A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (3 page)

I mention this mostly because so much of my Midwest’s communal psychic energy was informed by growth and fertility. The agronomic
angle was obvious, what with my whole township dependent for tax base on seed, dispersion, height, and yield. Something about
the adults’ obsessive weighing and measuring and projecting, this special calculus of thrust and growth, leaked inside us
children’s capped and bandanna’d little heads out on the fields, diamonds, and courts of our special interests. By 1977 I
was the only one of my group of jock friends with virginity intact. (I know this for a fact, and only because these guys are
now schoolteachers and commoditists and insurers with families and standings to protect will I not share with you just how
I know it.) I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body,
but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I’d come to see as my coconspirator. I knew, somehow, that the call to height
and hair came from outside, from whatever apart from Monsanto and Dow made the corn grow, the hogs rut, the wind soften every
spring and hang with the scent of manure from the plain of beanfields north between us and Champaign. My vocation ebbed. I
felt uncalled. I began to experience the same resentment toward whatever children abstract as nature that I knew Steve Cassil
felt when a soundly considered approach shot down the forehand line was blown out by a gust, that I knew Gil Antitoi suffered
when his pretty kick-serve (he was the only top-flight kid from the slow weedy township courts to play serve-and-volley from
the start, which is why he had such success on the slick cement of the West Coast when he went on to play for Cal-Fullerton)
was compromised by the sun: he was so tall, and so stubborn about adjusting his high textbook service toss for solar conditions,
that serving from the court’s north end in early afternoon matches always filled his eyes with violet blobs, and he’d lumber
around for the rest of the point, flailing and pissed. This was back when sunglasses were unheard of, on-court.

But so the point is I began to feel what they’d felt. I began, very quietly, to resent my physical place in the great schema,
and this resentment and bitterness, a kind of slow root-rot, is a big reason why I never qualified for the sectional championships
again after 1977, and why I ended up in 1980 barely making the team at a college smaller than Urbana High while kids I had
beaten and then envied played scholarship tennis for Purdue, Fullerton, Michigan, Pepperdine, and even—in the case of Pete
Bouton, who grew half a foot and forty IQ points in 1977—for the hallowed U of I at Urbana-Champaign.

Alienation-from-Midwest-as-fertility-grid might be a little on the overmetaphysical side, not to mention self-pitying. This
was the time, after all, when I discovered definite integrals and antiderivatives and found my identity shifting from jock
to math-wienie anyway. But it’s also true that my whole Midwest tennis career matured and then degenerated under the aegis
of the Peter Principle. In and around my township—where the courts were rural and budgets low and conditions so extreme that
the mosquitoes sounded like trumpets and the bees like tubas and the wind like a five-alarm fire, that we had to change shirts
between games and use our water jugs to wash blown field-chaff off our arms and necks and carry salt tablets in Pez containers—I
was truly near-great: I could Play the Whole Court; I was In My Element. But all the more important tournaments, the events
into which my rural excellence was an easement, were played in a different real world: the courts’ surface was redone every
spring at the Arlington Tennis Center, where the National Junior Qualifier for our region was held; the green of these courts’
fair territory was so vivid as to distract, its surface so new and rough it wrecked your feet right through your shoes, and
so bare of flaw, tilt, crack, or seam that it was totally disorienting. Playing on a perfect court was for me like treading
water out of sight of land: I never knew where I was out there. The 1976 Chicago Junior Invitational was held at Lincolnshire’s
Bath and Tennis Club, whose huge warren of thirty-six courts was enclosed by all these troubling green plastic tarps attached
to all the fences, with little archer-slits in them at eye level to afford some parody of spectation. These tarps were Wind-B-Gone
windscreens, patented by the folks over at Cyclone Fence in 1971. They did cut down on the worst of the unfair gusts, but
they also seemed to rob the court space of new air: competing at Lincolnshire was like playing in the bottom of a well. And
blue bug-zapper lights festooned the lightposts when really major Midwest tournaments played into the night: no clouds of
midges around the head or jagged shadows of moths to distinguish from balls’ flights, but a real unpleasant zotting and frying
sound of bugs being decommissioned just overhead; I won’t pause to mention the smell. The point is I just wasn’t the same,
somehow, without deformities to play around. I’m thinking now that the wind and bugs and chuckholes formed for me a kind of
inner boundary, my own personal set of lines. Once I hit a certain level of tournament facilities, I was disabled because
I was unable to accommodate the absence of disabilities to accommodate. If that makes sense. Puberty-angst and material alienation
notwithstanding, my Midwest tennis career plateaued the moment I saw my first windscreen.

Still strangely eager to speak of weather, let me say that my township, in fact all of East-Central Illinois, is a proud part
of what meteorologists call Tornado Alley. Incidence of tornadoes all out of statistical proportion. I personally have seen
two on the ground and five aloft, trying to assemble. Aloft tornadoes are gray-white, more like convulsions in the thunderclouds
themselves than separate or protruding from them. Ground tornadoes are black only because of the tons of soil they suck in
and spin around. The grotesque frequency of tornadoes around my township is, I’m told, a function of the same variables that
cause our civilian winds: we are a coordinate where fronts and air masses converge. Most days from late March to June there
are Tornado Watches somewhere in our TV stations’ viewing area (the stations put a little graphic at the screen’s upper right,
like a pair of binoculars for a Watch and the Tarot deck’s Tower card for a Warning, or something). Watches mean conditions
are right and so on and so forth, which, big deal. It’s only the rarer Tornado Warnings, which require a confirmed sighting
by somebody with reliable sobriety, that make the Civil Defense sirens go. The siren on top of the Philo Middle School was
a different pitch and cycle from the one off in the south part of Urbana, and the two used to weave in and out of each other
in a godawful threnody. When the sirens blew, the native families went to their canning cellars or fallout shelters (no kidding);
the academic families in their bright prefab houses with new lawns and foundations of flat slab went with whatever good-luck
tokens they could lay hands on to the very most central point on the ground floor after opening every single window to thwart
implosion from precipitous pressure drops. For my family, the very most central point was a hallway between my dad’s study
and a linen closet, with a reproduction of a Flemish annunciation scene on one wall and a bronze Aztec sunburst hanging with
guillotinic mass on the other; I always tried to maneuver my sister under the sunburst.

If there was an actual Warning when you were outside and away from home—say at a tennis tournament in some godforsaken public
park at some city fringe zoned for sprawl—you were supposed to lie prone in the deepest depression you could locate. Since
the only real depressions around most tournament sites were the irrigation and runoff ditches that bordered cultivated fields,
ditches icky with conferva and mosquito spray and always heaving with what looked like conventions of copperheads and just
basically places your thinking man doesn’t lie prone in under any circumstances, in practice at a Warned tournament you zipped
your rackets into their covers and ran to find your loved ones or even your liked ones and just all milled around trying to
look like you weren’t about to lose sphincter-control. Mothers tended sometimes to wail and clutch childish heads to their
bosoms (Mrs. Swearingen of Pekin was particularly popular for clutching even strange kids’ heads to her formidable bosom).

I mention tornadoes for reasons directly related to the purpose of this essay. For one thing, they were a real part of Midwest
childhood, because as a little kid I was obsessed with dread over them. My earliest nightmares, the ones that didn’t feature
mile-high robots from
Lost in Space
wielding huge croquet mallets (don’t ask), were about shrieking sirens and dead white skies, a slender monster on the Iowa
horizon, jutting less phallic than saurian from the lowering sky, whipping back and forth with such frenzy that it almost
doubled on itself, trying to eat its own tail, throwing off chaff and dust and chairs; it never came any closer than the horizon;
it didn’t have to.

In practice, Watches and Warnings both seemed to have a kind of boy-and-wolf quality for the natives of Philo. They just happened
too often. Watches seemed especially irrelevant, because we could always see storms coming from the west way in advance, and
by the time they were over, say, Decatur you could diagnose the basic condition by the color and height of the clouds: the
taller the anvil-shaped thunderheads, the better the chance for hail and Warnings; pitch-black clouds were a happier sight
than gray shot with an odd nacreous white; the shorter the interval between the sight of lightning and the sound of thunder,
the faster the system was moving, and the faster the system, the worse: like most things that mean you harm, severe thunderstorms
are brisk and no-nonsense.

I know why I stayed obsessed as I aged. Tornadoes, for me, were a transfiguration. Like all serious winds, they were our little
stretch of plain’s
z
coordinate, a move up from the Euclidian monotone of furrow, road, axis, and grid. We studied tornadoes in junior high: a
Canadian high straight-lines it southeast from the Dakotas; a moist warm mass drawls on up north from like Arkansas: the result
was not a Greek χ or even a Cartesian Г but a circling of the square, a curling of vectors, concavation of curves. It was
alchemical, Leibnizian. Tornadoes were, in our part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met
and whirled and blew up. They made no sense. Houses blew not out but in. Brothels were spared while orphanages next door bought
it. Dead cattle were found three miles from their silage without a scratch on them. Tornadoes are omnipotent and obey no law.
Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration. I believe now that I knew all this without knowing it, as a kid.

The only time I ever got caught in what might have been an actual one was in June ’78 on a tennis court at Hessel Park in
Champaign, where I was drilling one afternoon with Gil Antitoi. Though a contemptible and despised tournament opponent, I
was a coveted practice partner because I could transfer balls to wherever you wanted them with the mindless constancy of a
machine. This particular day it was supposed to rain around suppertime, and a couple times we thought we’d heard the tattered
edges of a couple sirens out west toward Monticello, but Antitoi and I drilled religiously every afternoon that week on the
slow clayish Har-Tru of Hessel, trying to prepare for a beastly clay invitational in Chicago where it was rumored both Brescia
and Mees would appear. We were doing butterfly drills—my crosscourt forehand is transferred back down the line to Antitoi’s
backhand, he crosscourts it to my backhand, I send it down the line to his forehand, four 45° angles, though the intersection
of just his crosscourts make an
X
, which is four 90°s and also a crucifix rotated the same quarter-turn that a swastika (which involves eight 90° angles) is
rotated on Hitlerian bunting. This was the sort of stuff that went through my head when I drilled. Hessel Park was scented
heavily with cheese from the massive Kraft factory at Champaign’s western limit, and it had wonderful expensive soft Har-Tru
courts of such a deep piney color that the flights of the fluorescent balls stayed on one’s visual screen for a few extra
seconds, leaving trails, which is also why the angles and hieroglyphs involved in butterfly drill seem important. But the
crux here is that butterflies are primarily a conditioning drill: both players have to get from one side of the court to the
other between each stroke, and once the initial pain and wind-sucking are over—assuming you’re a kid who’s in absurd shape
because he spends countless mindless hours jumping rope or running laps backward or doing star-drills between the court’s
corners or straight sprints back and forth along the perfect furrows of early beanfields each morning—once the first pain
and fatigue of butterflies are got through, if both guys are good enough so that there are few unforced errors to break up
the rally, a kind of fugue-state opens up inside you where your concentration telescopes toward a still point and you lose
awareness of your limbs and the soft shush of your shoe’s slide (you have to slide out of a run on Har-Tru) and whatever’s
outside the lines of the court, and pretty much all you know then is the bright ball and the octangled butterfly outline of
its trail across the billiard green of the court. We had one just endless rally and I’d left the planet in a silent swoop
inside when the court and ball and butterfly trail all seemed to surge brightly and glow as the daylight just plain went out
in the sky overhead. Neither of us had noticed that there’d been no wind blowing the familiar grit into our eyes for several
minutes—a bad sign. There was no siren. Later they said the C.D. alert network had been out of order. This was June 6, 1978.
The air temperature dropped so fast you could feel your hairs rise. There was no thunder and no air stirred. I could not tell
you why we kept hitting. Neither of us said anything. There was no siren. It was high noon; there was nobody else on the courts.
The riding mower out over east at the Softball field was still going back and forth. There were no depressions except a saprogenic
ditch along the field of new corn just west. What could we have done? The air always smells of mowed grass before a bad storm.
I think we thought it would rain at worst and that we’d play till it rained and then go sit in Antitoi’s parents’ station
wagon. I do remember a mental obscenity—I had gut strings in my rackets, strings everybody with a high sectional ranking got
free for letting the Wilson sales rep spray-paint a
W
across the racket face, so they were free, but I liked this particular string job on this racket, I liked them tight but
not real tight, 62-63 p.s.i. on a Proflite stringer, and gut becomes pasta if it gets wet, but we were both in the fugue-state
that exhaustion through repetition brings on, a fugue-state I’ve decided that my whole time playing tennis was spent chasing,
a fugue-state I associated too with plowing and seeding and detasseling and spreading herbicides back and forth in sentry
duty along perfect lines, up and back, or military marching on flat blacktop, hypnotic, a mental state at once flat and lush,
numbing and yet exquisitely felt. We were young, we didn’t know when to stop. Maybe I was mad at my body and wanted to hurt
it, wear it down. Then the whole knee-high field to the west along Kirby Avenue all of a sudden flattened out in a wave coming
toward us as if the field was getting steamrolled. Antitoi went wide west for a forehand cross and I saw the corn get laid
down in waves and the sycamores in a copse lining the ditch point our way. There was no funnel. Either it had just materialized
and come down or it wasn’t a real one. The big heavy swings on the industrial swingsets took off, wrapping themselves in their
chains around and around the top crossbar; the park’s grass got laid down the same way the field had; the whole thing happened
so fast I’d seen nothing like it; recall that Bi-mini H-Bomb film of the shock wave visible in the sea as it comes toward
the ship’s film crew. This all happened very fast but in serial progression: field, trees, swings, grass, then the feel like
the lift of the world’s biggest mitt, the nets suddenly and sexually up and out straight, and I seem to remember whacking
a ball out of my hand at Antitoi to watch its radical west-east curve, and for some reason trying to run after this ball I’d
just hit, but I couldn’t have tried to run after a ball I had hit, but I remember the heavy gentle lift at my thighs and the
ball curving back closer and my passing the ball and beating the ball in flight over the horizontal net, my feet not once
touching the ground over fifty-odd feet, a cartoon, and then there was chaff and crud in the air all over and both Antitoi
and I either flew or were blown pinwheeling for I swear it must have been fifty feet to the fence one court over, the easternmost
fence, we hit the fence so hard we knocked it halfway down, and it stuck at 45°, Antitoi detached a retina and had to wear
those funky Jabbar retina-goggles for the rest of the summer, and the fence had two body-shaped indentations like in cartoons
where the guy’s face makes a cast in the skillet that hit him, two catcher’s masks offence, we both got deep quadrangular
lines impressed on our faces, torsos, legs’ fronts, from the fence, my sister said we looked like waffles, but neither of
us got badly hurt, and no homes got whacked—either the thing just ascended again for no reason right after, they do that,
obey no rule, follow no line, hop up and down at something that might as well be will, or else it wasn’t a real one. Antitoi’s
tennis continued to improve after that, but mine didn’t.