectively to the passenger seat or its equivalent in all matters, but I hated driving, especially if I didn’t know the exact details of how things would go at the end of the drive. Would I have to swerve around looking for a parking garage? Would I have to parallel park? The former troubled me because I hated having to make snap decisions in the middle of traffic, but the latter caused me a deeper level of stress altogether. I pictured myself swinging out too wide, or swinging in too narrowly, blocking the street, pedestrians laughing, inconvenienced drivers behind me raging, my wife in the passenger seat making things worse somehow by merely explaining what needed to be done, her directions powerless over my unstoppable bungling of this simple everyday task. For weeks Abby had driven to most of the appointments with our real estate agent, but my need to be the passenger didn’t stop there. Abby made the necessary phone calls, found a mortgage guy, an inspection guy, a lawyer, and so forth, in all ways making the purchase of our first home happen. She set up the appointment with the lawyer to sign the papers. All I needed to do was ride along and write my name.

  But it turned out the amount of signatures needed was staggering. Because it seemed vital that the signature match the official identification I had brought to the signing, I did a version of my signature that used my full first name. I never signed my name this way, “Joshua.” I had rarely answered to that name. The only people who ever called me Joshua were my father, once in a while, and Morty, the boss at the liquor store where I worked throughout my twenties.

  “Be good to yourself, Joshua,” Morty said to me more than once through all those years when my self-pummeling tendencies were at their worst. The tenderness I felt when hearing my full name wasn’t altogether welcome. Is it possible to feel simultaneously loved and estranged?

  “Hello, Joshua,” my father used to say to me when I was a kid. This greeting, uttered whenever he rode a bus to our house for visits, joined the list of things underscoring my father’s distance from my everyday life: He didn’t know anything about the encyclopedia of sports roiling in my head; he couldn’t throw a baseball; he used my full name in greeting. For a while he had use of a little car, a VW Bug, to facilitate his visits, but he got rid of it not long after going into a 360-degree spin on the highway in the snow with my brother and me in the car. A lifelong city dweller, he was never at ease with any of the tasks needed to operate an automobile. Merging into traffic, yielding, getting gas. Parking.

  At the lawyer’s office things started out okay but got weird as the tonnage of documents piled up. I started to lose control of my signature. The W began growing extra humps. The lowercase i started morphing into an uppercase I. I watched as each signature worsened, going from gibberish to a scribble to an electroencephalograph record of a nightmare. My body was seizing up, constricting, as if I suddenly had to parallel park, but worse, because it was such a simple act. I had to stop.

  “What’s the matter?” Abby asked.

  “I can’t,” I said. That word again, can’t. I held up the pen.

  Some athletes have been similarly stricken with the sudden chronic inability to do simple tasks. Steve Blass was one of the top pitchers in the National League in 1972, finishing second in the Cy Young–award voting, and then in 1973 he lost the ability to throw the ball over the plate. While compiling an atrocious 9.85 ERA, Blass walked exactly as many men in 89 innings as he’d walked the year before in 250 innings, uncorked nine wild pitches, and despite the urgent truncation of his workload, sti
ll led the league in hits batsmen. His difficulties ended his career and established a new name for the struggle of pitchers undergoing similar inexplicable issues: Steve Blass Disease. A decade later this malady was joined by another, Steve Sax Syndrome, named for a second baseman who, just after winning the National League Rookie of the Year award, became unable, on routine plays, to make accurate throws to first base. Sax eventually made a recovery from a bout with his own syndrome, but another later second baseman, Chuck Knoblauch, the season after winning a Gold Glove award, developed a similar problem on routine throws, his arm suddenly unruly as an unmanned fire hose, the most famous of his misfires beaning broadcaster Keith Olbermann’s mother in the stands. The all-star was demoted from regular infielder, briefly logging time as a part-time outfielder and designated hitter before being shunted out of baseball altogether.