“Strange days have found us,” Jim Morrison sang the last time things felt anything like this. “Strange days have tracked us down.”
One evening last week I played a tennis match with a guy I’d just met. I was eager to play him. He and I were paired by a mutual tennis buddy because we play a similar style—all baseline, all hustle. So I knew we’d both get a huge workout from a ferocious match.
The guy is a Chicago public high school language teacher, that’s all I knew about him. I’m a writer, that’s all he knew about me. (During warm-ups, he asked me what kind of writer I am. I told him, “All kinds.”)
We played a ferocious first set, indeed. I won. And then a ferocious second set. He won.
As we drank water and gathered ourselves in the gathering twilight for the decisive third set, he asked me what I think about how things are going—you know, just with everything.
What?
I was tempted to say like Ruth in the TV series Ozark, “I don’t know shit about fuck.”
Instead I just shook my head, held up my hands and shrugged. So he kept asking. What did I think about all the shit going on in the city? With the protests and the looting and everything. (He heard the gangs have decided just to shoot cops on sight.) {And all the other shit that’s going on, in Kenosha.} And Trump is basically legitimizing all the shit!
I couldn’t tell what he was getting at, let alone side he was on. I tried to signal which side I’m on, if only to get back to the match, as the twilight was turning into gloaming. I told him the gangs aren’t organized enough anymore to make a blanket order to kill the police, and added that their lack of organization is part of the problem. When my wife started teaching on the West side in the mid-1990s, the gangs would call her elementary school and warn the principal not to let the kids out for recess because there was some shooting planned for that day.
(All the while, shouting over my own mind, which was demanding to know, What the fuck kind of conversation was this for strangers to be having between tennis sets?)
These days, I continued, the gangs are every street-corner-punk for himself. I was trying to demonstrate (and promote) a deep and hardbitten understanding among city people who have long realized that city shit is complicated. I’m used to having conversations like this with people from Naperville; not Chicago Public School teachers. (And not between sets!)
“But you know about all this,” I added. “You’re a teacher.”
Yeah, he said, but he teaches at a school on the Northwest Side—in a neighborhood that’s a famous enclave for cops and firemen who have to live in the city but who can’t afford to live in the high-rent white neighborhoods and don’t want to live in low-rent Black neighborhoods. So this teacher’s idea of diversity is Polish kids and a few Mexican kids. (He loves the diversity!) But things are just getting out of control in the city. And it seems like any minute, the city could just explode.
I didn’t disagree with him there. Honestly, I didn’t disagree with him at all, because he never quite managed to say anything I could disagree with.
(And really, it was getting dark.)
I couldn’t tell whether he was feeling me out, to see if I was some kind of liberal queer, or a regular guy. It actually felt more like he was honestly babbling out his upset and confusion, and seeking some answers from me. Because I am a writer? Because I seem like a smart guy? Because I am a new guy in his life? Because he doesn’t get out much? Because none of us get out much anymore?
And answers to what questions? Is it ever okay to be mad at Black people, or is it only okay to be mad at Trump? Is it okay to be mad in general? Is it okay just to be scared? Is it okay to consider moving out of Chicago? (Not if you want to keep that Chicago Public Schools pension, pal.) Is it okay to shit, wind your wristwatch, go blind?
I really should have just told him, “I don’t know shit about fuck.”
Instead, I said, “What can I tell ya?” And I walked out on the court silently determined to focus on the only thing I could control, which was to beat the guy in the third set.
And so I did. We bumped elbows in darkness.
And as we parted in the parking lot of nonprofit tennis club—(which stands, more or less incidentally, in the demolished footprint of what were some of the most notorious public housing projects on the south side of Chicago, and exists to provide “Chicago’s underserved youth with an enriching safe-haven and positive pathway to college”)—my tennis partner said maybe we should get beers next time.
I’ve either got to get out of that, or I’ve got to better prepared than I was for this.
I share the conversation with you because I feel like I am having it all the time these days.
And depending on who I’m talking to? Sometimes I’m me, and sometimes I’m the other guy.
Just a couple weeks ago, for instance, I sent this email to a Black friend the morning after we’d hosted him for some social-distancing beers in my backyard:
It occurred to me after you left that I talked too much and listened too little, put forth too many theories and asked not enough questions.
Now, that happens every single time I socialize with anybody—but I’m a little regretful it happened last night.
I also think it must be goddamn exhausting to be a one-man focus group for every Tom, Dick and Murray who wants to talk BLM and the history of American racism.
I forgive myself, of course—I’ve felt so pent-up, I’ve spent so much time talking to mostly white people about these things; and I truly value your thinking, and your writing too—but if you felt last night was as much of a job as it was a pleasure, I am sorry about that.
If I can forgive myself, I guess must offer the benefit of the doubt to the other guy, too.
“And through their strange hours, we linger alone, bodies confused, memories misused, as we run through the day to the strange night of stone.”
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