“We played at camp,” he says flatly as we pause outside the amphitheater, both of us looking in as huge, muscular, uniformed black men ram ball after ball through hoop after hoop on a mesmerizing four-sided screen, to the crowd’s rapt amazement and smattered applause.
“And so were you a major force,” I ask. “Or an intimidator, possibly a franchise or an impact player?” I’m happy to have unfreighted exchange on any subject, though I stare at his shorts, tee-shirt and skinthead and don’t like any of it. He seems to me to be in disguise.
“Not really,” he says, absolutely earnest. “I can’t jump. Or run. Or shoot, and I’m a lefty. And I don’t give a shit. So I’m not really cut out for it.”
“Lanier was a lefty,” I say. “So was Russell.” He may not know who they are, even though he’d recognize their shoes. The audience in the jam-o-rama amphitheater makes a low “Ooooo” of utter reverence. Other men with their boys stand beside us, looking in, uninterested in sitting down.
“We weren’t really playing to win anyway,” Paul says.
“What were you playing for? Fun?”
“Thur-uh-py,” he says to make a joke of it, though he seems unironic. “Some of the kids would always forget what month it was, and some of them talked too loud or had seizures, which was bad. And if we played basketball, even stupid basketball, they all got better for a while. We had ‘share your thoughts’ after every game, and everybody had a lot better thoughts. For a while at least. Not me. Chuck played basketball at Yale.” Paul’s hands are in his shorts pockets as he stares at the ceiling, which is industrial modern and shadowy, with metal girders, trusses, rafters, sprinkling-system pipes, all painted black. Basketball, I think, is American’s postindustrial national pastime.
“Was he any good?” I may as well ask.
“I don’t know,” he says, digging a finger into his mossy ear and creasing the corner of his mouth like a country hick. A second loud “Ooooo” comes from inside. Someone, a woman, shouts out, “Yes! I swear to God. Look at that!” I don’t know what she saw.
“You know the one thing you can do that’s truly unique to you and that society can’t affect in any way?” he says. “We learned this in camp.”
“I guess not.” People out here with us are starting to stray away.
“Sneeze. If you sneeze in some stupid-fuck way, or in a loud way that pisses people off in movies, they just have to go along with it. Nobody can say, ‘Sneeze a different way, asshole.’”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Does that seem unusual?”
“Yes.” Gradually he lets his eyes come down from the ceiling but not to me. His finger quits excavating his ear. He is now uncomfortable for being unironic and a kid.
“Don’t you know that’s the way everything is when you get to be old? Everybody lets you do anything you want to. If they don’t like it, they just don’t show up anymore.”
“Sounds great,” Paul says, and actually smiles, as if such a world where people left you alone was an exhibit he’d like to see.
“Maybe it is,” I say, “maybe it isn’t.”
“What’s the most misunderstood automotive accessory?” He’s ready to derail serious talk, alert to the dangers inherent in my earnest voice.
“I don’t know. An air filter,” I say, as the dunk-o-rama film gets over in the auditorium. I have seen no big cutout of Milt the Stilt, as was promised.
“That’s pretty close.” Paul nods very seriously. “It’s a snow tire. You don’t appreciate it until you need it, but then it’s usually too late.”
“Why does that make it misunderstood? Why not just underappreciated?”
“They’re the same,” he says, and starts walking away.
“I see. Maybe you’re right.” And we both walk off then toward the stairs.
On Level 1, there’s a busy gift boutique, a small room dedicated to sports media (zero fascination for me), an authentic locker room exhibit, a vending machine oasis, plus some gimmicky, hands-on exhibits Paul takes mild interest in. I decide to make my call to Sally before we hit the road. Though I have yet to see a legitimate snack bar, so that Paul wanders off in his new heavy-gaited, pigeon-toed, arm-swinging way I hate, to the vending-machine canteen with money I’ve supplied (since his is evidently for some other uses — a possible kidnap emergency) and my order to bring back “something good.”
The phone area is a nice, secluded, low-lit little alcove beside the bathrooms, with thick, noise-muffling wall-to-wall covering everything, and the latest black phone technology — credit card slits, green computer screens and buttons to amplify sound in case you can’t believe what you’re hearing. It is an ideal place for a crank or ransom call.
Sally, when I punch in her 609 number, answers thrillingly on the first jingle.
“So where in the world are you?” she says, her voice tingly and happy but also a voice that’s taking a reading. “I left you a long and poignant message last night. I may have been drunk.”
“And I tried to call you right back all this morning, to see if you’d fly up here in a chartered Cessna and come to Cooperstown with us. Paul thinks it’d be great. We’d have some fun.”
“Well. My goodness. I don’t know,” Sally says, acting happily confused. “Where are you right now?”
“Right now I’m in the Basketball Hall of Fame. I mean we’re visiting it — we’re not enshrined here. Not yet anyway.” I feel the most buoyant good spirit expand in my chest. All is not pissed away.
“But isn’t that in Ohio?”
“No, it’s in Springfield, Mass, where the first peach basket was nailed to the first barn door and the rest is history. Football’s in Ohio. We don’t have time for that.”
“Where are you going, again?”
She is enjoying all this, possibly relieved, acting breathless and appealed to. Plans might still spring to life. “Cooperstown, New York. One hundred seventy miles away,” I say enthusiastically. A woman several nooks down leans back and glowers at me as if I were making a call that amplified my voice in her receiver. Possibly she feels at risk being near a person in legitimately high spirits. “So whaddaya say?” I say. “Fly up to Albany right now, and we’ll pick you up.” I am talking too loud and need to put a lid on it before a Hall of Fame SWAT team is summoned. “I’m serious,” I say, more modulated, but more serious too.
“Well, you’re very sweet to ask.”
“I am very sweet. That’s right. But I’m not letting you off the hook.” I say this a bit too loud again. “I just woke up this morning and realized I was crazy as hell last night and that I’m crazy about you. And I don’t want to wait till Monday or whenever the hell.” For a nickel I’d muster Paul right back to the car and beat it back down to South Mantoloking along with all the other beach yahoos. Though I’d be a bad man for doing so. Being willing to invite Sally in on our sacred hombre-to-hombre is already bad enough — though like anybody else, Paul’d have more fun being along on something technically illicit. The world, as I told him, lets you do what you want if you can live with the consequences. We’re all free agents.
“Could I ask you something?” she says, two jots too serious.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It may be too serious. I’m not a serious man. And it can’t be about you not coming up here.”