(…) Your body’s doing it for you and the court and Game’s doing it for your body. You’re barely involved. It’s magic, boy. Nothing touches it, when it’s right. I predict it. Facts and figures and curved glass and those elbow-straining books of yours’ lightless pages are going to seem flat by comparison. Static. Dead and white and flat. They don’t begin to. . . . It’s like a dance, Jim. The point is I was too bodily respectful to slip up and fall on my own, out there. And the other point is I started to fall forward even before I started to hear him reply. Standing there: Yes, But He’ll Never Be Great. What he said in no way made me fall forward. The unlovely opponent had dribbled one just barely over the too-low public-park net, a freak accident, a mishit drop-shot, and another man on another court in another early-round laugher would have let it dribble, conceded the affordable, not tried to wave a hankie from the vessel of his limit. Not race on all eight healthy scarless cylinders desperately forward toward the net to try to catch the goddamn thing on the first bounce. Jim, but any man can slip. I don’t know what I slipped on, son. There were spiders well-known to infest the palms’ fronds all along the courts’ fences. They come down at night on threads, bulbous, flexing. I’m thinking it could have been a bulbous goo-filled widow I stepped and slipped on, Jim, a spider, a mad rogue spider come down on its thread into the shade, flabby and crawling, or that leapt suicidally right from an overhanging frond onto the court, probably making a slight flabby hideous sound when it landed, crawling around on its claws, blinking grotesquely in the hot light it hated, that I stepped on rushing forward and killed and slipped on the mess the big loathsome spider made. See these scars? All knotted and ragged, like something had torn at my own body’s knees the way a slouching Brando would just rip a letter open with his teeth and let the envelope fall on the floor all wet and rent ant torn? All the palms along the fence were sick, they had palm-rot, it was the A.D. year 1933, of the Great Bisbee Palm-Rot epidemic, all through the state, and they were losing their fronds and the fronds were blighted and the color of really old olives in those old slim jars at the very back of the refrigerator and exuded a sick sort of pus-like slippery discharge and sometimes abruptly fell from trees curving back and forth through the air like celluloid pirates’ paper swords. God I hate fronds, Jim. I’m thinking it could have been either a daytime latrodectus or some pus from a frond.

(…) The wind blew cruddy pus from the webbed fronds onto the court, maybe, up near the net. Either way. Something poisonous or infected, at any rate, unexpected and slick. All it takes is a second, you’re thinking, Jim: the body betrays you and down you go, on your knees, sliding on sandpaper court. Not so, son. I used to have another flask like this, smaller, a rather more cunning silver flask, in the glove compartment of my Montclair. Your devoted mother did something to it. The subject has never been mentioned between us. Not so. It was a foreign body, or a substance, not my body, and if anybody did any betraying that day I’m telling you sonny kid boy it was something I did, Jimmer, I may well have betrayed that fine young lithe tan unslumped body, I may very well have gotten rigid, overconscious, careless of it, listening for what my father, who I respected, I respected that man, Jim, is what’s sick, I knew he was there, I was conscious of his flat face and filter’s long shadow, I knew him, Jim. Things were different when I was growing up, Jim. I hate . . . Jesus I hate saying something like this, this things-were-different-when-I-was-a-lad-type cliché shit, the sort of cliché fathers back then spouted, assuming he said anything at all. But it was. Different. Our kids, my generation’s kids, they . . . now you, this post-Brando crowd, you new kids can’t like us or dislike us or respect us or not as human beings, Jim. Your parents. No, wait, you don’t have to pretend you disagree, don’t, you don’t have to say it, Jim. Because I know it. I could have predicted it, watching Brando and Dean and the rest, and I know it, so don’t sputter. I blame no one your age, boyo. You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-red. Kids today . . . you kids today somehow don’t know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We’re just bodies to you. We’re just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I’m not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so much as I’m saying you cannot . . . imagine our absence. We’re so present it’s ceased to mean. We’re environmental. Furniture of the world. Jim, I could imagine that man’s absence. Jim, I’m telling you you cannot imagine my absence.