The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Rattlesnake Lake

Testosterone initiates the growth spurt; increases larynx size, deepening the voice; increases red blood cell mass, muscle mass, libido; stimulates development of the penis, scrotum, and prostate; stimulates growth of pubic, facial, leg, and armpit hair; stimulates sebaceous gland secretions of oil. Throughout high school, my acne was so severe as to constitute a second skin. Oil leaked from my pores. I kissed no one until I was 17.

Acne flourished on my chin, forehead, cheeks, temples, and scalp, and behind my ears. It burned my neck, appeared sporadically on my penis, visited my stomach, and wrapped around my back and buttocks. It was like an unwilling, monotonous tattoo. There were whiteheads on the nose, blackheads on toes, dense purple collections that finally burst with blood, white circles that vanished in a squeeze, dilating welts that never went away, infected wounds that cut to the bone, surface scars that looked hideous, wart-like protuberances at the side of the head. I endured collagen injections, punch grafts, and chemical peels.

I washed with oval brown bars and transparent green squares, soft baby soaps that sudsed, and rough soaps that burned. I applied special gels, clear white liquids, mud creams. I took tablets once, twice, thrice a day; before, after, and during meals. I went on milk diets and no-milk diets, absorbed no sun and too much sun. I took erythromycin, tretinoin, Cleocin, PanOxyl, Benoxyl, isopropyl myristate, polyoxyl 40 stearate, butylated hydroxytoluene, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose. I saw doctors and doctors and doctors.

My father would ask me, please, to stop picking at myself. Sometimes he’d get impatient and slap my face (as if he were both reprimanding me for squeezing scabs at the dinner table and expressing compassion by striking the source of all the distress), but he was certainly justified in whatever frustration he felt. My hands were incessantly crawling across my skin, always probing and plucking, then flicking away the root canker. The inflammatory disease bred a weird narcissism in which I craved the mirror but averted any accurate reflection. I became expert at predicting which kinds of mirrors would soften the effect, and which—it hardly seemed possible—would make things worse.

My mother still had pockmarks on her cheeks as evidence of a diseased childhood, with patches of pink skin on her nose acquired in more than one surgery to remove the skin cancer that was her reward for believing, as a teenager, too many doctors’ X-ray radiation cures. (The enormous amount of radiation she received was thought to be the likely cause of her breast cancer and death at 51.) In a faded photograph of her brother wearing khaki in Okinawa, his face appeared to be on fire. A doctor at Stanford Hospital told my sister that he was the most decorated dermatologist in the Bay Area and there wasn’t a thing he could do to improve the quality of her skin until she was at least 21. Only my father’s face was impressively blemish-free, although whenever he cut himself shaving or the impress of his glasses left a red mark at the eyebrows, my mother would claim that he, too, had had problems. They used to have perfectly absurd arguments over who was responsible for the cluster forming on my chin.

My sophomore year of high school my zit trouble reached such catastrophic proportions that twice a month I drove an hour each way to receive liquid nitrogen treatments from a dermatologist in South San Francisco. His office was cattycorner to a shopping center that housed a Longs drugstore, where I would always first give my prescription for that month’s miracle drug to the pharmacist. Then, while I was waiting for the prescription to be filled, I’d go buy a giant bag of Switzer’s red licorice. I’d tear open the bag, and even if (especially if) my face was still bleeding slightly from all the violence that had just been done to it, I’d start gobbling the licorice while standing in line for the cashier. I’m hard-pressed now to see the licorice as anything other than some sort of Communion wafer, as if by swallowing the licorice, my juicy red pimples might become sweet and tasty. I’d absorb them; I’d be absolved. The purity of the contradiction I remember as a kind of ecstasy. My senior yearbook photo was so airbrushed that people asked me, literally, who it was.

In “Is Acne Really a Disease?” Dale F. Bloom argues that, “far from being a disease, adolescent acne is a normal physiological process that functions to ward off potential mates until the afflicted individual is some years past the age of reproductive maturity, and thus emotionally, intellectually, and physically fit to be a parent.” Dale F. Bloom’s thesis seems to me unassailable.

In one study, of teenage boys with the highest testosterone levels, 69 percent said they’d had intercourse; of boys with the lowest levels, 16 percent said they’d had intercourse. The testosterone level in boys is eight times that of girls. Testosterone is responsible for increasing boys’ muscle mass and initiating the growth spurt, which peaks at age 14. From ages 11 to 16, boys’ testosterone levels increase 20-fold. By age 16, the cardiovascular system has established its adult size and rhythm.

Hair grows about half an inch a month; it grows fastest in young adults, and fastest of all in girls between ages 16 and 24. Brain scans of people processing a romantic gaze, new mothers listening to infant cries, and subjects under the influence of cocaine bear a striking resemblance to one another. According to Daniel McNeill, “Our pupils reach peak size in adolescence, almost certainly as a lure in love, then slowly contract till age sixty.” As Natalie would say—as she actually did say—“That’s awesome.”

When she asked me why people write graffiti, I tried to explain how teenage boys need to ruin what’s there in order to become who they are. I talked about boys at the swimming pool who simply wouldn’t obey the pleasant female lifeguard asking them to leave the pool at closing time; they left only when asked gruffly by the male African-American lifeguard, and then they left immediately.

“One Sunday morning,” my father reminisced to me over the phone, “my father announced that he was going out to watch me play punchball. That was the first time in all the years I’d been playing that he expressed a desire to see me play. We played in the street in front of my house. The only interruptions came when a horse and buggy came through. My father found a place to watch at the left-field foul line. I saw him standing there and waved as I took my turn to hit. This time, I hit the ‘Spaldeen’—that’s what we called the Spalding high bouncer—with all my might and it shot like an arrow for the very spot where my father was standing, going probably sixty miles an hour. My father stood there, waving at the ball futilely. It struck him on his left cheek, missed his eye by inches.”

According to Boyd McCandless, “A youngster is his body and his body is he.”

Tolstoy said, “I have read somewhere that children from twelve to fourteen years of age—that is, in the transition stage from childhood to adolescence—are singularly inclined to arson and even murder. As I look back upon my boyhood, I can quite appreciate the possibility of the most frightful crime being committed without object or intent to injure but just because—out of curiosity, or to satisfy an unconscious craving for action.”

A dozen or so teenage boys stood atop a jagged rock in the middle of Rattlesnake Lake, four miles southeast of North Bend, an hour out of Seattle. Several teenage girls did the same. I lazed about on a raft, watching from afar. The boys wore cutoffs and, nearly without exception, boasted chiseled chests. The girls, wearing cutoffs and bikini tops, seemed considerably less toned. (During the pubescent growth spurt, girls’ hips widen in relation to shoulder girth. Boys’ shoulders widen in relation to hip width. Eighteen-year-old girls have 20 percent less bone mass in relation to body weight than boys of the same age.)

The rock was perhaps one story high. The boys chose to dive from the higher parts of the rock into the lake; most of the girls dove, too, but less spectacularly, less dangerously. One girl who didn’t dive kept being pestered by her friend: “I can’t believe you’re seventeen and you won’t dive. If you don’t, I’m never going to speak to you again.”

The boys at Rattlesnake Lake kept asking one another about their own dives, “How was that one? How did that look?”

It looks like this: the average penis of a man is 3″ to 4″ when flaccid and 5″ to 7″ when erect. The recorded range for an erect penis is 3.75″ to 9.6″. In the 1930s, mannequins imported from Europe came in three sizes according to the size of the genitalia: small, medium, and American (compared to other cultures, Americans are obsessed with the size of sexual organs: penises, breasts). Lyndon Johnson frequently urinated in front of his secretary, routinely forced staff members to meet with him in the bathroom while he defecated, and liked to show off his penis, which he nicknamed “Jumbo” in a private conversation, pressed by a couple of reporters to explain why we were in Vietnam, LBJ unzipped his fly, displayed Jumbo, and said, “This is why.” Phallocrypts, sheaths that cover a New Guinean man’s penis, run to two feet in length. The length of my penis when erect is 6" (boringly, frustratingly average); I’ve measured it several times. My father, though much smaller overall than I am, is, I’m pretty sure (glimpsed discreetly), markedly more well-endowed. No wonder he used to be such a sex fiend.

Boys vs. Girls (ii)

At birth, body fat is 12 percent of body weight, increases to 25 percent at 6 months, and 30 percent at 1 year. At age 6, it’s back down to 12 percent again, then it rises until the onset of puberty. Postpuberty, the rise continues in girls, while in boys there’s a slight decline.

During high school, girls’ bone development is 2 years ahead of boys. Young girls surpass boys in height and weight, and they frequently remain taller until boys enter the adolescent growth spurt that accompanies pubescence. Maximum skeletal development occurs at 16 for most girls and 19 for boys; dating between classmates in high school is by definition a hormonal mismatch and a farce.

“At seventeen, you tend to go in for unhappy love affairs,” said Françoise Sagan, who should know.

In males, the sexual urge peaks during their late teens or early twenties, but not until a decade later does it peak in females.

“I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, / or that youth would sleep out the rest; / for there is nothing in the between / but getting wenches / with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting”—so saith the Shepherd in The Winter’s Tale.

Between ages 15 and 24, men are three times more likely to die than women, mostly by reckless behavior or violence—e.g., murder, suicide, car accidents, war.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter, Scottie, “For premature adventure one pays an atrocious price. As I told you once, every boy who drank at eighteen or nineteen is now safe in his grave.”

Hoop dream (iii):

My father was the manager of a semi-pro basketball team called the Brooklyn Eagles, which consisted of Harry Glatzer; his brother, Nat, who played for Thomas Jefferson—where they both went to high school—“but,” according to my father, “went nowhere following graduation” Max “Puzzy” Posnack, at the time the captain of St. John’s; Allie Schuckman, also a star at St. John’s; Max “Kappy” Kaplan, from St. John’s as well; Artie Jackson, a black player who displayed “dazzling accuracy from all over the floor” and Isador “Midge” Serota, who “filled his days playing pickup basketball.” The Eagles were to be paid $100 under the table (since many of the players were college athletes) to provide the opposition for a Christmas Day game at Yale.

There is, I’m sure, much mythmaking in my father’s version of the story (and all his stories); the last time he told me this story, he told it with the same, implausibly perfect details he always does: as he and the seven players drove from Brooklyn to New Haven, “a slight snowfall came down at about four or five o’clock P.M., making driving a little tricky, but Kappy was a good driver. Somewhere, about twenty-five or thirty miles from New Haven, the light snowfall turned heavier, making driving a little dangerous. We were making slow but steady progress toward our goal, the Yale basketball court.

“All of a sudden, we felt a bump against the front fender. A body rolled up over the fender and off the car onto the roadway. We’d hit a man. We stopped the car, raced to a nearby farmhouse, and called the local sheriff, who showed up in about fifteen minutes and started asking Kappy if he’d been drinking or driving too fast, especially under these hazardous conditions. One look at the body by the sheriff and he said, ‘It’s that old Polack, the town drunk. He probably never saw you.’

“We were watching the time. We had to be in New Haven by six-thirty. The sheriff told us about a farmer who lived nearby and did commercial driving. By this time—five-thirty or so—we had to skip dinner, hire the farmer-driver for twenty dollars, and get to the game. Kappy’s car was impounded as evidence and would have to be kept in the town of Wilton, where we hit the man. We piled into the big limousine and got to the gym about seven, cold and hungry. The Yale people, who thought they’d been stood up, were furious with us.

“We changed into our uniforms, had a brief warm-up, and the first quarter ended with the Yalies leading by twenty points; the half ended with Yale up about thirty. At halftime, Allie and the team gulped down sandwiches and sodas. Hardly the recommended diet for players engaged in a clash with finely trained athletes—rested and ready for the game against those ‘tough guys’ from Brooklyn. Puzzy gave the team a pep talk at halftime and the second half was a different story.

“Puzzy, Allie, and Artie began hitting their shots. The game ended in a tie. We played two overtimes and lost by a basket. The Yale captain thanked us and paid me the hundred dollars, twenty of which immediately went to the farmer-driver to drive us back to the bus station in Wilton. We got on board the bus around midnight and arrived back in New York at about six A.M. The players made a dash for the Automat (now defunct; you placed nickels in food slots, and out came the food, from main dishes to dessert). I distributed what was left: each player got a few bucks. I took nothing. We had enough for subway fare—five cents back to Brooklyn—and the game was history. It soon became a neighborhood legend.

“A month later, Kappy went back to Wilton for the inquest. He was declared innocent. We never played another game.”

Why Lionesses Prefer Dark Brunettes, or Why Both Men and Women Are Attracted to Deep Voices

The olfactory system—the sense of smell—bypasses all the brain’s thinking processes and directs its information exclusively toward the regions that control sex and aggression. In order to mate with a female hamster, male hamsters must have this system functioning. Male mice need it in order to respond to female fertility signals, and female pigs need it to be aroused by boars. In humans, scent no longer dominates sexual response; scent is nowhere near as significant for us as it is for the rest of the animal kingdom.

Sight is much the most important human sense; appearance is what attracts us. “Gentlemen prefer blondes,” but lionesses prefer dark brunettes, which are believed to have higher testosterone levels and potentially better genes.

Humans and many other species find voices attractive. In humans, deep, husky voices—considered sexually attractive by both sexes—are also correlated with high testosterone levels and therefore potentially high sex drive and good genes.

Fear and terror, not shared pleasant experiences, are more likely to result in mutual attraction. The release of stress hormones activates the brain’s neurochemical systems that promote attachment bonds. In a famous experiment, an attractive woman interviewed young men on a swaying rope bridge 200 feet above a river, and also on the ground. Midway through the interview, she gave them her phone number. Over 60 percent of the men she interviewed on the rope bridge called her back; only 30 percent of the men on the ground did so.

I was 17, as was my girlfriend, Carla, and neither of us was sexually experienced. Rain fell like needles, but Carla’s parents’ cabin’s back porch, sheltered by a lean-to roof and enclosed by a tight green net, kept us dry. I wanted to sleep outside, catch cold. I wanted to share disease and shudder. Carla wanted to brush her teeth. She liked the smell of bathrooms, mirrors, warm toilet seats. Toothbrush and towel in hand, she pushed open the screen door and sought linoleum.

I unfolded the sleeping bags and unrolled them on the wooden floor, fluffing up our backpacks, tucking them into the mouths of the sleeping bags. I pushed the bench out of the way into the corner of the porch. I rearranged things and waited.

“Everything’s wet out here,” Carla said when she emerged. “Let’s sleep inside.”

“No,” I said. “The rain’ll stop soon.”

I shut the door to the house, jiggled the doorknob, and pronounced the door locked. The only way to get in was to find the key somewhere on the porch come morning.

Carla got under the covers and lay down next to me in her sleeping bag.

“How do I look?” she asked.

I searched my mind for adjectives. I wanted to please her, choose the right ones by being descriptive. “Kissable. Dreamy. Exquisite.”

“H-H-How do I look?” I asked. I stuttered less when I was alone with Carla than I did with anyone else, but it still cropped up occasionally.

Carla laughed and avoided the question. Whenever she asked me how she looked, she knew that whatever I answered, she was irresistible. She wanted me to be handsome, but I wasn’t. My pimples wouldn’t go away; I wouldn’t go away. I was who I was. I wasn’t handsome. Carla knew that. She could see. She wasn’t blind. She loved me, nevertheless. She loved me for the complexity of my soul—something like that. Anyone can have clear skin (as my father does), blue eyes (ditto), wavy hair (till middle age), a mellifluous voice (still).

We touched fingertips, interlocked fingers, pressed palms together like flat stomachs, squeezed tight. I spread her middle fingers, moved my index finger up and back between her fingers. I held the back of her neck, closed my eyes, kissed her. Surprisingly, she sat up, kissed me, and then we bumped foreheads while I was undoing the zipper of my sleeping bag and sliding closer to her. She laughed at what she took to be my clumsiness. I kissed her pug nose. We joined lips and twisted our heads until I said, “We’re destined to make love tonight.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure I’m ready. It’s cold. I really need to use the bathroom first.”

She got out of her sleeping bag, gathered up a few things from her backpack, tried the door.

“It’s locked,” I said.

She turned the doorknob, pushed the door open.

“Liar,” she said.

“I honestly thought I’d locked the door,” I said.

She closed the door softly behind her while I lay down on the sleeping bag. Outside, tree limbs swayed like broken arms and thick sheets of cutting rain erased the sky. I waited for Carla, who could easily be another few hours. She got lost in bathrooms. She felt safe in them, at home, locked in. She had a toilet kit like a suitcase. She liked to be clean. She talked about towels and soaps and different kinds of tissues—their warmth, their softness. She liked to play with faucets. Transfixed on beauty, she stared into mirrors for hours, scared away blemishes.

I was, in a sense and for the moment, one of those blemishes: I wasn’t Carla’s dream boy. I didn’t have a deep, husky voice. I wasn’t the lioness’s dark brunette.

My father, reminiscing to me recently about his first girlfriend, said, “For about five years, from the time I was twenty-three until twenty-eight, I dated one of your Aunt Fay’s friends, Pearl Feinberg, a tall and very attractive young woman whose statuesque figure evoked appreciative whistles and oohs and aahs from onlookers. (Don’t think we called it ‘dating’ back then, but you know what I mean.) Pearl was employed as a secretary and part-time model for one of New York’s big apparel firms. I had a good job (working for the Journal-American), a lovely girlfriend, a knock-your-eyes-out tan Ford convertible (which looked like today’s VW Cabriolet), some money. I felt like I had the whole world in my twenty-five-year-old hands.

“Pearl and I were always busy when we saw each other on the weekends: the movies, the theater, picnics, parties, lectures, and tennis in nearby Highland Park. Although we dated steadily for five years—all our friends expected us to be together forever—we never talked marriage. The fault was mostly mine. We were both well past the age of consent, but I was too immature, afraid to the point of being phobic about taking on responsibility. I was the least sophisticated twenty-eight-year-old in the Western Hemisphere.

“The Journal-American, like all the other daily newspapers in New York, was suffering huge losses in advertising as a result of the still-lingering Depression and made big cuts in staff. In 1938 I, too, became unemployed. I managed to land a job with the New York Post, but six months later that was wiped out. That summer, after three months of unemployment, I decided to take a job at Chester’s Zunbarg, the Catskills summer resort, maintaining the tennis courts and occasionally trying to teach tennis to overweight fur salesmen and Bronx schoolteachers. It was there and it was that summer that I met Helen [his first wife], who had just been divorced from a New York Times business page writer and was planning to spend most of her summer at Chester’s.

“Helen was a very sophisticated woman—by my lights, anyway. I learned all about sex and politics from her. She was, even then, deeply involved in Communist Party politics. In fact, one year after we met, she left her Wall Street job—she was a librarian—to work as a volunteer for the Party.

“That torrid summer—emotionally, not the Catskills’ fifty-degree climate—I forgot all about Pearl. At the end of the summer, I came back to Brooklyn and lived with Helen for several months before we got married. Never saw Pearl again.

“Forty years later, after coming to Providence for your commencement, I stayed for a week with Fay, now living in a posh condominium in Queens. One morning, she went shopping, and when she returned, the first thing she said was, ‘Milt, you’ll never guess who I ran into at the mall. You’ll never guess in a million years.’ I tossed out the names of some of my boyhood friends with whom I’d lost contact.

“‘Believe it or not,’ Fay told me, ‘I ran into your old flame, Pearl. Her name’s not Feinberg now. She married one of the boys from our old neighborhood who used to play tennis with us. Her name is Richman, the name of her late husband. She still looks beautiful; her hair is gray, she has two daughters and several grandchildren and lives in Queens. She gave me her phone number. I told her you were visiting from California and filled her in a little on what you were doing. She said she’d like to hear from you.’

“Well, 1978 was one year after your mother’s death. I was still working my way out of my depression. And the day before, I had seen the new Neil Simon play Act Two, which dealt with the anguish and torment faced by the leading character, a writer, who meets a young woman shortly after his wife’s death. He wrestles with the thorny problem of whether he should keep seeing this new woman in his life. He tells his brother, who encourages the relationship—‘life must go on’—that he has strong guilt feelings about the new relationship because of his still passionate feelings about his late wife. The writer winds up continuing the relationship and—as the curtain falls!—marrying her. I totally rejected Neil Simon’s cozy and glib ending. ‘How could he marry her so soon after his wife died?’ I said to myself while seated in the theater. ‘What were all those professions of undying love of his deceased spouse that he made in the opening act? Just foreign propaganda? And what about those Valentine gifts he sent every year like clockwork? Phony as a three-dollar bill.’ Those were the reasons I gave Fay for why I didn’t feel up to calling Pearl, let alone visiting her. But the biggest reason was my shame about the shabby way I had treated her, the god-awful way I ended it. Never calling or writing. Nothing. Shameful. Unforgivable.”

Superheroes

My cat, Zoomer, is exceedingly centripetal and social. The moment I spread out my papers on the dining room table, he lies on top of them. He greets most visitors by crawling onto their laps. His favorite activity is lying in front of the fire for hours while Laurie, Natalie, and I sit near him, reading. His second favorite activity is to lie between the three of us while we’re watching a movie; he eats ice cream from our bowls while we pretend not to notice. At night, he sleeps in the crook of Natalie’s neck, his paws wrapped around her forehead. And yet if we indulge him by petting him for too long, he inevitably reacts to this overdomestication by biting or scratching us. Zoomer loves to hide behind a bookcase and swat unsuspecting passersby or lie across the bookcase, one paw hanging in the air, and look out across the room—a lion surveying the savannah, scoping antelope. He wants to convince himself and us that, thoroughly pampered though he is, at heart he’s still a killer.

From room to room he drags “his” teddy bear—what Natalie calls his girlfriend—and, despite his supposedly having been fixed years ago, dry-humps it day and night, howling with a conqueror’s fury. He’ll spend hours scratching the window at his neighborhood nemesis, Fireball, but when presented with the opportunity to confront Fireball nose-to-nose, he always settles, pseudo-disappointedly, for the safety of imprisonment. On the rare occasions when he does go outside, he hisses, terrified, at all provocations and scoots inside on the flimsiest pretext. He needs to convince himself that he’s a tough guy, but really, Zoomy’s a pussy.

In the movie Spider-Man, when Peter Parker gets bitten by a spider and begins turning into Spider-Man, Uncle Ben tells him, “You’re changing, and that’s normal. Just be careful who you change into, okay?” Peter’s change from dweeb to spider is explicitly analogous to his transformation from boy to man. Before he becomes Spider-Man, he wears his shirt tucked in—dork style; afterward, he wears his undershirt and shirt hanging out. He can’t be contained. Neither can his chest, which is newly ripped, and his eyesight is now 20/20. To Peter, his sexual maturation is the equivalent of stealing fire from the gods: “I feel all this power, but I don’t know what it means, or how to control it, or what I’m supposed to do with it even.” Teenage boys want to believe that the sex instinct trumps and transfigures the day-to-day world. One of the amazing things about my father is that he still believed in this transfiguration deep into his 80s.

The first time Spider-Man rescues M.J., she says to her boyfriend, Harry, that it was “incredible.” “What do you mean ‘incredible’?” he keeps asking her. The second time Spider-Man rescues M.J., she asks him, “Do I get to say thank you this time?” and, pulling up his mask past his lips, passionately kisses him, sending both of them into rain-drenched ecstasy. The script makes painfully clear that Peter’s newfound prowess is procreation or, more precisely, onanism: “He wiggles his wrist, tries to get the goop to spray out, but it doesn’t come.” All three times Spider-Man rescues M.J., they’re wrapped in a pose that looks very much like missionary sex: Spider-Man on a mission. As Peter Parker, his peter is parked; as Spider-Man, he gets to have the mythic carnival ride of sex-flight without any of the messy emotional cleanup afterward.

Spider-Man is about the concomitance of your ordinary self, which is asexual, and your Big Boy self, which is sex-driven. Virtually every male character in the film worries this division. Even the “squirrelly faced” burglar who steals the New York Wrestling Foundation’s money, and who later winds up killing Ben in a car-jacking, whispers “Thanks,” then flashes a sweet smile when Peter steps aside so he can get on an elevator. Ferocity and humility are in constant conversation and confusion. (Natalie: “This movie is about how everyone has a covered-up side. People don’t always show you the way that they are.”)

On a Saturday afternoon a few years ago, at Seattle’s Green Lake pool, while I swam laps, my father swam a little, then lifted a few weights, took a sauna, and dozed, which he adamantly denied, as he always does. In the locker room, a 10-year-old kid started humming to himself, at first quite quietly, the Batman theme, which my father didn’t recognize at first, but when I told him, he nodded. In less than a minute, the tune had made its way through the locker room—about a dozen pubescent boys humming the song. Some sang seriously; others joked around. Some stood on benches; others whapped their towels at one another’s asses. Some danced around buck naked; others continued getting dressed. It was surprising and mysterious and confusing and beautiful and ridiculous and thrilling, though not to my father, who finds nearly all manifestations of mass entertainment—with the important exception of sports—appalling. “Popular culture,” as he explained to me in the car on the way home, “is not real community. It’s substitute community.”

At the end of Ann Beattie’s story “The Burning House,” a husband and wife who are separating finally confront each other. She speaks first.

“I want to know if you’re coming or going.”

He takes a deep breath, lets it out, continues to lie very still.

“Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake: you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”

He takes her hand. “I’m looking down on all this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

Superman.

My father lives in Woodlake, a Bay Area condo/sports complex for senior citizens. This is a place where tough old birds come to die, but they think it’s an Olympic training camp: mineral water and Frisbees. Jacuzzi, sauna, tennis courts, weight room, bingo parlor, dance hall, jet-black parking lot, jet-propelled automobiles, white stucco apartments, ice plant growing everywhere. Ducks quack across an artificial pond. Well-preserved, sun-baked septuagenarians stroll the putting green. Grandmas in string bikinis stride from the swimming pool. Dad’s cohorts scamper around the courts, wearing tennis whites and floppy hats and state-of-the-art shoes and C sunglasses, wielding their oversized rackets like canes and butterfly nets. My father’s studio apartment is remarkable only for the sheer number of rackets, racket presses, tins of balls, shirts, shorts, sweatbands, warm-up suits, sweat socks, shoes, jocks tossed about. It isn’t an apartment filled with my father. It’s a pro shop filled with the sport of tennis.

In almost every piece he writes on his antique Remington for his Woodlake-sponsored writing class—a dozen women, a retired dentist, and my father meet with the teacher every other Wednesday—he projects himself as a balanced okaynik, Mr. Bonhomie. He’s held more than fifty jobs in journalism and public relations and social welfare, been fired from many of them, been plagued by manic depression for fifty years, been hospitalized and received electroshock therapy countless times, is a genius at loss. Lily Tomlin was thinking of my father when she said, “Language was invented because of the deep human need to complain.” He’s always thrown a stone at every dog that bites, but in one story he sagely advises his friend, “You can’t throw a stone at every dog that bites.” My father, who is the only person in the world who may have a worse sense of direction than I do, writes about another friend, “Lou can go astray in a carport. He has the worst sense of direction of any male driver in the state of California.” Time after time he lets himself off way too easily. I used to want to urge him out of this macho pose until I realized that it’s a way to cheer himself up, to avoid telling mild good-bye and good-night stories, to convince himself and us he’s still a tough guy from Brooklyn not yet ready to die.

Story after story is built on self-flattering lies: his children from his first marriage, from whom he’s estranged, didn’t attend his 95th birthday party, but now they do, bearing gifts. He’s been bald since he was 40, but now his “hair is” only “nearly gone.” My mother dies at 60 (instead of 51). Writing, for him, is a chance to gild the lily. My dad still reads voraciously and he dislikes easy sentiment in life and literature (he recently declared J. M. Coetzee’s brutal, astringent Disgrace the best novel he’s read in ten years), which is why his upbeat tone fascinates and baffles.

His voice in these stories is that of a macher, when in reality he’s obsessed with his failures and as tough as nail polish; I want him to write about weakness, about his weaknesses, but instead he quotes, approvingly, a friend, who says about women, “Remember the four F’s: find ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, and forget ’em.” My dad, Sam Spade.

He grew up poor with four brothers and two sisters (his mother died when he was 12 and one of his sisters died when he was 16), but nostalgia reigns: “Ah, them were the days, the good old days: the age of innocence, the summers of my vast content.” “I’ve never felt that ‘at home’ feeling about any other apartment I’ve lived in as I did about 489 New Jersey.” “Mrs. Mason was very supportive, hugging me to her bosom at times or drying my tears.”

My father and mother divorced shortly before her death 30 years ago, and they had, by common consent, an extremely bad relationship. But it’s now a “solid-as-Gibraltar marriage.” My father, asking for time off from his boss, tells him, “I was faced with a palace revolution and the three revolutionaries at home were getting ready to depose the king.” The king he wasn’t. I want him to write about forever having to polish the queen’s crown according to her ever-changing and exacting specifications. I want to ask him: What did that feel like? I want to know: What is it like inside his skin? What is it like inside that bald, ill dome? Please, Dad, I want to say: only ground-level. No aerial views or airy glibness.

Hoop Dreams (iv and v)

The junior varsity played immediately after the varsity. At the end of the third quarter of the varsity game, all of us on the JV, wearing our good sweaters, good shoes, and only ties, would leave the gym to go change for our game. I loved leaving right when the varsity game was getting interesting; I loved everyone seeing us as a group, me belonging to that group, and everyone wishing us luck; I loved being part of the crowd and breaking away from the crowd to go play. And then when I was playing, I knew the crowd was there, but they slid into the distance like the overhead lights.

As a freshman I was the JV’s designated shooter, our gunner whenever we faced a zone. I’d make three or four in a row, force the other team out of its zone and then sit down. I wasn’t a creator. I couldn’t beat anyone off the dribble, but I could shoot. Give me a step, some space, and a screen—a lot to ask for—and I was money in the bank.

Throughout my freshman and sophomore years, the JV coach told me I had to learn to take the ball to the basket and mix it up with the big guys underneath. I didn’t want to, because I knew I couldn’t. I already feared I was a full step slow.

The next summer I played basketball. I don’t mean I got in some games when I wasn’t working at A&W or that I tried to play a couple of hours every afternoon. I mean the summer of 1972 I played basketball. Period. Nothing else. Nothing else even close to something else. All day long that summer, all summer, all night until at least ten.

The high school court was protected by a bank of ice plants and the walls of the school. Kelly-green rims with chain nets were attached to half-moon boards that were kind only to real shooters. The court was on a grassy hill overlooking the street; when I envision Eden, I think of that court during that summer—shirts against skins, five-on-five, running the break till we keeled over. I played in pickup games, for hours alone, with friends, against friends, with people I’d never seen before and never saw again, with middle-aged men wearing college sweatshirts who liked to keep their hands on my ass as they guarded me, with friends’ younger brothers who couldn’t believe how good I was, with College of San Mateo players keeping in shape during the summer who told me I might make it, with coaches who told me the future of their jobs rested on my performance, with the owners of a pornographic bookstore who asked me if I wanted to appear in an art film, with my father, who asked me whatever happened to the concept of teamwork.

I played on asphalt, but also in gyms, in my mind, in rain, in winds that ruled the ball, beneath the burning sun. I wore leather weights around my ankles, taking them off only in bed, so my legs would be stronger and I’d be able to jump higher. I read every available book on technique. I jumped rope: inside, around the block, up stairs, walking the dog. Alone, I did drills outlined in an instructional book. A certain number of free throws and lay-ins from both sides and with each hand, hook shots, set shots from all over, turnaround jumpers, jumpers off the move and off the pass, tip-ins. Everything endlessly repeated. I wanted my shoulders to become as high-hung as Warriors star Rick Barry’s, my wrists as taut, my glare as merciless. After a while, I’d feel like my head was the rim and my body was the ball. I was trying to put my head completely inside my body. The basketball was shot by itself. At that point I’d call it quits, keeping the feeling.

My father would tell me, “Basketball isn’t just shooting. You’ve got to learn the rest of the game.” He set up garbage cans around the court that I had to shuffle-step through, then backpedal through, then dribble through with my right hand, left hand, between my legs, behind my back. On the dead run, I had to throw the ball off a banked gutter so it came back to me as a perfect pass for a layup—the rest of the game, or so I gathered.

Mr. Rossi, the varsity coach, was wiry and quick, and most of us believed him when he alluded to his days as a floor leader at Santa Clara. He never said much. He showed a tight smile, but every now and then he’d grab you by the jersey and stand you up against a locker. Then he’d go back to smiling again.

The first few games of my junior year I started at wing for the varsity. In the first quarter against a team from Redwood City, I got the ball at the top of the key, faked left, picked up a screen right, and penetrated the lane—a rarity for me. My defender stayed with me, and when I went up for my shot we were belly-to-belly. To go forward was an offensive foul and backward was onto my butt. I tried to corkscrew around him but wasn’t agile enough to change position in midair. The Redwood City guy’s hip caught mine and I turned 180 degrees, landing on my leg. My left thigh tickled my right ear. I shouted curses until I passed out from the pain.

I had a broken femur and spent the winter in traction in a hospital. My doctor misread the X-rays, removing the body cast too early, so I had an aluminum pin planted next to the bone, wore a leg brace, and swung crutches all year. (I recently had the pin removed, for no particularly compelling reason of any kind other than it spooked me to think of one day being buried with a “foreign object” in my body. For one thing, it’s a violation of Jewish law. Not that I’ll be buried; I’ll be cremated. Not that I’m religious; I’m an atheist. Still, leaving the pin in seemed to me some obscure violation of the order of things.) In the fall, the brace came off and my father tried to work with me to get back my wind and speed, but he gave up when it became obvious my heart wasn’t in it. Senior year I was 10th man on a 10-man team and kept a game journal, which evolved into a sports column for the school paper. I soon realized I was better at describing basketball and analyzing it than playing it. I was pitiless on our mediocre team and the coach called me “Ace” (as in “ace reporter”), since I certainly wasn’t his star ballhawk. I could shoot when left open but couldn’t guard anyone quick or shake someone who hounded me tough. I fell into the role of the guy with all the answers and explanations, the well-informed benchwarmer who knew how zones were supposed to work but had nothing to contribute on the floor himself. To my father’s deep disappointment, I not only was not going to become a professional athlete; I was becoming, as he had been on and off throughout his life and always quite happily, a sportswriter. Listen to this trip-down-memory-lane piece he wrote a few years ago for his local paper:

Seventy-five years ago I was on the staff of the Thomas Jefferson High School newspaper, Liberty Bell, writing my slightly less than deathless prose about the school’s athletic teams and activities. Our baseball and football teams were perpetual losers; they made a science of the art of losing. But our basketball teams were something else; twice they won the borough championship and, in my senior year, they were in the city finals.

We played Evander Childs, a school in the Bronx, for the New York City title. The final score of that game was 27–26. That’s right, 27–26. In 1928 and for a dozen more years, there was no 45-second rule when you had the ball; there was a center jump after each made field goal; and the two-handed set shot was the only shot players took.

We lost that game in the final seconds when George Gregory, Evander Childs’ All-City center, slapped the ball backwards into the basket on a jump ball from eight feet away. I cursed and sobbed, by turn, for the entire hour-long subway ride home. I continued the “I-won’t-or-can’t-believe-what-happened” tone the next day when reporting to my buddies on the block.

Other times, other values.

I make sure to visit my father in the spring so he and I can watch the NBA playoffs together. He’s a huge fan of guys who try to do it all on their own—Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson. Solo acts. At the same time, and completely contradictorily, he tsk-tsks over every bad pass, every example of matador defense, compares every team’s esprit de corps—or lack thereof—to the 1970 New York Knicks. He lives for the body in motion.

Dying Just a Little

Whereas many boys want to be superheroes who dominate the world, anorexic girls retreat from the world and sexuality. Adolescent boys are trying to become strong and aggressive, but anorexic girls are trying to become weak and fragile. Anorexia, the feminine flip side to masculine violence and heroic fantasy, comes directly from pubescent peer pressure. Teenage girls develop anorexia in specific response to sex changes. Girls become anorexic because they’re trying to meet a cultural ideal of extreme thinness and/or desexualize themselves. They don’t want to develop hips and breasts, and they’re afraid of their bodies getting fat. The anorexic girl, wasted, tired, not menstruating, her secondary sexual characteristics slowed by poor nutrition, thus delays her entry into adulthood.

A superstition among “primitive” peoples: if a woman touches a cadaver, she’ll stop menstruating.

Ninety percent of anorexics are female. Seventy percent of women say that looking at models in fashion magazines causes them to feel depressed, guilty, and shameful. Ninety-five percent of people who enroll in formal weight-reduction programs are women. Ninety-eight percent of women gain back the weight they lose by dieting. Women regard themselves as fat if they’re 15 pounds overweight; men don’t think of themselves as fat unless they’re 35 pounds above the U.S. average. My father has always been girlishly proud of his quite thin waist; the first thing he comments upon whenever he sees me is whether I’ve lost or gained weight. His most rapturous praise: “You’re slender as a reed.” Eighty percent of people who have part of their small intestines removed in order to help themselves lose weight are women. Fifty-five percent of adolescent girls believe they’re overweight; only 13 percent of adolescent girls are actually overweight. Anorexia has the highest fatality rate of any psychiatric illness. Eleven percent of Americans would abort a fetus if they were told it had a tendency toward obesity. When asked to identify good-looking individuals, 5-year-olds invariably select pictures of thin people. Elementary school children have more negative attitudes toward the obese than toward bullies, the disabled, or children of another race. Teachers routinely underestimate the intelligence of fat kids and overestimate the intelligence of slender kids. Corpulent students are less likely to be granted scholarships. Anorexics often grow lanugo, which is soft, woolly body hair that grows to compensate for the loss of fat cells so the body can hold in heat. Anorexics have many of the physical symptoms of starvation: their bellies are distended, their hair is dull and brittle, their periods stop, they’re weak, and they’re vulnerable to infections. They also have the psychological characteristics of the starving: they’re depressed, irritable, pessimistic, apathetic, and preoccupied with food. They dream of feasts.

Girls and women quoted in Kim Chernin’s The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness:

“I’ve heard about that illness, anorexia nervosa, and I keep looking around for someone who has it. I want to go sit next to her. I think to myself, maybe I’ll catch it.”

“One of my cousins used to throw food under the table when no one was looking. Finally, she got so thin they had to take her to the hospital. I always admired her.”

“I’m embarrassed to have bulimia. It’s such a preppy disease.”

“I don’t care how long it takes. One day I’m going to get my body to obey me. I’m going to make it lean and tight and hard. I’ll succeed in this, even if it kills me.”

“To have control over your body becomes an extreme accomplishment. You make of your body your very own kingdom where you are the tyrant, the absolute dictator.”

“Look, see how thin I am, even thinner than you wanted me to be. You can’t make me eat more. I am in control of my fate, even if my fate is starving.”

“I get lots of compliments. My friends are jealous, but I’ve made new friends. Guys who never considered me before have been asking me out.”

“I hate to say this, but I’d rather binge than make out.”

“In all the years I’ve been a therapist, I’ve yet to meet one girl who likes her body.”

I was in my mid-20s. Before taking off her clothes, she said she needed to tell me something: she had herpes. Madly in love with her witchy bitchiness, I found occasional enforced celibacy insanely erotic, the way a chastity belt glamorizes what it locks out. We wound up living together, and as we fell out of love with each other, her herpes became a debate point between us. She suggested that we just get married and then if I got it, I got it, and who would care? I suggested she at least explore some of the possibilities of which modern medicine availed us.

For a multitude of reasons, the two of us didn’t belong together, but what interests me now is what, for lack of a better term, a free-floating signifier the virus was. When I was in love with her, it eroticized her. When I wasn’t, it repelled me. The body has no meanings. We bring meanings to it.

As psychologist Nancy Etcoff says, in Survival of the Prettiest, “In a context where only a king can control enough food resources and labor supply to eat enough and do no physical labor so that he becomes fat, prestige is conferred by signs of abundance. A thin person is a person too poor to afford the calories, and maybe one who does so much physical labor that she cannot keep weight on. When poor women are fat (because junk food is so cheap and available, and they are less educated about its hazards and unable to afford expensive healthy foods), then it’s in to be thin and dietary restraint and physical exercise become prestigious.”

“I can’t stand fat women,” a thin woman says in The Obsession. “If one of them has been sitting on a chair in a coffee shop, or on the bus, and there’s no other place to sit, I won’t go in there or sit in that place.”

“It’s like watching a death’s head,” another woman says about a fat woman at the market. “The co-op ought to pay her to get out of here. Who can go home to a good dinner with that in mind?”

My father’s term of derision for big-bellied men: “watermelon smugglers.”

Laurie and I stage monthly dieting competitions, though neither of us is overweight. “Want a second helping?” “I made some banana bread for you.” What’s going on here? We’re each saying: you’re beautiful; I, though, am wanting; I will do anything for love.

Fasting frees one from carnal needs and desires, prepares one for visions and trances. Moses fasted 40 days before receiving the Ten Commandments. Jesus fasted 40 days before his enlightenment. Medieval saints (especially women) fasted to demonstrate their purity and holiness, and if their fasting appeared to continue far beyond normal human bounds, it was proof of God’s grace. By controlling their breathing, nuns in ancient times were able to stop menstruating and limit their need for food.

Fasting is a constant for female saints. In the thirteenth century, Margaret of Cortona said, “I want to die of starvation to satiate the poor.” Thérèse of Lisieux died of tuberculosis in 1897, just short of her 25th birthday. As she lay dying, bleeding from her intestines and unable to keep down water, she was tormented by the thought of banquets. Gemma Galgani died in 1903—also of TB, also at 25. She dreamed of food; would it be all right, she asked her confessor, to ask Jesus to take away her sense of taste? Permission was granted. She arranged with Jesus that she should begin to expiate, through her own suffering, all the sins committed by priests. For the next 60 days she vomited whenever she tried to eat.

In 1859, an American doctor, William Stout Chipley, published an article describing a condition he called “sitophobia,” fear of food. In 1868, William Withey Gull, the English physician who was suspected of being Jack the Ripper, first mentioned anorexia nervosa; in 1873, he delivered a lecture on the disorder. The same year, a French doctor, Charles-Ernest Lasègue, published a long article on what he called “hysterical anorexia.” Lasègue described the following symptoms: menstruation ceases, thirst increases, the abdomen retracts and loses elasticity, constipation becomes obstinate, the skin is pale and dry, the pulse is quickened, the patient tires easily, and when she rises from resting often experiences vertigo—all of which are still associated with anorexia.

In the late nineteenth century, a tepid appetite was proof of a woman’s delicacy and elegance. A young lady who admitted to a hearty appetite would be said to “eat like a ploughboy” and would be the object of sneers and jests. Victorian women, even when they became mothers, were admonished never to demonstrate their hunger. If they did confess to hunger, they were expected to yearn only for light, sweet, delicate morsels and not for meat, which was thought to stimulate sexual desire. For a woman to enjoy a slab of roast beef was to suggest a baser nature that she was not supposed to acknowledge in herself.

In 2004, Hilary Mantel wrote, “Why do women still feel so hounded? The ideal body seems now attainable only by plastic surgery. The ideal woman has the earning powers of a chief executive, breasts like an inflatable doll, no hips at all, and the tidy, hairless labia of an unviolated 6-year-old. The world gets harder and harder. There’s no pleasing it. No wonder some girls want out. Anorexia itself seems like mad behaviour, but I don’t think it is madness. It is a way of shrinking back, of reserving, preserving the self, fighting free of sexual and emotional entanglements. It says, like Christ, noli me tangere. Touch me not and take yourself off. For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick, to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while starving the outer being; to buy time. Most anorexics do recover, after all. Anorexia can be an accommodation, a strategy for survival.”

In Cymbeline, Imogen apparently dies when she’s about 15. Her brothers, Guiderius and Arviragus, stand over her grave and chant a dirge over what they think is her lifeless body inside her coffin: “Golden lads and girls all must / As chimneysweepers, come to dust.” Then Imogen opens her eyes and comes back to life.

Ye Olde Mind-Body Problem

In accordance with the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, all advertisements for tobacco products in the United States must include one of these four Surgeon General’s warning labels:

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking by Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, and Low Birth Weight.

All four warnings must be used with equal frequency, but tobacco companies can choose when to use each warning. In compliance with the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, advertisements feature each of the four Surgeon General’s warnings with the same frequency—about 25 percent each. However, in the study sample of 52 ads in eighteen magazines, the warning to pregnant women occurs far more often in the ads in men’s magazines (Sports Illustrated, Esquire, GQ), 53 percent of the time, while this same warning occurs in only 20 percent of the ads in women’s magazines (Mademoiselle, McCall’s, Ms., Vogue, Working Woman).

The warning that cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide occurs in 37 percent of the ads in women’s magazines but occurs in none of the ads in men’s magazines. The advertisements featuring the carbon monoxide warning usually feature youthful, carefree, and less serious-appearing women. Carbon monoxide is a poisonous gas that interferes with the body’s oxygen-carrying mechanisms; advertisers apparently assume that women, especially young women, are less apt than men to know this fact.

The magazine with the most cigarette advertisements, Mademoiselle, has a young, female audience. Eighty-eight percent of smokers start before age 20, and the only group that smokes more now than it did 20 years ago is adolescent girls.

Tobacco companies appear to manipulate the use of the Surgeon General’s warning to render them as ineffective as possible, mitigating the purpose of the warning by often using the warning they presume the reader is most likely to ignore.

Whenever I reread this précis for a poli sci paper Laurie wrote eons ago, I never fail to be moved by her belief/hope that the actions human beings take might be based to any degree whatsoever on rational thought. All the evidence points to the fact that they’re not (cf. anorexia). My father being, of course, the exception: he took up pipe smoking in the early ’50s (in photo-album pictures from that period he looks improbably dignified), but he gave it up immediately after realizing, during a tennis match, that it was cutting down on his wind.

Sex and Death (ii)

In many insect species, when the female emerges from her sac as a mature life form, males immediately swarm around her, fighting desperately to mate with her. She mates, then dies after laying her eggs. Instead of the juvenile stages being preliminary to the fully formed adult life form, the adult life form exists only as the culmination of the juvenile life form, as a way for the cycle to continue.

In animals that produce all their offspring at once, like the salmon, most of the life span is spent getting ready for reproduction. The animal grows, stores energy, and prepares its gonads for one explosion. When the hormonal signal is given, resources are mobilized to maximize reproductive effort, even if this leaves the animal so damaged and depleted that it dies soon after. A salmon’s life span is significantly extended if it’s castrated before its gonads develop.

As the August mating season nears for the male marsupial mouse, its testosterone levels build steadily higher, reaching a peak in late July. The adrenal glands enlarge, sending elevated levels of hormones into the bloodstream. Males enter a state of extreme physiological excitement and stress. They engage in violent battles with one another for the opportunity to mate with the females. After mating, the males have—in addition to the scars from the battle—stomach ulcers that bleed severely. Their immune systems are so decimated that they easily fall prey to parasites. Nearly all of them will die in the course of the next few days. The females survive to raise and suckle their fatherless young, but they, too, are extremely fragile. Only a few females survive to breed again the following year.

A boy’s first ejaculations are nocturnal emissions: uncontrolled and unprompted acts. A boy’s body mechanically begins the process of sexual reproduction without much if any input on his part. And it’s fundamentally similar with girls (granting obvious, important differences). Before you are even really used to being alive and moving around in the world, much less have any understanding of yourself, your body’s already starting the reproductive process.

For most of human history, people mated as teenagers and conceived their first child by age 20. When anthropologist Suzanne Frayser studied 454 traditional cultures, she found that the average age for brides was 12 to 15; for grooms, 18.

In the last 30 years, the suicide rate has doubled among American children and adolescents; it’s the third leading cause of death in youth. The tumult of hormones is, for some teenagers, too much, e.g., a hugely disproportionate number of school shootings occur in spring.

Hoop dream (vi):

My junior year of high school, a month before I broke my leg, while we dressed for our first league game, our coach, Mr. Rossi, stood at the blackboard in the locker room, shaking and crumbling chalk. At first we thought he was just trying to get us psyched up. He stubbed his toe on the bench. We got on our road uniforms and tube socks and assumed maybe Mr. Rossi had had a taste or two too many. Then he burst out with it.

“Dicky Schroeder,” he said. And we all realized: where the hell was Dicky, home with a head cold when we had Lincoln at Lincoln? Give him a couple of aspirin and send him over there in a cab, right, Mr. Rossi?

“Dicky had a bad accident in his garage last night. His parents said it wasn’t an accident. Dicky’s not with us any longer.”

We closed our lockers. It took us a while to grasp what Mr. Rossi said, and it took us the rest of the year for it to sink in. Dicky Schroeder smoked Raleighs and drove a souped-up Chevy. He was always buying new clothes and car accessories and bullshitting you about getting laid. He was too busy to kill himself.

Around a week later, the school paper ran an obituary, quoting people saying what a solid student he’d been, which was an insult to everyone’s intelligence. The article finished up with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson saying, “Death isn’t an ending; it’s only a transition,” which did everyone a lot of good, knowing Dicky wasn’t gone forever: he was just running the transition game.

Immediately after Mr. Rossi told us Dicky had committed suicide, he asked us if we wanted to play the game and, to his surprise and perhaps our own, we all said yes. No one talked on the bus to the game and none of us took warm-ups. Once the game started, we all tried to play like Dicky, looking to pass, working the give-and-go. Everyone was looking for the open man, and the open man was Dicky. We were all hoping to wake up and find out he was only kidding. If we all tried to play like him, maybe he’d pop out from under his garage door and show us how to run the three-on-two. The play I’ll remember until I’m 90 was Brad Gamble, our star, all alone on a breakaway, me trailing. He stopped and set the ball down on the floor for me to pick up. I looked for someone to follow after me; I kept waiting, but no one came. I banked it off the board, and we won in a romp.