(…) Pure potential. Notice I tore it open along the seam. It’s a body. You’ll learn to treat it with consideration, son, some might say a kind of love, and it will open for you, do your bidding, be at your beck and soft lover’s call. The thing truly great players with hale bodies who overshadow all others have is a way with the ball that’s called, and keep in mind the garage door and broiler, touch. Touch the ball. Now that’s . . . that’s the touch of a player right there. And as with the ball so with that big thin slumped overtall body, sir Jimbo. I’m predicting it right now. I see the way you’ll apply the lessons of today to yourself as a physical body. No more carrying your head at the level of your chest under round slumped shoulders. No more tripping up. No more overshot reaches, shattered plates, tilted lampshades, slumped shoulders and caved-in chest, the simplest objects twisting and resistant in your big thin hands, boy. Imagine what it feels like to be this ball, Jim. Total physicality. No revving head. Complete presence. Absolute potential, sitting there potentially absolute in your big pale slender girlish hand so young its thumb’s unwrinkled at the joint. My thumb’s wrinkled at the joint, Jim, some might say gnarled. Have a look at this thumb right here. But I still treat it as my own. I give it its due. You want a drink of this, son? I think you’re ready for a drink of this. No? Nein? Today, Lesson One out there, you become, for better or worse, Jim, a man. A player. A body in commerce with bodies. A helmsman at your own vessel’s tiller. A machine in the ghost, to quote a phrase. Ah. A ten-year-old freakishly tall bow-tied and thick-spectacled citizen of the. . . . I drink this, sometimes, when I’m not actively working, to help me accept the same painful things it’s now time for me to tell you, son. Jim. Are you ready? I’m telling you this now because you have to know what I’m about to tell you if you’re going to be the more than near-great top-level tennis player I know you’re going to be eventually very soon. Brace yourself. Son, get ready. It’s glo . . . gloriously painful. Have just maybe a taste, here. This flask is silver. Treat it with due care. Feel its shape. The near-soft feel of the warm silver and the calfskin sheath that covers only half its flat rounded silver length. An object that rewards a considered touch. Feel the slippery heat? That’s the oil from my fingers. My oil, Jim, from my body. Not my hand, son, feel the flask. Heft it. Get to know it. It’s an object. A Vessel. It’s a two-pint flask full of amber liquid. Actually more like half full, it seems. So it seems.

(…) This flask has been treated with due care. It’s never been dropped or jostled or crammed. It’s never had an errant drop, not drop one, spilled out of it. I treat it as if it can feel. I give it its due, as a body. Unscrew the cap. Hold the calfskin sheath in your right hand and use your good left hand to feel the cap’s shape and ease it around on the threads. Son . . . son, you’ll have to put that what is that that Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices Second Edition down, son. Looks heavy anyway. A tendon-strainer. Fuck up your pronator teres and surrounding tendons before you even start. You’re going to have to put down the book, for once, young Sir Jimbo, you never try to handle two objects at the same time without just aeons of diligent practice and care, a Brando-like dis . . . and well no you don’t just drop the book son, you don’t just just don’t drop the big old Guide to Indices on the dusty garage floor so it raises a square bloom of dust and gets our nice white athletic socks all gray before we even hit the court, boy, Jesus I just took five minutes explaining how the key to being even a potential player is to treat the things with just exactly the . . . here lemme have this . . . that books aren’t just dropped with a crash like bottles in the trashcan they’re placed, guided, with senses on Full, feeling the edges, the pressure on the little floor of both hands’ fingers as you bend at the knees with the book, the slight gassy shove as the air on the dusty floor . . . as the floor’s air gets displaced in a soft square that raises no dust. Like soooo. Not like so. Got me? Got it? Well now don’t be that way. Son, don’t be that way, now. Don’t get all oversensitive on me son, when all I’m trying to do is help you. Son, Jim, I hate this when you do this. Your chin just disappears into that bow-tie when your big old overhung lower lip quivers like that. You look chinless, son, and big-lipped. And that cape of mucus that’s coming down on your upper lip, the way it shines, don’t just don’t its revolting, son, you don’t want to revolt people, you have to learn to control this sort of oversensitivity to hard truths, this sort of thing, take and exert some goddamn control is the whole point of what I’m taking this whole entire morning off rehearsal with not one but two vitally urgent auditions looming down my neck so I can show you, planning to let you move the seat back and touch the shift and maybe even . . . maybe even drive the Montclair, God knows your feet’ll reach, right Jimbo? Jim, hey, why not drive the Montclair?