Passing Strange

For me, New York City was more than “second acts.” It was second lives, more lives to lead and observe. But after living in The City for a few years, I had reason to believe I might be terminally ill with pancreatic cancer. A cyst the specialists at Memorial Sloan Kettering had been following with MRIs had grown. A biopsy was ambiguous, but the doctors still suspected cancer and advised a Whipple surgery as a precaution. You can look it up on Wikipedia. I had a choice to make: risk the radical operation or chance dying of cancer. Before I decided about the surgery, which rearranges your insides in a way God never intended, I wanted to consult Michael Keever, the proprietor of “Terminal Tours.” He would know what it would be like to be passing away—if I didn’t choose the surgery and did have pancreatic cancer, a sure killer.

Those who read the fine print on Keever’s website, TerminalTours.com, will know that he is the protagonist of my novels Passing Off, Passing Through, Passing On, and Passing Away. I know it will sound more than odd—“passing strange,” as Othello says--for a writer to “consult” a character he has created, but while writing those novels about Keever I had come to rely on him, not just as a convenient protagonist but as a perspective sometimes very different from my own. I felt that Keever, an assist man when a player, might assist me in thinking about the possibility of dying.

Some background of this strange relationship. In 1990, I took a year of unpaid leave from my university to move to Athens and write a novel about two of my loves, basketball and Greece, where I had been a visiting professor in 1981 and a part-time resident since then. I had never written any fiction, so this change from criticism to fiction was a big chance at 46. I wanted my player to be a risk-taking American, and I knew that some American players falsified their ethnic backgrounds in order to play as “Greeks,” so my player would change his name and be an imposter. I also knew I wanted my protagonist to be a deceptive point guard like Bob Cousy and, later, a tricky unreliable narrator to satisfy as many meanings as I could pack into the title I had in mind—Passing Off.

The name Keever is given to play in the Greek pro league—Kybernos--means “governor” or “navigator” or “steersman” that appears in English in “cybernetics.” His nickname is “Key” and several variations: Low Key on the basketball court, the Greek Key when he played in Greece, Coach Key when he coached at Queen City College. Although Key and I both grew up in Ludlow, Vermont, and have a few similar experiences, the novels are not autobiographical. Key was, for example, a star on his high school basketball team. He is sometimes called my alter ego because I make up alternative lives for him. Since those lives are quite unlike my own, maybe a better term for Key would be “counter ego.” But really—more strangeness here—I think of Key as a long-time friend, as a navigator to take me where my own thinking might not go. Key and I are like the old “give and go” play in basketball: I give him ideas, and he bounces them back to me with his unique and sometimes unanticipated spin. Key is also like an external hard drive, a recorder of some experiences that we do share. When I first invented Key, I felt I was smarter than he was, but his tours with the dying may have made him wiser than I am. He’s no steersman, like Charon, to the other side. But Key’s tours forced him to live with and think a lot about terminal illness, so I wanted to hear what he would say when I thought I could be passing away.

After witnessing many deaths during a thermal inversion in Athens when he was playing there, Key realizes in Passing Off that “We’re all athletes” needing air and water. In Passing On, he considers life in the womb and says we’re athletes even there, taking on hydration, flexing our legs, getting in shape for the long run, first crawling, then walking, and then running through our time on earth. As a point guard, he was conditioned to govern play on the court, and off the court his mind is governed by his athletic training. Low Key is unflappable: he anticipates only the next second or two, doesn’t panic in the last two minutes, and refuses to be deceived—though he made a career out of deceiving others on and off the court.

Although I’ve thought of myself as an athlete since I started playing basketball at eight and continued to 50, when a hip replacement drove me off the court and sent me to the ping pong table, I doubt I would have come to Key’s pure perception of existence without pushing myself to create the consciousness of a professional and obsessional athlete. So what would this former pro athlete say to this current amateur athlete about passing away?

“We’ve both been passing away for years,” Key says. “When we stop hooping, we start passing away. You should be used to dying. You’ve just been doing it slower than most. People used to say, ‘speed kills.’ Speed lives, slowing kills. You’re slower and slower until you’re still. You can try to test yourself, go on a tour, cross oceans at 700 miles an hour, scramble to dodge traffic in Cairo or Rome, but there’s nothing you can do that will make you feel like you’re playing ball and living fully—living again, maybe never dying. Why do you think Updike’s white Rabbit with his old weak heart played that Black teenager one-on-one in the Florida sun? To put himself out of his misery, the long misery of not doing what hoopsters do, run and jump and pass and shoot, rebound and defend, run ‘on and on and on’ as the motto of Terminal Tours has it. Like Rabbit, you always have a choice, die early or die late. But really, all athletes die young. We’re just not buried or cremated until later.”

For decades a basketball addict, I have to confess that I agree with much of what Key says. I tell him that’s why I’ve tried to stay quick with table tennis. He laughs and says, “You think ping pong is the difference between the quick and the dead? That game is no substitute for hooping. A game with no running? There’s competition but no combat, no physical contact with your opponent, no force. Your body is not at risk from a hard foul, you can’t undercut an opponent who has elbowed you. The game is weightless like the ball. The score, not the clock, governs. Hoopsters know life time is like game time. The buzzer goes off, a hundred times, a thousand times, to remind us that it could go off at anytime, no matter the score. And then when there’s no more buzzer to beat, we take a seat on the bench, and spend the rest of our years waiting to be buried and wondering how game time went so quickly and bench time goes so slowly.”

Keever isn’t a melancholy guy, just one who knows the score for the person who is all athlete. He never thought much about what being an athlete meant until he went to Greece, discovered that “athlete” was an old Greek word, and connected across centuries with ancient Olympians and the first runner from Marathon, who died after delivering his victory message. Key’s former wife believes he’s a “dumb jock,” and to some extent he embraces the characterization. Key feels his throwback sense of inescapable physicality separates him from Ann and her friends, who think of their identity in psychological terms. Key knows the word “proprioception” and believes his body knows more than non-athletes can feel or he can articulate. That’s why “Trust the body” is his first rule. “Keep it simple” is his second. Julian Jaynes posited that archaic Greeks didn’t realize they were thinking; they believed the voices they were hearing in their heads were the gods speaking to them. Key is not that dumb, but he doesn’t allow educated voices to override what his body tells him. Strip all the invented jargon from Heidegger and Sartre, put them in shorts and sneakers, and you’d approximate Keever, the existential simpleton.

I’m one of those educated voices. I’ve been studying death since I wrote my doctoral dissertation on death and comedy in American fiction. I’ve read and reread Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death and Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death. But when I believed I could be dying—quick or slow--profound intellectual explanations and others’ fictional explorations seemed like fabrications. That’s why I turned to Keever. “Everybody is lucky to be alive,” Key says. “But athletes live by luck, by chance, the unexpected. Luck is a constant, not something that happens once in a while. Every run up the floor is a run of luck. Every time a player jumps, he’s testing his luck. He knows it could be his last leap. Come down on the floor and jump again. Accidentally come down on a player’s foot, tear your ACL, and limp the rest of your days. Kareem played in the NBA more than twenty years. Len Bias’s heart exploded before he ever played a game for the Celtics. Breaks of the game. It can make you or break you. There’s good luck and what the brothers called ‘hood luck,’ dying young. Playing at a low level, you happened to have good luck on the court. You were able to hoop to 50, so you probably have only 20 or 30 years of passing away. I had shit luck, hip broken by a media guy too close to the court. Not even another baller. That’s life. Like driving, maybe millions of near misses and then one fatal accident. Forget all those Kubler-Ross stages. Keep it simple, Tom. You’re lucky to be alive, and then you’re not. It’s run and done, no telling when. Like I told my Terminal Tour clients on their last trips, “You’re still moving. Love your luck.”

Keever used to be called a “helper” on the court, but he’s not a comforter. I didn’t expect him to be. After Key’s mother committed suicide, he lost his Catholic faith and admits in Passing On that he hoped the terminal tours would help him retrieve it. They have the opposite effect, but in his last client Key finds his navigator, a physical therapist named Alice who engages death by traveling to famous mausoleums. He guides her through different countries, but she guides him to what she says is her “No Hope” tour, learning how to die with no illusions of immortality. “Even when Alice couldn’t get out of her hospice bed,” Key remembers, “she was an athlete. All body, no matter how shrunken. Her mind didn’t imagine a second chance, didn’t invent a passing on. She didn’t lie to herself. No fictions, no illusions. One and done. I want to have her spunk all the way to my end when it gets close. Alice is one tough test, Tom, but try to keep her in your mind, in your body, if it turns out you really are terminal.”

I tell myself to remember Alice and Key’s threes, his three-word sentences: Trust the body. Keep it simple. Love your luck. One and done. Hope is dope.

Always short of cash, Key takes the opportunity to ask me if I would want to go on a Terminal Tour. I tell him no, that I’d use the time I have left to keep writing, maybe one more novel. “What about you?” I ask, “Would you go if you had a few months with pancreatic cancer?” “Maybe,” he says, “but I’m sure not going back home like a lot of the clients, not to the Vermont potato farm that killed my mother, the icy river that sucked my father under. No, if I go anywhere it would be Athens. That’s where my life changed. In the States I was a slow white guard in a minor league. There I was the ‘Greek Key’ and ‘White Magic’ in the GBA. That’s success for an athlete—when you get a new name like LeBron’s ‘King James.’ That was the best year of my life. Game and fame. Play for pay. Yeah, it would be good to leave life with fresh reminders of that intense place and time, even if I did ultimately have to sneak out of the country.”

I was about 10 years older than Key when I first went to Greece to teach at the University of Athens in 1981. The students wanted me to lecture, not use the old Socratic method, so I didn’t receive the adulation he did, but I fell in love with the city and wanted to never return to the USA. I was playing ball occasionally but didn’t feel I needed to, not the way I did back home. Athens itself was like a court, and the Greeks were athletes, their hands in motion when they talked, their bodies hustling and pushing on the sidewalks, the motorcycles and cars speeding and jostling in narrow spaces. If I’m in fact terminally ill, I’ll want one last reminder of my feeling back then that I had come to the land of athletes, that Athens was my true home even though, like Key, I had to sneak out of the country, in my case with the Greek student I would marry in the United States.

I never knew Key went to museums, but when we talked of Greece he showed me a postcard. It’s the photo of an archaic ithyphallic figure from the National Archaeological Museum. The seated figure is thick, solid, and appears stolid. The sculpture may be stone, but it looks formed out of clay because of all the pockmarks. “Here,” Key says and laughs, “is your former athlete, a man of mass and force before Greeks developed their minds and idealized human figures. No erect `kouros,’ he’s on the bench now, wasting away. He’s out of luck. His run is over. He knows he’s never getting up again. The part of his head that houses the higher brain functions is gone. His penis is knocked off, his feet are missing, one hand is destroyed. He raises his other hand to his brow where the reptilian or athlete’s brain resides. Is the gesture a farewell salute or a sign of puzzlement? His mouth appears to be open. What’s he going to say?”

“It looks to me,” I tell Key, “like he’s going to tell us what it’s like to be passing away.”

I didn’t want to resemble that statue. I felt Key was kind of unfiltered and reductive, but I didn’t dare to risk wasting away with pancreatic cancer. I decided to take the chance and have the six-hour Whipple surgery the doctors recommended. If I didn’t wake up, I wouldn’t know it. When the doctors tested the body parts they removed—the gall bladder, part of my stomach, part of my pancreas—they found no malignancy. Although the surgery then seemed unnecessary, and although I spent a week in the hospital and two months at home recovering from being cut in half, I did, as Keever said, love my luck.