There is this different kind of kiss I know, one layered with memory and associations, one containing the promise of forgiveness. Like a key to a lock I cannot see. Unique from the others, this kiss lands loud and hard at first and leaves a blue mark. But it always bounces elsewhere. My father used to bring the stains home on the back of his thighs or his lower back, near the kidneys.
He taught me that this kiss is sometimes not planted with lips but by a brief meeting of racquetball and back, sometimes ball and thigh, or ball and eye, gifting you a bluish purple bruise the same size and shape as the ball itself—as if it has left its shadow on your skin, a shadow of a memory.
This is not the part I crave. Not the pain. But maybe the paint, the mark.
It is the kiss of ball to wall that I’m after. It’s the bounce off the concrete to the blur, the breath and noise. You know the kiss is good because of the sound. And here, in the moment, it’s all about the sound and the sensory rush. When you hit the blue ball good with the sweet spot of the racket, there’s a special noise it makes, a kind of hollow pong-whoop, and you know the shot will be hard and fast, and you can almost feel it reverberate in your chest like a bass drum; when you cock the hammer, racket raised over your head, and bring it down hard and fast, transferring all the momentum to your wrist and the racket head, you feel like motherfuckin’ Zeus unleashing lightning bolts from your fist. When you hit it good, the racket transfers all your angst, all those spinning thoughts and self-doubt into the blue ball and sends it slamming into the wall. But when you miss the moves and catch the kiss wrong, the shot falls flat and sends a shock-shiver up your arm like a tuning fork smacked on concrete. It rings your bell a bit and humbles you, confronts you with your failures to follow the bounce.
This kiss still reminds me. This bounce. This is what I try to track.
Imagine, if you will, entering a bright white windowless room, the only entrance a white door, smaller than a normal door, with a tiny fogged-up plastic window. The side walls are rimmed around the bottom with the black scuff marks of sneakers, a cloud of impact that rises up and fades into shadows of blue ball scuff. Black to blue. And back again. It looks like someone has tried desperately to climb the walls. The occasional constellation of cracks in the front wall, combined with decades of chipped paint, create subtle valleys, dips deep enough that they can ricochet the ball off at odd angles and keep you guessing about your worthiness. And this game is all about understanding the angles of bounce. It’s about patience. And forgiveness of your sins of the eye and hand.
In this game, this play, this dance, the ultimate kiss is the kill shot. Rackets are rated according to their kill shot potential. And each shot has its own sound, as significant as its force and speed and location. A kill shot sounds sharp, quick, like gunfire, and then it dies, usually as the ball dribbles out across the floor, impossible to return; and sometimes, if you hit the ball directly into the spot where the wall meets the floor, it makes a kind of hollow pop like a balloon and sputters to stop against a side wall. If you put all your pain into it, a kill shot can save you. And sometimes after a long rally, a rollicking volley of shots, the ball will feel warm to the touch, as if its chemistry is beginning to break down and you think it might melt in your hand. You’ve seen a ball split like a melon rind, too tired of the pounding.
Thus I arrive in my half-awake state, seven a.m. on a Sunday at my local gym. There in that temple of noise, I turn my arm into a whipping noodle with a racket attached, and the blue orb, unleashed, seems to hover and glow, lit from within, as it zips and bounces beneath the early morning light-emitting diode of the racquetball court—the hardwood and concrete church of chipped paint and cracked walls, the holey ceiling and half-ass patch job, piles of paint chips in the corner, shed like scales before your eyes. Sometimes the ball comes back to you dusted with white as it takes part of the wall with each kiss.
I play alone these days. Fifteen minutes to pray before my cardio time. Fifteen minutes of lightning and thunder. And it is an odd kind of meditation for me. A rhythmic trance where my body moves and my mind follows the bounce, leaping from one thought to another, all of them contained within the court, each one coming fast like a blue ball, and all I have to do is send it back hard or let it pass. It’s hard to explain the synesthetic rush of such worship.
The blue ball flies fast, daring you to keep up.
On Sunday mornings when I was a kid, my father used to take us for donuts and drop us off at the church where my mother worked running youth programs. Then he’d drive to his own places of worship, the racquetball courts or a bar called the Sanctuary where he sometimes took us for the all-you-can-eat taco bar after we got home from church. When we asked him why he didn’t come with us to church, he’d say, “I did my time.”
Dad’s religion was a different sort, the kind practiced regularly on racquetball courts, the kind that sent him home some Sundays with those round purple bruises. After the divorce, my brother and I would often go with him after school and lift weights or kill time in the hot tub and sauna while he played a few games with his friends; and I can still recall the loud ruckus of those days as their noisy kisses echoed off the walls and filled the small gym lobby.
When the games were finished we’d all head across the street to the Mexican restaurant where my brother and I would order a Roy Rogers and a Shirley Temple and my dad and his friends would drink beer and eat chips and salsa and queso dip and they would talk the language of men, a tongue we had yet to master but wanted desperately to learn. I think of my father every time I step onto a racquetball court and can still hear his voice booming off the walls. It’s a kind of reconnection, an intimacy through noise and sense memory—each visit like a trip back home. The ball. The court. The noise. And my father.
Still we bounce, each thought leaving a mark.
This gym is also the poet’s gym, the place near the railroad tracks where you might find the local Fresno poets Chuck Hanzlicek or, before they died, John Vineburg and the Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate Philip Levine. This valley is Levine’s valley in many ways, forever elevated by his love for a misunderstood place, his poetry, and his personality. This gym is his gym, the place I used to jokingly call “Senior Center Point,” this gym with the leaking ceiling that can’t handle the infrequent rains. This gym with its dead-spot wood floors that slope off to the side. This place is now my temple of visceral and sensual escape. This palace of kisses. Racket to ball. Ball to wall. Ball to floor. Bounce. Bounce. This gym and its rhythmic flow of noisy prayer. Everything echoes and reverberates until you are awash in the sound, the slap, the pong; and physics even bends to the glory, and you can watch sound try to catch up with the speed of light as the ball, hit well, leaps off the wall and the noise of its impact chases a split second behind. Part of you watches this happen and understands this is the way that a metaphor works—the vehicle leaping off the white page, the meaning trailing behind and echoing off the walls.
As far as I know Phil Levine didn’t play racquetball, but he was known as an excellent tennis player, someone who understood the angles and appreciated the bounce, someone who played to win and didn’t take it easy on lesser opponents. His modest house sits surrounded by large eucalyptus and redwood trees, just a mile or so from the gym where I now play and run on the elliptical machine; and he claimed to have written almost all of his books there in that house. His widow, Fran, still lives in the house year-round. I’ve known both of them for years and was once lucky enough to live there while Phil and Franny split time in their Brooklyn apartment. This was after my marriage had crumbled under pressures both inevitable and unpredictable; my kids spent half the week with me and we were all trying to negotiate a new life. Many days I felt like a terrible father and a failure; but Phil and Franny opened their home and welcomed my children and me without judgment. In the mornings, after I dropped the kids off at school, I’d often retreat to the gym for a few games of racquetball with friends. My therapist had suggested that I get some regular exercise as a way to combat the waves of anxiety and depression that seemed to wash over me at times; and I could not deny that I found deep solace in the simple bounce of a blue ball. I found some peace through the noise of racquetball and release through the thunder and lightning. And I’d come home spent, emptied, and sit at Philip Levine’s desk—an old door propped up on a couple of filing cabinets—and I’d write in Phil’s office, surrounded by his books, experiencing a kind of intimacy with genius that comes along rarely in life. Later, for dinner, I’d cook from Fran’s recipe books for my children and imagine that everything would be okay. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Levine house felt like a spiritual place, inhabited by the benevolent ghosts of art and poetry and jazz. Some days I’d flip through Phil’s shelves of classic jazz albums and drop a needle on Bird or Coltrane, Rollins or Blakey, maybe Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. I didn’t write poems in that hallowed house, but I wrote essays, mostly, things like this that ramble and move by digression and association, essays that bounce with associative fervor, because that’s the way my mind moves most naturally—pinging off something small, the idea of a kiss, to something larger like racquetball and religion, recovery, and back to this simple memory: When she greets you, Franny Levine, a small woman with an impossibly bright smile and soft eyes magnified by her glasses, will reach up to you and cup your face in her hands; she’ll hold you there, look you in the eye, never blinking, and kiss you square on the lips or maybe on the side of your face, keeping you in her embrace for a second or two—and this small gesture, this mark, is filled with more kindness and love than most people get in a day or a week or a month. This is no coldly formal European side-kiss. This is something bigger, deeper, the difference between a fountain and a well. She will reach out, bridging the abyss between any two humans, and offer this kiss, this true gift, this brief meeting of spheres, and you’ll feel like a balloon being inflated, and believe quite suddenly in the possibility of grace.