Playing Days (25 page)

About the author

Meet Benjamin Markovits

About the book

Behind the Book

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An Excerpt from
You Don't Have to Live Like This

BENJAMIN MARKOVITS
grew up in London, Oxford, Texas, and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study Romanticism. Since then he has taught high-school English, worked at a left-wing cultural magazine, and published six novels, including a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron. Markovits, who has lived in London since 2000 and is married, with a daughter and a son, is the only American to be included in
Granta
magazine's “Best of Young British Novelists.”

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O
N THE
T
UESDAY
after I graduated from college, I flew to Hamburg to stay with one of my uncles who had an apartment in Altona. My plan was to play basketball for some midlevel European team, and I spent the rest of the summer on trains, traveling around Germany and trying out at various clubs. Eventually I landed a job in the second division in Landshut, a town maybe forty-five minutes northwest of Munich. The club was sponsored by Hitachi and offered to pay me 1800 marks a month; it would also give me an apartment to live in. I was twenty-two years old, and this was my first real job.

Playing Days
is a novel about that experience. Much of it is literally true; some of it is less true. At the time I knew that I wanted to be a writer even more than I wanted to be a basketball player. Basketball is hard labor, but it doesn't take up much of your day; between practices, I used to work on a novel I had started in college. I also wrote long letters home describing what I felt and saw: the guys I played with; the empty shelves in the supermarket in Pezinok, Slovakia, where we went for training camp; how hungry I was all the time; what it felt like to lose.

Afterward I used these letters as the basis for a memoir, which I called
Leagues Away
. It eventually went through four drafts and attracted the interest of a producer at the BBC and an editor at Random House, yet it was never
published or broadcast. Somehow my struggles as a writer seemed connected to my struggles as a basketball player. Even after years of writing and rewriting several different manuscripts, I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. My parents started to worry about my job prospects, but the truth is I was also having a pretty good time, writing a lot, keeping in shape, falling in love.

At the age of thirty, within a couple of months of each other, I got married and published my first novel—twelve years after I had first put pen to paper, or fingertip to keypad. Things were looking up. And one child and three novels later, I decided to take another look at
Leagues Away
. But the ground was somehow still contaminated by failure. The manuscript had been through too many drafts; it had been written by somebody who seemed a slightly different writer.

The experience itself was still very important to me, it had left a deep mark, and if I wanted to write about it, I needed to start from scratch. Still, there was something about the tone of those early drafts that I wanted to keep, the awkward personal voice of a young man trying to explain himself. Most novels have a mix of truth and untruth in them; in my other books I had worked hard to make the true parts sound more like the fictional ones. Here I decided to reverse the process.

This approach turned out to be helpful, for a couple of reasons. In the first place, more than ten years had
passed. I've always been suspicious of memoirs that include much dialogue or description of moods or weather. Who can accurately remember such details? There are years of my life that I hardly remember at all. But this kind of recall doesn't bother me in novels, even in novels that are written to sound like memoirs. It's part of the convention that everything, even the past, seems to happen on the page in some kind of immediate present.

Second, as Ronald Reagan once said (I think it was a slip of the tongue), facts are stupid things. It's dangerously easy if you write memoir, or even if you write historical fiction, to include some details just because they happen to be true—not because they are interesting or revealing or important. Turning the experience into a novel let me include different kinds of facts too. Most of my teammates from Landshut have made it into this book. But there were other guys I had played with whom I wanted to write about if I was going to write about basketball. Some of them are in this book too.

At the same time, I tried to stay faithful to what seemed to me the heart of my experience, that first long summer after college. The experience of a world in which incredibly talented people worked extremely hard at what they do, even though none of them could turn their talents into a life that would satisfy them. My teammates were stuck in
the second division of a mediocre European league, and even years later, and long after I have quit playing basketball, I still hold them up as a standard for what it means to be good at something.

A
ROUND FIVE O'CLOCK
Gloria wanted to go home. She had seen the president, she had stood in the room with him, and it was enough. It was our first date, and I didn't know what my report card would look like. Maybe a B and not for lack of effort either. Somehow there had been too many people, people she didn't know, and I had let them take her away from me. Partly because I liked seeing her talking without me, getting along, standing short and straight in her green wool dress. She had a good face, very dark skinned, somehow bright black, and made eye contact and reacted naturally in conversation. Although I couldn't actually tell if she liked them much—my friends, I mean. Sometimes I didn't know if I liked them myself.

I went to find Robert and say thank you, good-bye. The whole thing was really his show. He had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie. As if to say, my work is done, like some hotshot trader after a hard day on the floor. Waiters were bringing leftover food to the kitchen, and Robert started picking at it, standing around with the chef and some of the president's entourage. Obama was there too, trying to get a game of three-on-three together. “Where there's a backboard there's a ball.” He meant the Roof King backboard over the garage door. The
snow had stopped, the evening was clearing up, and Obama offered to do a little shoveling himself. He hadn't done a thing all day but eat small portions of food, the kind of food you can hold in one hand while you talk a lot of crap. “Come on,” he said.

The impression he made on me was very strong, his fame and his restlessness, which was partly physical and partly in the way he talked—he interrupted himself and made little appeals to people around him, not just people he knew but also one of the waiters, a six-foot white guy who used to play point guard for Aquinas College in Grand Rapids. “Sam wants a game,” Obama said, “Sam's up for it. Sam wants to work off some of that gut you get in your twenties, when you work too hard and the rest of the time sit around on your butt.”

“Come on,” he said again. “Who's in? I need some names.”

Robert gave him a queer look. His shirt was unbuttoned at the top, his sleeves were rolled up. He kept himself in good shape. “The ball needs pumping up,” he said.

“So pump up the ball.”

Obama started pointing at each of us.

“You in? . . . What's your name? Introduce me.”

“Marny's more of a squash player.”

“I'll guard him then,” Obama said.

About twenty minutes later, I found myself scraping a snow shovel up and
down the concrete drive. We took turns. Robert had loaned me a college sweatshirt to pull over my undershirt, but I was still wearing slacks and leather-soled shoes. Then Obama took the shovel off my hands and pushed the last crumbs of snow into the pileups on either side of the drive.

“How far is East Lansing from here?” he asked. “About two hours?”

“A little less. An hour and a half,” Sam said.

“Robert, Robert James,” Obama called. “Did you invite Magic Johnson to this thing?”

“I'm not sure.”

“This is his kind of basketball weather. He told me once, he used to practice his jumpshot with mittens on.”

Then there was a ball bouncing among the six of us, middle-aged men, in dark pants and dress shoes, breathing smoke, as we shuffled around passing and shooting and chasing the ball under the garage lights. About ten security guys stood along the spear-topped iron fence, watching us, and the house itself was lit up like a Christmas tree. People crowded into the window frames to get a look, champagne flute in hand. Not what you see at the usual political fund-raiser; for this, they might have paid more than $5000 a plate. But the court felt private enough.

“I'm about as warm as I'm gonna get,” Obama said. “Come on, Reggie. Let's get it on.”

Reggie was his assistant, one of those friendly faced black guys, about six-and-a-half-feet tall, and as bald as a cantaloupe. About a foot taller than Bill Russo, who played too. Some of the money was going to his reelection campaign. Robert and Bill and I were at Yale together, it was all very cozy. So when Robert started buying up real estate in Detroit, he had connections on the inside. To set up what he called the Groupon Model for Regeneration—using the Internet to get a critical mass, everybody moving in at the same time. Regeneration or gentrification, it depended on whom he was talking to. Part of what I liked about Gloria is that she wasn't part of that crowd. She was a real Detroiter. I mean, she actually grew up there.

Bill kept a set of workout clothes at Robert's house and was the only one of us in rubber soles—he had on his wrestling shoes and started grabbing people by the waist and pushing. I liked him. For a young state rep, he didn't put on any airs.

“Get off me, Bill,” Robert said.

But Bill was having a good time; he didn't give a shit about basketball. He guarded Robert, and Reggie guarded Sam, and the president guarded me. Mostly I tried to get out of his way. I didn't want to injure anybody, and the cold concrete ground was slippery with snow dust. Obama put up a jump shot and missed, and Reggie grabbed
the rebound and kicked it back to him, and this time he knocked it down.

“It's raining on a snowy day,” Obama said. He had a quick jerky left-handed stroke, which took a little getting used to. After each shot he held his hand out like a claw.

“You've got to get on him,” Robert told me.

At one point between plays, Obama tried to start up a conversation. “So what's your story?” We were catching our breath, and I looked at him. He said, “What's your connection to these bums?”

“I knew them in college, but that's not what I'm doing here.”

I figured he meant working on Robert's staff or Bill's campaign team.

“So what are you doing?”

“Just living here. Teaching high school, mostly subbing. I'm one of the guys who moved in.”

“Don't let Robert push you around,” he said.

We played to fifteen and then we played to fifteen again. Sam was still in good shape. His shot was rusty, but he was strong and fast and could dribble all over the place; somehow nobody ever got in his way. And Robert had a nice little soft fifteen-footer, a white-boy jumpshot, Obama said. I don't think Reggie tried particularly hard. He picked up a lot of rebounds. We won the first game and then Obama got hot, shooting from the fences he
called it, and they pulled out the second. Obama and Reggie liked to talk. Sam didn't say a word, and Robert didn't talk much either; it took me a while to realize he was pissed off. Partly at Bill, who kept horsing around and taking out his legs. But partly at me too.

“Rubber match?” Obama said, and when the third game started, Robert switched me onto Bill and guarded the president himself.

Afterward I tried to work out what happened—I wanted to understand the buildup. Maybe it was a racial thing. Robert played varsity basketball for Claremont High. They had one of those teams where the uniforms don't show your name. The way Robert was brought up, you played hard and you made the extra pass and you didn't care how many points you scored, you cared about winning. And you didn't talk. But Obama liked to run his mouth. It didn't bother me much. But maybe it had nothing to do with basketball, maybe Robert was pissed off about something else.

Anyway, it was cold and people were tired, and still half-drunk. I got the feeling on both sides that some guys really wanted to win. Then Reggie set a pick for Obama, and Robert fought through it. I tried to help out and caught an elbow in the nose from somebody and sat down on the frozen concrete trying to hold the blood in with my fingers.

Obama put his hand on my head.
“You all right, kid?” he said. “Let's call this thing off.”

But Bill ran in to get toilet paper, which I stuffed in my nose to stop the bleeding.

“Marny's fine,” Robert said. “You all right, Marny? He's fine. If you start something you finish it.”

“I don't mind,” I said. So we finished the game.

Afterward, I said to the president, “There's somebody who wants to meet you. Someone I teach with.”

Gloria was waiting for me in the kitchen, with a wet warm cloth. I took out the bloody tissue and held it to my face. When she saw Obama, she kind of stood at attention, but he put out his hand and she shook it.

“I think you knew my father,” she said. “I think you knew my father before I knew him.”

Obama's high forehead was sweating under the kitchen lights; he started drying himself off with cocktail napkins. After a while, he had a handful of these napkins and nowhere to put them.

“Who's your father?”

“Tom Lambert. He used to work for the DCP in Chicago.”

He put the napkins in his pocket. “I was very sorry to hear it when he died.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Too long,” Obama said. “He died too young.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

The kitchen was crowded, there were maybe thirty people in the room, including the caterers, waitstaff, security, and the rest of the guys who played. Obama put his arm around me and said, “I want you to know something about this guy, he's not a whiner,” and then the other conversations took over. Somebody brought the president a glass of mineral water. He turned to Robert, who was drinking tap water by the sink, and called out, “You ever seen the shower they got on Air Force One?”

“You can use the showers here.”

“If I leave now I can kiss the kids good night.”

The sense I had of unreality was strong. Robert had left his shirt over one of the chairs and put it on again, buttoning it slowly; his fingers were probably cold. He didn't look very happy—we lost that last game by six or seven points, and I got this funny feeling that Obama was talking so much because he won. But then I couldn't read him at all. His face was very expressive. Of course, he was used to being looked at, and maybe the best way of covering up what you think is to show a lot of expression. But then at other times his face went blank, he stopped paying attention, and people around him had to repeat their questions. Robert I knew a lot better, but he was strange to me too, and I wondered if they had been working on some deal that didn't come off.

Gloria said to me, “Take me home.”

“You ready to go?”

“If you can't make it with me now, you never gonna make it with me.”

So I took her home.

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