your volleys, he yells—or tries to. An Armenian, born in Iran, my father speaks five languages, none of them well, and his English is heavily accented. He mixes his Vs and Ws, so it sounds like this: Vork your wolleys. Of all his instructions, this is his favorite. He yells this until I hear it in my dreams. Vork your wolleys, vork your wolleys.
I’ve worked so many volleys I can no longer see the court. Not one patch of green cement is visible beneath the yellow balls. I sidestep, shuffling like an old man. Finally, even my father has to admit there are too many balls. It’s counterproductive. If I can’t move we won’t make our daily quota of 2,500. He revs up the blower, the giant machine for drying the court after it rains. Of course it never rains where we live—Las Vegas, Nevada—so my father uses the blower to corral tennis balls. Just as he did with the ball machine, my father has modified a standard blower, made it into another demonic creature. It’s one of my earliest memories: five years old, getting pulled out of kindergarten, going with my father to the welding shop and watching him build this insane lawnmower-like machine that can move hundreds of tennis balls at once.
Now I watch him push the blower, watch the tennis balls scurry from him, and feel sympathy for the balls. If the dragon and the blower are living things, maybe the balls are too. Maybe they’re doing what I would if I could—running from my father. After blowing all the balls into one corner, my father takes a snow shovel and scoops the balls into a row of metal garbage cans, slop buckets with which he feeds the dragon.
He turns, sees me watching. What the hell are you looking at? Keep hitting! Keep hitting!
My shoulder aches. I can’t hit another ball.
I hit another three.
I can’t go on another minute.
I go another ten.
I get an idea. Accidentally on purpose, I hit a ball high over the fence. I manage to catch it on the wooden rim of the racket, so it sounds like a misfire. I do this when I need a break, and it crosses my mind that I must be pretty good if I can hit a ball wrong at will.
My father hears the ball hit wood and looks up. He sees the ball leave the court. He curses. But he heard the ball hit wood, so he knows it was an accident. Besides, at least I didn’t hit the net. He stomps out of the yard, out to the desert. I now have four and a half minutes to catch my breath and watch the hawks circling lazily overhead.
My father likes to shoot the hawks with his rifle. Our house is blanketed with his victims, dead birds that cover the roof as thickly as tennis balls cover the court. My father says he doesn’t like hawks because they swoop down on mice and other defenseless desert creatures. He can’t stand the thought of something strong preying on something weak. (This also holds true when he goes fishing: whatever he catches, he kisses its scaly head and throws it back.) Of course he has no qualms about preying on me, no trouble watching me gasp for air on his hook. He doesn’t see the contradiction. He doesn’t care about contradictions. He doesn’t realize that I’m the most defenseless creature in this godforsaken desert. If he did realize, I wonder, would he treat me differently?
Now he stomps back onto the court, slams the ball into a garbage can, and sees me staring at the hawks. He glares. What the fuck are you doing? Stop thinking. No fucking thinking!
The net is the biggest enemy, but thinking is the cardinal sin. Thinking, my father believes, is the source of all bad things, because thinking is the opposite of doing. When my father catches me thinking, daydreaming, on the tennis court, he reacts as if he caught me taking money from his wallet. I often think about how I can stop thinking. I wonder if my father yells at me to stop thinking because he knows I’m a thinker by nature. Or, with all his yelling, has he turned me into a thinker? Is my thinking about things other than tennis an act of defiance?
I like to think so.
OUR HOUSE IS AN OVERGROWN SHACK, built in the 1970s, white stucco with peeling dark trim around its edges. The windows have bars. The roof, under all the dead hawks, has wood shingles, many of which are loose or missing. The door has a cowbell that rings every time someone comes or goes, like the opening bell of a boxing match.
My father has painted the high cement wall around the house a bright forest green. Why? Because green is the color of a tennis court. Also, my father likes the convenience of directing someone to the house like this: Turn left, go down half a block, then look for the bright green wall.
Not that we ever have any visitors.
Surrounding the house on all sides is desert, and more desert, which to me is another word for death. Dotted with sticker bushes, tumbleweed, and coiled rattlers, the desert around our house seems to have no reason for existence, other than providing a place for people to dump things they no longer want. Mattresses, tires, other people. Vegas—the casinos, the hotels, the Strip—stands off in the distance, a glittering illusion. My father commutes to the illusion every day. He’s a captain at one of the casinos, but he refuses to live closer. We moved out here to the middle of nowhere, the heart of nothingness, because it’s only here that my father could afford a house with a yard big enough for his ideal tennis court.
It’s another early memory: driving around Vegas with my father and the real estate agent. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been scary. At house after house, even before the agent’s car came to a full stop my father would jump out and march up the front walk. The agent, close on my father’s heels, would be yakking about local schools, crime rates, interest rates, but my father wouldn’t be listening. Staring straight ahead, my father would storm into the house, through the living room, through the kitchen, into the backyard, where he’d whip out his tape measure and count off thirty-six feet by seventy-eight feet, the dimensions of a tennis court. Time after time he’d yell, Doesn’t fit! Come on! Let’s go! My father would then march back through the kitchen, through the living room, down the front walk, the real estate agent struggling to keep pace.
We saw one house my older sister Tami desperately wanted. She begged my father to buy it, because it was shaped like a T, and T stood for Tami. My father almost bought it, probably because T also stood for Tennis. I liked the house. So did my mother. The backyard, however, was inches too short.
Doesn’t fit! Let’s go!
Finally we saw this house, its backyard so big that my father didn’t need to measure. He just stood in the middle of the yard, turning slowly, gazing, grinning, seeing the future.
Sold, he said quietly.
We hadn’t carried in the last cardboard box before my father began to build his dream court. I still don’t know how he did it. He never worked a day in construction. He knew nothing about concrete, asphalt, water drainage. He read no books, consulted no experts. He just got a picture in his head and set about making that picture a reality. As with so many things, he willed the court into being through sheer orneriness and energy. I think he might be doing something similar with me.
He needed help, of course. Pouring concrete is a big job. So each morning he’d drive me to Sambo’s, a diner on the Strip, where we’d recruit a few old-timers from the gang that hung out in the parking lot. My favorite was Rudy. Battle-scarred, barrel-chested, Rudy always looked at me with a half smile, as if he understood that I didn’t know who or where I was. Rudy and his gang would follow me and my father back to our house, and there my father would tell them what needed doing. After three hours my father and I would run down to McDonald’s and buy huge sacks of Big Macs and French fries. When we returned, my father would let me ring the cowbell and call the men to lunch. I loved rewarding Rudy. I loved watching him eat like a wolf. I loved the concept of hard work leading to sweet rewards—except when hard work meant hitting tennis
