Here's Kickball
‑ Those inflatable
rubber balls, the rubber feeling very thin over the hollow, air filled
core. Although when the ball hits you,
it stings. It can sting. The surface of these balls, the rubber rind,
is always dented. Not smooth, but always
a little pitted. Pebbly. You never saw this type of ball outside of
school unless someone stole one. And
then everybody would know that this person stole this ball, because it was so
distinctive, so it wasn't a great thing to steal, in terms of other great
things you could steal, like magazines from stores or the little knicknacks,
batteries and disposable razors and such, that they always have hanging up at
the checkout counter, or (like your friend Eric's sister, Brenda, did) a
necklace from someone you were babysitting for.
Of course, Eric's sister wasn't prudent in committing the last mentioned
bit of larceny, because it didn't take a genius to connect Brenda babysitting last night with the
necklace no longer glittering whereever it had been glittering this morning.
The lack of necklace loomed large enough that the next day it was restored to
Mrs. Phillips by Mr. Klimke, and Eric's sister got punished as she was always
getting punished, by being grounded, and as always she glided out of her
bedroom window like a little sorority cat burglar when her boyfriend Bobby
drove up before the house in his big black Oldsmobile. Which Eric saw, of
course, but even though he didn't like his sister he still didn't tell about.
That is to his folks. To us he told about it. He always did tell us. Eric's
sister never cultivated prudence, which was why, on the back of the Thrift
Village there on Shallowcross road you could read that Brenda sucks donkey
dicks (a dismissable slander) and that Brenda suck Bobby (grammatically doubtful,
but accepted as gospel truth by the Gladstone seventh grade).
Kickball was the
eminent ball of the playground. There was the softball, the basketball, the
football, the baseball, and the program was that as we got older these would be
our balls, and we would be sorted out according to what ball we were around
most. (Oh, you forgot the bowling ball. But that was church. The Sunday School
class, organised for a rainy Saturday excursion to the bowling alley and you
watching the movie must have been made in the fifties, say, that guy looks
funny, he looks like my Uncle, yeah my uncle always wears his undershirt and
not a shirt over it and the movie voiceover telling Longstreet to take his
steps up to the line like in the diagram step a and dot dot dot step b ahead of
it and the arm back hey though these finger holes are too small and the after
swing ‑ perfecto, man, but the ball I don't think the ball is right see it
keeps curving like you know that means they must of unbalanced it by putting
more weight on the right, man, and that isn't fair). But up until the sixth
grade we were all sort of under the sign of the kickball. Liberte, egalite and
fraternite, translated into elementary school terms, meant kickball. If Engels
had been around we might have reminded him of that stage of primitive communism
when everything is pretty groovy and even the girls get to play on the kickball
teams, and then later on he might posit an Asiatic feudal stage in balldom,
when the huge project was sorting out the bats and finding the things like
petrified pillows for bases and then setting up our configurations and all of
this division of labor tending to establish a definite tyranny and caste
system, with the outfield getting to play the pariah parts. Any clumsy jerk
could be stationed out there, and a lot of times they doubled or tripled up, so
there are three right fielders at a time, two left fielders, and so on.
‑ I should try to be
more conscientious of the limits of my world, or at least put in markers here,
little surveyor's clues, even if the real limits are by their essence such that
the slave to them cannot see them. The
real limits are invisible and function invisibly, the real limits are self‑suppressing,
the real limit is not the wall I touch but the interface between touch and
wall. I am talking about the Gladstone
Elementary School playground as if it were representative of all elementary
school playgrounds, at least of a certain era, but I have to say my sample is
limited. The only other playground I had any familiarity with is the
Dallastown, Pennsylvania Elementary School playground. The Earlys moved to
Gladstone, a suburb of Atlanta, when Street was nine, and Mom was happy about
that cause she didn't like living up North so much and so she really got on Dad
when he got the opportunity to come down here, Dad was doing a little of this
and a little of that and had ended up there in Pennsylvania working on a
newspaper for, Street was surprised to learn twenty years later talking to Dad
on his porch and Dad reminiscing about that time, Dad making six thousand a
year. And it was only four thousand more, the ad agency in Atlanta, but Mom
kept pointing out it was a ground floor opportunity, look, honey, this article
says Atlanta is the new New York, it is
like the place to be. Honey. Like it was the opportunity of a lifetime. We could live near Grammy Shillowford. It is
important to note that Longstreet had, by that time, incorporated playground in
my paradigm of how to be ‑ yes, it was that stark, in those stark terms, that I
thought, since I was a melancholic child ‑ and so my memories of kickball,
which don't go back to Dallastown, where we played rather chaotic and un‑ball‑organized
games, plug into my playground and classroom routine.
‑ In Dallastown you
were beaten up on the playground. No, that is an exaggeration ‑ you were never
physically beaten up, but you were the object of a certain amount of bullying.
The bullying made an impression. For instance, there was this tyke Amazon who
would come after you with her coat. She'd swing her coat so that the zipper
would hit you. Of course, the zipper didn't hit you very often because you ran
away. Now why she came after you with the coat in the first place, that has to
do with the reasons children find the targets they do, and that has to do with
miseries that are accumulated from elsewhere. From one's relationship to Mom
and Dad ‑ standard answer. From the air, from God, the curses of angels or mad
toothfairies, who knows, but the important thing is that children, with their
back‑to‑the‑primates program of selecting out the weak, are going to find your
weak spot.
Now, here is the
thing: by the time you got to Gladstone you were not tormented, or not
particularly, and certainly not by children of your own age. The reason for this is that you were a quick
student, you liked to read, you impressed your teachers, and that gave you a
certain amount of power, a power base, and it taught you how to use powerful
allies to establish yourself. Not that
you told, you didn't have to tell. It was that you could have told and didn't,
actually, that made the difference. It is easy to caricature what I am talking
about here, we have the vocabularies we inherited from childhood, we know about sneaks, queers, snitches,
bookworms, bullies, but if I turn my back on that sad gallery and really think
about it what impresses me is the diplomacy involved in classroom and playground
survival, the ability to pick the right moments for remaining loyal and the
right and legal moments for jettisoning one's allies, ah, the terrible beauty
of Realpolitik in Kinderwelt, ah, the friends who turned out to be mistakes, or
somehow became mistakes, not that at first they were mistakes but it was like
the effect of some terrible hidden gene, you would be gone a summer from them
and you'd come back and there your friend would be, a mistake, a pud, a sucker,
coloring the very air around him with unhealthy vulnerability.
‑ So in Atlanta you
have a system down, you have a power model that you have discovered, you are
very quick to establish yourself. By the
fifth grade you have established yourself on the playground. All of our models are so crude, it goes along
with picking my nose or my butt and not worrying about it, it goes along with
poking a straw in my nostril, it goes along with the thing Eric can do
with his eye by putting his finger on
the lid right at the corner and pulling it and like pulling his eye right up so
that you only see the runny white of the eye, gross, this all goes along with
the rawness of the assertions and surrenders on the playground. You have got to
where you are in the middle of the kids who are selected for Jackson's team. Jackson
Whittemore is the biggest kid in fifth grade and his team usually wins, so you
are comfortable, this is the middle management level which a lot of these kids
will go into, it starts from here.
‑ The kickballs come
out of a closet. The janitor's
closet. The doors of all the classrooms
are wooden doors, easy doors to open, but the special doors in the school, the
door to the office, the door to the bathroom, and the doors to the storerooms,
they are all heavy metal doors. The janitor unlocks it selecting one key from a
great clanking mass of them, which is attached by a chain to his belt. The janitor, the main janitor of the
Gladstone Elementary School is an old black man (which means around fifty, to
Street the thick, tufted gray hair signifies extreme age, and he has no eye for
the damage and endurence of black skin, his measurements are all in white skin)
who at some later date ‑ when Street is already in High School ‑ has to leave
the school because he is caught trying to show a little girl pictures of naked
women. God knows what is involved in
such a complexly suggestive gesture. A teacher will get Grady to unlock the
door and he'll be attended by volunteers.
Maybe the teacher will go with Grady herself, but most of the time the
teachers' point of view is that playground time means going to the teacher's
lounge and taking a drag on a cigarette. So without Miss Petty or Beston or
Muldive we would get nine balls, and sometimes they would be deflated and they
are neat when they are like that because you can crevice the surface in this
way or that way, and if you knock a dent in the ball and then knock another one
in it the dents you form will interfere with each other, and that is endlessly
fascinating for about two minutes. The
other interesting thing about hitting the ball to obtain these dents is that it
makes an interesting thump, and the other interesting thing about it is that
when the ball is pumped up the dents will pop out, and that is good to watch.
The ball looks like it is alive when this is happening, a strange seal or
something, like it is eating, or at least the way things eat in cartoons where
a lot of times what is eaten is swallowed whole, gulp, and it just stays the
same inside, in fact if the thing eaten is the smart thing, like the
Roadrunner, then it just lights a match and the thing eating it, like the
Coyote, has to spit it out.
Okay, the balls
come out of the storage closet and suddenly they are all over the
playground. Little impish red balls,
around which coalesce groups of boys and girls and teachers, the ones who
aren't smoking in the lounge, which it must be that they switch on and
off. Boys and girls, though: this is a
teacher's words. I write this, I veer, I
am in another perspective with the touch of a word. Kids.
We were kids, I was a kid. We were big kids and little ones, we were
girls only in a special tone (geerl. You're a geeerl ‑ a special taunt among
the boys) and we were boys only in pathetic moments when we were licking the
ass of some especially chosen adult, like going home with some story of
malfeasance to a parent (he was a big boy ‑ he was a bigger boy ‑ phrases to
evoke sympathy and, one hoped, rage ‑ maybe Daddy will go over there and beat
up Mr. Whittemore!). We could all easily
be pretty pathetic lackies, childhood being a wonderful discipline for later
acts of supererogatory servility
‑ But normally we
werent lackies ‑ we were, as I have tried to point out, diplomats, secretaries
of state on delicate missions in perilous international situations.
‑ Shift a little,
Street, shift the focus. Because I want
this to be clear ‑ to actually describe the world of kickballs involves a lot
of subtle stuff, it involves the whole metaphysics of description and
depiction, that stitching between art and life.
‑ My dream is to
describe myself into existence.
‑ There is always a
word, but not simply a word: a charm. An open sesame, a one if by land and two
if by sea. The lock is unlocked, the
stone is lifted, the agents meet in the park at twelve and exchange briefcases.
Yes, not simply a word, because its synonyms won't do, the place that it holds
is uniquely its own, its function is to transform the situation, to make
visible the threshhold between absense and appearance. Like a stage mindreader, your challenge is to
pick out a few experiences from the
nattering psychic throng, all those unnamed lifes, all those random vibes.
Except here, in the palace of memory, those lifes are one life: your own. Your own, splintered into a thousand aspect
‑ There is another
kickball game which comes later, comes in high school. It is called smear the queer, although like
all these names there are official and unofficial titles and I'm pretty sure
Coach Sick, who had a hard enough time saying sperm when the time came for him
to say sperm when we got our sex education class from him, I'm pretty sure he
didn't go around saying smear the queer, he probably said something more World
War II like, like bombardment. Anyway, the game was played inside, in a room
that had one wall open so you could lean out and look down on the gym floor and
the girls and their little uniforms down there.
I should explain that you are in a school district where they have
compressed Junior High and High School, because other people I talk to, they
say ninth grade was Junior High. Well,
not for Street. Now, the girls were
inside for the same reason we were: it
was raining. But you didn't have much of
a chance to look down like that, because smear the queer was a hyperbusy
game. It was simple; two teams, lined up each before a wall,
faceing each other. You could run out a
certain distance, to a line running across the floor. You hurl a kickball right
before the line. If it hit some boy,
that boy was out. The tempo of the game
was different from the kickball games you played at Gladstone . Those earlier games were sort of slow fusion
jazz, a lot of riffs of inactivity ‑ retrieving the ball, watching the pitcher
pitch it, the exchange between catcher and pitcher, neither of whom was better
than anybody else at catching the ball, since to catch the ball you had to have
a developed sense of speed and the curves that the ball would take and we were
all a little primitive about that. Most of the time when the kicker did hit it
the ball was foul, and somebody had to go retrieve it, and even when he did
kick it and it was legal it usually didn't have to involve you. Mostly you could confine your involvement to
yelling, maybe a little sympathetic movement towards the part of the field
where something was going on. But in smear the queer, Coach Sick kept tossing
in kickballs, and since there wasn't any set time for anybody to throw a ball
balls were constantly in the air, so you could be dodging one and be hit by
another.
‑ What do you think
is going to happen? Do you think this is going to end with some more profound
knowledge about the meaning of kickball?
Do you think, yes you do think, that if you do it right, if you reach
the magic moment of greatest specificity, the sound one day of the ball
crunching on the sandy mixture they laid on top of the playground that you had
to dig down a foot through before you reached clay, the ball bounding towards
you segment by segment larger but not so that you had time to mark the stages
of its fascinating trajectory, the ball actually heading in your direction and
the screams and yells suddenly receding like the soundtrack going out,
something screwed up with the friggin
projector as Mr. Dupley in exasperation and shadow said one day, the ball
almost in your hands and you squatting down in the catcher's squat for it, if
you get this in the crosshairs, see it, know that posture and the waiting and
how suddenly you don't want to be here, it will be like a kickball will drop
out of the story, memory's relic take physical form, Lazarus as kickball come
back from the dead come to tell you all I will tell you all.
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