Playing Days (2 page)

My father likes to claim that it was his Uncle Joe, and not Kenny Sailors or Bud Palmer or Belus van Smawley, who invented the jumpshot in 1931. My great-grandfather, Ari Markovits, was six foot ten inches tall and weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds when he died at the age of ninety-nine, two weeks before my father's bar mitzvah. ‘I used to be tall' was one of his jokes in old age. He must have been a giant in his youth, and Uncle Joe spent his childhood trying to shoot over him.

Our family came to the States from Bavaria just before the First World War. Basketball has always been a ghetto game but in its early days the ghettos were Jewish and many of the stars were Jews.

The Markovitses worked their way up in the usual fashion. My grandfather was conceived in Munich and born on the Lower East Side in New York. As a young man, he entered into his cousins' grocery business and helped to expand it into a franchise. He moved to Middletown with his family to set up the new head office and commuted two hours each way to Manhattan three nights a week to get his law degree from Columbia. The house my father grew up in was prosperous, middle-class, but he used to boast that he had never read a book
out of school till he got to college: he spent his afternoons at the ballpark.

‘Markovits,' his high school coach once told him. ‘You may be slow, but you sure are weak.'

But he had a sharp eye and quick hands. These seemed to me, when I was a boy, just two of the instruments of his general authority. I was the son who had inherited his passion for sport, but I had also inherited something of my great-grandfather's height and a little of Uncle Joe's athleticism. We used to play every kind of game together, basketball, tennis, pool – and spent much of my rather friendless freshman year hunched over a miniature ping pong table, no bigger than one foot by two foot, every day after school. My father has a great deal of patience, but he doesn't play games to relax. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, we could test ourselves against each other without holding back.

The family fortunes followed the usual trajectory. The grandson of an immigrant, the son of a lawyer, my father had become an academic. His own son wanted to be a writer. The house I grew up in was full of books. We traveled to Germany every summer, where my mother was born and raised, and he brought back with him antiques and rugs that filled our sunny house in Texas. There was a big backyard, and in a far corner of it, he built a court for his kids to play on.

I don't suppose I've ever been happier anywhere than on that court. But something had happened between my childhood and his, and the difference wasn't only the
money we grew up with. Basketball had been his excuse for getting out of the house; it was mine for staying put. The game had changed, too. There were no Jewish stars anymore, and blacks had taken their place in the neighborhoods and the ballparks where they lived and played. Half of the kids I went to school with were black, fewer in the honors classes, more on the basketball team. The court was one of the rare places we hung out together, but even there the diffidence of what you might call my class sense got in the way. For example, it had never occurred to me to dunk a basketball.

It hurts, that's the first thing you learn, until the inside joints of your fingers grow calluses, preserving under the skin a few pixels of blood. My mother, an old socialist, remarked when she noticed them, ‘With hands like that you'll survive the revolution.'

Not that it helped much on court. On Friday nights, during my high school years, my father followed the team bus around Texas to watch me. To places with names like Del Valle and Copperas Cove, that flew Confederate flags outside the school gym. He sat in the stands with the other fathers, while I sat on the bench on top of my hands (to warm them up). I was scared the coach might put me in the game. I suppose a lot of parents have a sense of what their children are capable of in the confidence of solitude. We measure up one way in the world and another way in their love, and the difference must be painful for them to observe.

‘Do you want me to talk to the coach?' he asked me
once on the car ride home. Sometimes I traveled back with him rather than on the team bus.

‘Please don't talk to the coach,' I said.

But he persisted. ‘They could have used you out there. I've seen what you can do.'

‘Please don't talk to the coach.'

My shyness proved just how far he had come up in life since his childhood on the streets of Middletown.

But by senior year in college I had also traveled a certain distance. And somewhere among the four drifting years of undergraduate life, it occurred to me that I might be able to support myself playing basketball – nobody I knew had ever made a living writing.

A friend filmed me in the varsity gym, shooting and dunking by myself. That was the résumé I sent out, along with a small but crucial piece of information: that my mother was German, allowing me to slip under European quotas for foreigners. My classmates were busy applying to grad school and law school and med school, and waiting for their admissions notices. I walked out of the dean's office one windy March day, carrying in my hands the four thin pages of a contract an agent had just faxed over, on the strength of that video. Showing whoever came near me our signatures at the bottom. It seemed so wonderfully implausible. I hadn't put on a uniform since I was seventeen, but there was someone in Ober-Ramstadt willing to represent me.

I wanted to return to something, to my father's childhood as much as my own. A steady jumpshot and a good left hand were the things he used to strive for, instead of an education, a salary, tenure and a mortgage. Ordinary adulthood struck me as one of those weird formal occasions you have to go to as a kid – wearing a jacket and tie that don't fit, saying things you don't mean. Basketball was my excuse for not going. Also, I wanted a chance to do the things I hadn't done in high school.

Two days after graduation, I flew to Hamburg and spent the summer going from train to train and hotel to gym. In those days I traveled light, just a duffel with a spare of everything, including sneakers, and the bulge of a ball in the middle. I washed my laundry by hand in the bathroom sinks. Most of the big cities were taken up by soccer, it was only in the countryside, in the villages and market towns, that basketball had room to breathe. By the end of July I had landed a job in Landshut, just north of Munich, for a second division team known locally as the ‘Yoghurts.' So I flew home for a month and spent the summer as I always had, wandering between the cool of the air conditioning and the bright reflected heat of my father's court. At the end of August, I got on the plane to Munich to begin my new life.

My father drove me to the airport and sat in the car for a minute with the motor running. He touched a hand to my shoulder; I could tell he had prepared some advice. ‘Do me a favor, will you,' he said at last. ‘Don't mess around with these guys, these ballplayers.'

‘What do you mean, mess around?'

‘You know what I mean,' he said, ‘gambling, that kind of thing. These aren't the kids you grew up with. And while you're at it, watch out for the women who hang around them, too.'

On my way through security, and check-in, and the long windowless corridor to the gate, I noticed something odd. For the first time in my life I was scared of flying.

The club sent someone to meet me at the airport, an American by the name of Bo Hadnot; his accent was southern. He was about six one or two; probably an ex-player, I thought. With strong teeth, that forced open his lips a little and gave him a thirsty look. And strong hands – he took my duffel from me out of mine. It seemed a sad kind of job for an expat to sink to.

I was often ‘met' that summer, at airports, train stations, bus depots, by various team managers and club lackeys. Fat, badly dressed men, whose last claim to youth was that they still lived with their parents. Some friend in the front office would give them a job, arranging beds and timetables, hauling prospects from hotel to gym, cleaning up in the locker rooms afterwards, washing the jerseys, etc. Still, they got to lord it at first over the nervous recruits, over guys like me. Most of them didn't know my name, and Hadnot was no exception. It was enough for them that I was a basketball player, they figured on spotting my head above the crowds.

Sweating from the flight, stinking and shy, I fell asleep a few minutes into the ride. Hadnot got lost on the way from the airport. He had to wake me outside a gas station to ask directions, gently, repeating ‘Son,
son,' a little louder each time – he had seen me speaking German to one of the customs men. Back in the car, on the road again, I asked him how long he'd lived in these parts, and without much irony or embarrassment he told me, five years. What have you been doing with yourself, I said.

‘Playing basketball.'

Eventually we made it out of the fretwork of highways surrounding the airport, and into the real countryside, which was pleasant and modestly farmed. Country lanes, bordered on either side by tall grain. And villages that ran the gamut of names from Upper to Middle to Lower (Ober to Mitte to Unter), none of them larger than a bend in the road with a few farmhouses. The town itself, as we descended into it, turned out to be pretty and old. We bumped along the cobbled high street for several minutes, past a church with a tall brick spire as clean cut as a factory tower, before pulling over just in front of the river at a little Italian restaurant named Sahadi's. There were woven carafes hanging in the window under a striped red awning. Most of the cars parked outside were blue two-door Fiats with new license plates: a sign that the basketball team had congregated. But Hadnot said he had to pick up his daughter from her grandma's and pulled away as soon as I shut the car door.

Sahadi's was named after its owner, a Turk who had come north over the Alps from Turin when the Germans relaxed their immigration laws in the late eighties. He was the kind of man my father loves, a rootless
polyglot salesman type – the kind I spent my childhood watching my father ‘chat up.' He guessed by my height I was another player and led me under several low brick arches, strung with vines. Bavarians, he told me (I was plying him, as my father would have, with questions) had little interest in Turkish food, which is why he cooked Italian, but sometimes he managed to suggest a few eastern influences. Mr. Sahadi seemed genuinely excited to meet the new basketball players and detained me briefly under an arch with his hand on my elbow, to have his say – my first little touch of celebrity.

The last room was hardly more than a cave; it contained a low table and a half-dozen men lounging and trying to get their knees underneath it.

‘Where's Hadnot?' someone shouted, as I ducked my head under a potted vine and looked for an empty seat. He had to pick up his daughter, I said. ‘Are you the American?' called the voice. ‘Sit thee down, brother, sit thee down, for I would have a chat with thou.'

The man talking to me was one of two black men in the room. He made space for me beside him at the head of the table and reached over to get a clean plate, which he heaped with spaghetti from one of the serving bowls set among the bottles of fizzy water. Most of the others had eaten. There wasn't much left, but he gathered to himself what he could and offered it to me: breadsticks and hummus, cold calamari, Parmesan, lemon, a little Frascati. Charlie, he said his name was, Charlie
Gold, and introduced me to the rest of the team: Olaf Schmidt, Axel Plotzke, Willi Darmstadt, Milo Moritz, and Karl.

Charlie kept most of the conversation to himself. He was small-featured, low-browed, balding – impish without being youthful. For example, he hadn't bothered, as many athletes do, to shave off the straggle of curls around his ears and neck and towards the back of his head. The skin of his cheeks was as rough as acne. You could strike a match off it, an image that probably occurred to me because so many players at the table were smoking.

Their cigarettes were stubbed out among the leftovers, in the olive bowls, in empty cups of coffee. Charlie hadn't joined them, I could smell that at once. I could hear it, too, in the tone of his voice, which suggested, when he passed one of the candles for a light, both amusement and disapproval. He was glad to disapprove; it put him in the right position. He said to me, ‘You don't smoke, do you?' and when I shook my head, he added, loud enough for anyone to hear, ‘These Europeans, they think they artists; they think they rock stars. When the game starts, they talk about how many drinks they had the night before. They want you to play nice. Let me give you a word of advice, young man. Don't play nice.'

Then, laughing, one of them answered, ‘Yes, but we're happy.'

‘Na, you ain't happy, Milo, you won't be happy when I'm done with you.'

Milo had a boxer's face, thick-fleshed, with a broken-backed nose. Smiles tended to stick on it. As I was eating, a middle-aged man with a flourishing moustache made his way between the chairs to our end of the table. I must have been in his seat, for he looked at me queerly for a moment, until Charlie spoke up, ‘That's all right, Coach. Our boy was hungry, so I told him to sit with me.'

I recognized Herr Henkel from the tryout and rose to shake his hand.

‘Where's Hadnot?' he asked me.

‘He had to pick up his daughter.'

‘He never picks up his daughter,' Henkel replied and looked around briefly at the rest of the team.

There was something fatherly in his cursory glance, and something filial and homesick in me responded to it. ‘Do you want your seat back, Coach?' I said to him, making my appeal in German, but he replied in his abrupt English, ‘Don't give up your ground, isn't that right, Charlie?' And then, to one of the boys at the table, ‘Move over Darmstadt.'

Darmstadt was a high school kid with an uncut blonde bob. He pushed back his chair and stood up, and for the rest of the afternoon remained leaning with his shoulders against the wall; nobody said anything. In the silence, Charlie decided to pick on some people – his own phrase. He had a restless manner, which seemed to me even at that first meeting not particularly happy. You sensed that he wanted bigger fish to fry and was making
do with what he had. But he amused himself along the way. The man he'd introduced to me as Plotzke was a fat, long-armed German with the slightly exaggerated features of a pituitary disorder: a hanging, oval face; large cow eyes. ‘How much weight was you gonna lose this summer, Axel? Or was you working on gaining?' This kind of thing.

‘Ja ja,' Axel said. An educated voice, peevish, too. But nearly everybody at that table came in for his share of attention. Darmstadt he left alone, until provoked; but there was another high school kid Charlie planned on ‘claiming as his best friend.'

Let's just call him Karl. There's the legal question, for one thing, but quite apart from that his present fame would obscure the charm he had then, in his first professional season, when he was still more or less undiscovered. ‘You and me got a lot to talk about,' Charlie said. Karl smiled at his banter and didn't much listen and didn't much seem to care. He had the kind of flat large face that isn't particularly pliable to emotions. There was something very German about him, especially about his taste in clothes, which seemed almost officially casual: brown denim trousers, leather sandals and a bright yellow T-shirt with the words
HIGH ANXIETY
printed across it in smoky letters.

Later, when he ducked into the bathroom, I recognized the most remarkable thing about Karl: he was seven feet tall and looked normal. It was the rest of us who seemed shrunken or out of proportion.

Since Charlie couldn't get to him, he shifted his attention to Olaf, the other dark-skinned player at the table. ‘You still eating?' he said. ‘Want a little more time?' Then, in an undertone: ‘Man's too lazy even to feed himself.'

Teams are full of toadies – people began laughing. I had to cover my own lips with a fist. Olaf continued to pick at his food. He had the muscular patient air of a Greek sculpture, a six foot seven, black, two-hundred-fifty-pound Greek sculpture. Patience wasn't Charlie's word for him. Lazy lazy lazy; he sang it out like a church hymn. Holy holy holy. Olaf lifted his hand and lowered his head, a characteristic gesture.

‘I know what you're saying,' Charlie added. ‘Leave me alone. Well, I won't.'

The voices of Germans often sound sweet in English as weak tea. ‘No, I tell you what I say,' Olaf said. ‘Du kannst mich am Arsch lecken, Kleiner.'

This caused a small sensation, of quiet, and Charlie asked, looking around, ‘What's that, what's that?'

Darmstadt, still shifting on his feet against the wall, started giggling. ‘That boy'll laugh at anything,' Charlie said. ‘That boy'll laugh if you throw him off a bridge.'

Olaf continued in German, ‘It is a shameful thing, I think, to come here and beat up on little kids.'

Smiling, Charlie turned to me. ‘What'd that lazy son of a bitch say? What'd he say?'

For a second, I met his stare. Milo called out, clapping his hands, ‘Wir haben einen Dolmetscher!
Einen Dolmetscher.' An ugly humble German word for translator. Olaf looked over, too, and I could tell from something sheepish in his glance that he was a little afraid of what he'd said, a little afraid of Charlie.

I looked at Charlie, I looked at Olaf, and I looked at Herr Henkel, who said with a forced laugh, ‘Take it easy, Charlie.' He had a kind, ordinary, Bavarian face: brown and dignified and rough. The face of a prosperous farmer. Only when he joked or smiled, something cruder broke out in it, a humor he had picked up in the locker room. He was smiling very slightly now.

‘I thought this was what you paid me for. My preseason pep talk.'

But Henkel put his hand on the black man's head. ‘No, we don't pay you for this. You give us this extra.'

‘I'm a generous man,' Charlie said.

A few minutes later, Henkel called the meeting to order and launched into his own ‘preseason pep talk.' He outlined what he expected of us, his ambitions for the year, and also described the way the next few weeks would play out. In spite of the bad temper and awkwardness of the meal, I was touched to see how many of the men were sentimentally affected. Partly because they were a little drunk. Olaf rested his cheek on his large palm. Milo, as Henkel stood up to propose a toast, quickly stubbed out a cigarette and refilled his glass. You can't imagine such an odd collection of human kind – like mismatched chairs in a junk shop. Almost everybody there was some combination of too tall or too fat
or too skinny. ‘To winning,' Henkel said, ‘because it is better than losing.' We all cheered hopefully.

It was Charlie who drove me home after lunch – I mean, to my new apartment. His car was a little bigger than the others, a VW Golf with a pair of miniature Nike hightops dangling from the rear view mirror. I wondered if he was staking some kind of claim to me. We drove back through town and up into the hills again, the hills that opened out into farmland, and passed under the red brick arch of an abandoned railroad bridge. Only trees used the tracks now.

On the right a horse farm perched on a narrow strip of level land; beyond it, the ground fell away into a wooded valley. Charlie turned left, up a short concrete drive and parked behind a row of shuttered garage doors, which ran along the back of a big purple sixties apartment complex. He didn't get out to help me with my bag, but the way he sat there suggested that he wanted to say something, and I waited a moment before opening the door. As I had with my father, twelve hours before.

‘I have high hopes, young man,' he said, ‘that we can make it out of the minor leagues this year. Karl won't be sticking around, so we better make good use. But everybody got they role to play. You too.' After a pause, he repeated, ‘High hopes' – and those are what I left him with, as I grabbed my duffel from the backseat and stepped out.

Mine was one of the apartments overlooking the road. Most of my teammates had lived in that block, at one time or another, but there were also civilians, as you might say. Evidence of families, too: small bicycles cluttering the walkways, watering cans, rubber boots. The bright variety of life displayed on washing lines, strung between bathroom window and balcony railing. Herr Henkel had given me the keys, and I struggled with one of them to enter the windowless stairwell. Jetlag had begun to set in. A day before I was in another world. Alone at last, I thought, almost grateful for the darkness as I walked up a short flight to the front door numbered on the keychain.

The room it opened onto had a big bed in the middle, which looked luridly comfortable in the dusky light coming through the curtains drawn over the window opposite. These were thick and ugly, and the first thing I did was tear them down with a violence that suggested to me, for the only time that day, the carelessness of a young man's joy. The waxy patterned cloth filled my fists; I pushed and kicked the curtains onto the floor. It was five o'clock on a summer's afternoon, and the day had more or less cleared up – the sunlight had brightened as it leveled. The window overlooked a dirty walled-up balcony, which drained poorly; standing water had discolored the tiles. Beyond that was the road, and beyond the road were the farm and the valley and the woods. The transparent western light thickened to bronze before it faded altogether. That was the light I fell asleep in.