Ash Wednesday

by Ethan Hawke

  “You know, I don’t care, right, Jimmy? I mean, do you realize that this conversation is of absolutely zero interest to me?”

  “No, no, no,” he said. “Don’t be mean. You do care, I know you do.” The look in his eyes was earnest and sincere. That boy had upset him, but he was going to go on simply to prove otherwise. He was also convinced that deep down these ramblings held some level of interest for me.

  “I woke up on the morning of Game Seven—blink!—my body stinging with electricity. I went outside and shot some baskets to try and calm down. I felt if I could compose myself then they could.”

  “They?” I asked.

  “The team, the Knicks. I had this . . . uh . . . foreshadowing ritual where if I could make my first seven baskets in a row, the Knicks never lost. And that morning—ding, ding, ding—I drained ’em all. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “How old were you?” I sat back down.

  “I was twenty-four, but you have to understand that I’m not telling you about some random game, I’m telling you a fable, a parable, all right?” He looked at me hard from underneath his dark black eyebrows. “These sonsabitches taught me about empathy, compassion, integrity, and the real meaning of dignity. I’m telling you the truth now; this was only a little while after the death of my old man, OK? And this game taught me more about the real nature of prayer than anybody in the church ever could. I was so amped up, with my head spinning around in delirium about this game, that I ended up going to church to calm down. No shit. I got down on my knees and prayed.

  “But then I thought, What the fuck am I praying for?”

  “For the Knicks to win, right?” I asked, listening to him, trying to understand what he was really telling me.

  “Yeah, but I’m smart enough to know that some other shmuck must be praying for Houston to win, right? There’s a lot of people in Houston. Why should God choose me over this guy?”

  “Jimmy, you’re nuts. You realize that?” I was still anxious that the kid would come back with his money.

  “I’m kind of kidding and I’m kind of serious,” he said with a wink, looking like himself again. “I should just pray for the best man to win, or for everyone to do the best that they can, or for no one to get hurt. But I want my guys to win so badly I can’t even think straight, so I say, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, please watch over the New York Knicks. Let them blast those fuckin’ bastard Houston Rockets to hell! Let John Starks rain in three-pointers for forty days and forty nights. Let the common folk of America sit around their dinner tables and know deep in their hearts that sometimes the ordinary man can rise above the sludge of his environment and kiss the greatness set aside for kings. Let him win so the rest of us, every motherfucker stackin’ cans in the Piggly Wiggly, can dream. O sweet Mary, hear my prayer.’” Jimmy was standing in the middle of the court like a TV evangelist.

  I couldn’t help asking. “Did they win?”

  “At the start of the game, the Houston crowd was so raucous they were already wearing their HOUSTON ROCKETS WORLD CHAMPIONS T-shirts.” He started dribbling again, and I knew it had been a mistake to show any interest.

  “Please don’t give me a play-by-play coverage of the game,” I said.

  Jimmy unveiled a giant toothy, gummy grin. “Houston jumped out to an early lead, but the boys hung tight—not letting the game slip away.”

  One thing I’ve noticed in young couples is that the boys often seem to do the majority of the talking, rambling on, wanting everyone to listen to them, to hear them, to acknowledge them; and then in older couples the gentleman often sits silent with a distant look in his eyes as the woman chatters on like rain falling. At what age, I wondered, does the switch take place?

  “The team needed Starks to step it up and find his groove. At one point he missed three shots in a row: clang, clang, clang.” Jimmy shot up a ball that hit the front of the rim hard, bounced off the court, and went into the grass. Chasing after it, he kept right on speaking. “The ball kept going to him as the team waited for him to rekindle that spark that’d lit the way all season. He would find his shot: he had to.”

  I looked down at my engagement ring, trying to see only the intent behind it, but it was challenging not to focus on how ugly it was. My man had zero taste. He should’ve asked me to go pick it out with him. He’d said it was hand-crafted by a local artist, but it looked more like it was made by a teenager in metal shop. I tried it on different fingers, imagining my hand old, bony, spotted, and frail with this ring still drooping off it. I wished it was prettier; it didn’t fit perfectly on any finger.

  “Again and again Starks would carefully place his toes on the three-point line, as he always does, and let the ball fly, looking for that magic shazam.” Jimmy tossed another shot up from almost the middle of the court. “And still, brick.” The ball missed the basket, banging hard against the backboard. Jimmy sprinted over and caught it before it touched the ground. “Still, his teammates and the coach believed in him, long after everyone else had stopped. They knew the heart of John Starks would not fail.”

  I watched the father of my child chattering away at me and wondered which of us would outlive the other. I would, of course. I wondered if we would be buried together. The thought stopped my blood: I pictured our two names on one headstone. I didn’t want to get married, no way. I wanted my own headstone.

  “Starks’s eyes burned red. You could see how bright they were from the top of the stadium. I think I can, I think I can . . . he was saying to himself, looking for that miracle play that’d turn the tide of defeat, the moment that would live on forever in highlight reels and little boys’ minds. Grandpa would see a picture of Starks come on the television as they hung his number up in the rafters of Madison Square Garden and as John Starks was inducted into the Hall of Fame, and Gramps would say, ‘There’s a winner! See, kids, the meek shall inherit the earth.’”

  I couldn’t help it, a part of me viewed marriage as putting blinders on a horse and racing toward the finish line of death. Also, I was wondering what happens when the sex life goes. I decided I’d demand we make love once a day whether we wanted to or not.

  “But that’s not what happened.” Jimmy paused dramatically and went on in a subdued voice. “At the end of the night John Starks slunk away into a jubilant Houston crowd completely unnoticed, his eyes blood-red and blurry with agony, looking up to heaven. The Knicks lost, and he finished the night having made only two shots and missing fifteen.”

  I was staring at Jimmy talking. He was very handsome, with a well-shaped head that looks good with the short military haircut. I imagined I could feel his DNA regenerating inside me. I was getting so fat. My tits were swelling. Goddamn, I hoped my tits wouldn’t be ruined. I don’t like aging. The skin around my fingers wasn’t as good and tight as it used to be. I have the same problem around my toes. My nails used to be difficult to cut they were so thick and hard; now they’re verging on wispy. Aging gracefully is such a big goal. When I was little I didn’t think I was vain, but now I can see how hard it’s going to be when I lose my looks. Already I can see the pores on my face and the start of a giant crease between my eyes.

  “Random guy, comes up to me the next day, says, ‘Did you hear? John Starks tried to shoot himself?’ I’m like, No fuckin’ way! ‘Yeah,’ the guys says, ‘only he missed. Ha-ha-ha!’

  “So I go back to the church, to Mother Mary, and I ask, Why is there no justice? Why is life unfair? Why does Michael Jordan get to win so much and others not at all? I understand that a basketball game is not as crushingly complex as, say, an issue like disease or starvation, but I also understand that things are not as different as they seem, and inside a fully examined game of basketball is the answer to how you fix a combustion engine; you know what I’m saying?” His eyes were seeking affirmation. “Sitting there, in that church, looking up at that same image of Mary that I’d gazed at so full of hope only the day before
, I realized that prayers are left unanswered for a reason. And that reason is: We have no inkling of what is good for us.”

  Sometimes it’s so obvious Jimmy is an only child. When he goes off talking like this I imagine his mother just gooing and gaahing, encouraging him. I asked him once if I reminded him of his mother. I know I do. I’ve seen her pictures and I must, but he got all uptight, like admitting it would be some kind of taboo sexual thing. He definitely reminds me of my dad. They both have big oversized hands and a space between their two front teeth. Also, the way they both kind of half run, half walk, when they’re in a hurry; their shoulders wriggle the same.

  “Hakeem ‘the Dream’ Olajuwon is the big superstar for the Houston Rockets, right?” he continued. I nodded my head as if I understood what he was talking about.

  “Winning that championship might be the worst thing that ever happened to him. It’s possible. If he doesn’t handle it right, gets a swollen head, starts screwing around, his wife takes the kids back to fuckin’ Kenya or wherever he’s from. He develops a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-day coke habit that leaves him dead in a whorehouse outside of Philadelphia with his precious championship ring being melted down by some local pawnshop owner.”

  I was trying to listen, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married. Making vows about tomorrow seemed to be uselessly tempting fate. You could make vows of intent, but promising anything further about an unknown variable like the future seemed arrogant. The world has its ways, its nasty tricksy ways, to bring you to your knees and spin everything you hold true into a bald-faced lie.

  “John Starks might have become a great man that day of his seeming humiliation. He could have realized that grace, integrity, and hard work are their own reward. It’s easy to be gracious, tolerant, and accepting and say Everyone is equal and I wish everybody well when you get everything you want. But the real challenge is to still be this way when you don’t get what you want. Gratitude in the face of loss or suffering—now, that’s a man or a woman who knows the courage of their convictions. Is Michael Jordan a great basketball player? Yes. Is he my hero? No. I don’t want to idolize somebody because he wins. I don’t win. Look at me, man, I’m how you spell disappointment. I thought I was gonna be great like Jack Kennedy, you know? Somebody in cool important places doin’ all kinds of fantabulous things. Mr. Merrill Lynch. Instead I’m, like, Mr. Mediocrity.”

  I shook my head at him. I wasn’t thinking about basketball.

  If we could just love each other and live in truth as much as possible and not act out some idea of what a relationship is supposed to be. To not lie—at all. To be able to sit down, look each other in the eye, and speak our minds freely. To maintain a perspective on the other and not wholly judge him in context to yourself. I don’t want somebody to stay with me just ’cause he promised to do so eighteen years ago or whatever. He should stay with me because he wants to, because he loves me and believes that being with me is what he needs most deeply. An awake, conscious life, that’s all I really desired.

  “Somebody like that kid”—Jimmy was still talking, pointing across the field toward the housing development the young punk had disappeared into—“might look at me and think, What a nobody, but then they’ll see you and they’ll see our love and our soon-to-be scoobie baby crawling around, and if they got a brain in their noggin they’ll say, ‘That Heartsock, he’s got something on the ball.’ And who knows, maybe the worst thing that ever happened to me—you know, my dad’s death . . . my dad’s suicide”—he corrected himself—“made me available to show up and love you, or maybe it kindled or woke something inside me that makes me attractive to you in some way.”

  “You think I find you attractive?” I asked. I’d started listening. His breath was steaming out of his mouth.

  “I’m just saying we don’t know what’s good for us. I prayed my everlivin’ guts out in the church right over that hill for Shannon Macquarrie and I to be together forever. Shannon had her foot amputated recently because her circulation was so demolished from years of heroin abuse—you get it?”

  “So John Starks taught you acceptance?” I said, still watching Jimmy. I love the way he moves through space, languid, like a boxer warming up.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “You know what Starks said when they traded him away a couple years later? Some reporter guy asked him if he regretted anything, and he said, ‘Yeah, I regret not winning New York a championship. I regret going two of seventeen that Game Seven, but I hope if I can give the fans anything it would be the joy of the unexpected, and if they ever believe they can’t sink any lower they’ll think of me and know it’s possible to go on.’”

  “I want to talk about our wedding, Jim,” I said, inching my way toward a different conversation.

  “You do wanna marry me, don’t you, Christy?”

  Out from behind the pool house, tramping aggressively over the grass, came that little twerp and his buddy. This time with two more friends, the four of them all moving toward us at a quick clip. We could hear them cackling and cursing.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “I hate that kid. He creeps me out.”

  “No, no, no, hold on a second,” Jimmy mumbled, looking out.

  The kid shouted over the barren damp field, still wearing his Michigan State T-shirt, “You said you want to play me for a hundred bucks!” His voice sounded as if it had changed two days ago. “Maybe you should take out a loan,” he added, as he arrived at the playground, throwing down a pile of five twenties at the center of the court, like he thought he was an action hero.

  “What the fuck is your hang-up, kid? Is your dad the Pop Warner coach or something?”

  “Jimmy, let’s get out of here.” I stood up.

  “You ain’t got the money, just say so.” The kid was standing cockeyed, one shoulder much higher than the other.

  “I can’t take money off a child.” Jim turned back to me, shaking his head.

  “Fuck you. I’ll beat you straight up.”

  “You gotta be careful with that word.” Jim snapped around and walked deliberately over to the boy. “Fuck you is a big word.” He stood only a few inches taller than the kid.

  “Fuck you is two words,” the boy said, staring straight up into Jimmy’s eyes while his friends tittered with nervous pleasure.

  “Jim, this kid obviously has a problem. Please drive me out of here,” I said, trying to give him an out.

  “You’re lucky I got better things to do, shmuckface.” Jimmy dismissed the boy and turned to walk away.

  “Fuck you! You said you’d play me for a hundred bucks; now you’re gonna chicken out?” The kid was so aggressive it made my stomach hurt. It amazed me how a day could be going one direction and the wind could just blow everything backward.

  “When I win I’m gonna take your money, wipe my ass with it, and flush it down the toilet, you understand that?” Jimmy said, standing dead still in the middle of the court.

  “Jimmy, let’s go,” I called out impatiently.

  “You keep talking, but I don’t see you laying down the cash.”

  “You’re a fuckin’ arrogant little twerp, you know that?”

  “Jimmy, don’t do this,” I said again.

  “Let’s see the jack. Or maybe you want to borrow it from her?” The kid’s eyes were blue like an exploding constellation.

  “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred.” Jimmy flipped out his wallet and threw the money on the ground. “Come on, wiseass, let’s run it.” He picked up both piles of money and set them on the picnic table beside me with a rock on top to weight them down.

  “Don’t do this,” I whispered.

  “I have to, now,” he said.

  “I’m gonna get in the car.”

  “Baby, please stay.”

  “I’m not going to watch you get goaded into some ridiculous game.”

  “I can’t tell you why,
but this is important,” he said.

  “No, Jimmy, that’s the thing; it’s not important.”

  “I’m gonna win,” he muttered, tying the laces of his boots tight.

  “I don’t care if you win, I care if you’re an idiot.” I tried to get him to look at me. “In what way is this going to turn out well? Use your head. He’s a child.”

  “Please stay and watch; it is important,” he repeated. He looked at me, his eyes cold and faraway, and then turned around and walked onto the court. “Come on, motherfucker, shoot for ball, you little faggot.”

  “Kick his ass, Jamie!” His friends were standing at the edge of the court cheering him on. Jamie, I thought. This kid’s name is Jamie.

  “Twos and threes to twenty-one,” Jamie said.

  “Fuck that, homo, ones to eleven or no deal.” Jimmy has a temper—I’ve seen it before—and this kid had lit it.

  “You scared?” the punk said, trying to rile Jimmy even more.

  “Of what?” Jimmy said, throwing the ball far too hard at the kid’s head. “Shoot for ball, faggot.”

  I could see what bothered Jimmy most was that this kid wasn’t afraid of him.

  “By two?” the kid asked, catching the ball a fraction of a second before it shattered his nose. He wasn’t even slightly disoriented by Jimmy’s incredibly aggressive stance.

  “Straight up,” Jimmy said.

  The kid stepped back and shot the ball. It went high up in the air and fell cleanly through the basket, barely moving the chain mesh netting. In that moment I felt Jimmy would lose, and I was both petrified and angry at how miserable the rest of the day would be.

  “Your ball,” Jimmy said, throwing it back at the kid. “Check it up.”

  “I’m not going to watch, this is so stupid,” I said loudly, and turned around without looking back. As I stepped into the car I heard the kid’s friends cheer as he scored the first basket. I slammed the door, turned the radio up to a deafening roar, and switched all the old levers, trying to muster something from the heat. I couldn’t watch. I directed my eyes in the opposite direction over the graveyard and up into the large gray expanse of sky. On a telephone wire, two blackbirds tucked their necks into the warmth of their own feathered chests and looked off in my direction. With the music cranked up, I couldn’t hear any of the game shenanigans. Jimmy was still such a child. I could never marry him. What was I thinking? I stared at the two birds, thinking of Jimmy’s ninth-grade school photo, which I’d found once in his apartment. He had freshly washed sparkling-clean hair down to his shoulders, parted in the middle and feathered back out of his face; on his chest was a Black Sabbath T-shirt; and on his face was the sweetest smile. He was then about the age of this kid Jamie. The blackbirds flew away. I couldn’t see where they went.