If Rock and Roll Were a Machine (15 page)

Jerry walked into the court and offered Bert his towel. Bert took off his safety glasses and dried his face, then he dried the glasses.

“You look a little pale, Jer,” Scotty said. “Want me to call 911?”

Jerry raised his head and smiled. “Kid's rendering me down” was his reply.

Bert called Jerry by name when he thanked him for the use of his towel. He walked to the door, tossed the towel onto Jerry's workout bag, snugged the door shut, and took position to receive service.

Scotty leaned into the corner where the railing meets the wall separating the courts. He smiled and shook his head as Jerry's lob bounced off the receiving line and crawled down the side wall where Bert was not able to peel it off.

8–4.

One of the great things about this sport, Scotty was reminded again, is that you don't have to be an athlete to play it. Whack the ball, chase after it, whack it again. Hard to beat that for a good time. Jerry was nearly fifty years old and more than fifty pounds overweight, and here he was playing a kid a third his age and having the time of his life. And he'd win too—provided he didn't die.

Bert Bowden was not having the time of his life down there. He returned a couple serves, but his shots were wild. Everything was bouncing right back to Jerry's forehand, and Jerry was putting it away.

Scotty could see the boy's misdirected energy boiling off and leaving him brittle with frustration. Bert was trying hard, but he wasn't trying hard at the right things. He was quick and his hand–eye coordination was good. He
just needed to learn the game. And he needed to loosen up and have some fun down there. The poor kid was tight as a clutch spring.

The score was 12–5 when Scotty had seen enough. He felt bad for Bert, but he was also proud of him. The kid had played shitty and got murdered, but he'd kept his temper. Sometimes there was nothing tougher for a guy to do. This was a compliment Scotty could pay the boy.

The score was 12–5 when Bert told himself he would hit no more backhands. He didn't care where the ball was, he would not hit another backhand. He'd take it to the back wall with his forehand and hope it carried to the front. The book called this a desperation shot, and Bert was desperate.

Bert was more than desperate. All that was keeping him from unraveling was this desire that Scotty not see it happen.

Bert watched the serve arc toward him. It was perfect, of course, like every other shot this fat asshole had made the whole match. Well, maybe it wasn't quite perfect. It bounced off the side wall harder than usual, and there was room to swing. And Bert swung with all his might. A forehand that rocketed the ball into the back wall from less than three feet away, and right back into his face.

Jerry moved faster getting to Bert than he'd moved all match. Bert stood in the corner with his head down,
his safety glasses in his gloved hand, rubbing the bridge of his nose with the other. “Where'd it get you?” Jerry asked.

“My glasses caught most of it,” Bert said. “I'm all right.” He looked down at the ball. It was a perfect light blue. The blue of the oceans as they were painted on the globes in each classroom of the Susan B. Anthony Elementary School a long time ago. A dust bunny, like a wisp of cloud, clung to it where North America would have been if it had been the earth and Bert had been looking down from space. He picked up the blue ball and handed it to Jerry. “Your point,” he said.

Bert looked up at the railing, but Scotty wasn't there. He breathed deep, put his glasses back on, and positioned himself to receive service.

“Thirteen serving five.”

Bert let the serve bounce twice, caught it, and flipped it to Jerry. Why even try? He couldn't hit the fucking thing. He did the same with the last serve. “Thanks for the game,” he said.

Bert left the court without shaking hands. He closed the door with Jerry still inside. It was a busy time at the club, but Bert was alone at this moment. He walked to the doorway that led to the locker rooms and swung his racquet against the metal edge of the door frame. The racquet cracked, but didn't break. Bert hit it twice more until it collapsed into the shape of the number 3. He looked at the twisted strand of Kevlar wrapped in the
web of nylon. This amalgamation of synthetics had cost two hundred dollars of the money he'd received from the Sportster.

Bert threw the wreckage to the floor. But he'd forgotten that the safety cord was still looped around his wrist. The shattered frame hit him just above the knee and opened the skin. He ripped the cord from his wrist and his glove flew off with it. He threw again.

What remained of Bert's racquet bounced high, and Scott Shepard caught it as he walked out of the locker room. Scotty was standing at the doorway, close enough for the blood to spatter across his
TEAM EKTELON
shirt, when Bert gripped the door frame with both hands and brought his head down against the edge.

Scotty dropped the racquet, took two handfuls of Bert's blue sweat-soaked Lacoste shirt, lifted him into the air, and plastered him against the wall.

Blood flowed down the front of Bert's head, and a knob began to rise on the back. The sound of his head meeting the wall was what captured his attention. It resonated, like the sounds inside a racquetball court. Bert felt no pain. Not yet. The pain from the front and the pain from the back met above his ears and dulled each other. Scotty's face was so close it was all Bert could see.

Scotty spoke only loud enough for Bert to hear. “You've got a decision to make,” he said. “You need to find a way to earn your own respect, Bert, and you need to find it fast.”

Scotty held Bert against the wall.
They were eye to eye. Blood covered one side of Bert's face now and had begun dripping off his chin onto Scotty's arms. This is what the aerobics women saw as they came walking down the corridor, their voices and laughter bright as their outfits, their steps as light as if they'd been on their way to class instead of to the showers. They froze. It was as though they were seeing an accident they weren't sure had run its course.

Then Rita pushed through. “Scott!” she said. She clamped both her hands around Scotty's wrist. “Scott,” she said up at him. “Scott.”

Scotty let Bert slide down the wall until his shoes met the carpet. He turned to Rita. “It's a head cut,” Scotty said. “Not much damage, lot of blood.”

Scotty put his arm around Bert's shoulders and pulled him close. Bert's blue shirt was purple with blood now. Rita let go of Scotty's wrist. Scotty asked her if she'd run upstairs and get some tape and gauze and a scissors. Rita nodded. She smiled and touched Bert's forehead on the unbloody side. When the women saw Rita's posture relax they relaxed as well and filed through the doorway to their locker room.

“Let's sit right down here on the floor, Bert,” Scotty said. “I've got something else to say.”

They both leaned against the wall and let themselves slide down. The back of Bert's shirt left a shiny track. They sat on the floor near the door to court one as bodybuilders, aerobics people, and
racquetball players walked past. Everybody looked down at the bloody kid. Neither Scotty nor Bert looked up.

“Bert,” Scotty said not much louder than he'd spoken before, “if you need some help you've got to ask for it. If you want help with racquetball, I'll help you. And so will ninety-eight percent of the men and women who play here. Racquetball, whatever,” he said.

“Go shower up now,” Scotty said, “then I'll look at the cut. When you're home tonight I want you to think of the one thing in the world you'd respect yourself most for being able to do, and then I want you to decide what the first step is on the way to doing it.”

Bert nodded his head. All he could think of now was that he couldn't stand his life.

Scotty bent forward on his hands and knees, then raised his hips and pushed himself up with his arms. The metal rods in his old-fashioned knee braces strained against the leather and made it squeak. He reached for Bert's hand and pulled him up. Rita arrived with the first-aid stuff as Scotty gave Bert a light shove toward the showers.

Scotty was waiting by the sinks. He sat on the counter and examined Bert's head under the fluorescent lights above the mirror. Bert had a towel around his waist, but it came untucked and slipped to the floor. Scotty was holding his head, so Bert didn't stoop to reach the towel. He was naked and about as close to Scotty as one person can get to another.
He thought he should feel self-conscious, but he didn't.

Scotty pinched the skin closed with the fingers of one hand while he taped three thin strips across the cut. Then he taped a gauze pad over it. “That ought to keep you from bleeding to death until you get stitched,” he said. “It's my opinion, Bert, that you could use a scar.”

*  *  *

Bert stood at the foot of his cot and looked into the little mirror on the wall. Eight black stitches laced the right side of his forehead from a little below his hairline down toward the middle of his eyebrow. He would have a scar, all right.

A quarter inch of thread stuck out of the lowest stitch like a mutant hair. Bert touched it with the tip of his index finger. It was thick and coarse and hard. It made him think of the scene in
The Fly
where Geena Davis discovers the insect hairs on Jeff Goldblum's back.

Bert lay in the dark and listened to the fire pop in the stove. He thought of what Scotty had told him. Bert didn't need to ruminate for even a second about the thing in the world he would most respect himself for being able to do. The answer lay on the surface of his thoughts like crude oil on an Alaska beach. Bert wanted to beat that sonofabitch Gary Lawler at racquetball.

It wasn't much of an ambition, but it was the truth. Bert liked writing, and maybe he'd write something when he got old. But what he'd wanted his whole conscious life was to be a good athlete,
and it would take a good athlete to beat Lawler.

And what was the first step down this path? It was getting some help. It was finding someone who knew the way. It was asking Scott Shepard to coach him.

Bert's first racquetball lesson took
place on the old couch in the back of the shop at Shepard's Classic and Custom after a workday so busy nobody had time to eat. Saturdays were always busy but Saturdays in winter were really crazy because of the number of bikers who rebuilt while the days were short, the nights long, and the weather hostile. As Bert wrote up orders for Superblend main bearings, low-compression pistons and Stellite valves, swing-arm pivot oil seals, and Norton Isolastic shims, he wished he had a bike to work on. But Bert's commitment for this winter was racquetball, and when he returned from McD's with their six fishwiches, he and Scotty sat down on the old couch and focused on Scotty's clipboard.

“Okay,” Scotty said. He touched the tip of his pencil to the photocopied drawing of the floor of a racquetball court. “We're gonna start to learn this game by considering the court and where to position ourselves to best advantage.” He moved the pencil as he talked.

“The game is played inside a box forty feet long, twenty wide, and twenty high. All surfaces are in play.” Scotty took a swig of his Coke. The eight-ounce bottle was tiny in his hand. “Ball comes off the front wall, side wall, ceiling, back wall.
It comes from everywhere and at various speeds. We can't control where the ball comes from. But since we know where the ball's going most of the time, we try to control that position on the court.”

Bert took a chomp of fishwich. A glob of tartar sauce landed on the court with a soft splat. He made a sheepish face and wiped it off with a napkin.

Scotty looked down. He circled the grease spot, which was equidistant between the side walls and a little back of the receiving line. “We know that the majority of shots bounce right back here.” He tapped the pencil in the center of the circle. “Center court, a step back of the receiving line.” He looked up again. His face and his voice hardened. “You serve the ball, and you relocate on this spot. You return the ball—no matter where you are on the court—and you get your ass back to this spot. Sure, sometimes the other guy is gonna hit an excellent shot, and you might get to it if you're standin' up by the wall. Sometimes the guy's gonna kill it, too, but you can't return those because they're not hittable. Most of the time the guy is going to leave the ball up.” Scotty's voice softened now. “And where's that ball gonna come bouncin'?”

Bert tapped his finger in the center of the grease spot.

“You bet your boots,” Scotty said. “And then you're gonna put it away.”

Scotty went to work with the pencil again. “Something you've gotta do that goes right along with position,” he said, “is watch your opponent.” He made an
O
in the back left corner of the court. “This is your opponent,” he said. He made a
B
inside the greasy circle. “This is you—the Big B.”

Bert smiled. This information was not new to him. He'd read it in
Strategic Racquetball
. But everything was different now. Now he had a coach to focus it for him. If you had a coach you trusted, you could give up your responsibility for the zillions of things there were to think about and just concentrate on what he told you. You could focus all your attention, all your strength and energy on that. He took you step by step down the path. The path led to a field of play where you were on your own, but if you'd been well coached, you were ready.

Bert heard the squeak of the shop van's brakes, and in a minute Rita was pushing through the back door. She held a racquet in her hand. She flipped it to Bert, then she took off her leather jacket and scarf.

Bert held up the racquet. “What's this?”

“That's Rita's racquet,” Scotty said. “Grab hold.”