At around six-thirty I arrived at a bar on the Lower East Side that Duke had picked out. I could have gone back to the city with Karen, talked with her, but instead I’d wasted half an hour in an East Rutherford bodega thinking he’d want to meet me in Jersey. So I rode the train alone again. Duke’s choice of venue was certainly odd for a man who’d just signed with an NFL team: a basement sports bar festooned with the faded paraphernalia of the Green Bay Packers—the Bears’ chief rivals. The place was shriveled, stricken by time, neglect, and changing fortunes. There seemed to have been a glorious past, but perhaps it was only nostalgia to imagine that these dirty and wilted things had once reverberated with life. All these placards, photos, illustrations, and replica trophies might have appeared even worse at that point, for lacking any history, even one of degradation; there might, then, never have been a time when this bar induced meaningful feelings in its patrons, not until they were several drinks deep, at least, and pretty much any place would do.
As I entered, a bouquet of skin, charcoal, and the froth of bad beer greeted me. Duke waved me over as I came down the few steps below ground into the dark and dirt of the place, next to a window that might have brought some relief when it was fully light out, but now only gave one a sense that the day was at its natural end. He eyed me steadily as I sat down on a thick chair made from unmatched boards of pine slathered in a layer of clouded lacquer, so that they looked as if bacon fat had dripped and dried on them.
Duke wore a white hoodie and sweats, and still had a bag of ice under his arm.
“Like it?”
“Never been before.”
He let out a rumbling, croaky laugh, my first taste of his merriment, even if pain contaminated it. He clutched at his ribs, looked down at them as if they weren’t his problem but someone else’s, and he was simply inspecting them out of politeness. “You don’t like the place,” he declared. “That’s okay. It’s not great.”
I admitted my feelings with a shrug.
“It’s simple, really. I used to live right there.” He pointed up, out of the grated, water-stained window, into the night. I turned and saw the lights from the tenement building at the end of his finger. “My mom and dad moved back to Chicago only a few years ago. So the Bears are a dream for them. They want to keep an eye on me, after everything they’ve heard. But tonight I’m going to be in the old building with my man Bryan. Just because of the ribs... well, and the leg.”
“What happened to the leg?”
“It started cramping hard after I got dressed. Now it’s real sore. I didn’t notice until the car ride was over. I’m going to need all of this.” He took a shot of something or other and then downed a third of his pint. “I told Cotter my mom was here visiting, I think that’s why he went for it. He’s not as bad as they say. Freddie made the case, came up with the idea. He’s been working with them ever since I signed. I don’t know what he said exactly, but I guess you can tell, he says good things. He’s worked with a lot worse than me. Heard of Maurice Clarett?”
I vaguely had.
“Bad example maybe, what happened to him.”
I went up to the bar and got myself an IPA, and when I returned, without my asking, he began to tell me things. Perhaps this was to control just how much he divulged, and what. For such a young man, he was an old hand at dealing with doubts and questions. He’d also probably recounted the narrative of What Went Wrong so many times, the story that made sense of his peculiarities, now polished over dozens of tellings, that he didn’t, for his own sake, want to have to go at it piecemeal. I hadn’t really intended to talk extensively with him on a first meeting, but if he wanted to speak, I could certainly listen.
“We were doing pretty well here, in the city.” He pointed up again at his old building. “Chicago was harder, but it was never that hard on us, my family. Not next to people I knew.” His mother, it turned out, was the bookish one (there had to be one somewhere to explain Duke’s makeup), a pleasure reader of novels and monographs. That meant no television for the kids, no internet after five, nothing of the kind. He had an enterprising dad, in household supplies and hardware, who took the first opportunity, a decade in the planning, to move his family to New York and open a storefront with a white colleague of his from Chicago. There were siblings, too, two brothers and a sister.
“I was ten when we got here—the second child.” Duke sipped his pint and looked at me squarely. Now that he’d set the stage, made his opening move, I felt him waiting for the familiar pressure of an interlocutor picking a line of attack that he’d then counter, run around. But I asked him nothing. I wasn’t a journalist. I was there to look more than talk; I don’t think he understood this. So I simply got us a couple of beers when we’d finished what we had. I didn’t need him to do anything in particular for me, be anyone in particular. It would have been rare in his life to meet someone who took this attitude toward him. Perhaps it’s rare in anyone’s. Now that he was talking, my only aim was to steep myself in his stories, the truths, the falsehoods, so that he’d rub off on me, on the drawings. That’s it. What rubbed off exactly didn’t matter. But he couldn’t have known this, that I wasn’t a truth-teller attempting to limn his person. He might not have even agreed to the project if he knew how cavalier I was about it. For this reason, I adopted the studied silence of the psychiatrist, yet without the physician’s purposes and principles, the Hippocratic oath. Intervention, dialogue, I knew, drew out not half the gems that a well-timed series of nods could. Girls had taught me that, actually.
“What is that rotting in here?” he asked. “You smell that? I’ve never figured it out. But when I was sixteen, coming in here with a fake ID, it all smelled like roses to me. They knew it was fake, too. Didn’t care. My dad’s store was a few blocks from here, down near the river. It was there for a decade. Whenever I’d walk to it, I’d come by this place, look in this window, looking for friends of mine, the older ones, when I was too young. The store’s gone now. They’ve got something better going on back in Chicago.”
He studied me. Again I felt he was trying to induce me to probe, to search. And again I declined, focusing instead, and quite happily, on my drink, which negated the rank odor, or anyway reduced it to just one, of bad pale ale infused with the taste of ash. I was feeling intrepid enough to order food, maybe some loaded potato skins, but Duke grabbed me by the forearm, pleaded with me not to give in to a temptation I’d regret indulging.
“Want to come up?” he said. “There’ll be something or other in Bryan’s fridge we can hit. He’s not home yet. Probably the best time to see the place.”
I didn’t understand.
“Wouldn’t it help you, with all this? He was my next-door neighbor.”
I squinted at him slightly.
“Look, I don’t know what kind of shit you want out of me. Freddie didn’t really explain. But Bryan’s place is a lot like mine was. Not as nice, but a lot like it.” He swung his stiff leg out from the bench seat it’d been resting on, a posture that had kept his body rotated slightly away from me since my arrival. “Anyway,” he added while probing his thigh, “I want to put some heat on this.”
Bryan’s apartment was a two-bedroom with ceilings of reasonable height and fresh white paint everywhere. Nothing fancy about it, yet it was sharp-edged and clean, not at all like the bar below, or, for that matter, my own home, miles north.
“Our place was down the hall, just over there.” The lights dotting the hallway ceiling barely glowed, so I couldn’t see the door Duke pointed at on the way into Bryan’s apartment. I wouldn’t have asked to come here, not so soon, as I had no very developed thoughts on how I was going to proceed with Garrett’s project as it related to Duke. I was prepared, actually, to dream up most of him, including his history. None of Garrett’s or Paul’s instructions contradicted that. Duke was, of course, feeling me out tonight, getting some sense of my angle and aims. It was making him slightly wary of me, clearly, but this was no game on my part. Although I knew I needed to spend some time in his presence—and Daphne’s, too— that’s about all I knew. Nothing could be ruled out. He was right, then: maybe coming upstairs would help. With nothing else occurring to me, I took out my phone and held it up as a camera, out in front of me, and waited for Duke to load a plastic bag with ice from the freezer and come back and see what I intended to do. No surprises, not so soon.
“Yeah, yeah, fire away. That’s why we’re here.”
I started snapping without much consideration, my usual way, when I bothered with a camera at all. I took pictures of the light fixtures, the moldings, the views out of all the windows (mostly unexceptional). Then I went out down the hallway, toward Duke’s old apartment, shooting the faint lights above as I walked.
“I’ve been sitting on this couch of Bryan’s,” he called from inside, “for over a decade. And it’s still stiff as hell.”
I came back across the threshold and shot the L-shaped sectional, long and red, that marked off the living room from the dining room: first the bit with Duke on it, then the segment without him, or all but his iced leg, which ran right down it.
“These are just guides,” I said. “Nothing serious.” But he wasn’t listening, he was closing his eyes and sighing deeply, thinking of his pained body, of the flight back to Chicago tomorrow, of the game next week. Of everything but me and my pictures. While he meditated, I roamed farther afield, taking snapshots of each of the bedrooms, giving myself the largest range of materials to work with. I had a strong memory, but it’d softened a bit from disuse, the outsourcing of psychic duties to phones and pads and all other screens. I never leaned heavily on photos while composing. I’d tried doing that back in school and never cared for the results. The Rockwell effect, I called it. The function of these pictures, if I ever looked at them again—and there was no guarantee, just like the study notes one takes but never refers to, because writing them down sufficed to engrain them in the mind—if I looked at these pictures again, it would be merely as triggers to memory, which might lead me back to the living pictures of the imagination. This is why I took many of them, and so heedlessly: so that they might possess the unframedness of ordinary experience.
I was at the threshold of what looked like Bryan’s parents’ bedroom when Duke spoke again: “What exactly are you thinking of drawing? Because I sort of don’t give a fuck.” He laughed hard but briefly as a whine came from his lungs, his mirth punishing his inflamed post-game body. “I get the feeling that’s why you’re coming to me in particular. Not you. Arête, though. Why else? I didn’t even make the draft. It’s not like basketball. We’ve got seven rounds in football. And I still missed it. Only other thing is, maybe this guy James has got some serious Cal nostalgia.”
I returned to the living room and slipped the phone away, I hoped for good.
“I thought my shoulder, my ribs, was the worst of it, but now I can’t tell.” He had ice on his neck and his leg now.
“So... why Berkeley?” I asked bluntly. Why not? It was what came to mind.
Duke’s brow furrowed a moment. “Why Cal?” he corrected me. “Well, why me? How about you tell me that first?”
“You should ask my boss. I didn’t pick. Freddie probably knows more about it than I do.”
“They wanted me, for one.”
“Cal?”
He smiled.
“I have this feeling,” I said, “this wasn’t just about an athletic scholarship for you.”
“So you looked me up, I see. Well, I like football. I like smoking dope with Bryan and my crew. And I like selling it—liked selling it, I mean. But not really: just fucking-around selling it, small-time shit. Oh, the people you meet!”
“I believe that.”
“What you’re really asking is, do I like books. Yes. Hence Cal.” He was toying with voices, though I wasn’t sure whom he was mimicking. Someone with a sort of pan-European accent, certainly a non-native Anglophone. Someone not him, maybe that’s all that mattered. He pushed the icebag off his thigh and started gingerly flexing his knee. “You been reading about me?”
“Believe it or not, James told me not to.”
“Well, I don’t really believe it.”
“If I knew more about what we’re doing exactly, or how we’re doing it, I wouldn’t be taking random photos and saying a prayer.”
“So you’re meeting me for what? “Inspiration”? We’ve got room to fuck with then. That’s what that sounds like.”
“And why you, you wanted to know?”
“I do.”
“I guess you’ve got other things going on besides football.”
“Other things?” He pushed up violently with his arms and stood on his bad leg, keeping his knee locked.
“That’s got to be part of why.”
“There’s plenty of other things to pick from, yeah. A lot of these players, let’s be serious, they’re dumb as dogs. You and me aren’t like that, though, right?”
He was standing over me, biting his thick upper lip, exposing the brilliant pink innards of his lower one. He bent awkwardly at the waist, keeping the leg taut, and dug under the couch, into the lining, one section at a time, starting with the one farthest from me. As he moved along the couch, he pulled off the cushions and let them tumble to the floor. Eventually he got to the segment I was sitting on, closest to the window. I popped up and he flipped the last cushion and stuck his hand deep down into the crease near the arm until a smile emerged on his face.
“The final part of my post-game treatment is this right here.” Duke pulled his hand out and brandished a roughly hewn pipe and a plastic bag, one inch square, with oily brown sludge in it. He pinched off a bit of this sludge, whose pungency, as soon as he unsealed the bag, revealed it to be hash, and with a dexterity that was remarkable for hands of such magnitude, he nimbly loaded the tiny pipe, which looked like a scrap of wood whittled by a child, or a trinket from an Andean bazaar.
“So why’d the girl leave?” Duke raised his eyes as he tamped down the hash in the pipe with his pinky.
“You’ll be seeing her.”
“Did I say I wanted to?”
“I mean, if you don’t mind.”
“The fuck do I care.”
“She’s my boss—one of them, anyway.”
“You understand that, though, right?” he spat, ignoring what I’d said.
Perhaps it was this sort of thing that worried the team.
“You know I’m just joshing you, right?” He enjoyed putting italics on words, even when he didn’t slant his accent. He was suddenly mischievous, and it seemed to arrive from nowhere. I suppose the mere prospect of getting high raised his spirits; his body instantly seemed less imposing, lithe rather than stout, reposed rather than explosive, though he couldn’t have done more than shift his hips and shoulders a touch. “But yeah,” he resumed, flicking the baggie onto the cushionless sofa, which now appeared a repository of cellophane wrappers, coins, and crumbs: “I did wonder why she left. She didn’t say a whole lot. She wasn’t scared, was she?” He lighted the pipe and pulled long and slow on it, eyeing me in a way that made me feel as though he’d never stopped smiling.
“She said she wanted me to break the ice,” I replied. “Because I know a little about football.” I started replacing the cushions he’d thrown up in his search, just to soften the DEA-raid aesthetic prevailing in the living room.
“And anything about manhood?” he asked as he exhaled, no less deeply than he’d inhaled.
“She might know more than me about that.”
“I see,” he said, grabbing my neck and massaging it as if it were I who’d taken the big hits tonight. He started waving at the smoke with his other hand, big swings of the forearm, not so much to dissipate as to indicate that it was this he wanted me to draw into my own lungs.
“Shoot this,” the order came, just before he took another quick pull that made the pipe rustle like faint television static. He lowered his eyes to his lips and watched the smoke depart his mouth at its own pace. “I’m going to want to talk to her, eventually.”
It was a strong picture, the way Duke’s eyes were active but low. I let it settle in my mind.
He stuck the pipe close to my face.
“Shoot this goddamned shit.” The words were suddenly harsh and frightening. There was that torque running through his body again, the sense of coiled energy. You’d have to be outside a certain radius to feel he couldn’t pounce on you whenever he liked, and I was not outside it; the apartment wouldn’t allow me any distance from him. What was it that had changed in him?
I came out with the phone again, snapping blurry little jpegs of Duke.
“Not with this fucking thing in my hands,” he said with a blistering glare as he held the toylike pipe aloft. “Just the smoke is okay, I think. I can say it’s whatever, even when these end up online.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.”
“But I do, see. People are paying for these now.”
“My boss pays me more to keep them private.”
Duke shook his head. I didn’t know what it meant, exactly, the way he did it.
“I’m going to need to do a few drawings of you from life, at some point,” I said. “That’s one thing I did want to say tonight.”
He stared hard at me and tightened his grip on the pipe, which was sheltered now within his capacious palm.
“Okay?”
He opened his palm, gently cradling the device as though it were a baby bird.
“You can come out to Chicago. We’ll find some niggers in the wild for you,” he offered quite sweetly, as if cooing to the roasting bird.
“And here too, maybe,” I said. “Drawing you, I mean.”
The pipe disappeared in his fist and he smiled. “If I’m around again—if James pays me enough to be.” He pinched the instrument between his fingers. “Now hit this. And don’t tell me you don’t smoke, or that you only eat it in candy bars or some shit.” He said this as though my hash use weren’t a surmise on his part, but something he knew for a fact. He was right, actually: I’d had dalliances with it, though I’d quickly gravitated toward stronger things, when I was still interested in drugs. Most of the artists I knew these days were reliable workers, abstemious in the extreme. They’d never ended up in hospital beds on drip IVs for alcohol poisoning. They were academicians at heart almost. Excellent students, budding studio professors, no less than the Paris Salon painters of the fin-de-siècle. Somehow Duke seemed also to know I shared his contempt for the cannabis industry. Legalization really just meant pot-laced Snickers bars and CBD smart drinks, nothing more. I found the whole thing sillier than vaping.
Duke condescended to me with a smile then, watched me come to grips with his powers of observation. I took the pipe and the lighter from him without a hitch and smoked it like the natural I was or had been, in the days when I was every bit John’s match. There were entire years when I’d smoked it too freely, when I’d spent most of my time divided between the studio, the library, and the balcony, with hardly any left over for humanity. John hated that I’d moved on from that stage, actually. That was the first wedge between us.
I closed my eyes as I inhaled to better focus on the smoke in my lungs and the acrid relationship between the two that laced my experience with pain. At the same time, there was engagement; one managed to absorb the other, in the end. As I opened my eyes with my lungs burning and I spouted smoke from my mouth, there were Duke’s eyes to meet mine. Something like the first glimmers of trust crossed his face, trust in his own intuitions about me.
“It could be your leg, it could be something else—your soul even—but you have to say this shit’s pretty all-purpose, right?”