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Waiting on Deck

by Jay Lesandrini

I’m kneeling in the on-deck circle with two outs in the ninth, and we’re losing again. Losing by a lot, and all I want is one more at bat. Eighteen years of playing baseball is coming down to this — one more chance to stand in the batter’s box. The sun is dipping behind the trees in left field, and what had been a warm Sunday afternoon in late April has become something much colder. If I were sitting in the dugout with two or three guys waiting ahead of me to hit, I’d already be past this. I’d be thinking about getting back to my off-campus apartment and drinking a cold beer, or I’d be thinking that I still have to read The American for my Lit final next week. I’ve been putting it off all semester. I hate Henry James.

Instead, I’m here in the on-deck circle and I reach down, grab the pine-tar rag, tacky the bat handle with optimism. The batter takes ball one. I shout at him. Tell him to make the pitcher work. Suggest to him that the pitcher’s getting tired. Urge him to make sure it’s a strike before he swings. But I know he’s not listening. And I’m not really talking to him, anyway. I’m talking to the pitcher. I want to get inside this guy’s head. I want him to be thinking about me instead of the batter. He knows the game is over. He knows he’s got a long bus ride home and wants to get started as soon as possible.

He throws a breaking ball that freezes the batter, and looks low and away to me. The umpire calls a strike. It’s getting cold out here for him too.

I look into the visitor’s dugout and they are all laughing at the call. They start to bag up their equipment. Everyone wants the game to end except for me — and the guy in the batter’s box. The pitcher reaches back and brings the high hard stuff, and I can see the batter’s eyes turn into saucers. There’s something about a high fastball that makes you want to take a bite of that grapefruit as it dances up to the plate.

A swing and a miss. The count is one and two, and I know that the pitcher’s coming back with another high fastball. I give the batter the benefit of my wisdom, but he still isn’t listening. The pitch is head high, right down central and I see that moment of hesitation in the batter’s knees right before his bat comes forward. I’m already walking back toward the dugout when I hear the slight ping of cowhide glancing off aluminum, and the hopeful chink of the ball hitting the fence behind us. There’s still a chance for one more at bat.

I pick up the pine tar rag and stand there wringing it in my hands like a widow at a wake. I think about the afternoon when I was four years old and my mother stood behind me and shaped my fingers onto a bat handle for the first time. I think about the first game I played in the 12-year-old league when I was only nine, and how I was so scared that I bunted with the bases loaded. I think about all the nights after practice in high school waiting for the city bus to take me home, while my friend’s parents picked them up. I think about passing up the opportunity to go to Marquette because they didn’t have a baseball team, and about the day my high school coach told me that Butler University was offering me a scholarship. It all comes down to this.

It comes down to me waiting in the on-deck circle, hoping the guy at the plate, a junior who still has another year to play, will find his way on base and give me one last opportunity to hit a baseball. There is nothing in the balance. No record to be set. No game to be won to extend a season. This is it.

Eighteen years of playing baseball and I could never hit a slider. I could never pick up that tight rotation of the seams in time to recognize the pitch… until now. I see the ball leave the pitcher’s hand and watch the batter swing at a pitch that would strike me out.

The instant that the ball comes off his bat, I imagine the pitcher being undressed like Charlie Brown as the ball whizzes by his head. Then I hear the snap of cowhide on leather. Charlie Brown isn’t pitching today.

I feel the weight of 18 years of baseball drop in my stomach, and I kneel down to catch my breath, using the bat as a cane to keep me upright. On his way to the dugout the batter pats me on the back and tells me that he’s sorry, and I know that he really means it.

As I think back now, 20 some years later, I don’t remember what happened during the last at bat of my baseball career, I only remember waiting in the on deck circle hoping that it would never end.

Jay Lesandrini holds an MFA in creating writing from Butler University. His publications include Bluestem, Booth, Caesura, Mythic Indy, Punchnel’s, and Sport Literate. His essay “Waiting on Deck,” won our 2010 essay contest and was also named a notable essay in the Best American Sports Writing 2011. He lives in Carmel, Indiana, and is the Director of Communications and Marketing at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus, where he also teaches writing.

SL contest history

Over nearly 30 years in print, we have held a number of essay and poetry contests. On the essay front, more often than not, we pick an SL veteran, sometimes even a previous contest winner, to serve as a guest judge, picking his or her favorite from a short list of anonymous finalists.

We do not have a contest in the works for 2023. In 2022, Virginia Ottley Craighill was the guest judge on a “social justice contest.” Frank Van Zant, our longtime poetry editor, crowned the champion poet. Our two winners: Flavian Mark Lupinetti, for his poem “Wrestling Lake Burn,” and Sydney Lea, for his essay “The Cardinal, the Cops, and the Say-Hey Kid.” Lea’s essay, by the way, earned a notable nod in The Best American Essays 2023.

Some recent contest winners include the following.

• Hal Ackerman, “Concrete Charlie and the Golden Boy” (a “sport short”)
• Dave Fromm, “Tool Town Left to Its Own Devices“
• Matt Hohner, “Mob Hit at the Ark Ramp“

Meat Squad

by Peter Stine

I was relaxing in my brother’s kitchen over in Palmer Woods, waiting for him to return from the hospital, when Jack came in from a night class down at Wayne State. Last weekend he’d shaved his head again to make the hair grow back thicker. He sighed heavily and took a place at the table under a large round Faygo clock that glowed purple on the wall.

“Peter, I need a change, and not the minor things. New job, new pussy, the whole thing across the board.”
My sister-in-law walked in with a pile of laundry. “Hi, Jack. How was teaching tonight?”
“Betsy, I walk in there and they haven’t put the chairs around in a circle. Why do I have to ask them every class to put the chairs in a circle? I mean I’m a consistent person.”
Betsy chuckled and went to the cabinet to get some chips. I rolled a couple joints and placed them in the middle of the table. “This is what they would have preferred down at the soup kitchen today.”
“How’s that article coming?” she asked. “For Metropolitan Detroit, right?”
“Sister Mary Watson is a cool lady, Bets. She runs a remarkable shelter. I just hope to draw a little more attention and money her way.”

At that moment Pat arrived back from the hospital. Still thin as a rail after Vietnam, he grabbed a Lowenbrau and joined us at the table. His face was red from exertion.
“Patrick . . .” Jack said, reaching for a joint. “How’s it going?”
“A little busy in the ER,” he said, without elaboration, that mysteriously benign blankness on his face. “There was some basketball practice afterwards. Henry Ford has a team, mostly blacks from the ER. For a completely useless team member, I have quite a following.”

We passed the joint around, and talk meandered from the Boy Scouts to past summer jobs to what we might do with a videotape of Ronald Reagan butt-fucking a chimp, if we uncovered one. The three of us had been meeting regularly for mid-week bull sessions for a year now. This night Pat led us back to sports and some memories of his career as a half-miler in high school.

“I remember the Flint meet best,” he began. “I ran the first 440 in sixty, coasted the next 220, and then waited to see what I had left. Dad had the movie camera rolling. With about a hundred yards to go I started my kick. You knew it was time because these guys with long strides all around me were stretching it out, pulling away. But I had nothing left. Zilch. You feel the legs go rubbery, the vision blurs, and your body stiffens into some hysterical hunchback gasping for air. Your teammates are no help, standing along the track waving towels at you, yelling at you to pump your arms, as more runners are passing you, now pouring over the finish line, the camera recording all . . . On the ride home everybody’s horsing around, while I’m in the back of the bus, a wet towel over my head, puking my cookies into a pail . . . Christ, I remember after the Clio meet I went blind, simply lost my vision for half an hour.”

Maybe it was just dope profundity, but it struck me sitting there that over time jock humiliations like Pat’s became silver trophies, far more precious than memories of victory. It is the losing that unites us. “Buzz, as I remember you had some problems at the Huron Relays too.”

“Yeah, that was my first race on an indoor track, a medley relay, in Ypsilanti. I remember Jim Cooley ran the first 220 and handed me the baton with a thirty-yard lead. I jumped out and ran, entirely alone, just the tic-tic-tic of my shoes on the track. I lost a little ground by the second lap, but was still way ahead. I was really flying. But on the third lap, I went into the curve under the balcony in first place, and came out of the turn in fifth! Teammates on the infield were screaming and waving at me. I had run the whole race in my outside lane . . . It never occurred to me to merge.”

“You were taught as a kid to color inside the lines,” I reminded him. “So what do you expect?”

Jack popped a third of a joint in his mouth, and then leaned back, rubbing his shaven head.

“Pat, we had a defensive football coach in high school who believed that the way you proved you had guts was by spear-tackling, with your head. But at 130 pounds I didn’t want any of that. I remember once I went down to cover a kickoff and cut through traffic to the middle of the field, doing a good job of avoiding people. Suddenly there was a parting of bodies and a guy with the ball was galloping straight toward me. We ran full speed into each other in a straight-up position. I fell back and down as a knee went squarely into my nuts. Then I rolled over and passed out . . .”

“Jack . . . ” Betsy groaned, back at the sink.

“After that I made it clear to the coach: no defense. But it seemed to follow me. In lacrosse, I think it was a Rutgers-Princeton game, I got into an even worse collision. That was enough. I got up and just walked off the field, some guy clubbing me with a lacrosse stick all the way to the sidelines . . .”

Pat put a helmet of hands over his head in sympathy.

“Jack,” he said, “that’s what freshman football at Rumson High in New Jersey was like with my brother at quarterback. The first play of any game Peter would always call my number, 23-halfback dive, you know, just to feel out the defensive line.  And every fucking time I would get creamed, swallowed up in a grunting pile of bodies and choking dust. To this day I remember no pain, just stars, like in the cartoons.”

“Jack, why is he complaining? This was the days of standard T-formation football. Remember that? The end-run option was worse for Patrick. I’d get in trouble, after a few ineffectual fakes on the defensive end, and had to lateral to him as the secondary came charging in full speed. Right as my brother grabbed the ball, about eye level, they’d run his ass over.”

“Then they’d grab my jersey and shoulder pads and whirl me into the yardsticks.”

“You guys,” Betsy said. “These experiences are so violent.”

“Self-inflicted wounds,” Jack said with fatuous solemnity. “Self-inflicted wounds.”

“Look here, Bets.” I pulled up the front of my alligator pullover and pointed to a smooth disc of skin the size of a dime in the middle of my breastbone. “Our locker room at Rumson was about as ventilated as a dungeon. Everything stank. Shoulder pads were always caked with mud or soaked with sweat, rank and stiffening. I was fourteen with acne all over my shoulders, back and chest, and pulling on that equipment was like feeding a fire. So one day I’m sitting on a bench in front of my locker and pop this huge inflamed pimple. I keep pressing the skin around it until there’s a stream of yellow pus running down to my stomach, pooling at my hip, then, no lie, running down the inside of my thigh until it reached my knee! When I wiped away the pus there was a wound in my chest that looked like a bullet hole.”

“That was our assignment on the meat squad,” my brother said, redirecting the conversation. “We were road kill for the varsity during practices. Freshmen or sophomores, totally outsized, in worn-out equipment, yellow tank tops, unnumbered jerseys, battered cleats. Our heads poked out of those oversized shoulder pads like wary turtles… We were pitiful.”

“No,” I said, “we were sacrificial… ”

“I wised up about meat squads long before my brother,” Pat said. “He’s still on the meat squad. After that freshman year I switched to golf.”

***

Elizabeth and our son Alex were asleep when I returned home that night. One remark from the bull session kept sticking in my mind. He’s still on the meat squad. It was therapeutic to linger a while on the sofa, my Labrador beside me, and go back 20-odd years to those first two seasons of football at Rumson High.  How my gut used to fill up with anxiety each day as last period ticked down in study hall. Whether rain or fall sunlight was at the tall auditorium windows, I felt the lassitude of someone about to be ordered to walk in formation across open terrain toward woods alive with the crack of rifle fire. Every afternoon, I watched two rows below me our starting senior guard, a muscular pockmarked gnome named Earl Scholl, hold a cigarette lighter to the seat in front of him and char the wood with fierce concentration. He was just getting ready for practice. Up front the faculty proctor seemed too distracted trying to locate who was arcing pennies high into the air to notice Earl’s work. When the pennies came down with a metallic clank around the auditorium, like toy grenades, a ripple of laughter went up. Anything was possible, even permissible. When the final bell rang, while students flooded out of noisy corridors into airy freedom, I would file down to the locker room.

This was the late Fifties and locker rooms were a logical command post for preparing young American boys to be fed into the meat grinder of an inevitable war with Soviet Russia. They were cramped, filled with a gray din, like a crowded holding cell in some county jail. Despite the chorus of curses and jokes, slamming metal doors, the mood was somber among the meat squad. I would file out with the others into the slant light of afternoon, cleats clicking on the asphalt as we walked across a parking lot to the practice field. The distant goalposts stuck into the sky like lances. There the team loitered on a grassy knoll to await the arrival of Coach Rosotti. The meat squad stayed apart, like orphans. I remember how the woods beyond the field stood silent and remote, autumn leaves a lovely quilt of red and yellow, almost mystical, having nothing to do with football.

Memories of the meat squad kept surfacing in my mind, causing a quick, unexpected anxiety. I got up to pour myself a glass of bourbon, and then went back to the sofa.

When practice started, the team operated as a unit, stretching, doing jumping jacks, running laps, going though formational drills. It was like a wholesome boot camp. But soon the drills became violent. There were no facemasks on the helmets then, and I dreaded in particular the tackling drill. Two dummies were set up about four yards apart, and two lines faced each other on either side of the opening. At the sound of the whistle, a player at the head of one line ran with the football between the dummies. The player at the head of the other line did a somersault and met the charging runner in the opening. One afternoon I came out of a somersault late and rose up to catch a knee square in the face. I got up groggy and went to the back of the other line, where Mr. Early, the high school principal, who had stopped by to watch practice, started talking to me long enough to recognize I was standing up but out cold. I had a cracked cheekbone and concussion, and the next two days were a permanent hole in my memory. But meat was not expected to think.

In the second half of practice the meat squad scrimmaged the varsity. On offense I played the quarterback of the next opponent, Matawan or Point Pleasant, and whether handing off to a running back, running the option, or dropping back to pass, I was leveled. Every play was the same play: the signal count, then soft crunch of shoulder pads, confused yells and grunts, then contact like the rush of a train, a distant whistle, and the quiet weight of bodies piled on top of me. It wasn’t much different on defense, where I played cornerback. Billy Lewis, with a gang of blockers, was always breaking through a giant hole in the line and stampeding toward me. Maybe 5-10 and 140 pounds at the time, I just toppled over backwards and reached up to grab feet and legs as they ran over my body. Scrimmage offered the meat squad the pure experience of enduring blows.

When it grew dark, the team would huddle around the coaches for strategy sessions, the meat squad on the margins, a ghostly irrelevance now. But sometimes we were summoned to take more. Once, when the varsity was ordered back on the field to return kickoffs, I jogged down in coverage and was blind-sided by John Kunce, our best lineman and 240 pounds. I lay on my back in the torn grass, never wanting to move, feeling the relief of the dead. When I opened my eyes, there was the towering figure of Coach Rosotti staring down at me. On his mafia face was a look of the most exquisite compassion. John was staring down as well, innocent and uncomprehending. It was the closest I have ever come to being welcomed into heaven.

Once practice was over, back in the locker room, all the pain was replaced by the deepest sense of solidarity I had known. For the meat squad, the challenge had been met and we were still alive. Even the varsity players seemed to treat us like comrades-in-arms. The shower room, with its broken nozzles, chipped tiles, billows of steam, was abuzz with jokes and horseplay. Earl stood under a shower talking with the team captain, Paul Dobrowski, a James Dean look-a-like whose attentions kept the fawning lineman from realizing that the captain was pissing on his leg. For the meat squad, this was a restoration of justice. When he looked down, Earl jumped back, went berserk, and everyone broke up. We were inside the magic circle.

At the varsity games on Saturday afternoons, I recorded all the plays on a clipboard from the sidelines. I also tended to the injured. When Bobby Clark went down with a torn-up knee against Red Bank Catholic, I was a crutch, helping him to the bench, where he wept in pain in a litter of plastic cups, chewed orange rinds, and ultimate neglect. In a brutal away game against Sayreville, played on a field that storms had turned into a prairie of mud and standing water, I watched as our backup defensive end, Rob Hamilton, entered the game in the second half wearing a clean uniform – a splash of Technicolor in a world of indistinguishable brown shapes. But this was no mark of transcendence, rather an irresistible target for the Sayreville linemen. They jeered as Rob crouched into position. He came off the field a play later with his two upper front teeth knocked out. On the bus ride home, I sat next to him as he clamped his mouth into a blood-soaked towel.

I never played varsity football at Rumson High. My family moved to Michigan my junior year, where I quarterbacked another high school team, pretty well, until late in my senior season my career ended the way John Kunce started it – a blind-side hit after the whistle, blowing out my knee. But that seemed fated too. I was still on the meat squad. Nothing matched the existential edge of being aligned with a hopeless cause, the voluntary martyrdom of joining it, the complexity of surviving it. This was formative, and left me with an irrepressible, if distorted way of viewing events outside the chalk lines.

“I was an awful dope when I went into the last war,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. “I can remember just thinking that we were the home team and the Austrians were the visiting team.” This classical analogy between war and sport, a tragic confusion of realms, was drowned in carnage. A British captain, W. P. Nevill, led his men at the Somme attack by dribbling a soccer ball up to the German front lines. He was killed instantly, as was the spirit he embodied, by an engagement that cost the British 60,000 killed and wounded that day, for an advance of a hundred yards – the length of a football field. General Haig declared the battle a success.

The same sentiment resurfaced in my twenties, during the civil rights struggle in the South. Meridian, Selma, Orangeburg. I was drawn down there upon reading in Paris, in The International Herald Tribune, of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodwin, an early meat squad of the Congress of Racial Equality, being murdered by the Klan in Mississippi. The moral rightness of this struggle was self-evident, with a clear underdog, an engagement no more complicated than wanting to beat Sayerville. Only one injunction here: put your body on the line. Passive but resistant meat, something I understood. Beaten by whites in a Meridian bus station, only to be rescued by two black Vietnam vets returning home on leave. On the back steps of Brown’s chapel in Selma, keeping watch against marauding whites, an unloaded rifle on my lap. On the streets of Montgomery, arrested after being thrown through the window of a department store. On the sidewalks of Orangeburg, the first white guy to teach at South Carolina State College, blocked by a giant barber with a razor, a Klansman without his hood, eyes glinting from two cups of flab. None of this matched the terror of a Mississippi summer. But I suspect its leader, Bob Moses, put an end to the strategy when it became clear that someone on the meat squad, especially when white, became a far more useful symbol when dead. Yet what I remembered was the holy sense of community.

Over those years I watched the U.S. military in Vietnam prove less merciful with their “search and destroy” missions. Dump teenage grunts into the trap-laden, mine-filled, guerrilla-controlled jungle, and once they were ambushed, call in the napalm. An anti-war activist in the South, it was my shame to recognize only later that the grunts of Vietnam were the tragic meat squad of my generation: brothers sacrificed for nothing, 58,000 of them, including Earl Scholl, one way or another wasted, greased, iced, their poetic language for death a reminder of their physical mortality, an antidote to the Orwellian lies that justified the war. As I saw it, the war came to an end only when the nation woke up to white middle-class KIAs coming back in body bags, while the meat squads in-country mutinied through drugs and fragging. And as for the returning vets, twice as many committed suicide after the war as those killed in Vietnam itself, as if in loyalty to fallen comrades, as if survival guilt could be purged by death alone.

Afterwards a member of any meat squad carries off a dangerous respect for loss, for what could success possibly mean now? Lethargy settles in that in my case bordered on immobilization. An absence that is really loyalty to what has passed. Across the room from me, on the shelf of a bookcase was a framed picture of my mother. Last year I had leaned over her casket in Florida and kissed her cheek, firm and cold as marble. I had been away a year and a half, failed to reach her side in time. The same mother who, rightly fearful of meat squads, failed to see how her own open heart had inspired her children to volunteer. The same mother who, after dinner was over and my homework done, would apply sulfur compresses to the acne on my back and shoulders. The same mother who, every morning for the three months of the football season, was always there to help me out of bed I was so sore.

Peter Stine is the author of The Art of Survival (Rocky Shore Books), a collection of literary essays on Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. Regent Press published a collection of his short stories in 2019. His fiction, poetry, nonfiction and journalism have appeared in many publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Boulevard, The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Chicago Quarterly Review, Sport Literate, The New York Times, and Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. He is the editor of four books: The Sixties (Wayne State University Press), On Nature’s Terms (Texas A&M University Press), Sports in America (Wayne State University Press), and The Best of Witness: 1987-2007 (Michigan State University Press).

And In This Corner…

Michael Gawdzik

From time to time, coach made his fighters stay in a pushup position while he whacked them with a bamboo stick. “Humility is the way to greatness.” So he beat them to keep them humble, to have them know that, no matter how hard they trained, they would never be better than a bamboo stick.

I had come to South Korea to get as far from Indianapolis as possible. It was 2013, I was fresh out of college, looking for adventure, and had just spent months listening to old teachers complain incessantly about the state of Indiana education. It was a sermon I wanted no part in writing. What I wanted was to get rid of everything, leave the country, burn my couch, break up with my girlfriend, crush my bike, disembowel my bed, and stomp on all the frozen loaves of bread in my freezer. I wanted to get in a fight and see what I was made of.

So that’s what I did. I heaved my couch into a dumpster, tossed my bed in next to the couch, turned down teaching suburban kids on the south side of Indianapolis, and sold my bike for twenty bucks. I gave the bread to a buddy, broke up with my girlfriend, and headed for the airport. By day I would teach Korean children conversational English, and by night I would learn how to punch and take punches; I would learn how to box.

The gym was all hardwood floors crisscrossed with electrical tape. To the right of the door was the coach’s desk littered with forms, empty food containers, and a big green ledger filled with the progress of boxers. The place smelled like sweat, rubber, and rice. Mirrors hung on all of the walls and hand wraps and jump ropes hung from the posts of the ring in the back of the gym. A pile of towels stiff with blood sat in a corner. The first night I got my gloves coach told me to hit the heavy bag for nine minutes. Jab, cross, hook to the body, hook to the head. My gloves were thin, black, and shiny like a beetle shell. I got too excited and fought that bag like I could win. The next day at school my hands shook so much I could barely hold a pen to grade papers.

Movement, balance, flow, strategy — concepts that, when followed, allow a boxer to transcend the fistfight into a tactical test of skill. At best I had flashes of coherence, but only flashes. Weeks passed. I started sparring. I began to feel confidence percolating through my fists. The muscles in my body relaxed, allowing me to take deep breaths and move less like a robot and more like a boxer.

For my first sparring session coach and I sparred three one-minute rounds. He, fit and short with gleaming black hair and pearl skin, came out of his corner, chin down, gloves up, shoulders loose. There’s a saying among boxers to be afraid of the guy who looks relaxed in the ring. Coach could’ve been napping as he stalked toward me. I, on the other hand, couldn’t hear anything outside the pounding of my heart. He faked a right cross to my head to cover a left hook to my body. I brought my arms over my head, exposing my ribs. His hook landed flush against my stomach and all the air inside me vanished. He finished with a hard jab to my nose. I crumpled to the canvas while he strolled to the nearest corner.

Getting punched in the face didn’t hurt immediately like I’d thought. I got all the other aspects of it though — the sudden shock, disorientation, buckling knees, blurred vision. If I was hit really hard, my mind would go blank. My whole world would skip like a record, and, when I came to, I’d either be down or still on my feet with my opponent coming at me.

My first taste of victory came against a Korean guy named Ji-Ho, who was in his late twenties and wore thick glasses. I punched him once in the gut then threw a jab and a cross to his head. I dropped him to the canvas. At the end of sparring, I lifted weights then ran a half-mile up Buramsan — the mountain near the gym — turning around at a cluster of Buddhist temples, before shadow-boxing back.

After training, Ji-Ho told me in broken English over beers and cigarettes about a boxing tournament happening in a few months in a small town twenty-minutes south of North Korea. I demanded he run up to the gym to tell coach I wanted to fight. Moments later Ji-Ho came down and said coach would sign me up in the morning.

A few weeks before the tournament I watched all the Mike Tyson I could on my laptop. Mercedes, Colay, Canady, Nelson, Bruno, Spinks — Tyson destroyed them all, anyone dumb enough to step in the ring with him. And in studying his destruction, I took note of how to keep my feet apart and chin down, how not to grin when I eyeball my opponent, and how to hit, as Tyson’s coach told him, “with bad intent.”

My coach had me sparring at least four times a week. With only two weeks before the fight, I started seeing myself as a mad dog, fighting sometimes six rounds in a night, getting beaten mercilessly, rarely landing any punches of my own. Now the pap-pap of gloves hitting punching bags and the tik-tik of jump ropes skimming the floor stayed with me well after I’d showered and gone to bed.

The morning of my fight was cold, and the air smelled like gasoline. My coach, two other boxers, and I piled into a car and drove the hour north to the tournament. As we drove, I thought of nothing other than my opponent. I boxed him in my mind, slipping all his punches while landing my own ferocious combos. I wanted to destroy him and prove to myself that, as long as I was conscious, I would never stay down.

Then reality hit. Why did I even sign up for this fight? I thought, as I entered the cold gym, thousands of miles away from home. And why did I think that studying Iron Mike’s knockouts would ever help me, a tall, freckly, skinny white kid with small hands and a big mouth? All the Tyson fights I had watched began to haunt me: Tyson hitting Michael Johnson so hard in the ribs Johnson crumpled to the canvas; Tyson calling his knockout against Francois Botha like Babe Ruth calling a home run; Tyson peppering Steve Zouski with organ deflating punches; Tyson knocking down Peter McNeely, the poor goofy bastard, twenty-two-seconds after the ding of the bell.

Ding.

I meet him at the center of the ring. He smashes a jab through my guard. I stumble back against the ropes, eyes on the canvas, bracing for impact. A few hooks to my ribs drops me for the first time. The ten count starts. I wait for eight, then spring back up. Something is different; time moves in fits. I’m stiff with fear; my mouth is dry. I avoid him for rest of the round.

Ding.

Coach pours water into my mouth. He tells me to punch fast then move away.

Ding.

Conjuring every Tyson knockout, I come out ready to do damage — to hit with bad intent. I meet him in the center, whip out a jab then a cross. Both slip through, connecting flush on the bridge of his nose. He stumbles back, coach cheers, and, for the briefest of seconds, I am Iron Mike Tyson.

My opponent comes roaring back — walloping my head and ribs with big rights and snapping lefts — at one point knocking me through the ropes to dangle half out of the ring. The ref helps me up by the shoulders, dusts me off, then, signals for us to continue.

Ding.

Coach had come with me on my last run before my fight. We ran in silence past the pear orchard and alders up to the summit of the mountain. As the frozen road tilted to the black sky, coach pulled ahead. I stopped once to catch my breath, sucking in the biting air with my hands on my knees, before continuing. I kept going, gravel and ice crunching under my feet, up the mountain, toward the forest and temples cast in moon and shadow.

Michael Gawdzik  is a teacher by day and a writer in Indianapolis, Indiana, by night. He enjoys
traveling and attempting to bestow his enthusiasm for reading and writing
on anyone willing to listen.

Touched by the Greatest

John Julius Reel

Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali’s corner man, was a fan of my dad’s column in the New York Daily News, so in the summer of 1978 my dad, brother and I were invited to spend the day at The Greatest’s training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania.

A month earlier, I had been left off the Little League all-star team, despite having made it the two previous years. I hoped that meeting one of my heroes might snap me out of my slump.

We woke up early, and Mom dressed Joe and me up in plaid pants, fat-soled, Buster Brown shoes and wide-collared, short sleeved pull-overs, the kind that made my armpits itch and stink.

“Geez,” I said. “It’s not like we’re going to church.”
Mom would not be swayed.
“You’re meeting important men today.”

Dundee said he’d pick us up at the News Building. The last time Joe and I had been there, we’d run into Jimmy Breslin in the hall. His huge head, bushy hair and eyebrows protruding off a top-heavy frame had reminded me of a bison. He’d just grunted at us, with a cigar clenched between his teeth, then made some wisecrack that none of us understood. Dad nodded and smiled, until Breslin went away. The nicest guy had been the cartoonist, Bill Gallo, who invited Joe and me into his office and drew us our very own Big Bertha, who asked us in a bubble of dialogue to play ball.

The biggest highlight of that previous trip into Dad’s office hadn’t been his co-workers, but the building lobby, with its wall of clocks, each one set at a different time, for a different city around the world, and the centerpiece, an enormous globe with a railing around it, spinning on the same axis as the actual earth.

Today, as usual, we took the bus then the Staten Island Ferry into the city, then another bus outside Whitehall Station, getting off on Madison Avenue, a block away from what Dad called, “the quintessential spot to make sissy in the city,” the Yale Club. After leading us in to do our business – the urinals went straight down to the floor, like something you could prop up mummies in –, Dad gave the doorman a big hello on our way back out the revolving door.

“Little does that guy know,” Dad said, once we were walking home free down Vanderbilt Avenue, “that your old man was once arrested for pelting a New Haven cop in a campus snowball fight. I falsely pleaded ignorance.”

Once at the News Building, on 42^nd Street, we waited for Dundee’s limo beneath the mural above the entrance. The motto, “He made so many of them,” was sculpted into the stone. So many men, I guessed, since that’s what the mural showed, and that’s what the streets teemed with. Well, we were off to see the greatest of them, although he’d recently lost his title to Leon Spinks.

The rematch would be held in a month, on September 15^th, the day after I turned 11.

***

John Stearns was Bad Dude, Dave Kingman was Kong, and Pete Rose was Charlie Hustle. A few months after Reggie Jackson hit three homers in a single game in the previous year’s World Series, off the first three pitches he swung at, the Reggie Bar had come out. Joe and I agreed that the “Mr. October Bar” would have sounded better, although the second-rate name was small beans next to its wrapper – orange and blue, the colors of the Mets. Reggie Jackson was a Yankee! How could such a colossal error have been overlooked?

There was also Doctor J in basketball. The shots he was known for, the dunk and the finger roll, “didn’t even exist,” according to Dad, back when he’d played. We’d even heard of Broadway Joe, although more for Namath’s commercials with Farah Fawcett than for his football heroics. “A man about town,” my dad called him.

Of course none of these nicknames compared with The Greatest.
“Someone or something that’s impossible to forget” was how Dad defined greatness.
He’d often use the word when practicing with Joe and me. “Great play!” he’d say, or “Great catch!” Or even after we struck out: “Great swing!”
Sometimes, happy to be home after a long day’s work, or just lolling around the house on the weekend, waiting for Mom to call us into dinner, he’d pat one of us on the back, and say with an emphasis undiminished by his signature irony, “One of the all-time greats!”
We never doubted that’s what we were to him, and our plays and our swings as well. We were his sons, after all.

Perhaps Dad was great. He called his columns his “stuff,” the same word he used for a pitcher’s ability to get guys out. For instance, the Mets’ Jerry Koosman had “lost his stuff,” having gone from a 20-game winner in ’76 to a 20-game loser in ’77. This season he was doing even worse. Meanwhile, Tom Seaver, who’d been traded to the Reds the previous year, hadn’t lost an ounce of his. A few months ago, he’d thrown his first ever no-hitter. The Mets had tanked since he’d left. With the Mets, first he’d been Tom Terrific and then The Franchise, living up to both nicknames.

Although the News trucks had finished their work by the time I was out and about before school, and then, when the Night Owl edition was being delivered, Joe and I would already be in our pajamas, I knew Dad’s face had been plastered across the sides of every single one. So perhaps, in what he called “the newspaper business,” Bill Reel was as much a franchise player as Seaver, Jackson, Garvey or Schmidt.

How many trucks were needed to deliver all the copies of the News sold on Sunday? In any given moment of the morning, how many faces of Dad were spread across the Tri-State Area?
“Enough to fill Shea?” I had asked Joe one day.
Joe, whose paper route gave him an insider’s view, applied his mathematical mind to the question.
“Maybe enough to fill the box seats,” he’d mused.
Still, Dad’s definition of greatness wasn’t foolproof. Failure too was impossible to forget.

In August of ’75, a year before I had entered Little League with a golden bat and glove, proclaimed an eight-year-old prodigy in the national game, Mike Vail had debuted for the Mets. He went 4 for 4 against the Padres a few days later, beginning a hitting streak that had Dad, Joe and me going directly to the box scores in the News on mornings after games, more concerned with Vail’s performance at the plate than the final score. The streak ended at 23 games, the longest ever by a Major League rookie, and a tie for the longest by a Met. By the end of the season, he was being touted as the new miracle of the Miracle Mets. A .302 average, the second best on the team, behind only Ed Kranepool. Mighty Mike! Yet the following season, he hit just .217. And this year, during spring training, the Mets had finally let him go.

He was the Met I remembered most, for being a flash in the pan – exactly what Ali hoped to turn Spinks into, exactly what I hoped to never become.

***

The back of the limo was like a tiny living room, upholstered in tawny beige with gilt lining framing the pull-out ashtrays, door handles and overlaying the window lips. Dundee sat on the couch-like seat across from us, wearing dark gray pants and an open-collared shirt with shimmering pin stripes. A thin chain traversed the triangle of exposed flesh below his neck. A fatter chain circled his wrist. The frames of his eye-glasses, and even the top of his head – tan, shiny and balding – added to the sheen of gold. He also wore cologne. Because he’d shaken my hand, I wore it now, too.

“You boys ever had to defend yourselves?” he asked.
I considered telling him about the time I’d bashed Roy Jordan’s nose back in 3^rd grade. Instead of hitting back, he’d said, “Nice punch!”
“They’re ballplayers,” Dad replied.
Mr. Dundee nodded approvingly.
“I thought I saw fire in their eyes,” he said. “That’s what makes a champion.”

The radio was tuned to WNEW New York, exactly what we listened to at home. William B. Williams and Jonathan Schwartz, the station’s star DJs, played from what they called The Great American Songbook. To them, there was Sinatra, a.k.a. The Chairman of the Board, and then all the rest: Benny Goodman, Lena Horne, Nelson Riddle… The dudes and dames of something called “The Make Believe Ballroom.”

“Hello world!” Willy B would say, as Dad drove us back from St. Andrew’s on Sundays. We had a VW squareback, Dodger blue with cream interior, and a whistle in its engine tone. Dad would tap his fingers on the ball at the end of the stick shift, keeping time with the music.

Now, in the limo, I watched him ply his trade on Dundee. The give and take of their talk, its pace, made me wonder if they were angry at each other.

“It’s all about surprising the opponent,” said Dundee. “The greatest fighters even surprise themselves.”
“But he’s 36,” said Dad.
“Ali’s still got some surprises left in him.”
“He’s not the fighter he once was though.”
“He’s different. But his personality and character are the same,” said Dundee. “That’s what makes him the greatest fighter who ever lived.”

***

By the time we got to Deer Lake, the scent of Dundee’s cologne, mixed with the smoke from the cigarettes that he and Dad sucked down to the filters and filled the gilded ash trays with, had gone to my head. Also we’d skipped lunch. At one point, during complete silence, a fart had trumpeted out of me. Not even Joe had acknowledged it with a raised eyebrow or an elbow to the ribs. Now that we’d finally reached our destination, I just wanted to be back home, flipping through and talking baseball cards with Joe, eating one of Mom’s grilled cheeses with a glass of milk, ripping farts to my heart’s content.

Dundee must have sensed that we were faltering, because, as soon as we got inside the compound’s ring and training facilities, he went off to get us “Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee” t-shirts, blue for me, red for Joe, and two brass, Muhammad Ali belt buckles, with his likeness cast in a boxer’s defensive pose, the metal the exact color and shine as the skin of the man I was now seeing in person, alone in the ring, shadowboxing, sweat sliding down him, his face transfixed, like Dad’s when he would pound out his column at the dining room table.

He gave a final flurry of punches, then shook out his legs and arms and bent to slip through the ropes, as an assistant wrapped him in a white robe. When they disappeared through a door, I thought that was it. But Dundee came over and asked Joe and me if we’d like to join Ali in a few minutes to watch the Spinks fight tape in one of the bunk house living rooms.

We immediately stood with all our stuff.

Dundee went off to find something for us to put it in. He returned with a shoebox that said EVERLAST, and Size 13. It was the biggest shoe box I’d ever seen.

***

A couple of The Greatest’s sparring partners flanked him on the sofa. The three of them wore loose, gray t-shirts and shorts and hunched down like sitting bears ready to roll forward into swift motion. The furniture seemed like what you’d find at a garage sale, or left out for the garbage men to pick up. The upholstery gave off the odor of sweet feet and something muskier that I couldn’t pinpoint. The carpet was dirty brown, and you could see where food and drink spills had been carelessly cleaned up. I stared at the soda cans in the fighters’ hands, looking as tiny as dice-rollers from my Parcheesi game.

Once, way past our bed-time, at a dinner party with some of Dad’s friends in the city, I’d overheard him tell of the time he’d seen Yogi Berra in the Yankee locker room.

“Yogi had just stepped out of the shower. Body hair covered him like a wet shag carpet.” Dad rose from his chair and propped his foot up on the seat to show how Yogi stood. “He had a slice of pizza up over his head, drooping down, dripping oil, about to send it in. And down below his paunch. . .” Dad dropped a hand to beneath his legs, as if holding a great weight there.

“Billy!” Mom said. “The children!”
“Some indelible memories you’d prefer to forget,” Dad said.
The room had burst into hilarity. It was a side of Dad I’d never seen before, nothing sacred, the life of the party, having forgotten his family was present.

***

In the bout against Spinks, there had been some controversy about a moment between the late rounds, after which Spinks came out with a second wind, key to his winning the fight by decision. Ali fast-forwarded directly to this part, with the cameras on Spinks in his corner, then pressed play. We all watched as one of Spinks’ corner men squirted a water bottle into the fighter’s mouth. Instead of spitting it into a stool-side bucket, Spinks swallowed it.

“Didja see? Didja see?” said Ali, jumping up from the sofa and beginning to bob and weave.

After a flurry of jabs, he turned to me. “Ain’t nobody gonna cheat the king! Ain’t no one gonna cheat the worl’! The greatest of ALL time! Learnin’ new tricks at 36. Ain’t over the hill, Spinks gonna get his fill. Don’t stand no chance ‘gainst an Ali who can dance.”

His sparring partners chimed in, “Das right, champ!” . . .  “Uh huh!” . . . “Gonna whup him like you whupped the rest.”

Ali followed with a fiercer and more intricate display of shuffling and shadow boxing, as I sat on a foot stool below him.

“When that bell ring, gonna be so fast, he gonna think he’s surrounded. Be floatin’ an’ dancin’. Old enough to be his daddy, they sayin’. We’ll, I’m gonna beat him like I’m his daddy. Ain’t nobody gonna stop me. I’ll whup ‘em all. Gonna go outa boxin’ just like I came in…,” he squatted down in front of me, his face as big and golden as a gong. “Shockin’ the worl’!”

He bit his lower lip and popped his eyes out, as though it was all he could do not to let fly with the fist he held under his chin. I tried to smile, but a pathetic squeak betrayed me.

I felt his hand on my head, radiating heat.
“I would never hit you, little man,” he said. “Be afraid you’d hit back.” He stood and turned toward his sparing partners on the couch. “Someone get the champ here a Mountain Dew!”
He looked back at me, noticing the shoebox for the first time, then eyed me as though he’d caught on to my tricks.
“You tryin’ to put yourself in my shoes?”
He began to back away, still glowering in his jocular way.
“Spinks is a clean fighter,” he said, suddenly serious, “and a good fighter. People have to give him credit.”
Before he could take a seat, his sparring partner returned with my soda. Ali took it from him, popped the tab and stepped forward again.
The can changed from small to big, as he handed it to me.
“You know how smart Spinks gotta be to beat me?” he said.

***

On the return trip to the city, I stared out the window, like I would on school trips, so that it was just me and the outside world, my head pressed to the cool glass, my breath fogging it. I didn’t want to think about anything at all.

Little by little, as we approached New York, more and more homes, closer and closer together, began to line the highway. The greenery shrank, and became less exuberant, with more cars parked along the streets. Then the green merged with every other color into a general grayish brown. Factories spewed filth that warped the air. Warehouses surrounded by parking lots were crammed full with rows and rows of repair trucks, school busses or delivery vans, motors cooling, routes run, cargos unloaded.

An unending stream of cars, expanded now to three lanes, whooshed past in the opposite direction, or rushed alongside of us in the pell-mell return to the center of it all, bumper to bumper in front and behind. The driver put the radio on, louder this time. Sound surged up all around us. Jonathan Schwartz spoke low, his tone confidential, as though addressing only me. He said something about Satchmo, The First Lady of Song and summertime. A pause followed, interspersed with one or two pops of a needle on vinyl, then a muffled horn, a swell of strings and a sad, slow bell.

What did I need to do to be remembered forever, to have a nickname that everyone knew, or a candy bar named after me?
“One of these mornin’s you gonna rise up singin’,” sang a voice impossible to forget.

Satchmo was still at it when I saw the News truck pass in the opposite direction, with Dad’s face blown up to billboard size, plastered across the side of it. The east and west bound lanes had veered slightly apart at that point, so my eyes could linger long enough to read, “Get the Reel Story” – the same number of words and syllables as “I am the greatest.”

A short while later, when Dundee got dropped off at Grand Central, he said to the driver, “These young men are ballplayers. Get them home for dinner.”

There was still daylight left when the limo pulled in front of our house. Dad suggested that we play pepper in the street, while Mom got supper ready. I didn’t feel like it, but said yes, because that’s what ballplayers did to be the greatest.

John Julius Reel, born and raised in Staten Island, New York, has lived for 14 years in Seville, Spain. He is the author of a memoir in Spanish, ¿Qué pinto yo aquí?, and has collaborated as both writer and editor in El derbi final, an award-winning book about the Seville soccer derby. Among his English publications, the essay “My Darlings” stands out for having been recognized as “notable” in Best American Essays 2015. His two essays in the most recent issue of Sport Literate are part of a memoir in progress.

At Dodger Stadium

by Michael Konik

You attend a baseball game once a year. You don’t follow the sport or the players. Long ago, when you were a boy, you were a true fan who knew all the statistics and the nicknames, the characters and the storylines. These days, you’re only vaguely aware of who’s starting for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and even less aware of who’s playing for the other guys. You have no investment in the outcome of the contest, financial or otherwise.

You go for the spectacle, the grand circus of light and sound and motion, the hordes of humans swathed in blue and white. The players: beautiful in their graceful power. The field: radiating chlorophyll. The night sky: endless yet intimate. The air: redolent of grilled onions and cooked meat. Dodger Stadium itself: an elegant dowager confidently reassured by her place in history.

Being there is a pleasure, a constant offering of sensual enticements.
Except for the advertisements.
They’re everywhere.
Well, not everywhere. The players are not yet stickered with corporate logos, like NASCAR racers.

But almost every place a perspicacious marketer could hawk his goods is now “sponsored,” “branded” or “supported” by those with something to sell. The outfield wall. The scoreboard. The loge-level party boxes. The foul poles.

Yes, the foul poles. If you should chance to look at the gleaming yellow spires towering from the left- and right-field corners – and it’s sort of hard not to throughout the game – you’ll be reminded to Fly a Certain Airline. The message is affixed to a stiff banner that extends a foot or two off the pole into fair territory. If, say, Justin Turner or Corey Seager launched a fly ball toward the bleachers and the foul-line and the ball stayed just fair it would collide with the airline advertisement, simultaneously scoring a Home Run and a grand slam of value-added product placement.

Hooray.

We like to tell ourselves that Major League Baseball is “America’s national pastime,” an entertaining exhibition of grown men playing a child’s game. Maybe that’s right. For what could be more American than treating every person in attendance as a potential customer?

At the ballpark, our national urge to consume – whether pig innards served as “Dodger Dogs” or an international airline served as an umpiring tool – is reinforced with every pitch and at every interregnum in the action. Not participating in the commercial charade is only slightly less patriotic than neglecting to stand and applaud for the “Military Hero of the Game.” Few can say exactly why our brave soldiers are currently in Afghanistan or Iraq, but we all know intuitively that their sacrifices make our freedom to purchase stuff possible.

And to Fly a Certain Airline the next time we travel to the Middle East, preferably on non-war-related business.

When you make your annual sojourn to the stadium, you’re reminded at every turn how heartlessly mercenary the sport has become. This brilliant pitcher earns many millions of dollars, and that slugger earn many millions more, and, yet, in the curious mathematics of modern capitalism, they’re probably underpaid. Absent the coddled players, without their numbered presence and exalted skills, most of us probably wouldn’t pay to come to a place where our entire purpose is to cheer on cue and buy whatever’s being sold, whether $6 water, $15 beer or the comforting fiction that our cherished athletic competitions somehow transcend the tacky American imperative to make a profit.

Michael Konik was one of a trio of winners in the SL poetry chapbook contest for his collection, “Dodger Stadium Suite,” which became part of This Loss Behind Us. He is the author of many books, including the sports-gambling memoir The Smart Money and the golf-in-Scotland travelogue In Search of Burningbush. 

Speaking of Beast Quake

by William Meiners

A lot of people are putting things into historical context these days. With racist rants emanating from an authoritarian’s toilet in the White House, you might want to take some notes to address a future grandchild’s inquiry concerning your whereabouts and actions from 2016 through 2020. Indeed, writer and director David Shields likens the Trumpian era to Germany 1933.

In our mid-August conversation, I didn’t think to ask Shields about the title of his brilliant documentary…. Marshawn Lynch: A History. What sort of historical perspective could a football player just 33 years old offer? Don’t get going on Jesus now and what he achieved by 33. Yet this documentary, comprised of some 700 clips (around 10 seconds each) not only provides insight into a complicated young man, but also explores a history of protest against racial discrimination with a particular focus on Lynch’s chosen form of rebellion — silence.

Shields, a serious man of letters, is pushing the boundaries of creative nonfiction with a narration that has no narrator. True to himself, Lynch did not participate in the film. Though not for lack of trying from the filmmakers. Lynch’s group maintained a neutrality to the project, neither supporting nor discouraging the production. “Given Marshawn Lynch’s style, it would have been sort of ridiculous if he sat down for a 12-hour interview,” Shields says.

The Comedy and the Fury
It wasn’t always going to be like this. In the beginning, Shields wanted to turn Black Planet, his critically acclaimed basketball book, into a film. It’s his only book I’ve read, largely because of a blurb about its unflinching honesty by Robert Lipsyte. Covering the 1994-95 Seattle Supersonics season, Shields is anything but colorblind in Black Planet, “facing race” through myriad interactions of players, coaches, fans, and media men and their rhetorical missteps throughout a long NBA season. I told him Sport Literate was first published somewhere between chapters seven and eight of that documentary-style book.

Though the book didn’t materialize into a film, Shields says the themes of Black Planet — “race, history, media iconography, and sports morphed into the Lynch movie.” In tellings nearly 20 years apart, both stories have strong black protagonists (for a lack of a better word), both of whom are from Oakland. In the book, Shields looks intensely upon Gary Payton, the trash-talking, defensive-minded point guard of the Sonics.

“Both Payton and Lynch are very interested in violating ordinary language,” Shields says. “And I think that connects them. In their own ways, they’re both expressing a remarkable amount of comedy or fury through either silence or trash talking.”

There are plenty of laughs and tragedies in the film, often in quick succession. Lynch’s relationship with the media is sometimes jokey, other times contentious, especially as he begins providing one or two stock answers, i.e. “Thanks for asking.” As a cultural icon, Lynch becomes the punchline of Jimmy Fallon, but a contributing guest of Conan O’Brien. Graphic violence, including a Chicago cop’s murder of teenager Laquan McDonald, as well as the head trauma of football, continuously weaves in and out of the narrative. 

“The last thing we wanted was the ‘voice of God’ omniscient narrator.”
Folks wondered about getting someone famous to narrate the film. Like James Earl Jones. Danny Glover, the executive producer, could have done it. But Shields says the “kaleidoscopic, freewheeling film feels congruent with who Marshawn Lynch is.”

I like this reasoning. Though I can’t help but imagine how NFL Films might handle it via baritone voiceover and the trumpeting music.

The Autumn Wind is silent
Skittling in from Oakland.
Upon Beast Quake feet, he turns Saints and Rams into sheep,
All about that action, Boss.

Beast Mode in High Definition
Additionally, they never wanted the production to feel like a television show, or (God forbid) a three-hour NFL broadcast with the vanilla commentary of Joe Buck or Thom Brennaman, or anyone else whose dad got him the job. “That turned into a different mantra, which was to try to make the movie feel like the most kinetic Marshawn Lynch run,” Shields says. “It should be like Beast Quake… it turns, it twists, it surprises, stutter steps, reverses and repeats. It’s like a seven-second, 70-yard run.”

I remember where I watched Beast Quake — Lynch’s playoff pinball run through what seemed like a dozen New Orleans Saints. If my grandchildren should ever ask, I can tell them precisely. On January 8, 2011, I was in the bar of the Hooters Casino in Las Vegas. My friend and his friend, a banker and chiropractor, respectively, spent about six hours (two NFL playoff games) at the same craps table. I checked in with them periodically and drank alone. My live-in girlfriend, at home with the pre-existing condition of her three children, would be pregnant by St. Valentine’s Day. Our son James, born exactly 10 months after Beast Quake, brought forth the possibilities of my grandchild’s question.

Go ask Alice
Shields says the East Bay writer Alice Walker provided some cautionary advice for white folks embarking on a discussion of race. When asked what can white men do, she said: “They can sit down and listen for the next 350 years.”

Taken to heart, Shields says, “We tried, to the best of our abilities, to listen to Marshawn talk, or not talk. Especially as a white filmmaker, I don’t want to tell the audience what to think.”

Though thousands of people in multi-racial audiences have by now overwhelmingly enjoyed the film that’s also received some glowing reviews. Still is there something specific Shields would like white people to take away from the movie?

He says it has to do with the unremitting legacy of slavery, repression, and (I think) government-sanctioned violence against black people. Wearing his feelings on his own nerve endings, Lynch, Shields believes, “is trying to convey that history is real. If you feel it, then he can feel you. And if you don’t, then he’s not up for it. Much of what he’s doing is expressing the rage he experiences as a black man in America, especially a Trumpian America.”

To me, it seems, there’s an expanding lack of empathy in Trumpian times. Shields agrees, citing the profound tribalism in this great divide and the president’s uncanny ability to unleash a reptilian-like response in his base supporters. By sheer contrast to the “most powerful man in the world,” Lynch is an “extremely empathetic, loving, and imaginative person,” Shields says. “He’s also hugely aware of Trump’s awfulness. So if you think about it, Lynch could not be more presidential. If you want to talk about a beast, or beast mode, it’s Trump.”

Much Ado About Shyness?
It’s a question often put to Shields. “Are you over-reading someone who may just not like to talk?” But Shields pushes back. Through the work of his foundation and a commitment to his Oakland community, Lynch is no wall flower. And he has a lot to say when he wants to say it. 

Early in the movie, when a younger Lynch, still in high school, has a microphone thrust upon him with a demand that he ask for advice, he responds, “I ain’t got no questions.” In perhaps his last words of the film, he says, “Run through a motherfucker’s face.” That confident, beast mode mentality, may speak to his preference for action over commentary. In another clip, where he looks to be getting a pedicure beside some white guy, Lynch laments the fact that people might complain if he talks too much. So why would they even want any insipid sport cliches?

“The more I study it, the more I feel like Marshawn is a very intentional person,” Shields says. “He’s very eloquent, very lyrical, very funny.”

In the tradition of the African-American trickster, Lynch, who says Jeff Hostetler is his all-time favorite Raider, simply does not like to play by the rules of a corrupt game. Think Muhammad Ali and how hard it was for most white writers, aside from people like Lipsyte, to box him in racially as either a “good Negro” or scary one. 

“There’s a sense in which American sports media are trying to get black athletes to be vectors on the grid of American capitalism,” Shields says. “Lynch, to his great credit, says, ‘No, I’m not going to speak to your corporate capitalistic rhetoric.’ In a strange way, he’s speaking truth to power by being silent. ‘If you want to pay me a million dollars to sell Pepsi, okay, we can talk about that. Maybe I’ll do a funny commercial. But there’s no frickin’ way I’m going to give you your American sports media cliches and not be paid.’ So in a way, I would say Lynch is a savvy American capitalist.”

And that’s some tricky, complicated stuff, no matter how you slice it. If you want my two cents (and it’s about all I’ve got), I’d give Marshawn Lynch: A History two thumbs up for a rollicking ride and all its potential to make you stop and think. And to echo Snoop Dogg (and my favorite clip) maybe one middle finger to anyone who thinks highly paid athletes need to conform to the norms of a racist society.

William Meiners is the founding editor of Sport Literate.

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of 22 books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBREditors’ Choice). The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel was released by First Pond Entertainment in 2017. Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention was published in 2018; The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is forthcoming in March 2019. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, and Believer. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

You Forgot These

by William Huhn

There was everywhere the danger that a dance would arise. I could shrug off my other concerns, but the danger was there whenever I set my fiddle case down, whether in a walkstreet, a square, or alongside the most civil of the terrace cafés. While I also played in restaurants for tips, and plenty of “sandwich bars,” bistros, and nightspots heard my violin and sometimes my singing, I made my real money outdoors well after sundown, and could be seen still going at it late at night when the meaner elements were out, none of whom gave me trouble.

I’d wrung as much music as possible from Brussels since arriving some three months ago, and not once yet had my fiddle brought out of hiding the discontent in these street and squares, a discontent no music of mine could have reached if it tried.There was a hatred out here, beyond the capacity of even love to confound, but I played a way unaware that I had reason to fear, and my music mainly seemed to awaken just the good in people.

Soon I’d be leaving for the southern French provinces, in my vision of keeping forever ahead of winter and living for music alone, but even here up north, in September, with chills coming on in the evening, my fiddle could pull a crowd. Toes began tapping from the instant my opening notes sprang. Often that’s all I got out of them, but other times even when I was playing badly, they broke into dance.

My roadside recitals could also inspire acts of rudeness ⏤ the passerby who cursed my playing, a rock band that set up well within earshot of my mere violin, then flooded me out. But the dance moves ranged from bits of swing to traditional stepping, and once two shirtless breakdancers performed to a jig that a wandering guitarist accompanied me on….  With such gaiety all was forgiven of the unhappy few. Soon all the night’s revelers merged again into the passing stream, but not before I’d given some of them an interlude of joy.

I was anxiously alone in Brussels otherwise, living under  a subletting arrangement soon to expire, and not sure where exactly my gadjo soul would take me after France, when I crossed over into Italy. The fable of the carefree beggarman, whom God remembers and watches over no less closely than over all of us, struck me as true to life; and I had in music a spiritual protector, against which the mortal and mundane were no match, and which gave me courage. But most of the friends I’d made since coming here, including a German woman I’d dated for a month, had withdrawn to their native lands or vanished altogether by now. If on many nights I felt like a dreamy soldier, astray on foreign soil, glad not to know what the next day held, at times I grew solemn and restless with no steady friends around. I was about done with Belgium anyway, and having long since “conquered” the capital, I began branching out to the lesser cities more. I wanted to play them all before leaving.

They, too, couldn’t get enough of my fiddle, and their enthusiasm occasionally equaled what I’d ignited back among the Brusselois, but fewer dancers gathered at these farther corners, and even at their height the eruptions rarely climbed above a score of hands clapping in rhythm to my licks. Nobody threw in for a riot. Their zeal never devolved into the brave rituals of the mosh pit.

Liège, Ghent, and Lille felt just lifeless to me. I made barely enough gelt to justify the travel, and I never went back to these places. Bruges charmed, but again ⏤ no money. Antwerp paid its buskers well, and the finest musician I’d jammed with in Belgium, a Scot no less, was based there, but I disliked the city. Although nothing leapt out at me that I could point to, I’d gone twice now, and somehow both times gave me the willies. I was picking up on the discontent without knowing it and didn’t understand why I felt uneasy, just as now I couldn’t quite explain my reluctance to return to Antwerp.

After all, that Scotsman could play a mean ukulele! He kept mostly to his native Scots folk style, which I’d relished, then he’d go off on some jazz fusion riff of his own unworldly stamp. Even when introducing himself as “Ian V,” he’d been riffing, I’m pretty sure, as this couldn’t have been his exact name. “Fifth,” he added, while crushing my hand, “as is spelled with a ‘ph.’” Whether he meant “Ian the Phifth,” “Fiphth,” or even “Phiphth,” I hadn’t pondered. I was too busy getting me and my fiddle ready to join in the fun he provoked. With his passion for music un feu grégois (”a wildfire”) ⏤ a phrase I loved, having only just learned it ⏤ Ian quickly became as much a kindred soul as a minor hero of mine….  And in the end I couldn’t leave this little country without attempting to connect up with him for one last duo.

If I’d known that Antwerp, like any city, harbored the hate that had no earthly opposite, even Ian V’s ukulele couldn’t have enticed me back. My doubts about this Bohemian life I led were enough disquiet for a traveler. But you can’t plan to avoid malevolence, and the just stand I took against it was improvised. And of all the darkness I faced down that night, only my own made me afraid, only what all true fiddlers take to the floor.

***

The hour-long train ride to Antwerp’s Centraal Station put me, just after dusk, within strolling distance of the Meir, a spacious rue happily unavailable to cars and renowned for its shops. My mission here, as anywhere else, was to bring cheer to a few people, and for that I needed no companion whatever except for my fiddle.  But Ian V performed on the Meir every Saturday night from what I could tell, so that’s where I’d go.

It was warm out. I felt less lonesome already, having left Bruxelles behind, where the police had begun to view me as a well-dressed parasite. I was sick of watching them leaf through my passport as if they wanted to altogether stamp out fiddle playing.

I’d hardly started walking before the perplexities of the Flemish straat names had once again thrown me off. A wrong turn, and I found myself wandering an addicts’ alley just off Van Maerlantstraat. Glassy eyes looked out from shadows and stairways.  Through the grimy windows of an abandoned office building tiny spurts of flame revealed faces. I jaywalked toward the houses across from it and felt no safer. Here, too, the sidewalk listed like old grave slabs, littered with small ziplock bags here and there. Beneath a working streetlamp lay a syringe among scattered cubes of car glass.

My encased violin drew attention, but the users hung back, wary of an outsider. Though no police were near to hinder trade, only one dealer approached me. I shook him off by pretending not to understand the French he made his pitch in.

But around another corner, my pathway led to better en-virons. A recently paved road banked by Art Nouveau façades welcomed me. Just as I was getting that “all’s right with the world” feeling, though, a coven of prostitutes rose into view. The slit in the mini-mini of the closest ran so high it poked the cage of my animal spirits. Two others loitered near her, all in front of a rococo house whose window frames, with lurid purple-red glows within, resembled baby Doric columns.

I tried to not look as I passed, but I couldn’t not look. The close one nudged aside her leather lapels, exhibiting a lacy black bra; then with a pirouette she shape-shifted away from me, her spike heels clicking. When I caught up with the woman, now posted by the wrought-iron gate of the house, she calmly greeted me with a bright “bonsoir.”

Beauty makes me think impossible thoughts. I can’t and couldn’t help myself; and after returning her hello, I trembled to ask for directions to the Meir. She proffered them in the most elegant français anyone ever heard; and with a touching “faites attention” ⏤ touching, that is, my wrist with two fingertips ⏤ she, too, sensed that I was out-of-place here. So she asked, “Is it you would like to make love to me?”

“Where?” I stumbled, falling back into my native tongue.
“Chez moi,” she said.

I loved that “chez moi” ⏤ so direct, so clear. And I might have gone inside with the filledejoie, because I believed she cared about me. But rather than go, I began to wonder what her name was, and whether anyone loved her, besides God and maybe a mother somewhere. Then a feeling of almost a prayer came over me, and with simple words of parting I left her to the mercy of these endless streets.

No sign of Ian V reached my ears as I walked along the Meir, but I found the small plaza we’d played in twice before, and I set up in front of its central feature: a pallid statue of Anthony Van Dyck, the famous student of Peter Paul Rubens. Van Dyck’s painting had stood on its own so entirely that he became known in Flanders, then across Europe, as “Rubens II.” A graying redhead filled me in on all this while I struggled with my tuning pegs and she smoked. But she strolled off, denying me a chance to repay her in song for the two cigarettes she’d shaken from her pack into my open violin case.

I wasn’t necessarily hoping to become a second Ian V on the Meir that night, but this spot felt well-suited for any kind of lesson from a master; and the entranceway to the popular store Galeria Inno, forty feet away, drew people to the area and would do so till around eleven, closing time, even if Ian didn’t show.

Rain threatened, but since lamplight brightened the walkways, no one cared. But maybe Ian wouldn’t want to risk it. His was an exceptional uke. He called it an “akulele” and said that the secret of its rare sound lay in its maker’s choice of hand-carved spruce for the top. Reluctantly, he even let me give her a try. I doubted I’d ever strummed an instrument more alive, but with Ian so nervous I returned the “akulele” before my fingers could form a proper chord.

He might show up yet. The rain was holding off, the night still pleasant. The drafts allowed short sleeves so long as I played with passion. With my bow the sword I lived by, I struck the first notes of a rag, the nimble “Pig Ankle,” and soon after I was having at a high-speed tune whereupon my fervor grew uncontained, like that wildfire I’d learned the French for. Again I proved that wherever I stood in the open air, whether I pushed southward or hung on in Belgium till someone turned off the fountains for the winter, I’d have the light of my fire, and I could lean on it to the last.

But I’d have moved on to other plazas or burgs this minute if I could have, since this one wasn’t valuing my music. All I’d earned so far, besides the smokes ⏤ which I hadn’t asked for ⏤ was a comment from a crank, “Cigarettes kill people!” as he made a big display of stepping around my case.

“I’ll be fiddling this next one on your grave!” I thought, and I wanted to toss off a few bars of Schumann’s lone violin concerto (said to be a work of madness) for these outriders streaming by, but I couldn’t since I’d never learned it. Instead I hit them with “Orange Blossom Special,” which soon won me my train fare. If Ian was still ensconced at home, at least I was in the black.

Another musician came along, his guitar in a canvas slipcase strapped across his back, his girl in tow, wrapped around his pinkie finger. You’d have thought he was Irish or German till he opened his mouth ⏤ “We heard you, like, last weekend… with that ukulele dude” ⏤ then you knew he was American. I  remembered his girl more than him. Though she wore discount jeans and a pleather jacket, like last week, again I was asking myself, how did a loser like that get such a drop-dead girlfriend? If not him, I remembered his faded green vest ⏤ a US Army jacket with its sleeves amputated.

“You must mean Ian V,” I said. “You seen him around?” I also remembered that they’d tried to muscle in on our gig.
“Haven’t,” he said. “He could play that motherfucker.”
“I like what is these ⏤ a veeolin?” said his girl, in an accent I couldn’t place. She stepped forward ⏤ “You can make lot of money with these… veeolin” ⏤ and turned to face her guy. His eyes answered her suggestion. Her hair floated like candyfloss, not pink but a warm beige, a downy ridge cresting above the nape of her neck.

The guy walked around her. “I’m Gil, by the way.” Gilbert smelled like booze. He put out a hand that I shook. Then he ran his fingers through his long dirty blondness, in 80s throwback style, a revealing gesture: his mane was rapidly thinning.
“And this is Tarsie.”
“Why you always do this shit? You don’t tell them small name when first meeting the people,” Tarsie said. With one hand she pointed at herself ⏤ “I’m called Tarsila” ⏤ with the other she took mine in hers.  She held on for an extra pulse or two. And nor were her eyes afraid to hold mine.  She was spicy-icy hot this woman, and evidently a handful.

Last week Ian was done with this guitarist in an instant. Planting his blank gaze on Gil’s army vest, as if it said all anyone needed to know, he’d asked him if he knew the chords to “Greensleeves,” which Gil did not.

“A’m sorry,” said Ian, “bit ah don play reels wi’ a mon wha doesn’t ken ‘Greensleeves,’” or something like that.

But Ian wasn’t here to save me this time, and I had no witty defense at the ready when Gil asked, “Wanna maybe join forces for a jam, like impromptu?”
“Sim sim!” Tarsie clapped. “You play with us!”

While failing to identify this strange language the woman spoke, I also wondered how she fit in musically ⏤ did she sing?

No. She was the beggar woman. Rather than dig in an Hermès handbag for French perfume, she picked around in a wire-mesh bin till she found a tall paper cup clean enough not to offend the passersby. Then she freshened her lipstick.

After gathering up my earnings from my case, I applied my bow to “BakåtVista” ⏤ a melody that a Finnish flute player had taught me in July. I hoped the tune’s simple guitar accompaniment wouldn’t overexpose ole Gilbert’s thin talent. Not long into the number, though the guy was butchering it nicely, Tarsila’s smiles persuaded a tall black guy, wicked handsome, into pushing a bill into her cup. Something he said in a heavily inflected French made her laugh. He took little notice of Gil or me, but nor did he let Tarsie’s looks keep him from his night.

The guitarist abruptly nonsequitured into U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name.”  It took me a minute to hit on a violin sound not wholly unreminiscent of “The Edge,” and by the end I was also assisting Gil with my voice. We drew a sizable crowd and won more paper, which like that precious first bill, went straight from the cup into Tarsie’s pocket. She didn’t look like a thief. Keeping the container free of bills was a trick of the trade: you wanted them thinking you needed the money.

“So much people like these veeolin!” ⏤ Tarsie smiled, emptying the coins onto the velvet lining of my case ⏤ “especially on night like this of the weekend, when the people come out drunk from the bar.” A fistful of change stayed in the cup, enough to draw attention to our cause when shaken.

“A little early for that, Tarse,” said Gil. Having leaned his cheap axe against Rubens II’s pedestal, he extracted a half-size bottle of chardonnay from the daypack Tarsie had been carrying ⏤ “Ain’t nobody drunk yet!” ⏤ and unscrewed the cap.
“No, isn’t early. They drink starting soon as dark!”
“This isn’t Lisbon, Tarse,” he said. (Ah, she spoke Por-tuguese.) He offered her firsts on the wine, but she waved it away. I, too, declined. Gil said, “Antwerp you gotta wait till like eleven before the drunks are down.” He swept his hair loss back before taking a drink. “Not bad…still cold. You shoulda seen us came out here like a month ago.  Place was raging till like two AM even on week nights.”

I assumed Gil was just your everyday drunk, but when he learned I’d lived in LA for a year, he slackened his jaw and admitted to having been “big into dust” back in his home city, San Diego, a factoid that didn’t exactly clarify why Tarsie stayed with him.

We played more, but I kept scanning for Ian among our fleeting fans and the night walkers drifting past. His reappearance felt imminent, even after I began holding out little hope for it.  I couldn’t play Gil’s songs well, except maybe the folky R.E.M. anthem “Swan Swan Hummingbird,” but then, neither could he; and when I stopped trying and let my fiddle droop,  Gil stopped, too. He unhooked his guitar strap and sank back against the plinth of the Van Dyck.

“Fuck,” he said, “that kid must be freaking.” He reached the chardonnay by his hip.  Tarsie snapped up one of the cigarettes in my case and asked, “Is okay?”
“Help yourself.”
“I mean, that poor fucking kid,” Gil said, and swilled what was left of the undersize bottle.
“What kid are we talking about?” I asked.
“Ours. Our boy,” Tarsie said, touching a flame to the rette. “You don’t know? about our boy?” She shot Gil a cautious glance ⏤ “We have a boy,” puffs of smoke veiling her face.
“No way,” I said, as it dawned why she stuck with him.

Worse, the baby was “in hospital,” not breathing on his own. The two-month-old had had heart surgery. As Gil put it, the kid was “just lying there all by himself with all these, like, tubes and wires and shit sticking out of him. Fuck if I know what any of ‘em do.” He felt inside the pack for another bottle. Tarsie added that her baby had been “the same like this” for two days now.

Ready to give up on Ian, I was about to claim my share of the coins and bills and decamp.
“The doctors say he’s past worse danger,” Tarsie said.
Or I could just give them my whole night, I thought. They couldn’t get anything else off me, just my night.
“We owe the hospital like two million francs,” Gil said.
“It’s private hospital,” Tarsie said, proudly.

In my head I converted the absurd sum into US dollars: fifty thousand.  Gil was thirty or so, Tarsie maybe twenty-three. Together they had hardly more than his iffy musical gifts and her appetite for panhandling in their favor, less fifty-thousand dollars and an ailing child.

“How long you guys known each other ⏤ or been dating?”
“Like a year maybe.”

Gil watched me calculate the magnitude of their plight.
“A year in next month,” Tarsie beamed.  After a deep last drag, she flicked her cigarette into the smokefall.

On my nod Gil put the wine down and stood up with his guitar. The temperature had fallen, and we needed a show-stopper, so I went for a fast one, just to hear if he could keep up; and damn if he couldn’t! Sort of. He played confidently anyway, the new broken father. We drew another crowd ⏤ tourists, slackers, a nurse in lime scrubs, a clutch of officemates….

Then I encouraged Gil to go solo, just to see if he could hold our audience on his own.  He fooled with the tuning till it was close enough. After a gaze of reflection, he took a breath and sliced off the keyed-up chords of a John Lennon ballad. Although Gil was drunk and banished ⏤ and his mistake could die at any moment ⏤ his pained voice and missing guitar technique made him a folk legend when he sang, “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small/ by giving you no time instead of it all.”

Ian V would have pricked up his ears. Gil was channeling the late Beatle. A silver ponytail appeared amid the bobbing heads and sang quietly along and alone…. “A working class hero is something to be.” But everyone who listened knew Gil wasn’t a hero of any class. He was neither Tarsie’s nor even his own hero. It’s hard for a man not to be his own hero, and the folk adored Gil for showing them how hard. The entertainment took on a life I didn’t think the dusthead had in him.

Someone else I recognized arrived now, at the edge of the growing crowd. A wiry-framed figure, mid-fifties, clad in navy-blue pants, a light blue shirt, and a blue-black beret worn aslant, had paused to take us in, if not to listen to us. It was no Ian V standing back there but, rather, someone who’d had some trouble with the ukulelist, as I recalled. He was wearing the same hammy outfit as before. It’s remarkable how local we rootless souls keep until we disappear for good.

He hugged the same sketch pad to his ribs, a pencil stuck between his knuckles. With his free arm he shook a tea tin of change at the flow of pedestrians. The man drew comic portraits for a living and was fishing for takers. Last week when I saw him talking to Ian, I didn’t know it at the time but he was  trying to sell the musician on having his portrait done.

“So Ah bit,” Ian said afterwards. “And Ah din especially mind him wanting to make a cartoon a me.” Ian would have said no more about the fracas that I’d observed arise between them.  I had to press him for the backstory: it seemed the man in blue had violated a code. He’d laid a hand, uninvited, on the shiny carving work of Ian’s uke.

Gil left off strumming. As the clapping dwindled, all you could hear behind his John Lennon fans was the tin shaking and some brusque Flemish words. Tilting a smile at Gil, Tarsie poured another haul of coins into my case, five feet in front of us. The artist seemed to pause at the rush of metalic sound. And Gil smiled back at Tarsie.  He had delivered. His music had opened the hearts of our audience. Now we just needed to follow up. Almost any old song would do.

Caricaturists, like stick man back there, were usually a harmless stratum in Flanders. Hunting for tourists, they idled about the squares or fountains, or along the borders of sidewalk eateries. When he’d come around last week, at first I’d barely noticed him. I was caught up in rosining my bow. Then I heard an acrid curse ⏤ something Gaelic, probably the meanest word ever to exist in any language ⏤ and I looked over at Ian, who had him by the wrist. Though wearing an amused look on his blank face, the Scot was angry and held on, poised between letting him go free and a desire to punish.

But I quickly forgot about “the geeze” ⏤ and whatever other names Ian had had for him. And I hadn’t thought of him once since that episode and never as a threat, but here he was getting his tin in the faces of our people, scaring them off. His aggression startled me. Before, he’d gone away with no outcry. After all, the Scotsman hadn’t actually hurt him, just given him a bloodless hand.

Hoping I could both calm down the poor bag-o’-bones and make amends for Ian’s transgression, I waved him over. The staff of Galeria Inno was herding the last-minuters out the glass doors. I’d get my caricature done, a keepsake I could tuck into a letter to my parents or someone, but the artist stayed away. He looked like a washed-up sailorman in his blue getup, and with the bearing of an alley cat he eyed me like I wasn’t there.

Meantime, Gil was speculating that he, Tarsie, and baby would make a killing in Italy. Tarsie believed Gil, but what about the boy? No burden he. If the kid pulled through, said Gil, he’d make “an extreme prop,” and with that, he chewed off the über-intro of “Pinball Wizard,” a superb sequel to the Lennon, just what we needed to kick the show up yet another notch.

Where could I lay on a little fiddle? I wondered, the wood beneath my chin. But now the cartoonist bounded toward me and, standing between me and my case, was strangely staring.

“Bonsoir, Monsieur,” I said, speaking my most amiable French.  “I have much respect for artists.”
“Oui,” he stared.
“I have an idea,” I said, the Who chops gathering, the eyes of the artist narrowing.  Gil again proved he could sing: “EversinceIwasayoungboy, I’veplayedthesilverball.  FromSohodowntoBrightonImusthaveplayedthemall….”
“Let’s make a trade.” I stepped closer and talked at his ear: “I’ll play a tune for you”⏤ I lifted the fiddle for emphasis ⏤ “while you sketch my caricature; and however much money comes in while you draw and I play, will be yours in exchange for the picture. Çasuffit?”
“He stands like a statue, becomes part of the machine.”
“Baises!” said the man.
This word meant “kiss,” and it could also mean “fuck” as in “fuck me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, lowering my fiddle, as his stink ⏤ of body fluids, drink, and soil ⏤ reached me.
He was homeless.
“Thatdeaf, dumb, andblindkid ⏤ ”
“Baises!” he reiterated, puckering his hole.
“Who?”I stammered.
“Toi!” he rejoined.
“He’s a pinball wizard! There has to be a twist!”

I sidestepped, seeking refuge in Gil’s cluster of Who fans, hoping to play among them. The sailor turned, keeping me in his line of stare. Then saw my case. Most of the money we’d earned lay at his toe-tips, which poked through the filthiest tennis shoes you ever saw. You could barely tell they were blue.  I thrust my fiddle and bow into Tarsie’s good hands. By the time I got a hold of his funky shirt, his fly was unzipped over my case. His pad fell from where he’d stashed it under his arm. Gil quit playing. I yanked the shirt, popping a button, but mon vieux bent his knees to weight himself, still trying to pee.

Plunging my shoulder into his, I knocked his frame off balance. But he only almost lost his footing. He snapped back like a palm tree after a gale and once more stood over my case. Now when I went for him, he fought me one-handed, his other down at his junk, his cursing in pluperfect American ⏤ “I’ve got you fuck bastard” ⏤ that lapsed into a bout of Belgian-French curses.  En Belgique even the street people wax trilingual.

In my clearest King’s English I said, “You’re not fucking doing this!” then just creamed the guy with a body check. He stumbled backward, his tin wheeling in the air. Coins rang on the cobblestones. Backwards toward the statue he tripped on the steps and broke against the marble pedestal, where he deflated like a bag, now, of bone fragments, his half open shirt exposing a mottled pink chest. With his beret missing, he was bald as a vulture save for a ring of slick gray straggles. His zipper gaped, but by some grace his privates weren’t public.

I peeked at Gil’s fans. They’d stuck around, and others had joined them. All were enjoying this drama of the grotesque. None knew if I’d injured the man. His feral eyes were unclosed, but he was lying across the stone ⏤ until again on the move, crawling to his feet up the base of the statue. I called for Tarsie to put the fiddle away. My relief that my blow hadn’t paralyzed him turned to dismay that it hadn’t when he went for my case again. I blocked his way, now, to protect Tarsie, who was nudging the case offstage with the point of her boot.

Gil materialized next to me.
“No worries, Gil, seriously.  I can handle it.”
I turned not away from the vagabond.
“Sure?”
“Oh, sure.”
Gil backed off. Tarsie scolded him, “What is this you do? You want to beat up a old man?  Bring me guitar blanket.”

She didn’t mind if I beat him up by myself, while she and Gil stashed the money in his canvas case.  I’d worry about that later.  My opponent turned and spat on Rubens II.

“That was beautiful,” I said to his back.  “Now get the fuck out of here before next time you don’t get back up.”

With shrills of laughing, as if obeying orders, he galumphed forward and went behind the monument.  “You ain’t nothin’!  Baauh, you ain’t nothin’!”⏤I could still hear him.  But he came around the other side, nearly stepping on his beret, which he scooped up and flipped back on.  He paced the cobbles, also grabbing his pad, lurched my way indecisively, then abruptly turned down Otto Venius, the nearest sidestreet.

The gawkers wanted to get on with their night, but not far along Venius, the cartoonist took a beer bottle from a window niche, stashing his pad in same.  He drank off the beer.  The bottle shattered on the opposite building.  Everyone who heard looked, but he shot his glances only at me, while spouting garbles of obscenities and insanity.  “It’s my country!  He tells me get out, and it’s my country!” he screeched.  “My country!”  Then more awful laughter.

With his proud appendage on display again, he pranced from wall to wall, streaming with abandon, while all of Antwerp watched.  After belching, he tucked his bishop back inside and was ready for another run at me.  After madly grinding the glass underfoot, he exited the sidestreet with one fist raised, shrieking, “You ain’t nothin’, fuck fuck bastard, fuck….  Get out! connard, un connard!  Un connard in my country!”

I couldn’t figure why he was calling me a duck (”uncanard”) and only later learned he wasn’t.  I had to look up this word “connard.“  You don’t want to know what it means.

He assailed me with “This is mymymymy country!” while throwing a flurry of punches.  I blocked them easily enough, but it wasn’t easy.  He was aging, out of breath, and unyielding.

“Your country’s ashamed of you,” I said. He burped another loud one and tried to kick me. I stepped sideways, keeping him facing me, and said, “I do more for your goddam country than you’ll ever do.” Another absurd punch thrown missed. We were pacing through a circle I couldn’t break out of.

“Please just leave us alone!” I implored. He swung two more fists, gnashing his teeth, nostrils flaring. His smell.

“Let me tell you what you are,” I heard myself say. “You’re disgusting. You have no friends. Nobody on God’s earth gives a fucking damn about you, not your own goddam family….  How could they? You have no family. You’re a zero, a drunk ⏤ a fucking street bum! Why don’t you crawl off somewhere and die? No one would even notice.”

The circle broke. He gazed at me as intently as ever, but pain entered where before had been only dark vacancy. My words sank home, deeper than his scant store of hope. His fears took hold: the picture I’d drawn of him held true.

“You ain’t nothin’,” said the voice; “either,” it didn’t say, but I heard it in a kind of thought-echo caught in the aftertone of his failing croak. He tried for more laughter, but veered toward a cry. I thought, then thought better of asking him for my portrait again.

Now he was walking the plaza in confusion and talking out loud, as to convince himself that “this is my country.” But since an invisible tether connected us, he kept circling back as if about to unhinge anew, and I caught a shard of wisdom in his closing dispatch to the enemy.

After some French about the “star of my eyes,” which he aimed skyward and I couldn’t quite parse, his filmy stare fell on me a final time. He returned to English, his voice pitching up to a high songful register. “Go on, go on!” he said.  “I’ll follow you! I’ll be all right, I’ll be all right….  I’ll follow you.”

But off he went, a man whose gait told of a ship that was listing, always listing, always about to be overwhelmed. Upon reaching into the niche for his pad, he receded along the barred windows of Otto Venius until gone. The wrought-iron secured the people inside by keeping him out, him along with the street ladies, criminals, drug addicts, the other drunks, and the rest.

Near the Van Dyke lay an upside-down tea tin, a stubby  pencil, and the odd coin.  These things must have been valuable to the man. I should have gathered them and called after him, “Wait, sir!” Like a small prayer rising on his behalf, for him and all the friendless souls out here, “You forgot these,” I’d have said when reaching him.  Maybe then he’d have felt like an ordinary citizen of this country of his, not like one of the many who had lost the fight and left nothing of value behind.

Like any believer in the Golden Rule, Tarsie divided the pot, including the bills she had stowed, with perfect justice. She gave herself a third, the same as each musician.  But I   was no longer intent on this outcome. I got my money, but I’d squandered a chance to stand outside myself and see what only the few ever see ⏤ themselves in another.

Ian V’s every pick had made good on a promise ⏤ that music alone can arm you against the world ⏤ but he never did return with his akulele, and from this night on, the peculiar beauty of his playing began to defy my powers of recall. The sound of the tea tin, on the other hand, stayed fresh in my ear, for the seafarer came around often in the nights that followed my last in Antwerp, which turned out to be my last in Belgium.

This essay, which earned the writer a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays, originally appeared in Thema.

William Huhn lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife and their two-year-old son. His narrative essays have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and cited six times as a “Notable Essay” in The Best American Essays series, most recently in 2018 (“Grave Ivy,” Flint Hills Review #22). Huhn’s poetry has been featured in the The Carolina Quarterly and can be found on the popular website Verse Daily. His essay “The Pagadder” appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of Pembroke Magazine.

The Crazy Coyote Chase

by Scott Palmieri

On all days but this one, a middle-aged man wearing a coyote mask, pedaling his bicycle near a school, would raise concern. But not here, at the Crazy Coyote Chase, the annual fundraiser for my daughter’s middle school. The 5K is over, but it will never be forgotten, its runners gnawing orange slices, tracing names on results lists, tossing numbered tickets in baskets. There are still mutterings over the chaos, what will surely go down in the annals of PTO infamy.

But there is little time to dwell, as I near the start line of the second and last event of the morning–the Fun Run–with my three children: my daughter who loves to run, my son who loves to win, and our sixth grade Coyote, the daughter who hates to run. I can understand how the term “Fun Run” can be, for some, like saying “enjoyable angina” or “happy hernia.” I don’t love long distance running much, either. But every year, I run a 6.9K for charity, sponsored by a local tavern, known locally for its 69 beers, some of which are offered at race’s end. To survive longer distances, I tell my suffering self that there is no finish line, hoping to keep my pace and table doubts, when I start wondering how I’ll possibly make it.

But the Fun Run is only a mile, and we are here to promote physical fitness and teach those “never give up” metaphors, while we raise money for field trips and school programs. Someone blares from a bullhorn for the mingling parents and children to get ready. A few feet ahead of me, my daughter who loves to run and son who loves to win have wrangled their way to the start line.

The race begins, and we cross the one busy road to a quiet neighborhood, as I try to keep view of my two determined runners who have dashed ahead. Last year, I worried less about leaving my daughter who hates to run, when she kept an easy pace with her old friend Erin, sharing with her a sweet obliviousness to competition. Two days ago, Erin’s mother, my wife’s second cousin, died of a massive heart attack. Just 42, she battled weight her whole life, an unsuccessful stomach reduction surgery and an abusive boyfriend, Erin’s father, whom Erin does not remember.

At the first flagger, my daughter and I separate. It is here where the already infamous 5K went terribly wrong, when my wife’s cell phone rang, as she and other parents on the Crazy Coyote Chase Committee, stationed in the cafetorium, were overseeing the registrations, silent auctions, raffles and racing medals. The call came from another middle school mother, who oversaw the course, and her first sentence, I assert, has never been uttered before: “The coyote went the wrong way!”

My love for quotidian chaos makes we wonder if a coyote has ever been accused of such a thing. Just moments into the race, the teenaged volunteer who first donned the mask turned too soon, veering the wrong way for the real runners, in their nylon tank tops and runner shorts, who saw this sanctioned event as an inexpensive way to record their monthly time. It was too late to save them, though the flaggers lassoed the rest to the correct course.

One real runner, in particular, will never forgive this. He resembled Will Ferrell but an enraged, caffeine-charged children’s soccer coach Will Ferrell from the movie Kicking and Screaming, who would crash into water coolers, calling himself a “Tornado of Anger.” Tornado, in his running gear, hairy arms and legs, dwarfed the middle-schoolers in their sweats and hoodies and jeans, a sight gag befitting the star of Elf. And as he neared the end of his 5K, a seasoned runner like Tornado must have wondered why he was so far from the end. One can only imagine the anger that festered in the sweat and breath with each extra step. The course photographer snapped a picture as he came through the school driveway toward the finish line, as a tween in jeans, having run about a mile less, seemed to be gaining on him, Tornado pushing to the end, his painted perm still in tact, atop his haggard countenance.

I am not one to judge too harshly the middle-aged still “living the dream,” having played ten years now in a men’s baseball league. One night, while I was teaching a summer class, I wore sliding shorts and a jock strap beneath my khakis, hidden along with long blue baseball socks, so, after breaking down Othello, I could dress more quickly into my uniform in the field’s parking lot and play a few innings.

When Tornado finished, he ripped off his number bib and aimed his rage at the retractable ropes and posts, lined with cheering parents and teachers. He panted past the air-tattoo artist and the crowd of children waiting at the rented rock wall and through the open door that led to the cafetorium. As with most serious runners after a race with questionable integrity, he looked for the first mother he could yell at.

“Take my time off the list! I want my money back! I can’t believe this!” yelled Tornado, competing with the booming version of “This is How We Do It” that bounced from the DJ’s speakers.

One father tried to negotiate peace, as Tornado peppered the PTO, and the mother with the cash box counted out his 25 dollars and 25 for his wife, who was shaking her head but whose disgust was later clarified when she said, “I’m so sorry for my husband.” The small troop of the other real runners entered, sweating, smiling, taking it much better than Tornado, who jumped in his sports car, grunting on his way out at the bubbly teacher’s aide who yelled, “Thank you so much for coming!”

Near the end of the Fun Run, my own competitiveness kicks in after I see my daughter who loves to run and my son who loves to win safely slip across the busy street and back to the school, past the last flagger. I am proud of their inner athletic fire. But I keep thinking of Erin’s mother, who tried her best, too, just a few weeks from finishing her degree at the local university, the diploma to be given posthumously to Erin, who will cross the stage to accept it. Those were the thoughts that swirled when I first heard the news, in my office, as I struggled to speak, trying not to break for my colleague, who, in the loveliest of ways, said that some children are hardwired for this. Perhaps this is already true for Erin, in good part from her mother’s efforts, never wanting her daughter to be known as “the girl whose father is in prison” or “the girl whose father fractured her skull,” and certainly not as “the girl who has no parents.”

I finish at a decent pace, but I fear that my daughter who hates to run has drifted back too far, that this will be more of a disastrous day and she’ll end the race by herself, she, who, after braving through the day we heard the news, broke down that night, a frustrating math problem giving way to everything else. But here she comes, among others trying to end well, chugging at a good pace, finding another gear I didn’t know she had. I am so proud and remember her smile the year before and Erin’s smile, as they swung their connected hands across the finish line.

We enter the after-party, where the winners are announced- for what has been earned, what has been spent and what has been chosen at random. Despite the 5K, the morning has been a success. The PTO has raised good money, and we have had our workouts. But I am struggling to name the metaphors, as we help clean, sweep the floors, box up the extra tickets and t-shirts, reassemble the tables to their rows. A year ago, Erin’s mother smiled and waved, as they drifted out of the doors, off to start the last year of her life, just the twelfth of Erin’s, with all that time and distance to come.

Try your best? Run your race? Find another gear? If I can’t find the lessons, I worry that my children will believe it’s all foolish and brimming with dangers, as if we’re all just chasing coyotes. But the best metaphors are never easy. Perhaps time will help, perhaps next year, when the Crazy Coyote Chase Committee invites you, one and all, with the promise to do better and to cheer you, in your suffering self, when you don’t know how you’ll possibly make it.

Scott Palmieri is a professor of English at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. His writing has been published in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Hobart, The Leaflet, The Alembic, and Teacher as Writer. He played baseball at Providence College and continues his love of the sport through writing, coaching Little League, and playing, as long as his legs will allow, in a senior men’s league. He lives in Wakefield, Rhode Island, with his wife and three children, his biggest fans.

NBA Live

by John Krumburger

Before the game an anticipation
shared with strangers, each of us possessed
of the same silly towel
meant to wave above our heads.
There is the light show, the noise,
the food (high calorie, low nutrition, over-priced),
the cheerleaders (minimum wage caricatures
posed for maximum leering),
and the souvenirs (capitalism on steroids).

But where is the playground joy,
the heart’s tongue flung open
trash talking with gravity?
Or do they feel it even here
-corporate sponsorships emblazed on their chests?

With a drum roll the contest commences:
EVERYBODY CLAP YOUR HANDS,
lights flash, each play repeating on screen;
the artistry –
crossover dribble, step-back jumper, no look pass –
the food, the cheerleaders, the souvenirs,
the halftime acrobats.

And then finally the score tabulated, certified, accepted.
We come down like a flood,
like an army on the move,
like one sinuous body descending stairwells
then surging through long halls
to where doors release to the street
and the bowels of downtown:
taxis, drunks, hangers-on, more souvenirs,
the flatulence of buses,
the surprise of bells.

When beauty and grace devolve,
the soul retreats.

                                     There,
there I spot the soul.
She is a woman with a cup held for coins
or bills and a sign which says
NEED CASH FOR WEED.

And still more commuters are flushed out
–the stroboscopic after flash
exciting their neurons
in the absence of having a dream life–
coming down like the tail end of a bender,
bursting into the neon and exhaust
in a hurry and without gratitude,
shoulders hunched against the cold.

John Krumburger has published in Great River Review, Comstock Review, Rhino, Another Chicago Magazine, Artful Dodge, Flint Hills Review, and elsewhere. In 2008 Backwaters Press published The Language of Rain and Wind, his first full-length volume of poetry. His latest volume of poems, Because Autumn, was published in 2016 by Main Street Rag Press. He lives with his wife in Minneapolis and works as a psychologist in private practice in St. Paul.