WE PICK UP THE ACTION A COUPLE
WEEKS LATER, WITH THE DIALOGUE
ALREADY IN PROGRESS

‘You’re one of the few of our schoolmates who wears a suit and tie to work every day I’d bet, a white collar worker-’ she commented.2

‘Yeah, imagine that,’ I agreed. ‘My first stops in New York were not to D’Ags to stock up on olive oil, but rather to … shopping in New York. Supermarkets were so pinkie finger to the lips expensive, especially staples such as lettuce and pasta. Someone once told me this is because there’s no place for the delivery trucks to park and this raises the cost, but lettuce? Let us pray I could afford that basic vegetable on an entry level salary. My first stops were to Jos A Bank, Paul Stuart and Brooks Brothers, if it was good enough for F Scott Fitzgerald, it was good enough for me, before the House of Brooks went downhill, so downhill it ended up looking up.’

‘That’s not why I-’ she began.

‘Why then?’ I asked.

‘You didn’t have a white collar mentality,’ she said. ‘You were as comfortable with … I can’t think of who, but you know what I mean.’

‘Yeah, I do,’ I replied. ‘It was the students who were full of themselves I avoided. The kids who had to place themselves in the middle of everything for whatever reason. Because they lived in trailer parks and would stay there, and had to hide it by expressing superiority over others, and befriending the junior high gym teacher. There’s nothing wrong with living in a trailer park, but don’t hide it. If there’s a man behind the myth or not, we’ll all find out. The junior high gym teacher Mr Flight, though, no excuses …’ I exaggerated, but not by much.

‘So you had a blue collar mentality?’ she asked.

I thought about that for a sec. ‘Close but not quite. I had a backpacker mentality.’

She laughed. ‘That’s funny.’

I was equally at home at the Ritz or Fullerton in Singapore, or the Motel 6 in Freeport, as long as my cameo character Vijay was behind the front desk. Maybe I’ll make an exception for the Ritz. I continued. ‘We’re all the same. No one is inherently better than anyone else. My mother taught me that. Black, brown, yellow, green, well maybe not green …’

‘You have something against Martians?’ she asked.

‘Actually I do,’ I admitted, and laughed myself. ‘All men are created equal, as Lincoln said, and he specifically excluded Martians.’

Shopping in New York. I pondered life in the apple. ‘I recollect New York fondly, though at the time I couldn’t wait to get out of there fast enough. Buck fifty beers on Court Street in Brooklyn,’ The Landmark Tavern on 11th and 45th, the Washington Square Park bowling alley,3 free views of the city from my rooftop, summertime concerts at the Pier 34 Pavilion, and the best job I ever had, if I networked more and used it as a stepping stone to something better instead of lingering past the point of no return. ‘Urban basketball. The courts were near West 4th Street. That was a special place, Sheridan Square. It strikes a chord of the song Second Avenue, though this was the east side of the borough. Art Garfunkel made it famous, but he didn’t compose the melody I don’t think and the original was better.

Since we can no longer see the light

The way we did when we met that night

I think those are the lyrics. Tim Moore, I found it on Flashback Favorites. “I can still see you standing … on the third floor landing.” Art Garfunkel, in our senior stories pages, someone’s choice was “anything by Art Garfunkel.” That was Dianne, or Cindy, incidentally. One of those two.’

‘I can picture that,’ she said. ‘They were good role models.’

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘I agree. I don’t know what happened to Dianne, but Cindy became a teacher. In Jay of all places. Our mortal enemy. The Jay school system had to merge with Livermore,’ their other mortal enemy, ‘when the paper mill downsized. In someone’s infinite wisdom, the name of the combined school is Spruce Mountain, nickname the Archies, because Archers would be too intimidating. How emasculating for children of paper mill workers. Such a shame. All those workers losing their jobs, when there are no other jobs, nothing to retrain for, and they haven’t lived anywhere else, so how can they move? And there’s only space for one micro-brew per town,’ or region, if the individual towns were small. This led me to recollect Grateful Grains, which is on my list to return as soon as possible, for the reminiscence of forests abutting farmland during the wet and sloppy springtime, destination tourism and tourists such as me, popcorn and college basketball on its Sylvania TV set.

‘Yeah,’ she indicated. ‘I’m with you on that one, too.’

We paused for a little while, and naturally my mind drifted back to basketball.

‘There were courts around the corner from my apartment in Brooklyn. That was fun too, bringing a ball and shooting around on Saturday afternoons. I’m sure it’s gone now, the courts, redeveloped or something. My landlord, he was some bastard. He lived on the first floor and I should have changed the locks on him. However, I held a grudge. Grudges serve no purpose and they hurt more the person who holds them, because the offender doesn’t feel any sorrow, any dishonor. The question is whether you contact that person and try to mend fences, or confess to a confidant. I suppose it depends on the person.’

‘Which?’ she asked. ‘The perp or the confidant?’

‘That depends too,’ I reckoned, after pondering for a little while. ‘Basketball. You were a cheerleader I remember. Did you like the game? Or was it part of the camaraderie with the other cheerleaders, with the peer …?’

‘I did like the game,’ she replied. ‘Plus we had good teams.’

‘We did,’ I concurred. ‘But we couldn’t get over the humps. We choked during the big games. I remember one in particular. It was at home. It was going to be very close. However, before tip off Mr Baker gave a long speech in respect of a ref who was umping his 300th contest or something. Umping, I meant reffing. Anyway, who cares? It could have been two and a half sentences worth of thanks. He was a high school ref for Crissakes. What a downer. There was that momentum for the rest of the season.’

‘Phew!’ she said, ‘are you finished?’

‘Not yet,’ I insisted. ‘Haven’t started. It was two games before that Jeff lazily back passed to Vinnie, threatening a backcourt turnover. Being court aware, Vinnie (Vinnie: solid. More solid than a rock but less solid than an F-150) hopped and landed loudly across the half court line before catching the ball, thus signalling to the ref that no violation had occurred, but darting and dashing as if he was a 19-year old Shakespearean actor over-enunciating his lines. “The front half court shall be a stage and there hath be something rotten in ye Principality of Verona, thine schvine.” We also had Ernie on that team. 6 5, and he could touch the rim if he jumped. How did we ever lose? Jeff wore a broken nose mask well after his nose had healed, to psyche out the other small forward.’

Jeff’s father had a tough guy crewcut, though Jeff’s hairstyle was standard issue Beach Boys. In any event, the backwards pass was unintentional. Jeff, with his contagious positive mental attitude, wouldn’t do such a thing. He was much maligned for having athletic tip-in skills that peaked in 8th grade, though his infectious smile remains. Nonetheless, I still can’t picture him as a math major in college. As for me, I was good with numbers but didn’t have any idea what to do with them.

‘Now are you finished?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ I relinquished. ‘I had to get that out of my system about Mr Baker, and Vinny, and you were my confidant about that,’ I said, and chuckled. ‘Hope it’s OK. Hope it was OK. I just didn’t understood, never understood, didn’t understand, why he was held in such high regard.’ It’s about more than him declaring himself the Teacher’s Chamber mayor for life. The converted anteroom next door dedicated to environmental agitprop training was called the Eco-Chamber ha ha. ‘I appreciated Mr Barnes a lot more. Despite leaving his wife for the woman who played piano in our senior play’ – (how old fashioned, a teacher-teacher crush) – ‘and even though he was absent minded. He was selfless. We had an inspiration for a fund raiser. A comedy. Sketches. Sketch jousting, sketch jests. To pay for our caps and gowns. He got wind of what we were trying to do, listened to our plans and shook his head. He took us by our collective scruffs of the neck and whipped us into shape. It was a great performance and it went over well. “I hope you had no problême with the insults were learned you,” spoke the Bunacker tourist in one scene. We were irreverent without being cynical. Even the snobby Thumper congratulated me on my performance. Thumper. Thumper of all people. What can I say we all graduated and were able to pay for it, for the caps and gowns.’

We had a parody of a high end auto dealership, one of the few nearby to sell Mercs and top of the line Jeeps. If our rare yuppies were going to go deeply into debt for the sake of conspicuous consumption, it would be a Sub-Zero fridge freezer, rather than a set of hot wheels. In our TV ad version, though, the offering was a jalopy rather than a status symbol import, and our slogan was “Leave the Dramas to Us.” Voicing the word “drama” when the ear expects “driving,” and implying one of our used cars would break down on the turnpike sooner rather than later.

On that note, I was the driving force behind the fund raising initiative, but opted not to take credit. In my freshman year evaluations, teachers highlighted my lack of leadership skills, which essentially means I wasn’t greasy or political. Freshman are the bottom of the food chain and ritually hazed, rendering the concept of leadership extraneous in any event, and it would be bad for my image to be seen conversing cordially with a teacher outside of classroom conditions, even a good friend’s mother. Could I have run for student council anyway, and usurped one of the popular kids?

I preferred to lead by example, and how-to guides of gaming the system had not trickled into our edge of the Northeast. Machiavelli is remembered as the founder of system dynamics, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that von Neumann’s game theory experiments gained currency in the mathematics industry alone. Machiavelli taught us how one prince conducts a land grab from another and the world does not become aware until it is a fait accompli, whereas the polymath von Neumann and his contemporaries completed the proofs on jurisdictional and ratings arbitrage, which is the relevant skill on this playing field. This topic of study is interesting, but there’s no money in it, there’s hardly any money in anything which requires intelligence. The money is in commercializing moral panic.

Meanwhile, lest I didn’t recall vividly her cheerleading days, I found another letter of hers, in which she asked and explained: “How are your classes coming? I can’t stand mine. I’m not as bored as summer, though all I do is quote ‘bitch about cheering and school!’ unquote. Sound familiar?”

But what can I say, we all graduated.

‘It was a good show, yeah,’ she agreed. ‘I still remember it too. I distinctly remember one act that you were in, something like Recess Appointment I think it was called.’

‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘I wrote that sketch. This is one of the few we authored ourselves, rather than licensed.’ I have a photocopy of the dialogue somewhere. It took place on the Junior High playground. The basic concept was a silence broken by shouts out of the blue, the humor being abrupt and visual. It is not easily to explain, but it is easy to assert that the methodology was effective.

‘I was young and some of the humor was, quite adult,’ she continued. ‘I’m surprised they, he, let you do some of it, without easing some of the language. Thumper, Markie Thumper, I wonder what happened to him. Probably a caretaker’s understudy somewhere.’

‘Yup,’ I agreed. ‘Somewhere. Thumper played freshman basketball. Almost everyone did. Everyone strived to be on the varsity to benchwarm during the big game we’d choke,’ I admitted, and laughed.

‘I lost interest in basketball,’ she said, ‘after high school. It was as you said, just a game, and I became more interested in the spiritual, and individually, in the individual …’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You are a psychologist. I lost interest in the sport also. The rules were changed to dote on the superstars. If you sold a lot of sneakers you could take two steps and a hop before dribbling and it wasn’t a traveling violation … It is better now. The players actually practice shooting now, rather than lean in and get fouls called because their signature is on the sneakers the refs’ kids wear.’

‘Maybe I should watch another match,’ she indicated. ‘Though you’ll have to choose the game for me, because if it’s a boring contest I’ll regress – and it will be your fault!’

‘Indeed it would be,’ I said. ‘I’ll choose with care. No defensive struggles with players clanging six out of every ten free throws off the rim. The person who instigated “taking a charge” has a lot to answer for. The charging call dates to the 1928/29 season. It should be a no-call, or “a dive,” or a “play on,” as they say in Europe. I hate it. It’s stupid. It was a clever strategy, for a few years during the 1980s anyway, but it has long out-served its usefulness.’

‘You have an objection to “taking a charge?”’ she asked. Surprisingly, this term has not become popularized, I suppose because “taking one for the team” got there first. Other terms have, though. Full court press, hide the ball, and the four corners offence. And perhaps judges and lawyers default to basketball labels because the trash talk is so lame when compared with, say, baseball. A shout of “Miss it!” before a free throw hardly compares with “Hey batta, hey batta, hey batta, no batta, no batta, no batta, batter can not s-w-wing!”

‘Yes, I object, though my objection is with the plays in which help-side defenders run to a spot on the floor, plant their feet, and “grab their nuts because they know they can’t make a legitimate play on the ball,” as someone wrote, wrote in his blog. He also put in writing, this was five or six years ago, “it’s like being rewarded for an absurdity,” and like driving 45 in a 70 mile an hour zone. Say no more.’

‘So if my thing is spirituality, then what’s yours?’ she asked. ‘Basketball metaphors for life?’

‘Sure. Not sure,’ I guessed, ‘I’d have to think about it. OK, I’ve thought about it. The impossible dream. Achieving the Impossible Dream.’

‘Did you achieve it?’ she asked. ‘The Impossible Dream, if you didn’t achieve the Senior Scrapbook goals?’

Senior Scrapbook … close enough. I thought for another few seconds, before answering. ‘Yes, yes I did.’

She wasn’t expecting that. ‘What was it?’

My reply was swift and clear. ‘The Impossible Dream was to write the Great American Novel.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘and what was that?’

‘Easy,’ I concluded, though that part wasn’t. It was anything but easy, and I replied with the first response that popped into my head. ‘The Great American Novel is the Georgetown Papers.’

‘Aha,’ she remarked. ‘I’ll have to read it some time.’

‘You shall,’ I agreed. ‘You will. However, I have more regrets than achievements. I have many more Great Regrets.’

‘Doesn’t everybody,’ she commented, in matter of fact fashion.

‘Yeah, but,’ I began. I explained once more how I became friends with Scotty, about how we kept in touch by mail and in person, played tennis and listened to music together, drank Miller High Life and became the occasional drug buddy. Was he thinking about Denise during those latter times, was he thinking about his decadent sister, or was he thinking about his future life-to-be in New York? As long as he wasn’t thinking about me. What made our friendship more memorable is that he didn’t make a pass at me. Scott Bernard, to the professional world and to his partners, but to his collegemates and occasional drug buddies simply Scotty. ‘My great regret is that after he welcomed me to Manhattan with a working lunch in his wood panelled office, we lost touch, and I saw him only once more. We worked three short blocks from each other. He died at the age of 30, so young, though it didn’t seem so then. I’m going to pour myself a glass of something strong and toast to the memory of Scotty.’

The Impossible Dream was my favorite song at the age of eight, and that’s a true story.