Late Hit

I.

My back resting against the shower’s cold tiles, I examined a trembling hand. Hoping not to see the same cuts my boarding school football coach wore on his every Monday. Coach Short died in his apartment the summer before junior year. By then I’d quit the team to repair a 2.3 GPA, get into a decent college, go to a better grad school. Live faraway. Life abroad requires the death of routines. Daily commutes, bathroom stalls of favorite clubs, conversations with family at familiar restaurants. The longer I spent as an outsider, the easier it was to ignore the importance of old habits. Despite distance, the past was fully realized when least expected. Short was found a week after his death. An unremarkable coach, he was my favorite sophomore year dorm parent. Showering then, I could hear him again, stumbling down the halls scatting to non-existent Jazz as Benny and I vaped weed from lightbulbs, and downed banana Percocets with Hennesy & Shweppes in our room. I heard him confusing the names of defensive plays. ‘Goat Strong!’ he’d yell from the sideline with an index finger to his eye. ‘Do you mean ‘One Eye?’ ‘That’s what I’m saying, you pack of queens, ‘one eye!’ Let’s get the lead out!’

One Eye was a favorite because it meant blitz. I suited up as a varsity tight end for half a season until the head coach interrupted his daughter Ilene-Maria and I making out, my lips cracked from adderall and vodka, in her cherry red Saab 900 after a dance. “I adopted her so she’d be above this.” He said to me in disgust the following Monday. Learning of my demotion to JV, Benny, who’d introduced us, had an orchid delivered to my 3rd period Algebra II class. Short switched me to defense for my size. I preferred pursuit, enjoyed freedom from the stress of getting yelled at by hundreds of shouting fans over a dropped pass. I got ejected for the late hit of a Salter Town quarterback during the JV homecoming game. My left shoulder pad hit the bottom of his facemask so hard that his helmet popped off like a failed bottle rocket, clumsily landing yards away from his bloody mouth guard and unconscious face. My mouth bled too, I tasted pennies while celebrating with a sturdy rendition of the Carlton dance.

A teeny white ref grabbed me by my facemask and hauled me off to a chorus of boos. I’m not sure whose. Short rushed the field to curse the ref out. Then came over to the patch of grass the ref had sat me on, far from my team’s bench, and lovingly said ‘Kid, you’re a dirty piece of shit.’ I don’t think I said anything in return before puking yellow Gatorade between my padded thighs. The adrenaline had escaped. Seated naked, except my helmet, on a locker room bench, I wiped tears from my eyes. Probably knowing it was my last season, helpless to the passage of time. We’d lost the homecoming game 23 - 20. Benny, already drunk in preparation for MCing that evening’s bonfire, gave me a kiss on the helmet.

16 in a southeastern Pennsylvania locker room to 33 and unemployed in a south London apartment. Distance only ever appreciated in moments of isolation. Standing at the toilet, watching the plastic seat slowly land in silence. When had I stopped appreciating how conveniently quiet toilet seat technology had become? My apartment, its quiet toilet seat, loud washing machine, heated drying rack, large bedroom window surveying the grassy rectangular backyard, was the first place I’d ever had to myself. My aunt in Essex knew a Trinidadian landlady who’d rented me the first floor of her home. I was 24 and getting my MA at the London School of Economics. My apartment in Upper Norwood, existed on the periphery of London. I had to take a bus to the overground to the underground just to reach the actual city. I’d expected to stay for no more than a year. After returning from Benny’s funeral in the US, familiarity crept in. An awareness of safety, permanence even. Moving to Ghana for her IMF role, the landlady lowered my monthly rate by £275 when I agreed to keep an eye on her Mercedes and her cat and her plants. I saw a future in the bare walls. I framed the few pieces of small artwork I’d bought from the Tate Modern. A year and half in, I replaced the broken spring and styrofoam mattress, with one made of latex and wool that cost £400. I’d stay.

II.

My dissertation ‘Mid to Late 20th Century Economic Failures of Post-British Colonial West Africa’ had excerpts reprinted in the department’s blog. My advisor wrote that ‘His numbers serve as convenient tools in making abstract moments in time digestible.’ These ‘moments’ weren’t ‘abstract’ to me. But, with her connections, by graduation I was offered a few $20-30K a year tenure track positions in the US. I was also offered an $80K research position at the investment firm in Canary Wharf where a cousin, the daughter of my Sierra Leonean aunt, worked. For 7 years I did research, and made arguments in favor of or against market trends forecasted by colleagues and competitors. Every summer, my cousin, her girlfriend, and I would go away together for the late August bank holiday long weekend. Greece, Italy, Spain, Morocco, anywhere inexpensive via RyanAir or EasyJet with enough alcohol and nightlife to remind us we remained reasonably young.

“You remember when we almost kissed?”

“We’ve kissed?”

Exhaling her cigarette between laughter. “Almost. I feel guilty, but we were teenagers.” She brushed a leaf off her knee.

Berlin for their friends’ wedding, me joining was an afterthought. But there I was, grateful to be included, sitting in the backyard of a club I'd stumbled through once before while traveling alone. Back then, 7 am with non-native English speakers, all using a swirl of passable English phrases about whatever drugs we had or needed. This go around, it was 1 am, and I was with family. Less eager for drugs than to share my news. “I’m going to quit.”

“And go home?” She grabbed her empty drink to gesture with it. “With him as president?”

I’d thought through this conversation a dozen times, in none of my practiced scenarios did it occur here. I’d drunkenly stumbled into a false opening. “No, not that.” I looked up, searching for words in the night. “I just don’t want to do what I’m doing.”

“Something happened?”

We hadn’t messaged as much as a ‘hello’ in over 5 years when I arrived in London. Her mother, our only real bond, was chasing a man. All the way back to Africa. We’d reunited excited to discover shared habits: we both drank easily, we both laughed too much. We grew dependent on the social satisfaction gained from making simple dinner plans with someone who also bore witness (22 years earlier) to our mothers snatching my father’s mistress by her hair out of his car. These were the memories that, if they even came up, were laughed away, but provided meaning and trust to our reunion. Now, she looked genuinely worried. Her eyes wet. I felt terrible for bringing this up while her girlfriend, my friend, her future wife, was away in a bathroom finding us more ketamine. “Nothing happened.” I lowered any urgency in my tone. “I think I’ve just had it. Days all the same with no goal.”

She interrupted what I was attempting to placate her with by punching me directly between my legs. She hadn't done this in 17 years. It was equally effective at 33 as 15. I fell off the plastic chair, it fell with me, laughing. Our grandfather was white. My cousin’s father was white, making her 75% white, and this sort of behavior completely understandable. Seconds after, her girlfriend arrived with the ketamine. Bless her heart, she ran over to me, me wincing in pain on the wet grass, and shoved a Narcan emergency treatment up my nose. “You’ll fucking live,” she whispered in my ear. My cousin cried laughing, unbothered by her cigarette dropping from her lips to the ground.

III.

Success had done nothing to soothe the pang of regret I felt whenever I met a nurse, teacher, engineer, journalist, art handler. Left explaining what I did with an apologetic tone. Wedding over, I stayed in Berlin an additional week. Day one I called in sick. On the third I quit. I’d no longer wake in fright at 5 am to check emails and make apologies for things I didn’t actually give a shit about to faces in cities which were nothing more than alternative times on a clock. I took my shirt off, a pre-season JV football penny which read ‘Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body,’ by the Spree river on day four, unconcerned with how out of shape I felt, and drank a cold hefeweizen while reading a former co-worker’s book of poetry. The line ‘Do you really think you’re happier than I’m telling you I feel?’ stuck out, and caused me to send her a laudatory text. After the first beer, I drank 2 more, continuing to read, enjoying each poem and beer more than the last, before having a nap. I woke with my penny missing, the book flat against my stomach. Nearly 9 pm and the sun had only just begun to set. I marveled at the Northern Hemisphere’s ability to hold its summer sun. Above me, a violet sky streaked with yellow and green like a bruise. I read a few more poems in the dwindling light with the remaining beers.

My phone vibrated as I stood up looking for a private place to piss. Lots of teens and twenty somethings were out, carousing and drinking and smoking, I couldn't find a tree isolated enough. I saw a young woman wearing my penny over a long sleeved shirt, but when I approached I felt too foreign and too old so turned away. Let her have it, I thought. I remembered a bar only a few blocks from there that had clean toilets and cheap beers. Dingy, the type to let me in shirtless. Then embarrassed by my fear of confrontation, I said something. “Did you play junior varsity football in America 20 years ago?”

She looked at me, confused.

I pointed to the penny and said, “Mine.”

Unsure, she said “Thank you.”

“No, that’s mine.” This went on for another minute until a male friend, probably the one who’d stolen it, came over and told me he didn’t “want any trouble.” I imagined he’d heard this phrase growing up on American movies. More forcefully, I repeated that it was mine and that I needed it now. Seeming to finally understand, or deciding to stop pretending not to, they both looked at one another and he helped her take it off. They handed it to me apologetically, soft and unknowable German followed the gesture. Emboldened by this small victory, I curtseyed.

Unemployed back home, the past asked for me by name in dreams of memories: Benny and I smoking cigarettes on the roof of the abandoned jazz club where someone had been stabbed a year before it had caught on fire. We weren’t teens but 30 somethings. Between dreams, I stared towards youthful exploits, faintly illuminated along the ceiling, until my eyes grew heavy. When I woke again he was gone, again. I stared up at the spot where he’d only just existed. Dull light crept in at the curtain’s edges, London outside the window, never fully known, frustratingly familiar like an old song half remembered. The clouded city had opened itself years earlier, there’d been no great sense of accomplishment. Time to time I recall additional notes with some satisfaction.