The jumpers take turns warming up by jumping over the bar at a fairly low height. It looks about 5' or 5'6". Well, I should say that the home team jumpers are jumping. The Hoover guys are elsewhere. Finally they join the three white-uniformed jumpers. One Hoover guy jumps a couple of times clearing the bar by a lot, maybe a foot. The home team jumpers begin to sit down. Rick Hanks is over by the football goalpost, reading a book. A few minutes later, after the other jumpers have begun to settle down, he appears to be advising his teammates on their approach to the bar and to the take-off area. Each boy stands under the bar and swings his leg up toward it. Some boys do this many times, too many times. It is clear they are trying to appear to know what they are doing, but they seem nervous. Rick Hanks gets a tape measure from one of the coaches and with the help of a teammate stretches it from the near side of the crossbar, out several feet into the grass infield. He sticks an ice pick on a measured spot and winds up the tape. One of the other guys returns it to the coach. Rick Hanks stands motionless at the spot. He goes over every inch of the ground leading to the take-off spot — for twenty minutes. He tries out his steps, and then gets the tape measure and measures it all over again. He seems to be staring at the bar. He drops his head and with the first step of his first warm-up jump, everything in the stands, on the field, in the universe stops. Rick Hanks takes nine even steps, smooth and relaxed, with absolute purpose and ease. He does not stop at the take-off spot. His run and take-off combine in a single explosive instant. He shoots lightly into the San Diego sunlight, rises up, passes above the bar immediately, continues rising, rolls slowly hovering high in the air for what seems to be four heartbeats, and slowly descends into the sawdust. He brushes himself off as he returns to his book.
I am sure the girls responded in some manner. I know I heard a couple of hoots from the stands, a smattering of applause, and a grown man yelled something. I am sure that anyone who saw Rick jump that day was happy and inspired to see a boy eventually jump 6'10". But for me the world had not begun to turn yet. I was riveted to the boy reading on the lawn, lying on one side, propped on an elbow, his chin in his hand, his twitching foot the only indication of energy. A boy who knew something. A not-so-special boy who knew how to hover in the air, and do something so beautiful and so dramatic that he could let it speak for him.
“YOU’RE ON . . .”
The stakes are always so high. From the very beginning I thought it must be a complex combination of guts, glory, luck, and resolve. But I was looking too hard. If it had been a snake, it would have bit me. All the stakes are high, it shouldn’t have thrown me off. As usual, I guess, I wanted it simplified.
It turned out to be more difficult than simply “Keep your eye on the ball.” An old Indian used to drink behind our Little League Park. A home run was a lost ball. I was still ignoring the warning track in those days. After bouncing my head off the chain-link fence with a miracle disguised as the third out stuck in my glove, I lay still on the grass for an eternity. I knew a dramatic moment when I felt one. Slowly I raised my glove above my prostrate body. My dugout, of course, became a Vienna choir of cheers. Ecstatic, and bounding toward my team, I heard the Indian’s voice pulling me down to earth, growling, “Relax.” I told him to speak to me in English. His laughing fit lasted the next two extra innings. We lost.
For the next few days, the Indian was determined to teach me to hit. He made his own assumptions, I guess. He thought I’d be motivated by his words, had a direction to begin with, and really wanted to hit the ball in the first place. I didn’t.
My field of glory was out there. Not in some box with a fat man in black breathing down my neck, pointing out which ball I could have hit. I lived in the field, in the unpredictable moments of defense. I didn’t want anything served up, I didn’t want to think about a trick pitch. My life was never gonna be a count of three or four.
But the huge face with the purple alcoholic lips kept insisting, “Keep your eye on the ball.” I knew it was the wrong advice for me. With a nervous system resounding like a perpetually rung tuning fork, I became a strike-out king. I started swinging the Louisville 31 about the time the dust popped out of the catcher’s mitt. I wasn’t gonna look harder, I wasn’t gonna look at all.
The Indian must have known that. He had to. I was born to live above the letters and below the knee. Out of the strike zone. His advice just turned me on my heels and sent me walking, emptying the Red Hots down my throat, thinking in a whisper . . . speak to me in English.
I liked that Indian, I think he was telling me about something he had once but didn’t own anymore. It took me a long time to understand it. But now, to this very day, every time a fastball hisses at my heart, I can hear his voice echoing. “Take your base.”
Clarity
It rains accidentally, or it rains on purpose. It rains, we know that for sure. At weird intervals, for a moment, or for a couple of celestial days, I’d get it all. I could see it all plain, I’d be absolved of all these sins, I’d have the blessing of cognizance and capacity. I’d be living right then and there. But it evaporates. It leaves no trail. When it’s gone, you feel left behind, on fire, in the glare, wishing that clarity would drop out of the sky and soak your long hair, and wash your burning face.
Next Fall
Sex does the same thing. Hours where whatever ground your feet are planted on, the rest of your body is wrapped in the confusing immersion of hers and yours. Warm rapids rolling and bouncing into a flat placid space, revolving slowly in a fainting spin toward the lip of the next fall. Old women whisper about it, saying to anyone who’ll listen, that it’s just like youth, one day it just doesn’t come back. It’s gone, except in annoying dreams that make the fabric of their clothes irritate them here, here and here. They look away, and their fingers draw light circles on their soft cheeks, they get up and walk into another room.
The magic of a principled universe has us on our knees anyway, there’s no need to bend down. We stand in our gain, and walk to our loss. There’s nothing to remember and only ourselves to forget.
BLACKROAD
When there’s nothing left of America to sell, try a piece of blacktop. Just go right out there in the heat of the summer and kick off a hunk or two by the side of the road. Take it back to your doorway, your park bench, your abandoned car. It’ll give you something productive to do while you wait for the rest of your life in the two-day-long line, once a month, every month, for the maybe-it-works-maybe-it-doesn’t anti-AIDS vaccine. And if you can’t pay for your vaccine again this month, you can use a chunk of asphalt to help you take the change off the other homeless people you used to step over every day.
You see the beauty of it? It’s versatile. Bust out a piece of your car’s rearview mirror. Get the light just right and it’s as good as a microscope. Now just sit down and get a good long look at that gritty piece of oily shit, that smelly piece of America, that black hunk.
What you have there is the hottest-selling item in the world today. You just need a little imagination. You’ll want to catalog the things of value in each piece. And it is rich, and just by association, you are too. Look close. You are holding American nostalgia right there in your hand. You’ve got product and you can sell it.
Go ahead, collar any fool. Show him the tiny pieces of roadkill and hit-and-run. Little scraps of flesh and hair, feathers and blood — every damn thing that walks, crawls, swims, or flies on this rancid continent is stuck to that