It was beautiful hash. I also wouldn’t put it past Duke, or Bryan, the rightful owner, to have chemically enhanced it in some way. All sorts of agents might have been involved, but I liked to think it was angel dust. I didn’t smoke much of it, just a couple of hits to please Duke, and perhaps to satisfy some slight nostalgia his words and mien stirred in me, for the days when Rick and John and I would gather to discuss our latest paintings—the stuff we didn’t bring to class, our private work—only to descend into an oblivion induced by the hash-soaked cigarettes John would pass around, whenever sobriety no longer suited the lot of us, not just him.
Even if I wasn’t going to smoke seriously, Duke expected some sort of camaraderie in his rituals of self-medication. Afterward, he started rummaging through Bryan’s kitchen. From among the household cleaners, below the sink—I had no idea why it would be there—he pulled a bottle of Bombay and held it aloft. That would certainly do. It did far too well, in fact. It was the last sturdy memory I had of the night: Duke grinning triumphantly, pleased with himself for having sniffed out, for the second time, one of Bryan’s stashes. Everything after that moment was streaky and smudged. There were a few items here and there—I do believe I met Bryan, for instance—but my mind only returned to me with any solidity on Monday, around noon, back in my bed in the Bronx, with my lungs only capable of three-quarter breaths. My phone, however, teemed with traces of the night just past. It was on occasions like this, where biological endowments stood no chance, and memory capitulated, that photography earned its keep. Most of these pictures I couldn’t actually recall taking, which only reinforced the point. Some of them I hadn’t shot at all, as I was in the frame, from far beyond selfie-range. Duke would have taken those, after I’d crossed a certain threshold of incoherence. Some of the snaps were of me with Bryan, and some with me and his friends, who, I recalled now, did eventually turn up, although what I retained of them had the contradictory funhouse quality so often propagated by drugs: big hugs, and also, I’m sure, a punch to the face. My face. I ran a hand over my mouth and discovered only an eminence of flesh, mostly numb, hence not so painful. Not yet. It was only by opening my mouth, or trying to—as I discovered, I couldn’t open it much without a violent pain shooting through my jaw—that my lips could be individuated with my fingers. Using the phone’s camera as a mirror, I could see they were almost the size of Bryan’s. They could have become like this in a number of ways, of course, drunkenly stumbling through the city: crashing into a fence post, say. I hoped for a photo that would settle the matter.
My thoughts came together in a pleasantly sluggish way. Everything took an extra moment to register, leaving a trailing interval, a sort of wake in consciousness, where the strangest apprehensions, the unlikeliest possibilities, would enter and dissipate before I had any chance of examining them, much less putting language to them. I’m not sure, given the way my head felt, just how it was I’d managed to get home. If Duke had been feeling generous since signing his new NFL contract, or if he had basic compassion, he might have put me in a car. But he might have simply wanted me out at some point. I could be that kind of guest. And if so, I might well have taken the train back home, tripping my way down the stairs and onto the platform. Is that what happened to my face, a fall down the stairs? My comportment in subway stations was well-known and abhorred by nearly all my cohort, but it might have been my saving grace with John, the only reason he continued to believe in our brotherhood. For one, I smoked freely down there, waiting for trains while drunk or stoned on pills, dragging deeply and slightly enjoying the looks I got. Once in a while, someone would get brave, ask for a smoke and stand there with me, both of us puffing in triumphant silence. I might have smoked more cigarettes down there than anywhere besides the park.
I’d also been ticketed once: three hundred dollars for emptying my bladder in Grand Central. This was always the great temptation I felt, relieving myself down below the Earth’s surface, among the indigent dwellers, whether I was alone or in company. It all depended on the amount I’d drunk and the fullness I was feeling. It might have been why I looked so kindly on Helena, the homeless one in my station, who always stank of just this public feat, weakly executed, to wit, directly in those military fatigues that clung to her. My favorite memory on this score was the time, being frustrated with Helena’s failures, that I demonstrated the proper technique. I did it that night, right near the tunnel arch, the proscenium through which the train crushed the fourth wall. (Sometimes Claire had served as an unwilling lookout, and sometimes I hadn’t cared. I just went about my business, even with the platform half-full.) I sent up a heavy arcing stream in the corner there, right in front of the stage, as Helena looked on from track level. She was laid out flat on her stomach, with her head turned toward me and her eyes widening periodically as they always did. I thought I saw her smile, or else nod. Naturally she’d have to vary the technique for her own sex, though you could just as well crouch where she was, pissing onto the very edge of the tracks. I trusted her to make the necessary adjustments. But she never smelled any better.
I assumed Duke couldn’t have lost his mind quite the way I had last night, where I’d gone well beyond my usual limits. He probably got up to this regularly enough to have some tolerance for it. It was also, I knew, an NFL rite to smoke marijuana not for the purposes of recreation, not primarily anyway, but simply to ease the inflammation engulfing players like a holocaust the night and day after the game. In this they were no different than late-stage cancer patients, smoking to relieve their suffering.
It also came down to bodies. Though we were about equal in height and frame, Duke’s person was denser than mine. Just looking at his forearm, the taut skin, the muscling, the prominent veining that reminded me of ancient sculpture, I knew he must have had twice as many cells packed within him as I did, or else the ones he had were twice as alive. It wasn’t a matter of virility or dash. In fact he gave off a vaguely repellant air. Instead there was a kind of completeness to him, which meant his vitality had a fundamentally aloof aspect, sealing him off from weakening forces of all kinds, whether competitive or pathogenic, environmental or cellular. You expected joyful aggression to define every part of him. His blood you imagined thick and syrupy with macrophages confronting any and all invaders; and his organs, his kidneys and liver, you knew were vitiating all impurities. On the level of medium-sized dry goods, you sensed the recalcitrance in his arms, his neck, and then in his entire body, which was shot through, even at a standstill, and even lamed by injury, with movement—with, you might say, a basic resistance to fixed position and place.
I, of course, partook of none this. A profound immobility dwelled in me, so that resistance of any sort didn’t, for me, transcend the psychological, where it was indeed strong, as it was strong, I could see already, in Duke. Physically, however, I was easily undone. Small amounts of toxins made my body succumb. Surrender came naturally to it. I looked to some people wiry strong, but in fact I was probably just wiry.
In bed I scrolled through last night’s photos on my phone, blowing them up at random with two fingers in the haze that found its way around my blinds. I could see that Duke had spent much of the night without a shirt, or even that Arête vest. The only thing his upper body had as shelter was black pressure tape laced around one shoulder. At some point, Bryan’s ceiling fan, which I remembered to be hanging by a thread when we arrived, came crashing down. There was a deep soreness in my right hand. My fingers were stiff, as if I’d punched something. Looking at the wire-laden wreckage of the fan, flash-lit and photographed right on the floor, which was covered in the short green carpeting you find in office buildings rather than homes, alongside Bryan—yes, it was him, and I had met him—who held up one of the broken vanes that looked almost like a boomerang now with a disconcerted, unresolved look on his face, I had to wonder whether my hand had somehow ended up in the path of the blades. Yet the fan had swirled so lopsidedly, it might have simply ripped itself out of place with its own momentum. Could it have been slowly but irrevocably on the way to becoming this pile on the floor from the day it’d been installed, working its way out of joint over the decades? A bad bruise is what it would have dealt a roving hand. It wouldn’t have taken anything off cleanly; it rotated too lazily for that. And wasn’t I standing up on the couch at one point last night, putting my hand within the fan’s ambit?
In any case, I was surprised Bryan wasn’t angrier in the photo. Hadn’t I myself been doom-struck in the moment recorded by this picture, on seeing the fan in pieces while assuming the consequences were going to be steep for this mishap, whoever might have been at fault? Perhaps fault was hard to parse in this case. We could have all been responsible for the destruction, if it was the result of some collective inanity we’d engaged in beyond the drugging. You could see Duke in the upper-left corner of this photo, in the deep background, laughing gleefully, with a look that signaled at least complicity, that is, that he lay somewhere in the causal sequence leading to the fan’s tragic end.
It’s possible Bryan didn’t appear truly incensed in the picture because he’d only just arrived home and found Duke in his apartment. Wasn’t there a touch of enthusiasm and warmth lingering on his face here, from seeing his old friend, now a pro starter, back in the old place? And wasn’t this feeling, this expression of his, being supplanted by a rage prompted by what we’d managed jointly to do to his place in his absence?
I scrolled on, hostage to these photos of my own making. They were all that definitively remained of my mind, as far as yesterday went. There were shots of the hallway; I vaguely recalled taking some of these. But there was one of the door at the end of it, the door I’d not been able to snap the first time around when Duke had called me back from the blood red sofa. There were photos of people I didn’t recognize, probably some of Bryan’s friends or neighbors, who’d come around for only a very short time. Maybe one of them softened up my right hand(my off hand, as it happened).
As Monday wore on, my head swiftly cleared—too quickly for a hangover. In fact, I realized, I was still sobering up, and the crash had yet to come. When had we wrapped up last night, then? It could easily have been five or six in the morning for me to still feel this way. Which meant that the struggles I had in recalling the evening need not have been down purely to a faulty memory brought on by blackout drinking and drugging. My present intoxication might be contributing something. The afternoon went by happily enough, while I anticipated the revelations that would come into my possession when my dream state abated. I avoided all my messages—I was working, in a way, wasn’t I?—and simply observed, as my liver went to work for the rest of the day, great stretches of past experience come forth, talking with Duke, with Bryan, with his friends. It was like seeing, as though for the first time, what was already plainly there, fixed and determined: my perceptual memories of the evening past. And with every hour, the mental “tape,” originally just snippets of footage here and there, mutated into something resembling a continuous whole.
By Monday evening, I’d fully sobered up, and was in fact starting to have an inkling of the profound hangover to come. Though much of the previous night had returned to me by then, not everything had. Certain events remained garbled or simply missing. In other spots, the sequence of happenings blurred, though reasonable guesses could be made, especially in light of the email and text exchanges I would go on to have with Duke and Garrett throughout the week, clarifying this or that matter, or indeed, extending the discussion of certain points, filling in holes as best I could. The tale I came away with by Friday, a composite of all our knowledge, seemed, if not comprehensive or cogent in every detail, as strong as I needed it to be. The first bowl of hash Duke loaded yesterday, I had a very clear picture of. He’d smoked it standing up, in the kitchen. Frequently his bearing struck me as that of a caricature of an MC from another era—maybe Nas right near the beginning—the way Duke hunched slightly, with his arms curling out to his sides, as if he were ready to throw signs. I wasn’t sure what, if anything, he was trying to tell me by this. Was he playing to my own illusions of blackness, what he imagined them to be, anyway? I decided to proceed, at least for now, on the assumption that he was mostly stretching out his sore limbs.
I’d been alternating between sitting on a stool at the counter and standing next to him in the kitchen, hitting the pipe once or twice, but mostly topping up my glass, depleting the Bombay he’d found two-thirds full. After he finished the bowl, he was done hunching. His body had become elastic, he moved more freely, and he began to pace, a step or two in each direction, within the kitchen. That’s all there was room for.
“California,” he boomed, his voice tilting black here. Again I was finding there were always two things to assess in speaking with Duke, more so than with most people: what he was actually saying to me, and what impression he was trying to leave me with. I think in this instance he was saying the full name of his college team, though without any lead-in: a non sequitur that had enough meaning. Or maybe he was naming my home state, the stomping grounds of my family. Could he have known that? What had Duke been told by Hartley and Garrett? What had he found out for himself?
He stopped pacing but kept adjusting his weight from one leg to the other, testing the state of his limbs, I thought, or dancing to some music playing only in his head. While doing so he gathered up, through great reach alone, ice, a bottle of club soda from the fridge just behind him, and another glass from the cupboard near the window. (The absolute compression of space in Manhattan meant you could frequently do everything from a single pivot. You didn’t need to be an athlete to pull it off.)
Duke had been recruited out of high school as a tailback, not a receiver. “The best in Illinois,” he said. “One of, anyway.” This he told me on the phone, actually, a couple of days after our big night. He’d come up three yards short in the state championship. That was what he recalled most vividly of his high-school career: his broken hand (he’d played half the game that way) resting on the three-yard hashmark as a cameraman rushed onto the field, right past him, toward the opposing team celebrating wildly behind him. This is where Duke still drew his motivation, Bryan told me.
Division I was calling: UCLA, Cal, and Stanford, and that was just in California. He, like anyone else, had all sorts of ideas about the state, long before he’d ever been. He also had family out there, in Oakland, his mom’s brother especially, Uncle Irv, who’d played ball at Fresno State. Duke had stayed with Irv some summers during high school, when his parents were trying to get him away from friends like Bryan. The boys had too much time on their hands over the summer holiday for anything good to happen. Irv planted the seeds of playing ball in California. Not for Fresno, of course; Duke was better than he was, everyone knew that. No, he should play for one of the big schools.
While Duke’s father, Dante, was rather business-minded, and therefore not as interested in old grievances as in fresh successes, Sheila, his mother, had schooled her son in the long history of civil rights, so that Oakland and the Bay Area, the Panthers and the like, always mattered for him, even if now the region had been totally remade by the 0s and 1s of the digital revolution. She was, Duke forgot to mention—he was grinning now, he was happy to have forgotten, to have to remind me this way, after emerging from the kitchen, a gin and soda with lime in hand—she was a professor of sociology, African-American sociology, though higher education hadn’t managed to pull the family out of poverty. It didn’t always work as advertised. Actually it had pushed them into poverty, and then helped keep them under: she’d fallen into adjunct labor, beautifully schooled (a doctorate from none other than Chicago) but dirt poor, which was hard for her parents, being merely poor, to see as advancement.
Duke went out on a recruitment trip to California. It ended up being the only one he took. In his mind, it’s where he needed to be. He’d believed this for years, actually, before he’d even become a standout player. He’d schemed about living with Irv to get in-state residency status, so he could attend Berkeley at local tuition rates. Of course, all this became irrelevant for an athlete like him. He wasn’t going to be any kind of walk-on. They’d take you on and pay for you entirely, whichever state you were from. Given the money that college football created, it made perfect sense: this wasn’t affirmative action, just sound investment.
“Cal, though, Cal was the place.” Where did he say this to me? In the kitchen? The couch? Outside the building, where we roamed I don’t know quite when? What accompanied this snatch of aural memory were Duke’s bulging eyes, his normally taciturn calm shattered through recounting his school of choice. (Or by PCP.)
Cal was the place, he’d thought. There, they’d been most receptive to his “extra-athletic prowess.” Duke brought with him commitments, ideas, which had baffled some schools during interviews. But they didn’t bat an eyelid, the football staff at Berkeley, when he rattled off texts and figures approved of and administered in the first instance by Sheila: Gordon, Hall, Fanon. It wasn’t just this, though. Chicago had done it to him, too, the rising murders all through his youth there, the growing sense of black doom, which was twice that of New York’s, if such things could be measured. Oakland, though, it could compete for desperation, and it had worn politics on its sleeve for at least half a century. It made sense to him, to push deeper into the cauldron. To Irv, too.
I remembered Duke sitting next to me in Bryan’s apartment, with his feet up on the couch while he told me much of this. His body had limbered up, though he seemed, in speaking, to turn almost grave. He was eloquent and succinct, not much meandering. I could see by the look he flicked my way now and again that he was quietly resolved to show me just these qualities, dialectical ones, civilized ones, as early as possible. This was the burden he lived under, I knew. It was incumbent upon him to dispel preconceptions everywhere he went, not because there weren’t preconceptions affecting everyone, but because the ones pertaining to “men like him” were what they were.
I couldn’t really relate to him—that would have been the standard thing to say. But I wasn’t so sure. Relating wasn’t such a high bar. All you needed was an analogy to hold two things together, nothing more. Being is the tough thing; I certainly couldn’t be him. Nor the reverse, though. That was metaphysics. But the analogies between our lives weren’t so hard to see. Having artistic ambitions made you immediately suspect. Not professional or financial ambitions, those were different and in no need of explanation. I mean simply the aim of creating artistic objects, even if they didn’t bring you money or fame; indeed, especially if they pushed you further away from either, and left you, at best, illustrious and unknown. These aims were doubted, ulterior motives were sought. No-one could be that pure.
By no means was my predicament equivalent to Duke’s trials—and vice versa—but the common factor was also more than nothing, this visceral skepticism I encountered wherever I went, particularly now that I was no longer playing much for the usual gatekeepers who could verify my merit and intentions, approve them like the FDA approves a drug. Just what was I up to, they wondered, in getting off the career track? What sort of stunt was this? David Hammons had been mentioned.
Duke topped up our drinks, mine being straight gin. He seemed amused by my refusal of soda. He must have thought I was trying to prove a point to him with this, for instance, that I was bold or raw in some way, when in fact it was more practical than that. Whenever I was driven to drink with the purpose of getting drunk, which by this point I was—it was also a fait accompli: there’d be no avoiding intoxication tonight, so why hold back?—whenever I drank like this, I was going to take the shortest route, and mixing drinks wasn’t it.
He was standing at the window, rattling the ice in his glass, looking down onto the competing bodegas buffering churches, when he started speaking as if the window were open and he had an audience outside. He returned to the matter of Berkeley. In the series of moments making up the night in question, I’m not sure just where this one goes. Other things certainly may have happened between my drinking gin on the couch and Duke speaking down into the street like the Pope. Bryan may even have come back. What he said, though, and elaborated on later in emails, was that Cal wasn’t merely unfazed by the oddities manifest in his interviews, where he would venture all sorts of academic and political hypotheses with both the coaches and the deans. At least outside the locker room, they were actually going to flaunt his intellectualism. He’d be proof of their liberalism in a moment of crisis for multicultural capitalism, a volley fired against the ruthless, mercenary approach to college athletics that ruled Division I, where athletes routinely cheated on tests or didn’t bother going to class and everyone involved just pretended it wasn’t happening. Duke, though, was going to fulfill the true ideal of the student-athlete, rather than end up another teenage boy exploited for his black brawn, playing in a sport that mostly made whites rich, whether they were associated with the university or the professional sporting leagues that beckoned. There was the question of whether Cal was merely using Duke as a red herring, as the Democrats had Obama, to lead people away from the fact that, at bottom, there was nothing to challenge the status quo here, no change, no difference, just business as usual.
“I’m not so sure it’s as heinous as that, though,” he said. The university’s intentions may well have been basically sound, or anyway not straightforwardly bad. They were probably fighting in good faith against the darker elements emerging in American and European politics and culture—even if they weren’t exactly in a rush to reform the NCAA, top to bottom, as they sometimes pretended, rather than simply check its worst excesses. Maybe Duke would count as a precedent, or at least an example of what was possible, for other recruits, other schools.
He also had purely personal reasons to sign with Cal: he’d get a longer leash, given their avowals, to do much more on campus than chase a ball around.
“Politics doesn’t really mean books to me, knowledge”—another thing he’d said at some point in the night. It had struck me, particularly given my dawning realization of just how much he’d read. “And a lot of it,” he’d said—or had I misinterpreted him in my stupor?—“isn’t really under my control.” What did “it” refer to? His behavior? His politics? Duke did make it plain to me that he wasn’t conscientious like his siblings. None was quite as exceptional as him, either, his two brothers or his sister, and this wasn’t a boast, just a fact. So far they’d not established a domain in which they consistently excelled others. But, he admitted, none was quite as ornery as he could be; his mother used to say this with a sharp little laugh that actually tickled him. Sheila was a tiny bit proud of this mean streak in Duke, an untamed forcefulness, a less-than-civil disobedience. A degree of barbarity was tantamount to being truly involved in something: Sheila would never quite say that out loud, as it went against her education. It was probably an attitude that would be hard to argue for, yet this didn’t make it an attitude you shouldn’t hold. Wasn’t she herself a bit nasty? But then what about Duke’s father? Dante had been ambitious in his way, commercially, even if he’d not quite made out as well as he’d wanted to for the family. But there wasn’t much edge to him.
The problem with Duke, and it was unique to him within his family, was that under the heading of social awareness and resistance of the oppressor he placed more or less wanton criminality, the release of improvisatory impulses. Naturally, given the amount he had read, he had to justify, in his own mind, not just others’, this proneness to the unrestrained discharge of energy, the kind of electric experience that can only properly exist outside the realm of sanctioned behavior.
He knew this, of course. “That’s what makes nigger culture so potent,” he’d said to me. He didn’t hit the word nigger especially hard, he simply used it, in this case with an academic detachment, as if it were a bit of passé jargon. Probably one of his mother’s areas of expertise: uses of the word nigger in the Americas. There was no-one who didn’t at least implicitly know this about black culture: the source of its fecundity, its pervasiveness in mainstream American and now European life—whether in matters of music, fashion, television, film—was its original illicitness, its origins in humiliation. You could accuse Duke of rationalizing his conduct, but so long as it wasn’t pure rationalization, as long as some bit of it was genuinely a matter of disintegrating the known order of things, he wasn’t going to lose sleep over it.
“I like to ball this way,” he said, plopping down next to me on the couch, renewed by the hash and gin. “I like to fill with rage.” He liked to steal, too. To destroy things, though never people, he said with a wink of his watery eyes. It was his personal version of “disruption,” he said with a laugh. Weren’t we all supposed to be disrupting things these days, especially in California?
Duke started digging up more bottles of booze, methodically sifting through Bryan’s things and taking real pleasure in these discoveries while reacquainting himself with an old friend (he’d not seen Bryan in months). There was nothing malicious in it. He wasn’t snooping. Well, maybe a little, checking that Bryan hadn’t crossed any lines. But this wasn’t at all like the searching they’d both witnessed as kids, all those raids. At least that had never happened to either of their families, two of the more upstanding ones around here. There would be none of the officers’ thievery and seizure he recalled. Not that he was above such things, by any means; only that at the moment, unlike me, he had no financial troubles, and he wasn’t going to add to his old friend’s. Bryan was still selling phones at a Verizon franchise, second in line to the title of store manager, and still living with his mom, who was staying right now with a sick auntie of his in Delaware, which had made this little reunion possible.
Duke poured himself some Jameson he’d found in Bryan’s bedroom. “The short of it is,” he said—and the short of it was all he was going to give me, it appeared—Duke had gotten himself arrested, along with his younger brother, Zeke, and Bryan as well. More than once, in fact, back in high school. More than twice, too, Bryan would tell me later that night, beaming. An image remained with me of Bryan’s making this little correction, and of the friendly daggers Duke sent his way, to stab out the joy in those eyes.
The arrival of Bryan and his friends changed the atmosphere of the apartment decisively. With the crew present, Duke filled out the rest of the picture of himself somewhat reluctantly, although he did do it in a more nigger-friendly tone, as he called it later. He was right to be careful, because now the group would interject whenever they felt his tale went astray. Unusually, it appeared Duke was mostly downplaying his exploits, which was odd, given that his reputation was hardly a secret. Still, you had to be absolutely sure you had nothing to prove to take this line.
I couldn’t tell whether their versions of events were likely to be truer than Duke’s, of course, and frequently someone in the group took issue with someone else’s proffered amendment to the story. At the very least, Duke knew he couldn’t pass off any real howlers on me, which, in one sense, was a shame. If lies were part of his fantasy life, part of the man he wanted me, the artist, to see in him, well, that was real enough for me. Anyway, there’d be other chances to get him alone and give him a free hand to embroider.
The first thing that became clear was that he’d spent “his share” (was there a share, really?) of nights in jail. Never prison, just jail, with those chilly concrete walls and the steel toilet right in the middle of the cell, separating the two beds—if you can call slabs of concrete beds. The only pretense of comfort offered, with vicious humor, were the bleached white sheets mere microns thick. This bedding, a guard releasing him one morning explained, was only there to preserve the cleanliness of the cell, like a paper tablecloth at a chain restaurant. And always across from you on the other slab, Duke said, while Bryan and the others heartily agreed, there was a real criminal, muttering, barking, threatening absent people before threatening you, while you tried to lay low, given the smallness of your crime—when it was small. Vandalism with a spray can. Reckless driving. Wet reckless driving. Disorderly conduct. Public intoxication. Marijuana possession, before it ever got legalized in NYC.
Duke never carried cocaine or anything stronger. The guys he knew who’d been caught with that were, several years later, still serving time. Bryan, though—and this was the most valuable service he provided for me that night, an unintentional one—his face started shining, not just his eyes but everything, this face many times lighter and less menacing than Duke’s, yet with the heaviest of lips, this face turned to pure light whenever Duke’s indiscretions surfaced. Bryan was almost prouder of his old neighbor that he’d managed to make it all the way to the pros with all this history weighing him down, that he’d dragged it all past the finish line, into the end zone. Bryan himself was never a student like Duke. Nor an athlete. So there was never much chance of him hurdling Verizon. Duke though, however unruly, was the one who could, and simply knowing that it was possible for some was solace enough for Bryan.
Throughout the night Bryan’s visage, which seemed naturally to convey a certain thoughtfulness—he looked smart, even if he wasn’t—acquired a teasing edge, referring back, I felt, to a shared history of indiscretion, only a fraction of which he and Duke had ever been caught for. Some of it might have been quite a bit darker than anything I was being told, and this, perhaps, explained exactly why Bryan was so proud of Duke. But old comrades weren’t going to incriminate each other, not seriously, anyway.
Eric or Derek, I can’t be sure of his name, only of the brand new puffy red vest that looked out of place on him—he was one of their friends, and everything he wore besides the vest was mean, which made the garment look desperate on him, a poor cover-up, whereas a sweat-stained Hanes T-shirt would have lent him the greater power of authentic poverty. This man Eric intimated, as we sat around Bryan’s living room, that there might have been a somewhat longer stint in jail for the second DUI Duke had picked up, even that someone might have gotten hurt or threatened a lawsuit. I think he thought only I heard him; he was sitting next to me and fondly relating the possible injury to the other party: Duke took him out good. Immediately after, Duke stiffly passed him the pipe, shoving it into his chest with a thump as if it were a football. Derek didn’t speak much again, or anyway he didn’t resurface in my memories. From then on he would have been too muted, too cowed, to have made the cut. Some of these people, I must have met five or six of them that night, including several who hadn’t seen Duke in over a year, were probably auditioning for his payroll, should his contract, presumably heavy on incentives and light on promises, yield enough cash to put together some sort of an entourage, as professional sportsmen will. Duke’s remonstrance might have been his way of training up Derek, or Eric, for the role, seeing if he was fit for it.
Sometime in the very early morning, everyone left and Bryan crashed out, having to work the next day at eight. Duke, seeming remarkably sober as he sat in the living room with me, both of us whispering so as not to wake up his friend, came back, at great length, to the subject of Cal. He was obsessed with it, just like Garrett, and he’d go on to tell me a lot. The university’s recruiters had known about some of his trouble, apparently, the deeds that had made him untouchable for many other schools, once their full extent surfaced. But at Cal there was policy-based wiggle room for students with difficult pasts, and not just athletes. Partly this was down to Berkeley’s committing to a renewed, radicalized progressivism as the distance and enmity grew between left and right in the country. In the end, when all of Duke’s records had been fully released to colleges, the only ones not hemming and hawing were Cal and UCLA, which answered to the same Board of Governors.
In truth, he explained, he’d always quietly counted on a blind eye being turned on his transgressions. He considered the wide berth he was given in the more civilized portions of the culture the true reparations every black man got. It was compensation not just for past grievances, but for current ones occurring at the lower end of the culture, on the street and at the “correctional” level. What, really, was the point of being black if you didn’t collect your allotment of leeway, Duke said that night. Sometimes you collected it on your own behalf, for every time you were followed around a department store or a pharmacy by staff, and sometimes you did it for all the other blacks who continued to be macerated by society, the ones who didn’t have enough brawn or hustle to lend their services to white diversion. On the gridiron, say.
For all his errant behavior—errant from the point of view of the university, anyway—he’d actually enjoyed college. “It was beautiful,” Duke said, and the way he said this word, the governing word not of art but at least of aesthetics—the philosophy of the beautiful—caught my notice. His college years couldn’t have been beautiful in any ordinary sense. The experience had been full of turmoil, chaotic; there was nothing balanced or harmonious about it. What, then, did he mean? Well, he’d been able to be an athlete, an intellectual, and an aesthete all at once. He’d not had to sacrifice the spirit of moral dereliction that felt like his birthright. I’d noticed after the game, with Karen and Hartley, something subtly wayward about Duke in the company of whites, a quality that lightened considerably in the presence of his own race. It was easy to enjoy this about blacks, of course, their waywardness. The entire entertainment and sports industries were built around this possibility. You could enjoy them, their doings, their productions, in just the way you enjoyed the strife and suffering of fictional characters. So when you saw blacks in person, if you could overcome your initial fear of meeting such things, these creatures of low tragedy—and there was no guarantee that you could—you might even enjoy it in person. For a while, anyway, until those dramatic things, inevitable things, really, given who you were dealing with—humans pressed into the quasi-human role of entertainer—until they started happening right around you, in real life, when you very much stopped liking them. No more than you would like the serial killer who steps out of the crime procedural right into your living room.
Duke, I thought, had smiled at me that night in a way he didn’t smile at his brethren; and there was a warning in that smile, although I didn’t strictly require it. I understood the fantastical element of his appeal, to me, to Garrett. But there was something nefarious about him, even once you accounted for his racial and economic background: an air of perfidy, I’d felt it already, even if I had no real idea how this might manifest. It was hard to say whether this quality was rooted in his thinking, or whether, as he liked to suggest, it was lodged somewhere deeper, a place unreachable by knowledge or etiquette. Whatever it was, it radiated from him, right along with an indwelling power.
Duke had actually finished his college degree, a rarity among gifted college players, who typically entered the NFL after no more than three years of school. He could have done that, given his talent. Yet while he did see himself as an athlete, that didn’t mean he wasn’t also, in his mind, a budding intellectual. Or even a sort of performance artist. A college acquaintance of Duke’s had once described him that way, and he’d held on to the term, long after he’d forgotten the person who first applied it to him. I myself began to see the man as a belligerent provocateur, whose medium, for the moment, happened to be football, but whose vision easily exceeded it.
There were other facts about those four years, he explained, that even a star professional would find it nearly impossible to replicate. No city can be dominated by a single personality the way a sportsman can dominate a college campus. Granted, the effect was probably stronger elsewhere, particularly in the Midwest and the South, with so little else competing for attention, than in Berkeley, an intellectual and activist haven with all the entertainment and energy of the broader Bay, of San Francisco. Yet even there, if the team were really winning that year, beating SC and Stanford, vying for the PAC-12 title and a bowl-game berth, a football player could hold the place in his thrall. True, in staying for graduation, Duke proved he needed to understand something more than a playbook. But he also wanted all four years of the paradise promised him.
His on-campus persona had been, almost from the start, and I suspected by design, indissolubly complex. At least he took some retrospective pride in his own inscrutability. On the field, there were the improbable catches. But there were also the often unnecessary blocks off the ball—outlawed, in the pros, by the so-called Hines Ward rule—that had left half-a-dozen players unconscious, to be carried off the field on gurneys, some with cracked vertebrae. There were a few suspiciously low tackles on interceptions: he would chase down the cornerback and play games of chance with their knees. Several thought it a matter of time until he paralyzed someone with this approach, or sundered someone’s ACL, and about all of this Duke wasn’t exactly unrepentant, simply vague, dipping into player-speak so that nothing of substance actually had to be said about it. People sensed this in him, that something was slightly off—which he liked, he claimed. It was important that they know. What would be the point if they didn’t?
Away from the field, he reveled in building as much as in destroying. There’d been the campus protests against the right, the notorious visiting speakers of Breitbart whom Berkeley, as a state university, had been forced to host. He’d spearheaded those protests in his junior year, to much praise, even by university staff, who tacitly agreed with him. With his bullhorn, he’d also apparently let them descend into riots: rampaging students destroying property, private and public, some even looting in ways that made Californians think back to the riots of the nineties down south, in Los Angeles. The consequences had been serious. One student ended up blind in one eye because of a rubber bullet; another required skin grafts for burns sustained in the midst of automobiles set ablaze by the more violent elements of Duke’s faction.
He wrote an ongoing column for the Daily Californian, unheard of for an athlete, given that his pieces were almost never about sports. In the paper he would critique Cal’s sometimes malignant relationship with the city of Berkeley. He was even able to save certain neighborhoods from university designs, by preventing sale of their land. At least that’s how campus lore had it. At the same time, Duke used the column for personal vendettas, subtly attacking the credibility of certain professors—he considered this to be political intervention, and maybe it was—professors who’d not taken to his classroom grandstanding and refused to show him the privileges he was accustomed to on campus. Frequently his targets were women, and the incidents with them went beyond mere words. No rape allegations, he was very firm about that, even standing up for emphasis when he told me. They were, he said with a laugh I found chilling, allegations of unnecessary roughness. Everyone was a consenting player, in his mind. You understood the risks. He pointed to his forearm: an opponent tackled him by it and broke it in three or four; he lost most of his sophomore year. But he wasn’t mad, he’d left himself vulnerable to it. “Protect yourself at all times, right?” He had a boxer’s mentality. No complaints.
Later I would learn online that his sexual encounters with women, several of them underage, had led to as many people being brought to unconsciousness by him in his bedroom as on the field. How much, I wondered, did Garrett know about all this? Both sorts of incidents, the two halves of Duke’s life, had cost him a lot of playing time. Apparently he’d needed all four years just to get the minutes he wanted on the field to refine his game.
Duke told me that night he’d been one of the four or five “problem” players in his class, perhaps the worst offender among them. So he wasn’t exactly shocked when nobody called on draft day. He’d laid the groundwork for it, hadn’t he? “I sacrificed,” he said unequivocally, and absurdly. “It’s just the price of being something more than a player.” Of being what more exactly? Something good?
As he stretched out those long arms that finished in monstrous hands, the stuff of stereotypes—but then, he was a receiver, this was no random sample—I couldn’t help but marvel at his lack of loyalty to his own talents; to something, football, he took probably more pleasure in than anything else (didn’t he?); something, too, in which his singular skill, his exceptionalness, might be made plain. It was precisely this that made him a threat to the NFL, and what put his future in doubt.
So what was it Duke held above pleasure or worldly success, both of which he was already experiencing through football? When the game became something concrete, not an abstract contest of wills, it was clear from the way he spoke that he had a sort of gentle contempt for his colleagues, whom he didn’t view as equals, just instruments, nothing to be taken too seriously. It was, he warned, this same spirit, of existing beyond the plane of his fellow players, of more than anything tempting fate, that had allowed him to sign on to this project for the Arête brand without much sense of where it was going. If you were desperate to succeed in the NFL, you probably wouldn’t be open to such improvisations. But he didn’t seem to mind doubt, confusion, havoc. Wasn’t that night at Bryan’s its own kind of chaos, one he had more or less manufactured? Didn’t it have the feel of an initiation into some obscure cult whose rules were unknown to me? And where had we left things at the end, exactly? My memories gave out at that picture of him somberly uttering the word sacrifice. Nothing that happened afterward was going to be able to compete with that.
It was sometime in the small hours of Tuesday that the hangover seized total control of me, and I was almost glad for its arrival, signaling as it did the beginning of recovery. Typically I dreaded the time lost, the concentration destroyed, not just the day after, but in the days after that. If you paid enough attention, you could sense a slight diminishment in acuity—a new and unwelcome graininess to consciousness. Indeed, whenever I went to blackout levels, as I had with Duke, and most of the night was a blank, it could take me as long as five days to regain absolute clarity and expunge the mental lag. For that time, I’d have to deal with a persistent clamminess to my eyelids and forehead, and the subtlest tremor of my tongue when I placed its tip on my palate. It was a test I used to conduct on myself, actually, to know when I was truly fit again to work, to think, to imagine. Yet as I lay there, in full knowledge of the disagreeable week I’d set myself up for, my thoughts were pervaded by an easy and unfamiliar optimism. In a single weekend, I’d gathered proof of the adequacy of my materials: Daphne and Duke. Which meant that when this bleariness abated, there’d be real work to be done, not mere trial runs, or just final pieces to previous puzzles, like those morose portraits of Claire that had come to dominate my life. It had been a year at least since I’d last worked with this excitement of possibility, of opening rather than closing vistas. Along with this would be the first serious money in a while, quite possibly more of it than I’d yet experienced or had any right to expect had I carried on with Sandy and his vaunted gallery. With philanthropists like Garrett, you really couldn’t know just how lucky you were going to be.