10 S N E 1?

Driving to the tennis courts in Delaware Park last Saturday to play for the first time in about five years, I was whisked back some thirty years and a couple thousand miles.

My parents, who were the same age I am now, received matching tennis rackets at Christmas 1974. They were wooden and top-of-the-line, but they sat untouched in their vinyl covers with a couple of other assorted rackets and things like the slide projector and wrapping paper and ribbons in a back closet until one dinnertime the following June. As we were finishing dinner, Mom announced that she felt like playing a little tennis. We all gaped. Mom? Tennis? No way! We left the dishes as they were; my dad and my brothers and I grabbed the rackets and the few cans of balls. Where the balls came from, I have no idea, and at least one of the rackets still had its old-fashioned wooden press.
We drove to the local high school, and once we got a free court, took turns rallying in mixed-doubles. We kids got a particular kick out of Mom, doing something we never imagined her doing—being athletic. I wasn’t known as an athlete either, but enjoyed banging the ball furiously against the backboard.

I never saw my mother play tennis again, but I discovered that an old childhood friend played, and for the rest of that and several summers running, tennis became my game. It was the period when wooden racquets were rapidly giving way to metal ones. The Wilson T2000 that Jimmy Connors used had a crazy wire wrapping. Head came out with its composite racket with the elongated oval face. I envied the new equipment in the hands of other players, but did my best to keep up until my parents gave me a metal racket for my 15th birthday.

I started following tennis on television. Borg was my favorite player, and not just because of his long blond hair and blue eyes. I liked his cool. His Nordic cool. It’s what I admired about Edberg and Sampras, and what I like about Federer. I couldn’t stand the theatrics of a Jimmy Connors or a John McEnroe. I’ve come to respect the games of players whose playing style I don’t necessarily like, just as I came to like baseball even when the Yankees aren’t involved. I’ve been to the U.S. Open several times, but I hadn’t played here in Buffalo until last week.

It was wonderful to be out there on the court at seven-thirty in the evening with the sun still up and out. The heat and dryness of the air, the smell of the grass, the shouts of the kids on the soccer field behind the courts. When I was a teenager, the courts at the local high school didn’t have lights for nighttime play, but that wouldn’t stop us, especially if the score was close. Penn, Dunlop, and Wilson all manufactured balls that were Day-Glo Orange, and even made some balls that were half-yellow, half-orange. I was happy to see that my backhand remained as strong as ever, but my forehand always needs work. But mostly what needs some work is me. I winded quickly, and couldn’t last more than an hour. And I kept trying to move my feet, but they refused to move quickly, as if protesting, “Take it easy! We can’t throw all that weight around as easily as we could when you were thirty years younger and half the size.” I’m going try to do what I can to relieve them of some of their burden.

In Memoriam: Andrew King

This past Wednesday, I heard some sad news.

Andrew Rivan King was a colleague from my time in the M.F.A. program at Columbia. He was an enthusiastic writer who was working on a book about his experiences in Africa. This was the early Nineties: Mandela had been released, but apartheid was still in the process of being dismantled. The Battle of Mogadishu was news in the literal sense. The Rwandan genocide had not yet happened. Just about the only Africa memoir we could reference was Out of Africa and we all thought Andrew had a good thing going. Andrew’s pieces in the workshops were peppered with Kiswahili. Jambo (“Hello”). Mzuri (“I’m fine.”). Mzee (“Older man”).

Andrew, like me, was a part of large and unusually supportive group in the Nonfiction concentration at Columbia. There wasn’t a lot of competition between us or, if there was, it was kept far offstage. Most of us were writing memoirs and, as with Africa, this was relatively uncharted territory. We looked back to This Boy’s Life and The Woman Warrior. The Liar’s Club hadn’t been published yet. The Internet was new. So was Amazon.

We both finished at Columbia in 1995. He continued to write, like I did, as other colleagues from Columbia drifted away from writing and started families or had their first books published or both. He moved from his Morningside Heights apartment to Brooklyn, and then out to Bay Ridge. I hadn’t heard from him in a few years; the last time I saw him was sometime around 2002-2003. He was still writing and still working to break through.

Wednesday I received an e-mail from a Columbia colleague I hadn’t heard from in a while, and her note warned of unpleasant news. When I called, she told me that Andrew took his own life in the second week in May. The news was just filtering out. In our conversation, Catherine told me that Andrew had long suffered from mood swings and depression, which he seldom discussed. The moment she said it, I felt like I understood Andrew’s persistent positivity. I don’t suffer from chemical or other kinds of depression, but have experienced the havoc that a thyroid disorder can wreak with physical and emotional energy and stability. I have also experienced the despair that results from other kinds of untreated disease. There was a long period in my own life when I contacted people only when things were going well, or when I felt I could “sell” them (and myself) on the positive aspects of my life. In Andrew’s slow but progressive geographical dislocation from a place where he was happy (Columbia/Morningside Heights) to a place where I suspect he could hide his despair, I recognized a strategy I’d tried. Its futility became apparent to me as it would have become to Andrew, and that must have been painful for him—to have to admit that his efforts to stave off his despair were in vain. The despair would have been its own kind of pain and sorrow; the failed efforts to combat it another. Andrew must have also been discouraged by his failure as a writer, but I feel that I want to distinguish between his efforts and his expectations. Every minute of every day there is a person somewhere striving to fulfill his plans, his dreams, his ambitions, and necessarily doing so in isolation. We don’t see those efforts, but that doesn’t make them failures.

Kwaheri, mzee. Amani.

Apple Time

I was in New York City for a recent week-long visit, and though I enjoyed seeing friends and sights and shows, I was reminded more than ever that I now live here. I think there are always going to be moments when I want to live there, but the city is so incredibly expensive and the pace and energy and stress of it all so exhausting. Spending $15-20 dollars on breakfast isn’t something I do here. I don’t even spend that much on dinner, most of the time. At one point I was walking down a Midtown sidewalk and was deliberately pushed by someone. Though I stopped and yelled at the person and asked what was wrong with them, it made me feel like I no longer have the thickness of skin needed for a place as crowded and frenetic as Manhattan.

I saw three shows, a baseball game, and a number of gallery and museum shows. I was looking forward to the Yankees for a couple of weeks running, and though I wasn’t able to find tickets online before I left Buffalo, I planned to try the stadium window on Friday night. The World Champs were in town from Philly, and so was the fleet. I’ve never gone to a baseball game by myself, and plunked down fifty for a seat on the Terrace behind left field. Pretty high up, and unfortunately I had the one seat between two large men. A friend refers to the physical overspill from one seat to another “thigh seepage”. Double thigh seepage. I had a feeling that if I actually made it to the Stadium the Yankees would lose, which they did. The fans around me were hooting and hollering about the fourth-string catcher, Kevin Cash, and complaining about Joe Girardi. I understand reaction, and wanting to win all the time, but sports aren’t separate from life, or separate from any kind of work. Some days you aren’t going to win. Some days are going to be dull. Some days you are going to lose. And maybe some days you have to let someone play who lacks what other have. Perhaps I just was looking for the silver lining between the pinstripes.

I saw “Exit the King” on Saturday with Geoffrey Rush, Susan Sarandon, Lauren Ambrose and Andrea Martin. I don’t know the play, but it’s being by Ionesco gave me a faint idea of what might be in store. So I was really blown away by how great this play and this production were. The play, about a dying king, is a meditation on life, death, mortality, power, madness, relationships, and more. The cast was mostly brilliant. Andrea Martin stole almost every moment she had onstage, dialogue or none. Lauren Ambrose was always brilliant in “Six Feet Under” and I’d missed seeing her in “Hamlet” and “Awake and Sing!” so the chance to see her here was worthwhile. Geoffrey Rush was astonishing, and so were Brian Hutchinson and William Sadler. The curiosity (and another selling point) of the casting was Susan Sarandon. She played the role of the elder wife of King Berenger with a remote, lofty cool, very much the Sarandon persona in many of her movie roles. Between bits, she didn’t seem to know what to do with herself; I wanted a sense of her character even when she was just sitting down. Thiough her performance clicked in the queen’s long monologue that closes the play, I could help feeling that Stockard Channing or Sigourney Weaver would have known how to convey a sense of the character just sitting there without pulling focus, the way the other actors were, and still been able to convey the messages in that important last scene.

Real daring in art is something to experience, and “Next to Normal” is a daring, brave musical. It’s about a family breakdown and the breakdown of members of that family, but it is wise and funny and sad. And provocative. Alice Ripley is perfect in the pivotal role of the mother, and so is Jennifer Diamiano as her daughter. Aaron Tveit, the actor playing the son, is also very strong. But the twists in the musical aren’t simply the subject matter; the book reveals a critical piece of information slyly and slowly, and when you realize the full situation, what was until that point an unusually captivating musical about mental breakdown becomes something deeper. The lyrics weren’t always as surprising as the material, but so much about this musical is, that it balances out in the end. Very, very unexpected.

Sunday afternoon: the “Hair” revival Sunday afternoon. The iconic “American tribal love-rock musical” is definitely an artifact of its time. Much of the music sounds like Strauss waltzes compared to the amplified power chords in shows like “Rent” or “Spring Awakening.” The energy in the revival is infectious, and boy, did some of those bodies in the cast trigger some old (and not so old!) remembrances of desires past (and not so past!).