Dead Languages

DID YOU KNOW that corporal punishment is often used for petty and trivial offenses such as throwing gum or not stripping for gym? Did you know that it is sometimes administered with split baseball bats and with slotted paddles? Did you know that it has been done in front of other children, as well as by students? Did you know that it has been done to disturbed children who need to be helped rather than hurt, that in the name of discipline grown men will hold a resisting child down on the floor and hit him many times?

Did you know that, when Mother got worked up about an issue, she could crank out a purple pamphlet with the best of them? Well, I suppose you did…. It wasn’t so much that I hated the members of my family as that I couldn’t communicate my love. That is always a problem, I’ve found, being unable to communicate one’s love. It gets one into the least attractive type of trouble. And I did love them. I loved them as ferociously as it’s possible to love one’s field artillery when one’s field artillery is committed to the ideal of social justice but prone toward intramural warfare. It seemed to me Mother thought the only reason to exist was to perform an endless number of good works. Where in the world would she get such an idea? No wonder Beth’s doctoral defense was going to be a revisionist view of the Levellers.

The primary beneficiary of Mother’s largesse was the Negro People. There were far fewer honeymoon pictures of Mother and Father kissing each other than of both of them kissing some black-faced, white-robed statues in Palm Springs. And that seemed to set the tone for the remainder of the millennium. Father rooted for the Dodgers because they were originally from Brooklyn, but we as a clan stayed loyal to them because they hired the first black baseball player (Jackie Robinson), retained the first crippled black baseball player (Roy Campanella), and started the highest number of black players with Stepin Fetchit faces (Johnny Roseboro, Jim Gilliam, Tommy Davis, et al.). There was something slumming in all this, something that was wrong, and I knew what it was when I was nine years old: we would love someone only when he was helpless. Gretchen thinks most of my problems pretty much stop and start on that sentence. One Easter weekend at Watts Towers Mother looked smogward through some latticed wine bottles with a positively religious sparkle in her dark eyes. When cousin Sarah married a black man from Philadelphia, Sarah’s mother couldn’t come, so Mother substituted and brought the temple down with an a cappella finale of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Never in my life have I met anyone who meant so well.

She began working full-time as the public information officer for the first integrated junior high school district in California and proceeded to make the Levellers look like a gang of Georgia Democrats. Mother sat on the side at the Tuesday night school board sessions, attacking her antique typewriter as if she were H. L. Mencken in Inherit the Wind. Whenever she grouped school children for posed pictures she insisted there be black faces in the crowd, but she was such a poor photographer that the black kids always came out as smudgy studies in ebony. She wrote the bimonthly newsletter that was distributed to the teachers, my teachers, and nearly every issue offered a signed editorial polemically in support of desegregation of the schools.

“We were all babies,” she wrote, explaining the origins of human sympathy. “We all have parents who love us. We all live in some kind of house. We all have families. We all have friends. We all need food. We all have feelings.” She got giddy about people she’d never met in a way she never could about people with whom she lived in some kind of house. Mother needed a scrim between herself and love, in the same way Father has relied upon the periodic cancellation of his memory; Beth, the space of time; and me—at twenty-one I already seem to suspect I’ll never marry.

One day Mother came home and stood on our tiny plot of front lawn, pounding a for sale sign into the grass, shouting at us to come outside.

“What’s for sale?” Beth said, wise guy, as she was deep in some homework assignment. “The lawn?”

“The whole blessed house,” Mother said. She pirouetted ecstatically in the windy twilight.

“Back to L.A.?” Father hoped. It was the only true paradise he ever experienced, way in the past.

“She’s lost it,” Beth whispered to me. “She’s finally joined Daddums in the burn ward.”

“At today’s Human Relations meeting, Ike said, ‘Revolution comes the day white families give up their houses in Pacific Heights to move into the ghetto.’” It was 1968. Mother took what Ike said as a personal challenge. Ike pronounced the word, “ghetto,” with exaggerated emphasis on the first syllable to make it sound like he still lived somewhere near there.

“Honey?” Father tried again. “Don’t you think Ike meant it just sort of rhetorically?”

Mother refused to entertain the notion that words were ever meant as anything less than a direct call to arms and, while we paraded up and down the sidewalk with flashlights, accosting inquisitive pedestrians, Mother got on the horn with a hundred realtors, trying to get one, just one, to have enough imagination to foresee what a publicity coup it would be for them to work out a swap with a black family from the Fillmore. It’s a pity Father hadn’t earned his real estate license yet. Maybe he could have figured out a way to get us waking up every morning in the projects.

That wouldn’t have been his style, though. He was more circumspect about his role in the revolution. That fall, Father was fired from his post at the Jewish Welfare Fund—he wasn’t getting enough one-liners about last night’s charity dance into Herb Caen’s gossip column—and accepted a much lower-paying job as director of the poverty program in the Mission. He sat in a one-room office without central heating and called grocery stores, wanting to know why they didn’t honor food stamps; called restaurants, asking if, as the sign in the window proclaimed, they were indeed equal opportunity employers. Sometimes, on weekends, he flew to Sacramento or Washington to request more money for his program. In the Mission district, they worshipped him. They called him the Great White Hope. Watts rioted, Detroit burned. Father said, “Please, I’m just doing my job.” They invited him to barbecues, weddings, softball games. At the softball games he outplayed everybody. The salary was seventy-five hundred dollars a year, but he was happy. The ghetto was his.

Father called a landlord to ask whether the apartment listed was still available and received assurances there was a vacancy, but when he returned that evening with a skinny black man who’d just arrived from West Texas the landlord said the room had been rented. The poverty program filed a complaint with the city housing department; when weeks passed and Nicky was still without a place to live, Mother told Father to move Nicky’s luggage into the guest room.

Nicky didn’t have any luggage but he stayed until spring. He showed me how to shake hands, how to play pool, play cards, how to dance, how to dress. He bought me liquor and dirty magazines. He played basketball, baseball, football, tennis, and track with me and let me win. He didn’t leave until he met and married a pretty white girl, but what I remember is this: the morning after he moved in I walked into the bathroom while he was showering, smelled his body as burnt butter, hot heated jelly, damp sweet sweat, and vomited into the sink.

With Father working to improve the ghetto and Mother working to get children sent out of the ghetto, they couldn’t very well, in all good conscience, keep me going to a lily-white private school. Besides, neither of them was making anywhere near as much money as before and they couldn’t afford such exclusive education for me any longer, especially since Beth still had another year to go at Jack London Preparatory Academy. Also, Mother thought it would be good for me to mingle with unpampered people; I might get off my high horse and loosen up a little. Instead of going, as most Currier graduates did, to Borough Hills Middle School, which was neither in a borough nor on a hill but in the middle in the sense that it was an intermediate step between private grammar school and prep school, I went to Bayshore Junior High in the heart of the city.

BAYSHORE was different from Currier. No grass fields, no left field walls, no right field fences, no tower with hour bells. But no speech therapist, either, no farcical student elections, no red-robed Christmas chorus catering to tourists and appearing on the eleven o’clock news, no all-night Open Houses. Just gunmetal gray lockers, gunmetal gray corridors, gunmetal gray classrooms, and little black boys carrying gray metal guns. They left me alone; they knew who my parents were. My reputation as a runner had also preceded me, and they weren’t going to harm someone who, come track season, promised to be so valuable.

After school I’d walk into the Mission, leave my books in Father’s office, then go to the court in the ghetto, which, after the murder in Memphis later that year, was renamed King Memorial Recreation Center. A hoop, a swing, a clay tortoise. At first I just watched. Black basketball is to white basketball as hockey is to, say, hopscotch: they’re not the same sport. I’d played white basketball in well-lit gymnasia, on glassy surfaces, against glass backboards, dribbled a leather basketball, passed it politely to my teammates, allowed my opponent to score a reasonable number of points, acknowledged the fact when I committed a foul. I’d played that game. Even when I played with Nicky, we’d play with people from the Heights and, if he had any jazzier gestures, he never revealed them. Maybe he just wasn’t a very talented athlete. The Mission version—wearing purple socks and black boots with a steel comb in your hair, never passing the ball to your teammates or shooting from beyond five feet, refusing to confess your most flagrant infractions, and kicking your heels and leaping off cement into rarefied ether—I’d never encountered before and was awed.

From the library I checked out Rattling the Rim, which concerned the heroes of street basketball in New York City. I’d memorize the myths, then appear at the Mission playground and, during water breaks, in halting tones, tell sad stories about Bedford-Stuyvesant drug addicts who could jump through the moon. The San Francisco stars didn’t want to hear about the New York stars. They didn’t care if Earl Manigault could touch the top of the backboard with his elbows, if Connie Hawkins could spin the ball on his nose while coming down off cocaine. They didn’t care. They weren’t interested. They wanted to be left alone and not be compared to anyone else and dunk until dark.

I shut up and just watched, but I kept reading about basketball until I found an even better book, A Sense of Where You Are, which was about Bill Bradley, who attended Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship, then played competent if unspectacular professional basketball for several years. During halftime of the Harvard game, while Coach Van Breda Kolff was explaining how to handle the Crimson’s full-court press, the future Rhodes Scholar was off in a corner with a towel draped around his neck and his Converse high-tops unlaced, reading Donne’s Holy Sonnets. At halftime of the Harvard game, in Cambridge, trailing by six, he was slouched against an open locker, scanning “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you/As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;/That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend/Your force, to breake, blowe, burn, and make me new.” He put the book away, laced up his shoes, and scored thirty-six points in the second half, including a left-handed hook from behind the basket to win the game in double overtime.

A sense of where you are. I wanted an unalterable compass of my position, not this other, disgusting feeling, this childish apprehension that wherever I was I was hopelessly lost, wherever I stood was quicksand. I stopped going into the Mission district, had Father nail a hoop to the garage door, and started practicing—with Nicky when he was around, by myself when he wasn’t.

Although I was the fastest twelve-year-old boy in San Francisco, I had what in basketball circles is known as white man’s disease: as a vertical leaper, I had feet of lead. I couldn’t do tricks around the basket, hang on the rim, hold the ball in one hand, dribble it through my legs, pass it behind my back, spin it on my finger counterclockwise, but Father said all of that was only fancy-dan foppery. He said, “Let me show you how Joe Lapchick used to shoot them at the Garden in the thirties.”

I didn’t especially care how Joe Lapchick used to shoot them at the Garden in the thirties, but Father parked the car, slammed the garage door, and trotted onto the court, clapping his hands and calling, “Pass the old apple over here, Jeremy.” Maybe Joe Lapchick used to call the basketball the old apple, but I didn’t want to be seen playing with someone who did and who was standing at the edge of the driveway wearing suede Hush Puppies, mismatched socks, checked pants, a striped shirt, a navy blue blazer, and tinted sunglasses; clapping his hands; requesting that I pass him the old apple.

Our house was at the top of a hill. If your shot was short, it would hit the handle of the carport door, take a crazy bounce, and roll all the way down the hill into a crowded cable car. I thought most of Father’s shots would fall short, and I’d spend the hour before dinner chasing the ball down the hill into various crowded cable cars, so I didn’t pass him the old apple. I just stood there, dribbling it idiotically against one particular crack in the pavement. Father rushed at me, putting on the press, so I handed him the ball and took a seat on a little wooden fence that divided the driveway from the front porch.

He dribbled around the driveway, slapping at the ball with his right hand while holding his left arm straight out to the side. He threw the ball against the carport door a few times, using the old-fashioned two-handed chest pass. It looked ludicrous. Then he ran to the top of the slope, cradled the ball in both hands as if it were a baby or pumpkin—something immense, heavy, and round in only a general sense—knocked his knees together, rotated his wrists, and let fly from the waist a flatfooted, two-handed, arching set shot very much in the style of Joe Lapchick. It looked even more comical than his chest pass against the garage door. The net danced. I clapped, more out of surprise than admiration, but Father barely managed a smile. He retrieved the ball, jogged to the top of the driveway, and threw up another set shot. The old apple barely rippled the cords. For a solid hour he ran around the court in his Hush Puppies, wiping sweat off his bald brow, taking his belt off at one point, putting it back on at another, always adjusting his sunglasses, sinking Lapchickian set shots from every angle. Occasionally he missed. The wind probably came up on those attempts or maybe he was just trying to show he was human. When Mother rang the dinner bell, he finally stopped.

“You’ve got to forget about the fancy-dan tricks,” he reiterated. “Just get the two-hand set shot down and they won’t be able to touch you. Joe Lapchick used to shoot them like that in the Garden during the thirties and was unstoppable. Put a little English on it, a little backspin, follow through, and listen to the crowd roar. Knees together, wrists cocked, right over the top. That’s all there is to it. Get that shot down, Jeremy, and you’ll be dynamite.”

Then he went inside and listened to Mother ask why he’d forgotten to post her letter on his way home. In this important epistle addressed to the superintendent of schools, Mother had outlined her plan for receiving the right kind of publicity on the multimillion-dollar bond issue. At that moment, I think I felt for Father something like love. Immediately after dinner, I went outside and, by the light of the street lamp, worked on the rudiments of the two-handed set shot. For two months I did nothing else. I played an hour before school, usually with Nicky; all afternoon; all evening when Father installed a floodlight on the balcony above the court. I’d play until Mother waltzed outside in her nightgown and said, “Okay, hon. That’s enough. The bounce of that damn ball is driving me crazy. I have to get up early tomorrow.” I’d go inside and squeeze a hard rubber ball until my fingers itched and my palms turned red, run up and down the stairs with sand bags tied to my legs, do sixty sit-ups a minute on the hard floor of my bedroom.

Not surprisingly, I became extremely adept at the two-handed set shot. Father was still a little more accurate than I was, but I could shoot from farther distances. Sometimes, exhausted and all alone in the floodlight, I’d make a basket and look up; there would be Father, standing on the terrace, thrusting his fist triumphantly into the night sky, and yelling, “Listen to the crowd roar.” I listened. The crowd wasn’t roaring. Other times, I’d be dribbling in the driveway at four o’clock in the afternoon, Beth would bring a few of her theatrical friends home with her, and by way of introduction and dismissal she’d say, “This is my brother. He plays basketball.” I had a fine, tight, little body. That summer, when we visited Father’s Relatives and Historical Landmarks Back East, the prettiest actress at Jack London Preparatory Academy asked Beth to snap a photograph of me in shorts, standing next to the Lincoln Memorial, and Beth had to oblige.

One Saturday morning, after having been away for quite a while, I ventured back into the Mission. I was hoping they’d remember who I was, but when I arrived at the court no one was there. The fog was in, the wind was up. I figured they’d all decided to stay home or had jimmied the lock on some gym. I’d grown accustomed to a straight basket, a mesh net, and a half-moon backboard with an orange square in the middle. At first all my shots were falling short and to the left. A sense of where you are, I kept telling myself, a sense of where you are, and soon enough my touch returned. I moved all over the court, farther away from the hoop, and became more accurate as the morning lengthened. It wasn’t unlike playing in the driveway, only without the sound of the net swishing and, instead, the rusty clang of loose metal as the ball wriggled through the rim.

Around noon, someone came to keep me company—a little guy wearing a wool cap and black tennis shoes laced every other eyelet with a kind of light rope. He was no older than I was, but he had a goatee. His name was Jupiter. I never knew his real name. I think it was something like Howard Morrison. His nickname was derived from the fact that, although he was very short, he could jump to Jupiter. The only other thing he was known for was setting Siamese cats on fire. I felt a little self-conscious shooting two-handed set shots while a leaping pyromaniac leaned against the pole, chomping on a toothpick, combing his goatee, and drinking chocolate milk. I stopped shooting and said, “Hey, Jupiter, where’s everybody else?”

“Don’t know, man. They’s probably at home watchin’ the Saturday morning comics.”

Jupiter held out his carton of chocolate milk and asked, “Want the rest, man?”

I was thirsty from playing all morning and went over to take a sip. Jupiter threw the empty carton onto the cement. I went back to shooting baskets.

Jupiter asked: “What’s this girlish-lookin’ gunk you throwin’ up, man?”

I heard him but didn’t know how to reply, so I said, “I’m sorry, Jupiter. I didn’t catch that. What did you say?”

He hit the ball out of my hands, did an extremely poor imitation of the shot Joe Lapchick did so much toward making legend at Madison Square Garden in the 1930s, and said, “I says, Mr. Zorn, what’s this two-handed, knee-knockin’, flat-footed, fairy-wristed, double-backspin booshit?”

Jupiter had a way with words and I didn’t. I banked a few shots from the right side, then said, “My father showed me how to shoot.”

“I’m sure he did, man. But that shit don’t wash here. I mean, you shoot that shit: it get knocked back. In your face, man, down your drawers.”

I had to reply or go home early. I said: “You want to go a l-l-little one-on-one, Jupiter, just until everyone else shows?”

At first, Jupiter thought my challenge was too funny for words and leaned against the pole, laughing like one of the crueler dogs on the Saturday morning cartoon shows. Then he said, “Shit, man, I ain’t got nothin’ else to do. I’ll play you to twenty-one and spot you five, man.” I refused the advantage, thanking him graciously. That got him mad. “Okay, Zorn, I’m playing for real now,” he said, sticking his steel comb in his hair, removing his jacket to reveal a purple tank shirt that said in silver Cunning Linguist, stepping out of his black dancing pants into cutoffs slit to the waist. “Take it out, man,” he said.

In the Mission they played Make It–Take It; if you scored a basket you remained on the offensive. I must have made four or five shots from twenty feet before Jupiter even got his hands on the ball. When he did, he dribbled through his legs for the longest time, executed eye fakes, shook his shoulders, wiggled his hips, stopped, started, twisted, turned, spun, jumped high, but he couldn’t shoot to save his life. I’d grab the rebound, dribble to the top of the circle or into either of the far corners, and arch my antiquated set shot cleanly through the rim.

“Come inside on me, man, and you’ll eat a leather sandwich,” Jupiter kept saying.

I stayed outside. I didn’t go inside. I didn’t do what’s called penetrate the key, and the sexual analogy is apposite because it’s always been my philosophy, as the inauguration poet observed in another context, to back out of all this now too much for us, to stay away from the center and perform some archaic, immaculate feat where no one can touch you. That, such as it is, has always been my philosophy. Jupiter, whatever else he had, did not have a philosophy. He had springs in his legs, and philosophy wins out every time over springs in the legs. Or, if that isn’t quite true, it was true this time. I won going away.

“Let’s play again and this time I’ll give you a little lead,” I suggested.

Jupiter threw his box of toothpicks at me—little cinnamon spears—and said word better not get out what the score and who the victor was of our little encounter, or he’d murder my mother. Word didn’t get out, but it didn’t have to. I was the surprise sensation of the Bayshore tryouts. I was the only white player on what had traditionally been an all-black team, the only virgin in the lineup, the only starter under five feet tall. The coach was white and thought white people should be coaches and captains, so he made me captain, which meant I shook hands with the other team’s captain before the game and called our plays during the game. I panicked when I had to shout in a packed gym. We worked out a system by which I simply held up a certain number of fingers to indicate what play we were supposed to run. Play number four entailed everyone else standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the left baseline, me dribbling behind them, and taking my shot. I signaled number four a disproportionate percentage of the time. The coach didn’t mind since I never missed. He’d approach me in the locker room—the marching band’s storage space—put his arm around me, and say, “My job depends upon your performance.” I didn’t know what he meant and wasn’t sure I wanted to; I took him to mean he liked my Lapchickian style of play.

Each starter had his own specialty. One rebounded mightily. Another dribbled well. Someone else passed beautifully. The fourth played extraordinary defense. So when we needed a rebound we looked to Michael. When we needed to prevent the opposition’s hero from scoring we looked to Kenny. When we needed a basket, though, when we needed two points in a hurry, they looked to me and stood back and watched.

“Listen to the crowd roar,” Father would yell as I ran up and down the court, tossing in set shots. He never missed a game—home or away—and sat in the front row, taking home movies so I could study minor problems in form. Mother showed up once with Nicky and said she thought it quite beautiful the way blacks and whites worked in harmony on the basketball court. He gave her a look, stepped away, and said, “Black and white can’t work together off the court?” Mother, mortified, said she only meant she felt there was a feature story here, some good publicity for the junior high school district. Another time, Beth came and said the arena reminded her of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s stage set for Troilus and Cressida. I was the basketball correspondent for the Bayshore Recorder. While playing, I would hear in my head phrases to describe the momentum of the game, the shot I just made, the pattern of the other team’s jersey. This seemed to me pretty much the culmination of existence: living and triumphing, then going home and writing about it in detail.

We won the city championship by such a wide margin that our substitutes played the entire fourth quarter. After receiving congratulations and various cheap trophies and having dinner at an A&W Root Beer stand with the rest of the team, I went home, sat down at my desk, and began my narrative. The Recorder was planning to play it in the top right-hand corner of page one as the March issue’s lead story, but it had to be in the following morning, so I stayed up late finishing it, then brought it upstairs to get Mother’s corrections. She was sitting at her desk in the den, tape-recording the eleven o’clock news because there was supposed to be a report on an interracial rock-throwing incident in San Jose. The house was asleep. Bruin was snoring on the sofa like the shadow of Mother’s psyche. The room was dark. The only lights I had to guide me were coming from Mother’s white nightgown, the blue radiation of the television screen, the slice of moon and ball of street lamp glowing through green-tinted windows. I sat on the floor and watched the news with Mother. The rock throwers never made their appearance. Mother sighed, shut off her tape recorder, and was drifting off to bed when I held her hand and requested that she read quickly through my account and mark any mistakes.

She returned to her desk, switched on a lamp, took out her glasses, and examined the story:

The Bayshore Bobcats bombarded the Redwood Forest, 71–45, for the 7th grade public school championship of San Francisco Wednesday, March 12, at the Cow Palace.

It really was no contest. The Bobcats (your Fighting Lynx!) outhustled, outshot, outplayed, outeverythinged Redwood from opening tip to final buzzer. Jeremy Zorn scored the first two points of the game on a set shot from straightaway, Michael Carr scored the next two on a left-handed drive down the lane, and from there on the Bobcats were not to be stopped.

The score at the end of the first quarter was 19–8. In the second quarter the Bobcats put on their full-court press, which left Ward Riley, Redwood’s highly touted center, a fumbling fool. The second half was just silly….

The story continued—with summary, then analysis, then quotation, then poetic outpour—for twenty-seven triple-spaced pages, but Mother quit halfway through the third paragraph and broke into laughter, which sounded eerie so close to midnight.

I was standing over her as she read. I stepped back into the lamplight and asked, “What’s so funny?”

“Well, for one, honey, the clichés,” Mother said. “Every sentence is a tissue of sportswriting platitudes.”

I’d thought sportswriting was a wonderful convention and the best you could do was follow its formulae. I made a mental note to exploit the convention next time I wrote a sports story. I sat in a chair across the table from her and asked, “What else?”

“Well, the immodesty is not very becoming. Will your by-line appear on this article?”

This last remark struck her—this last remark struck me—as a little too proud. She handed back the article, saying the rest of it seemed fine. She put Bruin in her basket and I was a good boy: I didn’t kick her in the rib cage. Mother turned off the lamp and walked with me down the dark hallway, carrying the rough draft of a book she was writing called Every Generation Must Win for Itself the Right to Be Free: Civil Liberties for Young People. It was Mother’s hope that “some of the readers of this book will be the lawyers and judges and legislators who will help make the Bill of Rights stronger for the next generation.” Nicky was just pulling into the carport. At the end of the hallway the stairs to my bedroom began and a white door gave onto the bedroom. Father was snoring. Beth was reading, oh, I don’t know, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Mother whispered: “Sometimes when people ask me if all you do is play basketball I want to tell them, ‘At least he’s devoted to something, at least he has an activity which he loves and at which he excels,’ but other times I wish you were obsessed with something a little more permanent, that you had a devotion which was a little more dignified.”

“Sometimes I just want to tell those people: ‘Leave me alone. Leave him alone. He’s like a dancer on that damn court. That’s where he’s king,’ but what I usually tell them, what I really feel, and I guess what I’m trying to tell you now is that I wish you’d dedicate yourself with the same passion to a slightly more refined endeavor.”

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