Odd balls
Gladstone Georgia,
1969 -1973
Kickballs
Generalizations
of the ball, ideals of round, 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 a little pitted, pebbly you
could call it. Kickball was the eminent ball of the playground for a few years,
between third grade and sixth grade. There was, by the fifth grade, a little ritual. Somebody would find Grady, the
janitor, to unlock the storeroom to get the kickballs. He selects the one key
from a great clanking mass of them, which is attached by a chain to his belt,
and now you are behind him, light on, no windows in this place, there’s the
bats, the bases, the basketballs, and in that metal box are the kickballs. You
look at Grady, the thick, tufted gray
hair, eyebrows thick, the stiff walk in the perpetural work suit, you see
extreme age, you have no eye for the damage and endurance of black skin, your
measurements are all safely in white skin.
When you are in highschool one evening
Mom has news, you remember Grady, the janitor at Gladstone? Grady’s been
caught trying to show a little girl pictures of naked women. God knows what is involved in such a
complexly suggestive gesture, a whole trove of erotica discovered next to
the tub of floor soap in his closet. But
to wind back to you, who wound up to that moment with Mom strain to picture
some surreptitious passage, something you didn’t understand at the time, a
gesture, a smack of the lips, some personal current of perversion, no, well
he’s simply gruff, in your memory, the eyebrows, the voice there they are, take
em, with other things to do in it, go
down talk to the women in the kitchen, with his broom, be fooling around about
these balls all the time. Feeling was he didn’t even like you. You and Kevin
and Mike. Part of the respect you had for him, as if he’d studied you all and
made his judgment. You all need all the balls, and usually at least one would
be soft. When they are soft you can crevice the surface in this way or that
way, the folds will cause other folds
to erupt, here’s a fold, here’s a dent,
the sound is a sickly thump of your knuckles a little raw on the rubber, all of
which is endlessly fascinating for about two minutes. Then somebody says Mr.
Grady, can you fill this one up? Grady
will attach the ball to a pump, he’s got
a hand pump. Up and down on the handle of the thing, the ball ripens, rounding the way things eat
in cartoons, the clever bird swallowed by the cat, the bunny by the wolf, Jonah
by the whale. The bird, the bunny, Jonah, they stay the same inside, integrity
intact, it is dark in there, hey, where’s a light, they light a match, the cat, the wolf, the whale, not the whale
so much, although you hear that story and you can’t help but think, smoke comes
out of their ears, or maybe the bird or
the bunny has a stick of dynamite, KABLOOM and the eaten thing is out again, a
jagged hole in the predator, the bunny
with a characteristically pointed remark, the chase is on again, contained
against container. Kabloom could happen with the balls, but long before it
reached that point Grady would have stopped. He isn’t into straining himself,
he says.
The balls, round and ready, now, are
herded out of the storage closet, you
all hold a bounty of balls in your arms and are kicking the others, get along,
little doggie, and this is fun, it is roundup, you all are cowboys, kick, until
out the door you go, and suddenly impish
red balls are all over the playground. Boys and girls and teachers coalesce
around them, the teachers that is who
aren't smoking in the lounge, they switch on and off on a schedule of their
own. Boys and girls, though: I write this, I veer, I am in another perspective
with the touch of a word. Kids. You all
were kids among yourselves, you were the people, big kids and little ones. It
was important, too, what you were called - like among the boys, the word girl
would come out with your lips puckered, as though you’d eaten something sour.
It wasn’t a word to speak, it was a word to reject,
it was a name. But self description, in the channel between grown up and
kid, is coded with the words they would
respond to, and frankly you don’t want them using your words.
The
kickball teams sprawl, a hazy web, over an area of the field, once covered with
gravel and now a mixture of gravel and gravel dust and sand and red clay, this
fine spiculate powder, the red rubbed on
sneakers, on hands, in your hair, that red stain running throughout your years
at Gladstone as though a vengeful ghost not to be wholly dissolved by no matter
what new ingredient’s added to powder or liquid. The pitcher, you all take
turns as a pitcher, on the mound, although eventually you settle on Eddie Munch
as the pitcher, who can wheel that ball down on you with curves and speed,
pumping sound of the balls skittering over the ground. Leg out, shoe profiling
to the kick and then the automatic shriek, if the ball’s good, usually it’s
foul, and the race to first. In the outfield, meanwhile, they are sitting down,
or wandering away, and the balls when the kicks a good thump you can hear pass
rolling by like rocks through wet tissue
paper. You run down a ball, the screaming gets distant, you catch up with it
and for a moment you’ve escaped not only the game, but the school, that whole
current of familiar sounds, the environment, your immediate concerns, you are
an ant on your lonely out there. The clash of voices at your back is small, and
then you wheel around, the ball prised up and
trundle back, kick it, watch the distant movement around the diamond,
the players come back to life, figures now gone to their positions, the score a
sad thing but wait until your side is up, you run and come to rest at your old
post.
The
most active player is the catcher, who has to run after the wild pitch, the
foul. There’s the ditch where the playground ends, the stickers and stand of
pine, the backyards of houses the grass towards porches and onward the whole
meander of Belle Vue subdivision. The ball’s momentum, though, is usually
arrested by the bushes in the no man’s land, wade in through the stickers and
scratch your legs, the thin cursive of thorn and twig the jotting on your legs
almost constantly, a memo pad of remnant bushes, ditches, the collecting pools
mandated by county regulation, the oddments of lots the Effberry’s hadn’t
parceled out. You liked being catcher, though, better than the outfield,
eventually it becomes a given, Eddie pitching, you catching. The anticipation
when Eddie smoked one, to scoop it up from the ground where it scorched along,
the complaints, Mrs. Crawl coming out there, Eddie if you can’t throw slower
we’ll have to get another pitcher, and under her supervision a slow wobble meets
Patty’s askew attempt at a forward punt and she’s off.
In
the sixth grade the domination of kickball was broken, and mere anarchy, for an
interval, in the form of superballs, basketballls, softballs, footballs, and
even soccer balls was loosed upon the playground. In the seventh grade, the
basketball had achieved, in your group, supreme power, and the kickball was
forgotten, a thing for lower grades. Outside of the playground, you began to go
for the tennis ball, you got a tennis racket for your birthday, Woody Davis
goes he’ll show you how to play, all
that spring at the Dekalb Junior college
you had Woody, biked out there and the bikes resting against the high chain
link fence that separates the courts from the rest of the campus, bat around
the ball and come to some semblance of
recognizable play, and as March turns into April more players begin to
come out, kickball and its usufructs,
that anachronistic kingdom slips away from you until wind up to now you look
back through meshes when what comes back is unconnected, haggard streak
illuminating briefly a stance, a blocking out of bodies, but not and never the
real face, measures for the real proportions bounded by superlative and
diminutive, lost those things altogether.
Superballs
Superballs
came out when you were four, they were the modern world, the space age reaching
into balldom. Suddenly they appeared,
this was in York, on your street, Dita’s friends coming out of their houses in
the embers of the afternoon deposited by the bus, corner of Dewwater and
Heidi’s Corner, gone to milk and crackers or a cookie, then out, Dads not home yet. You were home
from kindergarten hours before, slamming these new, wild balls down hard on the
asphalt with Robin, your next door neighbor, watching the balls ascending to
amazing heights, pop flies, which you could catch and it was a real catch, like
catching a baseball, you positioned down below, your hands cupped a cautionary
glove, hopeful, the intersection not something you could be neglectful about,
Dad slowly looping you a baseball or Dita tossing you a beachball, but
positioning and running, a lesson in spin and speed, you stand there and miss
it, the ball having become to quickly a speck and then a falling pupil to pass
somehow the clumsy part of your hands no longer area enough to be anything more
than a quick grab which fails to intersect the second bounce, okay, and with
the loss of rubber impudence, zany control as though perverse cosmonauts were
indeed in the capsule, running out of fuel though needing your arm pumping the
slam down and now dribbling its reentry to
you grabbing it. Roger, Houston, and out. As soon as Dita gets hers you
want yours, which one Saturday you are able to point out to Mom there the balls
are in a stiff plastic pocket and groovy colors not just black but a wave of
gold and green, only fifty cents, so then, home from kindergarten, you and
Kofax spend time up and down the street, practicing, Robin growing weary,
returning to her yard to play pretend horse, but you couldn’t get these balls
out of your mind.
Croquet
It
was after Alice Lee came to visit that the croquet craze really hit, and then
it was you and Mark for a while, the little wire arches set up, goals knocked
in, striped red and white and blue, where Dad would protest the lawn the grass
I’ve worked hard on that spot going to have a bald spot under the maple and you
would listen and go ahead the next afternoon, prudence calling the game before
Dad came home’s all, or over to Mark’s yard although with the way Purse never
mows it or weeds it the balls smooth courses have a tendency to be distracted
into sudden losses of motion by nettle and uneven cupping among sparse blades
of crab and St. Augustine grass. The balls are wooden, and like the poles there
are stripes of color that band them, red and green and blue and purple, to tell
one ball from another. Balls, in this game, aren’t neutral, exchanged among
opposing players, but are territorial, possessed, yours, Mark’s, Dita’s, Alice
Lee’s, or whoever’s playing, parts of yourself. Croquet has an oddly board game
quality about it, a gentility, a Victorian etiquette of politely muted imperial
energy, sideswiping masked by the mandated rush for territory, and partly it is
just that, that the balls are your markers, bound and not unbound bits of
energy, but it is also the woodenness of the ball, the gravid, grave way it
travels, the click as it is hit off your mallet and the click as it hits
another ball, the spin of the stripes pressing down the blades of grass under its roll.
Balls
exist, like numbers, in different systems, and the two great systems are the
bounce and the hit. It’s like the
rational and the irrationals are for numbers. Different kinds of pleasure
attach to the expectation of a bounce or a hit, an elastic contact, with just
its hint of an energy free as a spark, or a hard contact, from throwing pebbles
in a pond up to bullets shot from a gun. Hard contact, once shaped into a
conventional ball - the bowling, billiard, or croquet ball, modify violence
into aim, the arm back to hurl the clump of mud at the pine tree now grasping
the croquet mallet and, with clean fingers, what was the joy of viscous matter,
the swamp, the edge of the lake, come up to the lawn, affecting a silent sweep
through the pennywire arch, on to the gauntlet before the goal stick. You played this game until you suddenly were
exhausted by the very idea of it, and then the set’s put away, and the next
time you play croquet you’re on acid in college, tripping on the Alice in Wonderland aspects of it.
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