"Underworld" and "Passing Lane"

“Underworld”

This cover photo of Passing Down was taken by Kinga Owczennikow at Half Moon Bay on the Pacific coast between my radiation treatments. That speck in the upper left corner is me. The other person is Sharon. In liberal California, it’s a woman who takes you to the Underworld. When I’m ready, Sharon tells me, she will take me down the passage to the entry circle on the beach.

“No rivers in this area, so no more boat rides, but we still have the water,” she says. “Also no more company. In this country of obsessive individualism, the portal gives private access to the Underworld.”

“The entry is small,” I tell her. “How do you accommodate all the dead?”

“Demand is low. Not many people still believe in the Underworld.”

“Probably not many believe in Otherworld either, but once you’ve experienced it the Underworld doesn’t seem impossible.”

We stand in the fog and look down at the mysterious circular hole. The waves washing over it and receding remind me of the repeating, ponderous machines in the radiation chamber.

I think of Keever and his Terminal Tours. “Do people jump from this cliff and bypass your service?” I ask.

“Those who do believe in the Underworld know they must be guided down.”

Passing down to the past, I think, to an ancient immortality full of shades and shadows, ghosts made famous by Homer and Dante.

“I’ll let you know,” I tell Sharon.

“Passing Lane”

“Drive,” they said, every one of my coaches.

When I needed money to supplement my Social Security, I started driving for Uber.

“Drive and deliver,” my coaches said. Murray Jacobs told me how: “Bring `em to you, fuck `em up.” Fake `em and take `em to the hoop. Keep going. Create in air. Pretend to shoot but deliver a pass to the open man, to some big lug who could score only off my lobs or to the slow-ass shooters on the wings who could make their jumpers only with my tricky set-ups. No way to fuck up my passengers, not with the Uber pre-payment method. Not even if they ask mid-trip to spend 15 minutes in a bar or puke in the backseat or give me no tip. Besides, most of my passengers here in Silicon Valley are polite Asian-Americans. They look surprised to see a senior driver pull up, but don’t question or berate me. The women are probably happy I’m too old to come onto them. Men spend their ride looking at their screens. Just like me watching my big screen GPS if I’m not doing a familiar run on 101 up to SFO or down to Mountain View.*

Drive and fuck yourself up: come down on an opponent’s foot, break your ankle, and be done for a year or forever. I may have fucked myself up when I moved out here. My daughter thought I’d be safer in a senior suburb, so she found me a place and helped me finance a used white Tesla. But I’m barely making enough to cover the payments. The passengers do seem to like the car. They don’t expect an Uber Tesla. It validates their existence in the Valley—the auto is new-tech and expensive. A few local passengers are regulars, mostly people even older than I am who need a ride to medical offices. I gave them my cell number so we could bypass Uber billing once in a while, but nobody calls to fuck up Musk and his multinational corporation.

*

My daughter worries about me. Not my driving but my body in general and my brain that can’t seem to remember my phone number or hers. I worry about myself. I used to say, “trust the body” but no more. Too many unreliable organs inside. They’re like the complicated parts of old gas-powered cars. Now I have to trust the simpler Tesla, my new body. I remain the brain. My model doesn’t have “Autosteer.” I will admit Uber is the right job for the geezer whose everyday memory is failing. See the request pop up, accept the ride, enter address and destination in the GPS, show up and deliver.

*

I’m a pensioner, so I have time to sit at a charging station with other Tesla owners. I remember my father always talking cars with other drivers when gassing up, but Tesla owners stay behind the wheel and work on their laptops. To me, it’s a strange sight, as if they are committing suicide hooked up to electricity instead of carbon monoxide. But between runs I sit with them and jot down in my laptop these notes for an essay I want to write.

*

When I first started driving, I tried to talk with the passengers the way cabbies used to talk to me in Greece when I was a star, hoping, I figured, to increase their tip. Or maybe the cabbies lived alone, like me here in the Valley, and wanted someone, anyone, to bullshit with, even in my fractured Greek or their accented English. My daughter sometimes comes down from San Francisco for a few hours on the weekend to check on my prescriptions and confiscate anything with glucose. We talk about old times when I could eat a few Oreo cookies every day. In the new times I’ve been driving, I haven’t made a friend. I used to think I’d meet a passenger to have a drink with (if my stomach still let me drink). So far I mostly talk to the Greek guy who runs the neighborhood café. I tell him about my year as the “Greek Key” in Athens. He wants to discuss current European soccer.

*

When I was playing in European cities, then living in Mexico City and New York, I never had a car. Now I like to drive. The inside of my body is pretty well fucked up, but my feet and hands still work despite the peripheral neuropathy. At my age, driving is the only thing I do that tests my reflexes and gives me an occasional shot of adrenaline. Out on the five lanes of 101, I’m like the point guard with the ball, calculating the ever-changing speeds and positions of the players, my teammates and my opponents. Then recalculating the next second and adjusting my own speed and lane, deciding again when to pass, when to hold. 101 is like the crowded court at high speed, definitely a place where you could fuck yourself up—and others. I know some drivers daydream or listen to podcasts or talk on the phone when they drive. I think about driving, the present, the next second. When I have no passengers, I think a little ahead to where I can pull over and piss in the plastic bottle I keep in the car.

*

When fares are thin in the late morning, I sometimes go busman and drive the 15 miles to Half Moon Bay to watch the surfers. They’re like an athlete’s career: a few moments of speed and a long petering out. On the way over, I smile at the “No Passing” signs—completely unnecessary because of the short straight stretches, hairpin turns, steep dropoffs, and low guardrails. I like the road’s twists and turns. They demand quick shifts of direction like mine on the court. On the return upgrade, a mile-long “Passing Lane” allows more speed. It too pleases the aged athlete. I still have some touch to make subtle changes at the wheel, as if feathering up a floater over a rim protector after leading a fast break.

Route 92 could be the “pasting lane.” Driving over the California green mountains always reminds me of when I was a kid on a Vermont farm. My older brother Pat showed me how to drive his pickup down the winding one-lane dirt roads to town before I had my license. Pat liked to drive at night when we could see the lights of oncoming cars. If no one was approaching, he’d slalom through the curves on the gravel. Pat wasn’t much of an athlete, except behind the wheel. He was a gambler who became a small-town cop with a powerful cruiser to drive and a betting habit that got him killed when he pulled his gun on a loan shark to whom he owed a lot of money, a cop’s suicide-by-perp. Pat wanted to be remembered after death and thought I would be “immortal” because of my books. I told him no chance, I wasn’t penning literature, just memoirs of a former player. But I did write Passing Away about him.

*

It’s strange to me--after years of writing nothing—to be writing again, even if it’s just these notes for a personal piece. I hope it will make me a few extra dollars. If it doesn’t, at least the notes are a way to pass my down time waiting for a run. A profile: the file of a former pro. Maybe AARP will use the essay in their magazine—for a series they can call “How Some Seniors Make Do During Inflation.” I won’t mention how little “Do” or dough I make. Like other magazines I read at the library, AARP will want something unusual, even eccentric, but uplifting. And true. Though I now spend much of my life in my auto, the piece can’t be autofiction.

Let’s see. First, I’m OG, an old guy with wrinkles to prove it. I always wear a white shirt and bow tie as if I were a college teacher but in a fifties movie. Another joke just for myself: I also wear the same kind of no-logo green baseball cap that Clint Eastwood wore in his movie about himself as a senior drug mule. I think Steph Curry is a jerk who wouldn’t last 10 minutes on an inner-city playground, but I have his bobblehead on my dash since he has achieved sainthood in the Valley. Although I hate wearing contacts, I want my passengers to feel safe. I still wear my COVID mask. I always address them as “Sir” or “Madam” or “Ms.” though many could be my grandchildren. I will grab their suitcases out of the trunk at the airport, but I mostly slump in my seat. I’m 6-3—still!—and don’t want my customers to feel in any way lorded over. I was usually the shortest guy on the court, so I know how the Asians might feel. The passengers almost never ask me what I did before Uber, but if they do I tell them I had years of experience driving a yellow cab in New York City. Another joke just for myself, not for AARP.

*

Safety rules when fares are aboard. I obey all the speed limits. When passengers ask me to hurry up, they’re running late for a flight or important meeting, I lie to them. I say this former point guard has racked up too many DMV points for speeding and will lose my license if I score more. The Chinese and Japanese accept this. For some reason, white women are the most insistent on going fast. I could joke, “You’re a fast woman, are you?” But I don’t. I always keep in mind the Uber driver rating system, the need to please. Driving for an app now was like writing books: you have to worry about what readers will believe, what reviewers will say. “Story moves too slow.” “Protagonist too odd to be likable.” “Style seems evasive.”

At the end of an airport run, I keep the Tesla doors locked until I can get out and open the curb door for passengers. Treat them like celebrities exiting a limo. At the dropoff, I grab their suitcases from the trunk. Hoping to insure good luck in the air, some passengers slip me a little cash, presumably because of the polite functionalism I display. Or it could be because of my age. “Poor old man,” they may think, “lost his savings in the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank and now has to drive to live.”

*

“Drive to live.” I understood it and profited from it when I was running Terminal Tours, taking terminally ill people on their trips. They wanted to be in motion, to have one last excitement, one final run before the buzzer. I drove them in their cars or accompanied them in planes, carried their suitcases, acted as a guide. Most were happy to be on the road--including the woman with MS who was in a wheelchair that I pushed onto the Golden Gate Bridge. She planned to jump, she told me later, but decided to live because of something I told her. I wish I could remember what it was. I could tell it to myself now.

Not everyone has the drive to live. I should have known. My mother drove her Dodge up into the wood lot behind the house, hooked a hose to the exhaust pipe, and killed herself when I was 13. She was 45. A few years later my father drove his pickup into a river and drowned. It was ruled an accident though Pat told me there were no skid marks. Old times in Vermont. Deep dives, death drives. No notes from them. With 25 years on both my parents and with a dead second wife and with no hope of a different future, I don’t have much drive to live. Just drive to drive. I used to be the point, the point of attack. Some days now I feel like that other point, the location in geometry, a bodiless speck. Pointless, a whole lot less than I was when still an athlete.

All true but not for AARP.

*

I may be seated but still need to be quick in the car. If I’m not quick at the wheel, I could be DRT, what Pat said was cops’ lingo for “dead right there” when the Jaws of Life were too late at an auto accident. People claim you can’t learn quickness, just as coaches say you can’t coach height. But when I was an undersized kid, I trained myself to be quick in a room above the tractor shed on the farm. I painted spots on the wooden walls. Then I practiced quick sleight of hand dribbling—behind my back, between my legs—and passing the ball off the wall without looking at the spots, catching them with my peripheral vision or just mysteriously knowing where the spots were. The shed roof was not high enough for a hoop, so I spent hours becoming quick, faking one direction, taking another, dribbling and passing the ball to myself. In the shed, I never had to worry about an injury or an opponent or a teammate fucking up my no-look passes. It was self to self. No coach, no language, pure play by myself and for myself. Too bad writing can’t be that kind of play unless, of course, the writing is just notes.

*

Too much background! AARP won’t give a shit about it even if people my age don’t have much foreground. Our lives are mostly foregone. Our time shrinks, we shrink, lose height and weight. The smaller we get, the larger the distant past. Easier to remember it than to imagine even the near future, the next month, the next year. I try to be ready for the next second. “In or out,” the shooters used to say of their next shot. Always chance is involved in playing and in driving. When a tire blows or you make a two-inch mistake turning the wheel, it’s like last shot time. That’s when the old point guard gets his test. In or out. Ball don’t lie. Live or die. Speck no more.

*

“Anticipate,” my high school coach told me. Hooping, driving, writing. I’ve dealt with enough editors to know that AARP will want some anecdotes, some action. “What were your worst fares, your best fare?” I’ll downplay the negatives. But can say I now refuse to deliver eats. Tips are bad, and the food is chancy. One customer took the bag at the door, told me to wait. I thought he was going inside for cash. No, he was checking the food. He brought the bag back and threw it on my shoes. I used to drive at night, but no longer. No more men too drunk to drive singing off key in the back seat. No more tipsy women crying on my shoulder as if I were a bartender. It’s mostly silence in back of me. The Uber is loneliness, as if I’m driving by myself to places I’d never choose to go.

Bury the past, Keever, not the lede.

My best fare—the one I made the most—was also the most interesting. And uplifting, the kind of story AARP will like. At SFO one morning, I picked up a fortyish woman with a lot of camera equipment who wanted a run down Route 1 along the coast toward Santa Cruz to Davenport, which barely showed up on the GPS. When I pulled into a turnout overlooking a very picturesque beach—cliffs, rollers, a brook feeding fresh water into the sea--she got out, went to the land side of the road, set up her tripod, and started shooting photos of a ridge of burned over trees, needles and small branches no more, just tall black silhouettes against blue sky. She moved the tripod around, then left it and started climbing up the ridge for closer shots. I hollered to her that I get a hundred bucks an hour cash money for waiting, and she just waved. Assisting yet another shooter. After an hour or so, she came back to the car, and we drove further down the coast to another blackened ridge for more photos.

When I was playing and watching hours of videotape of my opponents and me, trying to see their future, I started believing all language “lied” about movement. I rephrased “ball don’t lie” to “tape don’t lie.” So the photographer’s work reached me even if it was a bunch of stills. Shut up and open the shutter. Her work was good for my work: two long-distance fares, 500 bucks for waiting, a 100 cash tip, and free lunch in Davenport where she told me about her project shooting the aftermath of forest fires, not just the ones that destroy towns and make the news but ones that go unnoticed. The photos would be in a book called Still Standing, Standing Still. “The athlete’s nightmare,” I told her. “Mine, too,” she said, and listed about 15 places in the U.S. she’d traveled to take photos of still upright trees, more powerful reminders of loss, she thought, than completely burned down land. She reminded me of Eleni the environmentalist in Passing Off, my first autobiography—even though Eleni was made up by my ghostwriter, my first wife. On the way back up Route 1 to San Francisco, the photographer pointed to the dashboard Curry and asked me if I’d been a player, the first passenger to make the connection between bobblehead Curry and grayhead Keever. For AARP, I might make the photographer a senior citizen. No foul, no harm.

*

In the Uber, I’m “Mike.” Passengers don’t know I’ve been stuck with Key since high school ball. I can’t shake its influence, so I’ve always been sensitive to others’ nicknames. A player on the Timberwolves is called “Slo Mo.“ That’s me too with my artificial hip outside the Tesla. Low Key, slow Key. Speed kills but so does slow. My second wife died a slow death with months in and out of hospitals. She had the drive to live right until the end, when she weighed 85 pounds, but her body wasted her, slowly fucked her up. By the time she was diagnosed, I couldn’t even take her on a Terminal Tour.

Recent times, old times. Why is it that past deaths keep popping back into these notes? The facts of death. AARP readers don’t want to be reminded. I don’t either. Write the note to understand but leave it out. The dead make me feel our lives are adding up on a meter like taxis used to have. I saw what the meter did to my wife and way back when to my Tours client Alice. I’d prefer the game clock. You’d know how much time you have before the buzzer. When traveling with the terminally ill, I developed an irrational fear of sudden death. I was much younger then. Now I have a rational interest in it. Drazen Petrovic, Hank Gathers, Pete Maravich, Kobe Bryant, hoopsters DRT, no slow decline for them as the meter runs on and on.

*

Okay, I get why the deaths. But what about the basketball that keeps bouncing back to me like the ball off the walls? It’s been decades since I touched the rock. Why all this distant replay? My coach in Athens was obsessed with “conditioning,” by which he meant running the suicides at the end of every practice. Players are no longer a team. We are all individuals, each being tested. No ball is in play during the suicides. No deception is possible. The coach blows his whistle and up and down the floor we sprint, touch the baseline, back and forth we run, touch the baseline, round and around at full speed. We need to please the coach. We want to play. We run for our life. The coach says the suicides are like life: you run until you can’t. His whistle and our brains press our bodies on and on and on. Someone stops running, gives up, commits hoop suicide. The rest of us keep running. The suicides end only when one body can run no more, goes down on the floor, and vomits.

Maybe my balling conditioning was deeper and higher than the legs and lungs and stomach, up in my mind that nowadays seems to be hosting a backward-looking mind of its own. I feel it’s the worst effect of being old, of being me. I can take Aleve to relieve the arthritis. Nothing seems to control the athlitis, memories of throwing passes in the shed, flashbacks to the suicides, unbidden hoop imperatives, fragments of musty videotape, random ball jargon, thinking like a passer. I should be grateful. Those were the best of times but now all reminders of my lost body, and increasingly my losing mind! Nothing distracts that shifty unreliable mind except driving. See the next second, and the second after that. Keep it simple and repeat. Time passes. I recharge the Tesla but not myself.

*

Dialogue. How could I forget dialogue? I need to do something light and easy for AARP readers, most of whom are probably women who have outlived men.

At a retirement home in San Carlos, I pick up an old woman with plastic tubes in her nose, tubes that lead back to an oxygen cylinder she is dragging behind her. I expect she’ll be conserving her breath, but she begins talking right away.

“My late husband used to make me sit in the backseat.”

“He probably knew it was safer back there.”

“He said, `I know about backseat drivers but they can’t be worse than a frontseat driver.’”

“Before the GPS, I liked to have my wife up front where she could read the map and give me directions.”

“My husband always knew where we were going. `A hearse always goes the same way,’ he said.”

“This car is more like an ambulance. I’ve taken two sick people to the hospital down in Redwood City.”

“I need oxygen but I’m not really sick. At Golden Refuge, everything is done for us. They even have a doctor come around every month to check on us. I don’t need to go to Palo Alto today. I just like to ride around in the backseat on the money my husband left. It makes me feel like Miss Daisy.”

“I’m too old to play Morgan Freeman.”

“And the wrong color. The movie was good but would have been even better if Miss Daisy were black and Morgan Freeman were white. Daisy leaves the back of the bus and tells her white driver up front, `Take me on down to Palo Alto, Mike.’”

“Yes, ma`m, and what will you be doing down there today?”

“Coming back to San Carlos.”

The passenger was white. Very few Black folks in the Valley, and probably even fewer white folks who’d want Daisy to be Black. I guess I remember the details of our conversation because decades ago I was the white Morgan Freeman serving my mostly Black teammates. I miss their dialects, their dialogue. I can’t remember when I last had a Black passenger. The loneliness of the short distance driver.

*

After the photographer: when I make a run back and forth to Half Moon Bay, I’m mindful of all the green trees on both sides of the road. I should be thankful they’re not burned over. But I’ll be damned if the mindless mind of mine doesn’t bring up the guardrails between the Tesla and the trees. More pasting in the passing lane. For the point guard, there were always guardrails. Guardrules. Godrules. As a kid I was trained to be controlled and controlling, be the coach on the floor, assist others, give the ball to my teammates, sacrifice my own scoring. In high school, I was recruited as a facilitator. After college, my agent moved me as a “helper.” I agreed to marry because my girlfriend was pregnant. I went to Greece to play so we could buy a home with the bonus—that I never got. We finally got the home and lost it because I was willing to take an old man to Lourdes, where he died and his son sued. That was in Passing On. In Passing Through I risked my life to help smuggle a feminist dissident out of Algeria. In Passing Away I tried to help Pat extend his life. About the only service job I never had was working in a restaurant.

Yes, money was often involved. It was one rail. But so was the nuns’ catechism. Even before Terminal Tours I’d lost my belief in their heaven and hell. But couldn’t seem to get over their “Jesus saves. Make Him your model.” The point god. Faith, hope, and charity. Faith and hope were internal. Charity was something you could do, an activity you could see yourself doing, something others could see you doing. First the priest in the box, the parents, then the coaches and teammates, the fans, wife, daughter, terminal clients. Seems like I’ve always been assisting, helping others. And now, whether the passengers show gratitude or not after an airport run, I assume they are thankful that they’ve been safely transported. Jesus saves. Key delivers.

*

A former basketball player has the nickname “The Truth.” Sportswriters called me “Keever the Deceiver,” the con man and escape artist. My first wife said I was the “Lying Cretan.” I admit it. I’ve been lying much of my life—first with my body to those opponents I was trying to fuck up with my fakes, then with words to my terminal clients who I tried to comfort, to readers of my autobiographies who I tried to please with fictions, occasionally to my passengers who I hope will tip. But now, near what feels like the end of my life, I try not to lie to myself. Others maybe sometimes but not myself. So, Keever, just who the fuck are you kidding about getting paid for a personal story when these notes show no signs of an unusual job or a pleasing narrative or a happy ending? What if writing notes is just passing time? Or evading time, thinking about its end. Maybe I’ll send the notes to Tom and see if he can do anything with them.

*

Note to self: Keep running, keep driving, keep writing. You haven’t vomited yet.

*

The past: it lasts, but it’s not all dead weight. When I was about eight, my father took me in a new car he was trying out to Plymouth Notch near Cal Coolidge’s birthplace. The Notch is a very steep, mostly straight climb that people in the area used to test drive cars and trucks. The car was an Oldsmobile 88, an eight-cylinder. My father floored it at the bottom of the Notch, and I was pushed back against the back seat. Up and up we went. I’d never been in a plane, but I felt I was flying. Probably the Olds never topped 60 MPH on the climb, but the sensation of somehow being free of the road continued until Dad eased back on the gas near the top. Can I 60 years later call that sensation autonomy?

*

Lately I’ve been thinking about the many strange names the passengers have, two letters short, a dozen letters long. Bi. Balasubmaranian. The names have no meaning, not like Carpenter or Shoemaker with their echoes of employments. Decades ago I was Kybernos, the Greek steersman. I’m still steering but have switched to German. Now I’m an Ubermensch. “Over”: more “past” than “above” for me.

*

These notes must be coming to an end because now I’m down to writing words about words, something else AARP won’t want. But I can’t help thinking it’s odd we still use “lane” that originally meant “narrow hedged-in road” to refer to sections of a highway that accommodate wide trailer-trucks. If I were playing, my ball-control coaches would tell me, “Stay in your lane.” Lovers’ lanes are no more except maybe in rural Vermont. The free throw lane still exists. I’ve spent a lot of these notes in memory lane. As for “passing lane,” maybe it’s all those “Passing” books I wrote or just a sign of old age, but now I feel it could be where people pass over, pass away, pass on.

*

If these notes ever became a story, how would it end, what would the old point guard’s main point be? We live by luck, run with risk. In a freak accident, a TV soundman too close to the action broke my hip and put an end to my runs as an athlete. Run and done. Life in a Key’s three.

*

When I come to the passing lane on the way back from a run to Half Moon Bay, I give the Tesla its head and give myself a test. Press my luck. Uber no more. Slo no mo. The speed limit is 55, but we’re quickly over that and rising. The trucks are fucked up in a blink. Accelerate. At 75 I quick cut into the slow lane to pass law-abiding drivers and then quick cut back into the free passing lane. Key no more. Drive they said. Words no more. No chance to lie. In or out. At 90 centrifugal force pushes the Tesla toward the guardrails on the curves, but I control the wheel and the auto holds the road. Slow kills, speed thrills. Keep going. Last shot time. Create in air. At 100 near the end of the passing lane and the top of the mountain, my auto could easily jump the low guardrail, fly out over the cliff, and plunge down into the ravine. Lying no more. I live to tell this true tale because—every time so far—I brake hard and the Tesla skids sideways through the last curve.