Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

And how right they were! And how hopeful to think my own surviving children could enjoy some confident mysteries in life, and not fall prey to idiotic factualism or the indignity of endless explanation. I would protect them from it if I could. Divorce and dreary parenting have, of course, made that next to impossible, though day to day I give it my most honest effort.

To get a divorce in a town this size, I should say, is not the least bit pleasant — though it is easy, and in so many ways the town is made for it, appreciates it, and knows how to act by way of supplying “support groups” (a woman’s counseling unit called X the day of our settlement and invited her to a brown bag lunch at the library). Still, it is troubling to be a litigant in the building where you have gone to pay parking fines or retrieved stolen bikes, been supposed a solid citizen by stenos and beat cops. It leaves you with a bankrupt feeling, since the law here is not made to notice you or even to be noticed, only to give you respectable, disinterested sway. From what I hear, Las Vegas divorces are much better since no one notices anything.

Ours was the most amicable of partings. We could’ve stayed married, of course, and waited until things got better, but that was not what happened. Alan, X’s little lawyer with fragrant dreams of a rich entertainment practice — XKEs awaiting him on tarmacs, chorus girls with giant tits — huddled up with my big, slope-shouldered, bearded, ex-Peace Corps, ex-alcoholic Middlebury guy and, across a mahogany table in Alan’s office, struck a bargain in an hour. In principle I surrendered everything, though X didn’t want much. I kept this house in exchange for helping her buy hers with my half of the savings. I laid claim to the Block Island map and three or four other treasures. We agreed on “irreconcilable differences” as the theme for our appearance in court, then all trooped across the street together and sat chatting uncomfortably in the back until our case was called. And in less than another hour we were “done,” as they say in Michigan. X flew off with the children to a golf-and-swim holiday on Mackinac Island, to “open some space.” I drove home, got drunk as a monkey and cried until dark.

What else could I do? The cleansing ritual of strong fluids and hot, balming tears is all we have native to us. I looked around for some Rupert Brooke poems or a copy of The Prophet but couldn’t find them. Around eight, I stretched out on the couch, put a taped NBA slam-dunk contest on television, ate a pimento cheese sandwich, began to feel better and went to sleep watching Johnny. And my sleep, I remember, was one of the most sound and dreamless sleeps of my life — till eight-thirty the next day when I woke up hungry as a lion and as trusting to the future as a blind sky-diver.

Was I not alienated? Depressed? Ashamed? In need of violent cheering up? Schitzy? On the edge? My answer is, not much. Dreamy as Tarzan, perhaps. Lonely. Though in a way that I got over after while. But not chance’s victim. I got myself busy after breakfast, finishing up work on a six-pronged analysis of major-leaguers’ base stealing styles, and before I knew it I was back in the thick of things. Which is how it’s stayed. Bert Brisker told me that after his divorce he went crazy, broke into his ex-wife’s house while she was gone on vacation, threw bricks through the TV screen, slept in her bed and emptied cat shit in all her drawers. But that is not the way I felt. We can make too much of our misfortunes.

Ever since I was in the Marines (I was only in six months) I’ve been an early riser, and have done my best thinking then. I used to lie nervously in my bunk, wide awake, waiting for the reveille record, my mind thrumming, mapping out how I could do better that day, make the Marine Corps take notice and be proud of me; make myself less a victim of the funks and incongruities my fellow officer candidates were wrestling with, rise to rank quickly, and as a result help protect the lives of my men once we got situated over in Vietnam, where I felt they’d have a lot on their minds (like getting blown to smithereens). I had the advantage of an education, I thought, and I’d need to be their eyes and ears over and above the level they themselves could see and hear. I was an idiot, of course, but we’ve almost always wrong when we are young.

What I’d like to do as I lie here, and before the day burgeons into a glowing Easter, is put together some useful ideas about Herb, just a detail or two to act as magnets for what else will occur to me in the next days, which is the way good sportswriting gets done. You hardly ever just sit down and write it cold, staring at an empty yellow sheet expecting yourself to summon up every good idea you’ll have ready at the first moment. That can be the scariest thing in the world. Instead, what you try to do is honor your random instincts, catch yourself off guard, and write a sentence or an unexpected descriptive line — the way the air smelled one day, or how the wind lifted and tricked off the lake surface in a peculiar way that might later make the story inevitable. Once those notes are on record, you put them away and let them draw up an agenda of their own that you can discover later when you’re sorting through things just before the deadline, and it’s time to write.

Herb, though, is no easy nut to crack, since he’s obviously as alienated as Camus. It would’ve helped if I’d filed away one perception or recorded a quote, but I didn’t know what to say or think anymore than I know now. The way the air smelled or the wind shifted or what song was playing on the radio as we drove out, don’t seem to figure. Simple, declarative sentences just don’t exactly flock to big Herb’s aid. Everything is minor key, subjunctive and contingent. Herb Wallagher’s got his eye on the future these days (at least until his mood stabilizer wears through). Herb Wallagher has seen life from both sides (and doesn’t think much of either one). It would be easy for Herb Wallagher to take a dim view of life (if he wasn’t already as crazy as a road lizard).

The cheap-drama artists of my profession would, of course, make quick work of Herb. They’re specialists at nosing out failure: hinting a fighter’s legs as suspect once he’s over thirty and finally in his prime; reporting a hitter’s wrists are stiff just when he’s learned to go the opposite way and can help the team by advancing runners. They see only the germs of defeat in victory, venality in all human endeavor.

Sportswriters are sometimes damned bad men, and create a life of lies and false tragedies. In Herb’s case, they’d order up a grainy black-and-white fisheye of Herb in his wheelchair, wearing his BIONIC shirt and running shoes, looking like a caged child molester; take in enough of his crummy neighborhood to get the “flavor;” stand Clarice somewhere in the background looking haggard and lost like somebody’s abandoned slave out of the dustbowl, then start things off with: “Quo Vadis Herb Wallagher?” The idea being to make us feel sorry enough for Herb, or some idea of Herb, to convince us we’re all really like him and tragically involved, when in fact nothing of the kind is true, since Herb isn’t even a very likable guy and most of us aren’t in wheelchairs. (If I were paying salaries, those guys would be on the street looking for a living where they couldn’t do any harm.)

Though what can I write that’s better? I’m not certain. Some life does not give in to a sportswriter’s point of view. It ought to be possible to take a rear-guard approach, to look for drama in the concept of retrenchment, to find the grit of the survivor in Herb — something several hundred thousand people would be glad to read with a stiff martini on a Sunday afternoon before dinner (we all have our optimal readers and times), something that draws the weave of lived life tighter. It’s what’s next that I have to work on. Though in the end, this is all I ask for: to participate briefly in the lives of others at a low level; to speak in a plain, truth-telling voice; to not take myself too seriously; and then to have done with it. Since after all, it is one thing to write sports, but another thing entirely to live a life.