Brushing the Famous

I never thought I’d be famous and I’m not. In my one-room Vermont schoolhouse, a severe portrait of our town’s native son, Calvin Coolidge, did not inspire any hope for Cal’s fame. Attending his old high school where I was a married father my senior year, I never even imagined I’d have physical contact with someone famous. But one day when I was a student at Boston College I was standing in a doorway watching the B.C. basketball team shooting around before their practice began. I felt a hand on my left arm, gently pushing me to the side of the doorway. Then a male saying “Excuse me” as he was brushing by me to the gym floor. I had been touched by Bob Cousy, the coach of the B.C. team, former Boston Celtic six-time NBA champion, 13-time All Star, the greatest passer pro basketball had ever seen, and--mirabile dictu—my hero and model as a kid growing up. Like me as a teen, Cousy was smaller than most basketball players, but he was a master of deception that leveled the floor for him and made him a winner.

Did my brush with the Cooze explain my decades-long, joint-destroying obsession with playing hoops, and even somehow lead me to write five novels—each with “Passing” in their titles—about a passing guard like Bob Cousy: Michael Keever, who does become famous (briefly) when playing in Greece? Probably not but remembering that moment in the B.C. doorway got me to thinking how brushes with the famous have been an unlikely but continuing feature of my life. What could have been brushes turned in some cases into prized friendships with the famous. Other brushes have been unpleasant. I record them all here because I want to have a record of them in the future and because I think some—the country bumpkin meeting urban sophisticates--will amuse readers who may not have brushed the famous.

After Cousy’s touch in Boston, I had to wait 10 years for another contact. In the meantime, I received a Ph.D. from Duke and started teaching literature and playing pick-up basketball at the University of Cincinnati. Although I was by far the oldest and usually the whitest guy in the gym, I got picked because my Cousy-imitating passing skills made me an attractive teammate: someone who would rarely shoot but whose passes would get easy shots for the other four guys. And because I wasn’t a shooter, I was expected to be a defender.

During summer pick-up games, the UC gym was pretty much open to anyone, no IDs checked. One slow day, a guy nobody knew called next game. He looked about 6-1, and I was told by my bigger teammates, “You guard the new guy.” The first time he had the ball, he passed by me so fast I barely felt brushed. He took two long strides and made a vicious slam. The unrecognized new guy was Johnny Davis, then the point guard at the University of Dayton, later a long-time NBA player and an NBA coach. Big guys who tried to bully me I could undercut when they were in the air. For Davis, my second contact, I had no answer.

I was also in summer games with Pat Cummings, a former UC player, and LaSalle Thompson, a Cincinnati native, both of whom had long and fairly illustrious NBA careers. Both were 6-9 or more. Thompson’s shoulders looked like he was wearing football pads. Cummings’s hips jutted out to clear rebounding space. I got nowhere near either one. They were not someone 5-10 wanted to brush up against, but they might give me a nod—instead of slapping palms—if I made a good pass to them. Fifty years later, I did get a handshake from Antonio Davis, an equally large former NBA player who had a long career with the Pacers and Knicks. I was protesting in front of Trump Tower when Davis was passing by. I had first seen him play in Greece, so I yelled his team’s name to him. He came over, pleased that someone remembered his pre-NBA days. We chatted for a moment and did the brother clasp. I’d been physically rewarded—contacted--for being a watcher, not a player. A few years later another NBA former star gave me the strangest brush off ever: Stephon Marbury and I were sitting close to one another in a JFK airport restaurant. I said, “You sure look like Stephon Marbury,” and Marbury said, “Nope, not me.”

I decided to become a college professor because I knew all colleges had gyms. They also have committees. When I became the long-serving chair of the Special Events committee at the University of Cincinnati, I had sometimes unhappy and occasionally humorous brushes with visiting litterateurs, some quite famous decades ago. Alice Walker called me a racist because I complained that she had read a lecture rather than the agreed-upon fiction. National Book Award-winnng Norman Rush brought along his wife; at dinner he was silent and let his wife respond to all questions directed to him. Ishmael Reed was a day late for his appearance. J. P. Donleavy pointed out that I was driving him to his hotel the wrong way on a one-way street. Stanley Elkin was irritated with me because I put him on a panel about humor with an ethnographer, who happened to have a million jokes that took up Elkin’s time. Richard Powers pulled a Walker and read a lecture instead of fiction. John Gardner and William Gass continued their public aesthetic argument in my living room long after my usual bedtime. Robert Coover wasn’t satisfied with the facilities for his high-tech presentation. Mark Danielewski, famous among his cult followers, visited my class and joined the discussion about a Hawthorne story he admitted he had not read.

Not being famous could be advantageous. Jonathan Lethem has called DeLillo a “master” and a continuing influence in published interviews, but made some uncomplimentary remarks about the master in a small gathering that I attended in Cincinnati. When Lethem later realized at a dinner party who I was—an unfamous friend of DeLillo—Lethem said he guessed he wouldn’t have said what he did if he had recognized me. My non-famous colleagues at the dinner got a glimpse of one famous writer.

In addition to getting a feel for the unpredictability of the famous, I had interesting and even valuable conversations with some of the guests when driving them back and forth to the airport. Some could be feckless and all were, after all, just passing through, returning home or heading on to their next one-night performance. The novelists were on the road like the travel writers—Paul Theroux and David Quammen—I also dined and transported. It seems improbable to me now that the most famous guest I entertained—Joseph Heller—was the most willing to talk about his work and the most congenial to host. Maybe Catch-22 kind of fame creates noblesse oblige.

When I wasn’t playing basketball or teaching or driving to the airport, I used to review novels by famous (or then famous) novelists, and even got to talk with some of them for a book of interviews entitled Anything Can Happen. As with the guests I served, problems often ensued. During my first interview, with Stanley Elkin, the tape broke and had to be repaired. My second interview was with William Gass, who took a year to rewrite all his answers. I got a rare interview with William Gaddis, but he refused to edit it or let me publish it. I went from Cincinnati to New York for an agreed-upon interview with Toni Morrison, but was told by her secretary that Ms. Morrison had no time set aside for me. Generally, the more famous the interviewee, the more problems for the lowly interviewer, but all the interviews added to my understanding of the writing process—and how not to act if I ever became a famous writer.

In 1979, I traveled from Ohio to Athens, Greece, to get the first interview with Don DeLillo, who was not then famous. When we met, he handed me a card that said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” This looked less like a brush off than a brush back, a term from baseball describing an intimidating pitch near the batter’s head. Fortunately, the card was a joke, and we did the interview. George Plimpton, then the famous editor of the Paris Review, rejected the interview for the magazine’s “Writers at Work” series because DeLillo was not sufficiently famous. The interview was published by a less prestigious magazine, but DeLillo and I have been talking with and writing to each other ever since. Like Cousy, DeLillo was my hero, so I feel particularly lucky that this contact with the famous was not—like almost all the others--in passing. My moving to New York City solidified our friendship as we used to go out to lunch every few months. Although DeLillo never caught my act at SPiN, he did come by Trump Tower when I was protesting there. We’ve had some good times together, but more important than our friendship—for me—was traveling to Athens to meet him, the first of more than 30 trips to Greece where my life changed, changed again, and changed yet again.

DeLillo alerted me to the work of Richard Powers. I reviewed his second novel and others; published a much-quoted essay about him, Vollmann, and Wallace; invited him several times to the university; and (along with DeLillo) wrote a letter of support for Powers when contacted by the MacArthur granting agency. (He got the genius grant.) Some years later—in another New York City moment—I had the pleasure of introducing Powers to DeLillo at lunch. More recently Powers and I had lunch in London when I was living there and he was passing through. Though not as famous as DeLillo, Powers’s body of work is approaching the range and status of the older writer’s. My senior English teacher at Black River High told me I could write—but writing my way to friendship with two of the best living American novelists? That feels like luck to someone who spent primary school under the gaze of the tight-lipped Calvin Coolidge.

I also met another novelist who admired DeLillo and who became famous: David Foster Wallace. Before our meeting, we had briefly corresponded. He was writing about sports--tennis, I believe--and asked to see the manuscript of my novel about basketball. His response was short: “Not what I have in mind.” Wallace had written an essay about tall young novelists—Richard Powers, William Vollmann, maybe someone else, and Wallace himself. Before a lecture I gave at Illinois State University, where Wallace was teaching, I was introduced to him and immediately told him, “I thought you would be taller.” I didn’t know at the time that Wallace was paranoid about his physical appearance, that his trademark bandana was worn because he sweated profusely in public. Wallace was supposed to join others and me at dinner after the lecture but brushed us off. I wrote a rave review of his Infinite Jest but never heard from him.

After I moved to New York City, my contacts with the famous were much more unlikely and more various than the literary contacts I had through the university. One day at SPiN, Woody Harrelson needed an opponent. But he could not return my side spin serves, so I spent a half hour trying to teach him how to be more competitive. A long history of marijuana use made Woody a very slow learner—as if the character in Cheers were really Woody. I gave him my email for the next time he was in New York, but he never contacted me.

I also crushed Geoff Dyer, well-known British novelist, travel writer, and photography critic, and then showed him how he was hitting his forehand, his backhand, and his serve returns all wrong. Several years later, I asked Dyer for a blurb for my novel that included photographs, but he said he was too busy.

Ethan Hawke asked me to teach his son pong fundamentals, but the kid just wanted to spray balls around the club. I showed Danilo Gallinari, a current NBA player, a few things when hitting with him one night. Among minor celebrities, I played against Will Shortz, crossword editor at the New York Times who used tricky old-man’s anti-spin rubber; practiced with David Rockwell, famous Broadway set designer and architect; was paid to play Timmy Regisford, an iconic New York DJ at the time; and instructed Gregory Cowles, now a senior editor at the Times Book Review. I split matches with the guy who routinely wears a “World Champion” cap: the comedian and actor Judah Friedlander. He used to hang around SPiN, but he never spoke to me afterwards until he accused me one night of stealing his cell phone.

My favorite moment with the non-literary famous involved Susan Sarandon. We were sitting near each other while she was watching her young boyfriend Jonathan Bricklin in a club tournament. He was doing uncharacteristically well and Sarandon was encouraging him. But after I beat him, she consoled him in my presence, and I told her, “We senior citizens have to stick together, Susan.” I suppose this is my favorite moment because I surprised myself by baiting fame. Friends asked me why. It just popped out like my remark to Wallace, I told them, but now I’m inclined to think I needled the most famous person I’d ever “met” because of how I’d often been treated by her and some other famous folks—not those who brushed by me but those who brushed me off.

I had worked for Sarandon for five years; she used to sit near me at the Friday night tournament where Professor Ping Pong kept score. She would acknowledge me in passing, but in those five years she never asked me anything about myself, not even how I came to be called Professor Ping Pong with my bow tie and suspenders. I’m quite sure she didn’t know my name—and doesn’t now—but I know from the look on her face she was taken aback—surprised--by the comment from an underling only two years her senior. My remark was trivial comeuppance, I realize, and yet more fondly recalled than, for examples, waxing Harrelson and Dyer.

In all the decades I played basketball and ping pong, I encountered only one famous person with whom I’ve had a long-term relationship. That’s the prolific novelist Jerome Charyn, whom I met while he was playing at SPiN in 2008. I introduced myself as the person who had reviewed in the New York Times Book Review his 1976 novel Marilyn the Wild. Until I left the city in 2020, we were playing and talking regularly. Sometimes DeLillo joined us for lunch. When our novels about Lincoln came out, Jerome and I interviewed each other. Now we read each other’s books and emails. At this writing, Jerome is 86, still playing, still writing books, still encouraging me to keep doing both.

I’d like to think that my occasional poking of the famous is an All-American example of the little guy sometimes refusing to be intimidated by the big players on or off the court. My hero the Cooze was, after all, quite small to be a basketball player. I could understand and accept the famous who wanted only perfunctory and transitory contact with marginal me. But I came to resent the famous who presumed celebrity was in itself worthy of my respect.

I left New York, celebrity central casting, in 2020. I describe what I miss about the metropolis in the upcoming essay “The Locus.” Far from American fame during a year in Warsaw and a year in London, I realized I didn’t miss the famous. And not in a suburb just south of San Francisco where, I was told, many tech billionaires lived. I never saw them or just didn’t recognize them when they emerged from their Teslas. None of my ping pong opponents in Silicon Valley exuded the aura of fame. I was once offered the opportunity to go up to San Francisco and attend a gallery opening where I could talk with the famous photographer Lee Friedlander, the famous actress Frances McDormand, and the famous director Joel Coen, all masters of the image, all together to promote their book Lee Friedlander Framed that Coen edited. My partner, a photographer, went, but I passed. She said she couldn’t converse with the aged Friedlander because of his deafness. She began to tell Coen about her own framing project, but she was interrupted by someone more important to Coen. She didn’t bother with McDormand whose afterword in the book was so superficial that it was clearly included because of her movie fame. “Told you so,” I told my partner when she reported her brushes.

Since leaving Coolidge’s hometown, I’ve had a lot of brush bys and brush offs. But I still think of myself as lucky to have observed close-up some of the famous—and to have observed myself observing them as we passed by each other. Most lucky because what could have been short brushes have developed into long friendships with Richard Powers, Jerome Charyn, and Don DeLillo. DeLillo and I banter about who had the most unfortunate childhood—me growing up in my backwater hamlet, he living with persons who didn’t speak English. Back and forth we go with our comical hard luck stories, but finally we take pride in them and take pleasure in our improbable good luck to be the writers we have become. Though I didn’t have the immediate success as a novelist that DeLillo did, I’ll give him the last words: “I never expected my first novel to be published, and it was published by the first publisher to look at it. Ever since then I’ve felt lucky.”