“Passing Tests”
Two big suitcases. You must have passed those PSA tests.
Just one.
Taking a big chance, Tom.
I’m not changing my name to leave the USA. Not driving a hundred miles an hour in a passing lane.
I gave that up. I’m still here, still showing up, driving this taxi.
Assist man to the end. Key delivers. Driving to the grocery store and writing essays are not enough for me. Life here is happening in a “School Zone.”
So now you’re leaving to be an “athlete” somewhere else?
Just an old man who can’t shake his childhood sense of himself. Who doesn’t really want to shake it. Who wants to test his capabilities one last time.
Yeah, I read those essays you sent me. The ones about being an athlete are pretty good for someone who never got paid to pass or shoot a ball. “Play to play” could be one of my threes. And that piece about radiation made me glad my PSA tests are borderline. Now we’re both waiting for that next one.
But not here.
You moving back to New York?
Further than that.
Athens again?
Further than that. Hong Kong.
That’s about as far from the USA as you can get, no matter which way you travel, west or east. The Orient. Shit, Tom, that could be the dis-Orient.
That’s why I’m leaving, to be disoriented like you were when you first landed in Athens. Probably more English spoken in Hong Kong, but I’ll still need to be alert every minute, like you back then.
I was a lot younger then. And now you’re a lot older than me.
True that, but at last I want to be reoriented to Thisworld, turned away from myself, reinvigorated by the unfamiliar. Asian voices, alien food. New perceptions, different interpretations. From what I’ve read and what I hear from Kinga, who lived there five years, Hong Kong will give me more of a challenge than Athens or New York or London ever did.
A big chance. A tough final test.
Exactly. Isn’t that what all athletes—pro or amateur or imagined—do? Pass tests, tough ones they choose to take? Not the SAT or the PSA, those quick brain and blood probes, but extended physical tests. Body moving with other bodies in a city as crowded as a court. Hong Kong won’t be a contest, but walking and watching should be intense while I’m waiting for that next PSA test, maybe waiting for the last years of my life. Cancer made the slow time of San Mateo even slower. I want a place with pace.
Hong Kong gonna be your third or fourth or is it the fifth act?
No act, no script, no blocking, not made up. Action, maybe a chance to surprise myself or be surprised. The possibility of excitation and fascination.
A lot of “-tion” abstractions, Tom, for an athlete. You sure you’re not overthinking this move, overimagining it, all this stuff it’s gonna give you?
I think leaving will give me a change of thinking.
If you want excitation, I hope you’re not doing that chemical castration thing. For the tests you’re looking at, you’re gonna need all the test--tosterone you can get up.
Well-played. Another “Key’s Three”: “T. the Key.” But Hong Kong is not sex and the city.
I know you love big cities, but you may never have been anywhere like Hong Kong. It’s not Athens. Have you seen the skyscrapers huddled together, their top floors in the clouds? With all that density, you’ll be competing for short space with millions of people who aren’t very sympathetic to white folks, particularly the English-speaking old ones who might be mistaken for colonials. You’re not gonna be invisible. Tell me you’re not trying this test alone.
No, no, Kinga has a job there. She left earlier to visit Poland. We’ll meet up in Hong Kong in, let’s see, two days if I have the time zones figured right.
All this time with her and all those essays about your prostate, and you never wrote about testosterone.
You’re right, Key. Too intimate, too private, I guess. Involving not just me but another person. The radiologist decided he didn’t need to shut off the “T.” for a few months. I guess he’s confident his rays hit all the cancer. But like I’m waiting for the next PSA test, I’m also waiting for that “T.” to percolate again.
Seems strange to me that you’ve written a lot about being an athlete but never once do you give any credit to the “T.” It moves us, and not just in bed. Stronger bones, more muscle mass, higher aggression, the 24-hour-a-day dose of something like adrenaline.
Is this something you think about a lot, Key?
Not me. I’m done with the sex business. I never even check out short skirts in my mirror. But I worry about you. We’ve been connected for a long time. I’d hate to see you fuck up. Maybe you need that “T” not to fuck up. You know about Wilt’s records, on the court, in the sack.
Maybe Wilt had too much “T.” He was only 63 when he left our very own California.
Down in Lakerland. That reminds me, why are you leaving from down in San Jose instead of SFO? This ride is costing you triple.
There must be a lot of Chinese in San Jose. Turned out the flight down there was cheaper, so I might even tip the driver.
Forget the tip, Tom. But if you do put “Passing Lane” in a book, I want my share of the royalties.
It’s a bunch of fragments. It’s not an essay or a story. When are you going to pull it together?
Nah, now I like it the way it is. Like a small city, small but kind of mysterious. Maybe a test for the reader. “No game, no gain.” You know that drill. Actually, “Lane” is sort of like those essays you sent me, pieces rubbing up against each other but not exactly cohering, except maybe around luck.
You told me “love your luck.”
I did, whether it was bad or good. But you are mos def pressing your luck this time. Shit, Tom, you are zone pressing it, going up against a whole team of probable misfortunes. There’s the cancer, your age, all the shit you got wrong with your body, the metal hip, half your intestines, the bad feet. And don’t give me that “competitive” ping pong you play over here. You think you’re on Otherworld in the USA. You get over there and you’ll be on SomeOtherFuckingWorld. You could run out of what you think is your dumb-ass luck in two weeks. Get trampled by a bunch of mainland Communists rushing onto the subway. Have a heart attack walking up those stairs and mountains. Fall off an overcrowded ferry and go down to the Underworld with no guide.
Quick exits. Not so bad. You know that drill. Passing lane, not passing away.
I’m not shitting you, Tom. I’ve seen the photos. All those people carrying open umbrellas when it’s not raining. I’ve heard the visiting Chinese talk to their American cousins in my back seat. The natives want out. Hong Kong is too late for a man like you to test your luck.
It’s not a man like me. It is me, with my recent history. You remember things I don’t, so you can’t have forgotten our trip to Athens together a few years ago. You tried to talk me out of my luck with the photographer. You were wrong, Key.
This is different, Tom. She might have broke your heart. Hong Kong could break your spirit, your faith in being an athlete, even your faith in mystery. Once you start living there, you can’t say, “I pass” when confronted with some fucked-up problem. If there are a bunch of tests you can’t pass, are you still gonna be an athlete? You’ll start thinking about the cliff.
Sometimes I think you made up the cliff. You know, a cliffhanger. It’s hard for me to believe you could be that desperate.
I’m not in the fiction biz, Tom. Maybe you can’t believe because you were never an athlete all the way down. You talk about embodiment, but you were a professor who read books and gave tests to others, not an undersized guy trying to make a living by testing his body against the biggest and the best bodies that growth hormones and steroids could produce. You have a pension. I have this Uber rig in my car. You have a partner. I have a Tesla. You’ve been desperate writing about your diagnosis and treatment the last few months. I understand. But what if that desperation cooled down over decades and turned into despair? With various other losses, that under-skin despair can accumulate and push to the surface. Sort of like your cancer pushing against the wall of your prostate. Like cancer, despair can test your drive to live.
I’m sorry, Key. That’s my bad, my failure of imagination, of empathy. I appreciate your concerns. You’re still the assist man. But listen, if Hong Kong is too much of a test for me or if the PSA tests I get there go bad, I’ll slink back and call you to pick me up at SFO. Hong Kong is no suicide ride, no terminal tour.
So what you gonna do there besides ride the escalators and jostle with millions of King Kongers? Keep writing essays? Seems like there are some gaps you could fill.
You think I should write more about you?
Nah, not me. Maybe more about what you did wrong. If a man believes death has entered, I’d expect he’d be remembering and thinking about all he could be confessing.
Blame that gap on the Jesuits. I thought outside their black box, their dark confessional. But if you’re worried, I’ll try to remember my encyclopedia of sins in case I do call in a priest on my deathbed. I don’t have your memory. I wrote some of those essays to have a record of facts that I’m afraid I’ll forget. I think I’m done with the essays.
So if not essays, what will the speck do when he gets tired of walking? Go back to writing stories? “USA ping pong player takes over the HK Senior Games—until authorities discover he’s 80, not the 90 he claimed.”
That story sounds familiar. No more stories. Maybe I’ll buy a serious camera. Kinga and I have a collaboration in mind. “Passing By.” As she takes an art photo, probably some form of nature surviving in the city, I take a shot of whatever happens to be behind her, the random, cluttered world outside the aesthetic frame, the scene everybody would pass by without looking. No characters, no invention, just my reorientation to unpredictable solid Thisworld.
Knowing you, Tom, I figure you’ll find some way to fictionalize, to rig the reverse shot, find a better scene somewhere else to double up or contrast with hers. You’re not going to be satisfied to do random facts while she does the artistic compositions.
No, Key, I’m telling you, I vowed after that essay on Banks no more fiction, and I certainly won’t be writing about myself. The cancer freaked me out, fucked me up. I admit it. Facts were piling up from the high PSA to the MRI to the biopsy to the inserting of little gold seeds for the radiation, to the five sessions in Otherworld, to the burning urine, sleeplessness, and fatigue afterwards. Time was passing slow. Too much down time. During all that time just about all that I could think about was myself.
Yourself and the books you’d read.
The point’s point?
Just that much of that writing you sent sounds pretty bookish to me. Maybe that’s why the pieces seem fictional. I don’t mean imagined or invented but relying a lot on literature, all the fiction you’ve read and even some you’ve written. It’s like books were the anti-cancer in your brain contesting the cancer in your prostate.
That would be a losing bet.
Like life itself. You say you’ve been doing a lot of wondering. I wonder if thinking through fictions was a way for you to avoid thinking directly about the possibility of dying.
“Lit a Lie.” Another Key’s Three? Fictions as a way of evading myself, lying to myself? A strange accusation from the unreliable guy who was once called the “Lying Cretan.”
I’ve been trying to give it up, but sometimes lying is necessary, Tom. Like the belief in good luck for you.
Now “Luck a Lie.” You’re on an L-alliterative roll, Key. Have you forgotten your bad-luck busted hip?
Feel it every day in this seat. Just like athletes know luck every minute they play. But you’re no athlete, not really, not any more. For you, luck is something that comes along once in a while and you string the episodes together into a run of luck. Luck is not a lie, but that run you believe in—the connected sequence--is something like fiction, fabricated.
The series of improbable and fortunate events in the last few years is a fact, a set of facts. Like the referee you once were, I call `em like I see `em.
About that seeing--Do you remember those “Be Like Mike” commercials that presented that killer Jordan as a friend of children?
Of course, for Gatorade. I can probably hum the tune.
Okay, so here’s the thing I see in your recent writings: now you say you want to be like this Mike was in Athens decades ago.
Keever the navigator.
But you don’t want to see like this Mike when we talked about pancreatic cancer and passing away.
See like a simpleton.
See without filters.
Is driving a filter? Or a distraction?
Driving could be both, but it’s not imagined. Not like a run of luck. There is no run, Tom, no order, no plot. Just run and done.
So life is not random, it’s “rundom.” Seems rundumb to me.
Maybe so but even dumb athletes know every moment of action is lucky. Or not. Go down with an injury and the life you know could be done.
That’s every moment. Every night after the radiation felt like a long run to me. In the dark, the writing never seemed filtered through fiction. More like compelled for comparisons. No lie. Some of those pieces I had to write to sleep if I was going to pass the daylight test of creeping, invisible desperation. I was in the center of myself whether I wanted to be or not. Instead of lying, I think of those post-cancer writings as speck-asserting. Isn’t that what you were trying to do in “Passing Lane?” Putting words together to contest mortality.
A tough test. One I couldn’t pass. No order, just some fragments.
“Shored against my ruins.”
Literary to the end of the ride.
I never got much respect for my literary productions. Maybe I felt writing facts about my death and life would break through. A late break. You know, like a last-second game-winning shot from half court played and replayed on ESPN.
Always a lot of blind luck involved in those buzzer beaters but no “mysterious significance.”
You may think me blind or vision-impaired, but let me leave you with one last literary phrase. There is no “transparent eyeball,” not down here in Thisworld. The older we get, Key, the more floaters and filters and fictions we have.
Add “failures” and you got yourself a 4-F.
“Farewells” would give you a finishing five. Let’s stick to threes. Keep showing up. Wear your contacts. Make your runs. Observe speed limits. Remember Key delivers. And if you turn our conversation into a story, send it to me.
You, too, Tom.
Stay where you are, Key. I’ll grab the suitcases myself. Thanks for the tips. HK or Bust. “Trust the body,” Key. Test the body one last time.
Good luck, Tom. But nah, not “last.” I know you. If you pass Hong Kong, you’ll keep on passing. You’ll be passing along and passing around with your lit and your luck until you end up in Athens, that old center of the world, the locus that created both of us, artists of the scam and sham, adepts at passing off.
--Last--
“Last Post”
My first PSA test was 1.2, a steep and sudden drop with which my radiologist was very pleased. He said there was no reason to not move anywhere that I can get another test in three months. So my partner just accepted a job offer in New York City for the fall. Nathanael West’s characters came to California to die. West left New York and died on a California highway. I’m going back to New York to live. One is not cured by the revolving machinery of Otherworld, but one can be relieved of some fear by those rays. Should problems arise, I’ll be seeing my former doctors at Sloan Kettering, one of the best cancer hospitals in Thisworld.
The job is in a Williamsburg school next to the East River, one stop on the L train from the furnished apartment we’ll be renting for a year at 1st Avenue and 13th Street, one block from the L train and my favorite Greek taverna.
I call this piece “Last Post” because it’s my final essay in Passing Down and because I hope this posting to New York puts an end to my nomadic period. I have bought three toasters in the last four years. The East Village apartment has one. Having never lived in Manhattan, it will be both somewhat disorienting and definitely convenient for the wayfarer, a 15-minute walk to the Strand bookstore and Union Square. Ten more minutes if I want to play ping pong with Jerome Charyn at SPiN. I might even take the train over to Williamsburg one night to the original Café Mogador with its excellent merguez sausages.
Manhattan should be even better for Kinga the photographer. She can shoot its streets, visit its galleries, and walk to Fotografiska and the International Center of Photography. We have been to the city twice since moving to California, and she has never been anxious to return to our suburb. She won’t eat sausages but likes the pirogi at Vesselka, about a 10-minute walk, and at Little Poland, two blocks away.
With all due respect to the Keever of “Passing Tests,” I’m calling this surprise move to a locus a lucky break. To remain in the USA with her kind of visa, Kinga must be employed as a teacher. She had not been able to apply to Montessori schools in New York City because almost all require a degree in childhood education. The school where she will work does not require the degree and needs someone with just the kind of dual-immersion experience—Chinese and English--that she has from her years in Hong Kong and San Mateo. So, Michael, can I claim her good luck as my own? As an addition to my run?
Looking several months ahead to New York and looking back at the pieces in “Later,” I see how many of them are about the future. After death enters, the countdown to zero begins. What do you want to do in whatever time you have? What will you be able to do? How will you think about your time? But it’s not “you” now, not speculative. It’s “I” in time unknowable despite what doctors say. I want to keep time in my mind, the “New York minute.” Difficult to do when one—no, make that I—is tranquillized by suburban boredom, discouraged by my inability to break out of it. The walk lights in New York give you the seconds you have to cross the streets. Take too long to get on the train and you have to wait for the next one. Forget to take a number at the deli and watch others order their food. The street is not as quick as the ping pong table, but daily life in the city makes one—that’s me, again—alert and engaged. If not any longer like an athlete, maybe like the street photographer is alert. “Don’t walk with your lens cap on,” said a famous snapper of the sudden.
The future I want is the next minute, the next hour and day. Perhaps this imagined future immersion in what Gertrude Stein called the “continuous present” is an evasion of the sure future, the end of my time. Or maybe this desired future is just a compressed version of old literary advice, Horace’s “carpe diem.” Or Keever may again be my navigator and living in New York City will be like one of his Terminal Tours, intensity and pleasure running on and on and on until the last thing.
June, 2024
Conclusion
“This World is Not Conclusion” begins one of Emily Dickinson’s poems. This Conclusion is not resolution but is an ending, something like one of Kierkegaard’s beginnings, his title Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. You will have noted that the Introduction and, now, this Conclusion are in a different font than the rest of Passing Down. “Font,” I learned, is derived from “fount.” Think of the beginning and ending, if you don’t mind the caps, as flowing from the AUTHOR, a somewhat different and more authoritative personage than the authorial character Tom LeClair who appears in and narrates much of the rest of Passing Down. This AUTHOR doesn’t enter now to suggest what to conclude about the book you have almost finished but to explain why you are left to conclude.
Admittedly an inveterate creator of unreliable narrators in his novels, the AUTHOR realized after collecting the writings here that he may have been creating an unreliable author in this memoir, one way to suggest that all memoirs have a fictive quality. Another more intentional way was adding to the essays fictions about or by an unreliable character, fictions that emerge in the book during difficult times for LeClair. “No game, no gain,” Keever has said. When constructing Passing Down, the AUTHOR’s game was eliciting readers’ interest in and sympathies with LeClair, then testing how far they would extend as he becomes increasingly reliant on fiction and imagination in his “half year of mysterious thinking.” This game I found more ambiguous and, therefore, more artful than the “magical thinking” Didion makes explicit, but I could only hint at the game—could not give it away--in the “Introduction.” More artful and possibly more helpful to those with less than terminal diagnoses, as I say in the Introduction.
In “Passing Tests,” the fictional character Keever attacks the authorial character LeClair’s thinking. LeClair defends himself at the end of that story and in “Last Post.” Now the test passes to you to conclude, to judge their conflicting conclusions—and judge the merit of the AUTHOR’s choice to present a possibly unreliable author figure in Passing Down. Both Keever and LeClair praise action, physical exercise. Perhaps you will forgive my taking you into a game that might give you the gain of emotional and intellectual exercise, challenging activity when the subjects are luck and living, disease and dying. If it’s any consolation, the AUTHOR has not decided whom to trust—Keever and his “run and done” or LeClair and his “run of luck”--so Passing Down is not just a game with its readers but an onrunning game—a conflict without resolution—within the AUTHOR. For now, these are his last words.