"The Ball" and "Action Writing"

“The Ball”

When the radiation treatments ended, fatigue set in, as if to demonstrate daily my sense of deceleration during the treatments. A month or so after they finished, the fatigue began to ease, but waiting still made me feel suspended in time. On, I guess, a whim, I bought a basketball, the first one I’ve owned in more than 20 years. I felt no desire to return to ping pong. I don’t know why. I wanted to shoot baskets. I had no intention to play. I can’t run and I can’t jump, and I’d be helpless on defense. I just wanted to have the ball in my hand again, dribble it, pass it off the cement wall at the playground, catch it, and shoot it.

I stood under the basket where one shoots layups. My first attempts were a foot short, not even reaching the backboard. I couldn’t believe this. I asked a guy shooting at another basket if the hoops were too high, more than 10 feet off the ground. “Maybe by an inch or two,” he said. My shots were 12 or more inches short. I couldn’t believe how weak I had become, not just from radiation but also from playing ping pong, swinging that light little paddle at the much, much lighter ball. My legs were okay for sliding right to left and back at the table, but I was weak in the knees, where basketball shots begin even if the shooter is not jumping. Get up on the balls of your feet, bend your knees, and come up from there with your back and abdomen muscles, your shoulder slightly back, your arm raised, elbow cocked, your wrist ready to snap, your fingers holding the ball away from your palm. Since my father put up a hoop on the side of a barn when I was around 10, I must have gone through these motions a million times. Now I not only lacked “touch,” fine motor skills, my arm lacked strength.

This failure was not a disturbing Otherworld experience but shocking to someone who still wants to consider himself an athlete. After I managed a few layups, I moved five feet away from the basket but directly in front of it. All of my attempts were short, some of them air balls. I’d never been a great shooter from distance, but from 20 feet in (the top of the key) I was reliable and even better when shooting bank shots from either side. Now I could not shoot. I didn’t move back to the foul line, 15 feet from the hoop. From there I’d have to hoist the ball up underhand, as one sees little kids do when they’re trying to play on a regulation basket.

Just five years ago I was playing ping pong in a recreation center where the tables were next to baskets. When tables were full, I was making shots from 20 feet out and hitting a high percentage of foul shots. There I had one of the happiest moments of my life in ping pong. A Chinese ponger, a guy a few inches shorter and decades younger than I, a guy who always beat me, came over to the court and asked me if I wanted to play one-on-one. He couldn’t shoot from more than five feet out, so I was able to block his shots and then back him down and shoot over him from in close. The former baller beat the current ponger. It was an old story, the young with false expectation of the old.

Go back another five years to outdoor courts in Brooklyn Bridge Park. I was just shooting around with another person’s ball when some guys at the hoop beside mine needed an eighth for half court and asked me to play. Mostly young Black men, a couple of white guys, and, again, a short Asian who seemed to have never played. He was assigned to guard the old man. I could still move back then. I went around him, forced better players to switch onto me, and then hit the men they left open for easy baskets. We won, and then “ran it back,” as players say. This time a very quick young guy was told to guard me, and I was done. He was so quick I was afraid to dribble the ball, say nothing about attempting to go around him. But I didn’t feel bad. I was still able to shoot if the quick kid left me open.

Of course ten years changes a body, and even five years without vigorous exercise can change a body, but not being able to make a layup? That astonished me. So I kept going to the playground, kept practicing, started building some strength until I could at least make some foul shots and take some pleasure from the exercise, even if I never had the sense that it could lead to play, to quickness.

Shooting, though, was not enough for consciousness. Not while shooting but afterwards, I started wondering: why would I give up ping pong and want to shoot after being radiated? Nostalgia is the obvious answer, maybe going all the way back to my father and I shooting together when I was a kid. But come forward a few years and my memories are not so sweet. Playing in youth leagues and then in high school, I was never very good. When I got to Boston College, my game improved, not so much in the gym as on the playground where most of the players were Black. No need to tell here the next thirty years of my hoop history.

So probably nostalgia, but also, I think, faith in muscle memory, in embodiment. If my verbal and visual memories were slipping away, if Otherworld enervated me, muscle memory would have to connect the diseased octogenarian to the healthy youth. My prostate cancer should not interfere with my shooting, so I counted on physical continuity despite loose skin where muscles used to be. If my muscles remembered, most were too weak to respond. Now they are being strengthened. I will never remember birthdays better, but with a lot of repetition muscle memory is coming back and my shooting is improving.

What else brought me to the basket, I wondered? The basket was stable, always the same dimensions, always the same height, but that couldn’t be the attraction. Not other players because I’ll never be able to compete. Not the language of hoop because I am almost always shooting by myself. Not the sunny California weather because I’d much rather be shooting inside with no wind and no sun to interfere. Maybe I came to the court to avoid the table, the competition there, the losses even if they did not outnumber the wins. Shooting by myself, I was like myself as a kid practicing passing like Keever, bouncing the ball off the walls to myself, nobody else involved, no losses. I had not lost my prostate, but I had lost some faith in myself on Otherworld.

Wondering away about my unlikely return to shooting, my mind wandering away from the obvious, I hit on the ball. It’s not the shooting that took me back to basketball--it’s owning the ball! As the point guard like Keever, I “owned” the ball when playing. No one was going to take it away, and I decided when and where to give it away, to pass it. I was in control of play, at least on offense. In the last seconds of a close game, my decision about what to do with the ball often meant winning or losing. “Mine,” I used to tell my teammates, short for “the ball and the game are in my hands.”

“Mine” bled outside the court. When I used to travel back and forth to Greece every summer and play pick-up on playgrounds there, the point guard always brought my ball in my carry-on. Fully inflated because the first time I took the air out I had trouble finding a place in Athens that could inflate the ball with the needle I had. I brought my ball because the Greeks always had cheap lumpy ones—and because dribbling and shooting my own familiar ball gave me a slight advantage. My Greek wives questioned my taking up space that could have been used to bring back olive oil and other edibles. But I resisted, and after many trips across the Atlantic my ball became more than a ball. For me, who used to be nervous about long flights over water, my ball came to seem like a talisman, a good luck charm, a guarantor of a safe flight. My wives couldn’t deny that it worked. I never had to use my ball as a flotation device, and I never lost my ball, safely tucked between my feet.

For decades, I claimed, erroneously of course, that I didn’t dream. I also had little truck with the unconscious, even though literature often did. I believed in the conscious and the pre-conscious, the body’s lucid mind. Telling my wives that the ball was a talisman was a joke, but repeated usage of “talisman” somehow gave the irrational a basis, at least in my mind if not in objective reality. I was not really superstitious. I liked the word itself. For me, it combined ancient Greek “telos,” meaning end or completion, and English “man.” Talisman was much better than charm or amulet.

Flash forward 30 years. Among all the things that I forgot over those decades, why did I remember “talisman”? I have to wonder: Did I buy a ball as an under-conscious talisman against my cancer? If that’s the case, do I have to keep shooting the ball to make its luck work? Or is owning the ball enough? On the night I brought it home, before my partner came to bed, I placed the ball between our pillows. I told her I always slept with my ball, but she wouldn’t believe me. Right now the ball is resting in our only chair, right across from the couch where I’m typing this. We found the chair on the sidewalk and will leave it there, along with a lot of other things, when we move from California. We travel light, two suitcases each on the flight from London here. I wonder if I will take my ball on our next flight across wide water.

Here’s another detail I wonder about. I could have bought a Wilson or a Nike or some other brand. Maybe not a Wilson because I wasn’t planning to talk to my ball as Tom Hanks does in Castaway. I chose a Spalding, probably because it used to be the NBA ball, possibly because Spaulding was my grandfather’s name. Not just any ball, then, but one that connected me with language—if not with muscles--to my past.

The more I wonder about buying my ball, the more I wonder about “wonder.” Call it meta-wondering. Could a cancer diagnosis cause one—this one, in fact—to engage in improbable and possibly irrational behavior, symbolic or otherwise, and then wonder why? I’ve said that in the past I’ve played sports to surprise myself. Buying that ball surprised me. Did I buy it to shoot it or to own it—or to surprise me, to demonstrate to myself that I was capable of doing something unlikely? That is, an 80-year-old man with cancer buying a ball that will last years after his death. An improbable action but, if wondered about long enough, that action could possess a hidden likelihood that I might find. Find or imagine? Another question to wonder about. In The Moviegoer, Percy has his narrator Binx talk about living in Gentilly: “And there I have lived ever since, solitary and in wonder, wondering day and night, never a moment without wonder.”

Why “wondering”? A question for me, but probably not for you, so I’ll move on to two actions I performed. First, I did a word search for “wonder” in the manuscript of these writings. The word pops up a lot, in almost every piece but moreso after my cancer diagnosis and my vision of Otherworld. “Signs are taken for wonders,” says the old man in Eliot’s “Gerontion.” I know my diagnosis is no wonder, and yet it seems to have elicited considerable wondering—and wondering, I now feel, could be a prelude to imagining, to fictionalizing. Perhaps “wondering” should be added to Percy’s “waiting and watching.” He said, after all, that the wayfarer “is open to signs.” Wondering while wandering.

My second action: as is my practice when wondering, I checked the etymology of “wonder” as a verb. In Old English one meaning of “wonder” was “magnify.” Maybe the act of wondering about something does not just display curiosity but also magnifies that something. Even if one’s curiosity is never satisfied—especially if it’s not satisfied--the something that one wonders about would be given a mysterious significance. Like some books, like my ball.

“Action Writing”

In 1975, I reviewed in the New York Times Book Review Russell Banks’s first book, Searching for Survivors, a collection of stories published by Fiction Collective, an experimental small literary press. Banks was 35. I was 31.

When Banks was in his 60s and famous, he came to Cincinnati’s Mercantile Library to give a reading. Before the reading, he was encircled by a group of 10 or so admirers sipping wine. I pushed in, affected a boorish tone, and said, “Are you Russell Banks? I’m Tom LeClair, and I discovered you.” The admirers were taken aback, but not Banks who laughed and assured them, “Yes, yes, he’s right. He gave my first book a positive review in the Times.” We chatted for a minute, about what I don’t recall, and I let him get back to his other admirers.

Banks died in 2023. Now I’m reading his just published posthumous book of stories, American Spirits. Although our only personal connection was that minute in Cincinnati, I miss Banks. For me as a novelist, he was an exemplar--for the variety of forms he worked in and for his unusual loyalty to and sympathy with his struggling small-town people, my Vermont cousins to whom I have little attended. We are unlikely to see again his working-class, not academicotheoretical, progressivism.

I was sad when I learned of Banks’s death from cancer a year ago, but now thinking about his death adds to my anxiety about my own possible death from cancer even though that event may be years in arriving. This is embarrassing to admit, this memento mori narcissism.

But perhaps there are reasons for this negative self-indulgence, what Ahab calls “the little lower layer.” Several years ago, I was asked to write a long advance obituary of Don DeLillo for an online magazine. Since I count him as both an artistic model and a friend, the writing was difficult. That obituary was the only thing I’ve ever written that I never wanted to see published. I wanted him to keep writing more novels though, like Banks, DeLillo was into his 80s. Now Banks is dead, and DeLillo has said his final novel is The Silence, published in 2022. When I visited him a year ago, in his study things were piled on his old manual typewriter. He said he doesn’t read fiction, say nothing about writing it. Around his study were small scraps of paper, notes to himself I assumed.

The man whom Ahab calls his “pilot,” the Parsee named Fedallah, tells Ahab near the end of Moby-Dick that “I shall still go before thee.” The prophecy comes immediately true when Ahab sees Fedallah fastened to the whale with tangled lines. Very soon Fedallah’s prophecy of Ahab’s death also comes true. Banks and DeLillo, two “pilots” or guides born before me, have been silenced before me. Are they my Fedallahs? Are Fedallahs reverse talismans, not insurers of safe living but predictors of imminent dying?

Two other novelist friends, Jerome Charyn and Joseph McElroy, were born even earlier than Banks and DeLillo. Can I take comfort because Charyn and McElroy have somewhat improbably kept writing? Perhaps they, not Banks and DeLillo, are my Fedallahs. They are my friends, I don’t want them to be “other guys,” the people with a fate worse than my own that I described in “Otherworld,” and yet I also do not want to go before them.

Since I believe these admissions and questions will induce cringes from just about anyone still reading, they raise two other questions. Have I taken Moby-Dick too personally? Probably. I’m not the captain of a whaling ship. I don’t believe in prophecy. I know the older don’t always go before the younger. The second question is more troublesome. I’ll put it in the present tense: why am I writing what you are reading now? I wonder if I’m admitting my self-indulgence and superstition to be a “pilot,” to show readers what just a cancer diagnosis—even one with a likely decent prognosis--can do to a mind that I thought was lucid and reliable, to emotions I felt were normal. I’m not terminally and desperately ill like the protagonist of Banks’s previous novel, Foregone, who in his last day alive can’t seem to stop confessing and criticizing himself for confessing. I’m not literally living on Otherworld, though it does seem to live in me. Yes, death has entered like a swimming sperm but who knows how long it will take to mature.

Maybe there’s the lowest layer. While waiting these slow months after radiation for my first PSA test, perhaps I’m writing to be writing, an act of magical acting. If my pilots are no longer writing, at least I can continue tapping the keyboard, the Key-board. This is not writing to fix pre-radiation fears on the page, discussed in “Living, Leaving.” It’s not writing attempting to resolve habitual wondering, as in “The Ball.” No, this writing here may be psychologically necessary daily activity, like driving for Michael Keever. Possible repetition of content and probable alienation of readers are largely irrelevant to this run of writing.

Maybe what you are reading is not so much a confessional essay as it is action writing, like action painting. It’s been said that action painting came from the body, an expression of physical knowledge and needs. Perhaps this writing of mine, though not splashed on the page, comes from the athlete’s body. In my case the body’s old activities of throwing balls and hitting balls. Do or die. Run or done. Move or mourn. Write on and on and on, as the motto of Terminal Tours says. My autoreview of myself? Compulsive writing about writing—meta-writing like meta-wondering—could be a disorderly consequence of experiencing Otherworld.

I don’t know, not really. I do know that, like the ball, action writing has for me a “mysterious significance,” perhaps significant because mysterious—like no-look passing, like no-knowledge dying. Three pages from the end of The Year of Magical Thinking, in which Didion records her fantasies of bringing back her dead husband, she writes: “I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account.”

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus says of the ever-active Sisyphus, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Unlike the mythical figure, I know that my action will one day end. Until then, perhaps I should be happy that cancer has given me something—something new—to write about even if it is again and again.

When not writing on and on, I have now finished reading Banks’s three stories, oddly old fashioned in their narration, as if his northern New York imagined town of Sam Dent were Winesburg, Ohio. The stories are also derivative. One story relocates and closely reworks a 2018 California murder of adopted Black children and the suicide of their two white “mothers.” Another takes many of its details from a north country 2020 kidnap by Canadians of two American grandparents in a drug deal gone bad. The third also seems to have been inspired by a local upstate 2020 murder resulting from a dispute about hunting rights on land once owned by the victim’s family. I’d like to think the characters are the ghosts—the spirits—still circulating from Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which was set in upstate New York and heavily influenced by a murder there. But because the language of Banks’s MAGA narrators is dull, even banal, American Spirits seems like footnotes or endnotes to a vigorous career.

Once I looked into the stories’ likely factual sources (the first was obvious), I reluctantly concluded that even the famous novelist Russell Banks near the end of his life may have been writing to keep writing. Not his usual long fiction but linked facts and fictions—like Passing Down.

In David Foster Wallace’s story “The Depressed Person,” that suicidal person, as well as the narration, seems to endlessly spiral inward and downward in self-recrimination and self-sabotage. The same happens in Banks’s Foregone whose protagonist says he’s telling his increasingly muddled story trying to stay alive. If I stop writing down my words here—right here before the next clause--will I show that I’m no longer writing to keep writing to keep living? Playing to keep playing. Probably not. But it does occur to me that this action writing of mine may recall what Keever says is the end of running the suicides that finishes only when one of the running players can run no more, goes down on the gym floor, and vomits.