to the side of the stands and lean on a fence with the little brothers and sisters of the athletes on the field. Little kids. I move to the other side of the stands, walking behind the stands this time, and stand near some trees that obstruct most of the view. The place smells to high heaven from the piles of neighbors’ dog shit. I am alone at least.
Hoover’s track team wears maroon sweats. They are an integrated team of Negroes and whites. They are walking in the direction of the field in knots of five or six. The home team wears white sweats and is all white. I wonder which boy is Rick Hanks. I search the thirty or so maroon figures looking for someone who could pull a carload of bitchin’ girls to see him jump. I can’t tell.
A smallish white boy appears in the bus doorway. All his teammates are on the field. One boy with three coaches steps down the stairs. As soon as he is out of the bus, he smiles a huge smile. The girls in the stands are on their feet yelling “Rick” and waving at him. He is walking like this happens all the time. He breaks into a light trot toward the high-jump pit. This is enough to get the girls louder for a second. They sit down in silence, and then they start mumbling to each other. I can hear them. Most of the words are along the line of cute, so cute, or sooo cuuute. Well, cute I don’t know, but certainly improbable. He’s got a baby face, a Kingston Trio haircut, and with the three other guys he now walks with, he looks like a younger brother. Except for something. What, I don’t know. I look into the stands and I can tell that all the Hoover kids are feeling pretty good to be going to the same school as Rick Hanks.
The track is bright in the sunshine, the wind is dying down. There are red, blue, and white plastic triangles hanging in long lines all around the infield. The chalk is in even lines all around the huge track. The hurdles are sitting in stacks by the straightaway. The high-jump pit and the pole-vault pit are mountains of fragrant wood shavings and sawdust. The athletes are jogging, stretching, jumping up and down, passing batons, and every face looks like it means business. Men in red jackets are carrying pistols. Coaches are standing in conference with clipboards, pointing and directing the occasional athlete that approaches. A man sits at a table with two large loudspeakers, one facing the stands and the other facing the infield. The man at the table shuffles a stack of papers. The stands sound like a gigantic beehive. I am beside myself with energy.
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,
