Hobo Love

In June of 2002, I packed up my small studio apartment in Boston, MA and headed south down the Interstate-95 corridor. What was supposed to be a 10 hour drive ended up being closer to 15 for reasons that I cannot quite remember, and by the time I arrived amidst the sunny pastures of North Carolina, it was too late to check into a hotel and too early to pick up the key to my new apartment. Thus, my first night in the Carolinas was the 3 hour nap I took in the parking lot of the Kroger Grocery store. My first night as a hobo was rather uneventful compared to my second night as a hobo, which would take place about a year later when I was flat broke and sleeping on the floor of an airport some 50 miles outside of London, but that’s a story for another day. What my two hobo moments shared in common was that they both took place in a completely unfamiliar environment, where the nearest familiar face was hundreds of miles away. I literally knew no one.

Of course, the prospect of knowing no one was not altogether unfamiliar to me. As a child, I bounced around from school to school and was forced to make new friends everywhere I went. I went to one school for nursery and switched to another for kindergarten. First and second grade was spent at a third school, while third, fourth, and fifth were spent at a fourth school. My fifth school took care of sixth, seventh, and eight grades. The longest time I’ve ever spent at the same institution of learning was my sixth and seventh schools – high school and college – each of which spanned 4 years. Indeed, even my tenure at an eighth school – graduate school – was completed in only 3 years, after which I’ve technically been enrolled in a ninth school for the past year, though I am yet to take any continuing education classes there. Point is, after nine new beginnings, solving strangerdom becomes old hat. More out of historical necessity than for the sake of anything else, I’ve grown pretty good at making friends when needed.

Historically, I’ve always been the one leaving my friends. However, this has not been the case since I’ve moved down to North Carolina. Every summer for the past five summers, people whose company I’ve come to enjoy and value have moved away from me. Indeed, each and every person that I may have called a significant friend, with only one exception, has moved elsewhere, or will this summer. Part of it, I suspect, has to do with my age. Many people my age are starting new careers or transitioning between careers, which often entails changing location. Part of it, I suspect, has to do with geography. I now live within The Triangle created by the 3 large research universities nearby. Many people just come down here to get their degree and are happy to start their “real lives” elsewhere. Most people I come into contact with these days, then, including those whom I befriend, are transients. Ironic, then, that it is in this place bereft of any interpersonal stability that I would decide to finally take root.

Reflecting upon the friends that have come into and out of my life, I wonder if I’ve let some of them go too easily. I’ve always accepted the fact that I’m much better at making friends than I am at keeping them. I am apparently completely devoid of all of the skills necessary for maintaining long distance friendships – remembering birthdays and anniversaries, sending out news of marginally important life events, and the ever popular calling-just-to-say-hello. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever in my life called someone just to say hello. The effect of this has been that when I move away, or when people move away from me, goodbyes really tend to be goodbyes. I used to think that this was the case due to some personality defect of mine, but I now wonder if it’s rather a matter of philosophy.

This week at Sunday school (yes, I realize it’s strange that I attend Sunday school while not actually attending church or even being Christian for that matter, but I’ve found that such an arrangement suits me quite well), the minister lectured about the virtue of chastity. I didn’t care for much of what he said, but one point really did resonate. He suggested, contrary to what I was expecting, that the problem with America today was not that there was too much sex, but too little of it. That is to say, our sexuality was intended to be a broad-ranging drive which permeated all aspects of our lives. The real perversion of sexuality, then, is to confine it to the mere act of congress and it is this narrow portrayal found everywhere you look which is, so to speak, poisoning the water we drink. The Greeks, who, mind you, were naked all the time, believed that love existed in many forms including familial, sexual, charitable, and that between friends. True love, we say, is to be found in a committed sexual relationship between a man and woman and behind closed doors. Think of how many times we use the phrase ‘I love you’ and how many of those times are limited to romantic/sexual relationships. Maybe we’d all be healthier if we freed love from the bedroom, or romance in general, and let it breathe out in the open, where it could contribute positively to all aspects of our lives, more like the Greeks (though they may have taken it too far, honestly). While the minister did not mention this (and I’ve probably already butchered his lecture to pieces), I would like to add that in the story of the Fall, the first thing Adam and Eve did was clothe their nakedness, or hide their sexualities. Maybe that is something we still need to overcome.

Part of the problem with the way we think about love, I suspect, is that we have bought into the notion that love as a commodity is, to borrow a term from economics, rivalrous, which is to say that the more we give one person, the less we’ll have left over for others. But even if we assume that love exists in fixed quantity in the manner described above, would it be an altogether bad fate to have expended all the love one was given? I mean, consider the alternative - how much worse off would you be to be standing at the gates of your death, like the William H. Macy character in Magnolia, repeatedly saying, “But I have so much love (left) to give!” Maybe I’ve been guilty of putting my love on the shelf and waiting for just the right moment to use it.

But now, I’m a new man. It's no longer just about making new friends to replace the ones that I already have. It's about taking love off the shelf and allowing it to permeate my entire existence and broadening my conception of the creative drive of attraction to include even platonic relationships. Take heed new and old friends alike, this hobo is coming to a town near you, and I’m bringing my bucket of love and I plan on sharing liberally, and maybe this way we'll each find our way to salvation.

Happy Donkey Day

Today is the 27th anniversary of the day of my birth. Though I'm not one to make a big celebration of such things, I do love cake and I'd like to share some of my favorite flourless chocolate variety with my readers. Look, there's even enough for everyone.



Also, I wanted to post this video, but couldn't think of a good reason to do so, but since it's my birthday, I guess I can do it for no reason at all. The video does have a donkey and there is a bit about souls, so if nothing else, it will fit in thematically to what we've got going on so far. Enjoy!

Can't Knock the Hustle

Over the past nearly-27 years, I’ve sustained my fair share of injuries while playing sports. Some of these injuries were unavoidable and would have befallen anyone in my position. Others, however, were the direct result of a self-created desire to be the “hustle guy.” The hustle guy is the player that does the little stuff necessary to help his team win – in baseball, his uniform is always dirty from diving all over the place; in basketball, his body is bruised from playing hard-nosed defense; in hockey, he’s the guy without any teeth. Some examples of hustle guys I grew up emulating were Mets second baseman Wally Backman and Knicks forward Charles Oakley. And though he’s before my time, the prototypical example, of course, is Pete Rose, whose gritty play earned him the well-deserved moniker “Charlie Hustle.”

A little note on the psychology of the hustle guy: they do not hustle because they want to, they hustle because they have to. That is to say, hustle guys tend to be people that were not given the gift of natural athleticism. Instead, they must manufacture faux-athleticism with some concoction of sweat, gritty determination, and quite often an utter disregard for the safety of their own bodies. If hustle guys had a natural grace about them – think of the way Ken Griffey, Jr used to lope after balls in center field, the effortlessness of Will Clark’s swing, or the way Clyde “the Glide” Drexler would soar through the air – someone somewhere along the pipeline would have told these kids to stop putting their bodies in harm’s way. But the hustle guys were never handled with kid gloves like that. Instead, their psyches were hardened by being kept so dangerously close to the fire of failure. As a hustle guy will tell you, leave grace for those other guys, because there’s nothing graceful about picking grass out of your teeth, or, better yet, just leaving it there.

To take an example from my own life, when I was in 6th grade, my middle school threw together a boys basketball team. My friends convinced me to play, even though I had hardly ever played basketball. Due in part to my inexperience, I could not dribble the ball and my jumpshot reflected only the vaguest apprehension of the purpose of the game, namely to direct the ball into, or at least in the generally direction of, the hoop. Still, because I was willing to work my butt off on defense, I, quite remarkably really, earned a starting spot as a four-guard. You likely have never heard of the position. That’s because my coach created the position, tailored it to my unique skill set (or lack thereof), and instructed me to “on defense, find the opposing team’s best ball handler and stop him, and on offense, stay the heck out of the way.” This arrangement was just fine with me. Defense was a largely thankless endeavor which comported quite nicely with my notion of the hustle guy. I stuck to the other teams point guard like white on rice. I was playing defense on him wherever he was on the court – half-court, three-quarters court, full-court, wherever. Heck, I was playing defense on him even when MY TEAM had the ball! I’m sure opposing point guards had never seen anything like it.

Indeed, there’s a certain rituality that comes along with being a hustle guy. Over the ensuing 15 years since middle school, I’ve developed some respectable offensive skills which allow me to participate, even contribute, on the offensive end, but I still play defense like I did in 6th grade. If you’ve ever seen me play, this will explain to you why I seem to run a one-man-full-court- press all the time, regardless of the circumstances, even if no one is back there helping me trap the ball handler. I’m sure people must have wondered what I was doing. I doubt that any how-to manual will suggest that you expend 95% of your energy on defense, but it’s how I was taught to play. It’s become a ritual, one that persists irrespective of my skill level. And that is part and parcel of being a hustle guy. The circumstances are irrelevant. If you’re going to play, you’re going to go all out. This means running out every ground ball, diving after every loose ball, playing hard defensively even if you’re getting blown out, and going all out, even at practice. Joe DiMaggio, who was too talented to be called a hustle guy, once remarked about his hard play, “There is always some kid who may be seeing me for the first or last time, I owe him my best.” I suppose that the same should hold true, even when no one is watching.

Still, hustle guys inevitably realize that hustling all those years takes its toll on one’s body, and that all the bumps and bruises, nicks and cuts, even the small ones, have a cumulative effect. After playing through countless ankle sprains, I finally went to see a physical therapist a couple of years ago. After examining my swollen left ankle, he said, “This thing is a mess. Let’s see the good one.” But after he saw my right ankle he said, “Holy crap! This one’s worse!” Apparently, “playing through” makes soup of the tendons in one’s ankle. Who knew. Still, that episode pales in comparison to the time I broke my wrist playing pickup basketball. Sure, it hurt, but that was no reason to stop playing. And you might say, and rightfully so, why would you keep playing if it was just a pickup game – nothing was really on the line? Fair enough. But I would reply, where I come from, if you can walk, you can play, and if it hurts, rub some dirt on it. And besides, I’d remind you that it was the wrist of my non-shooting hand. And we’d both have a point. Eventually, I’d go to the hospital and have my arm set in a cast for 6 weeks, but not before I finished the game I started. Pete Rose would be proud.

Still, I can’t help but feel as though this Charlie Hustle may have met his demise this weekend. I recently joined a church league softball team, which has been holding practice the past 3 Saturdays. Of course, I went to practice, and, of course, I busted my tail like it was Game 7 of the World Series. I was diving after balls in the gap, running out groundballs, and trying to take an extra base at every opportunity. In my last at bat, I got on top of a ball and bounced sharply to the shortstop. Most people would go through the motions and jog to first. Not me. I had it in my mind that I was going to beat out the throw to first. So at the end of a long day of practice under the Carolina sun, and after playing basketball for two and a half hours the night before and neither stretching after basketball nor before softball, I bust it out of the box. I’m digging down the line, really have my wings on, trying to make it a close play at first. Then, just as I’m making my lunge for the bag, I feel, in the back of my left leg, a sudden pop. As I’m lying next to the bag, the girl that was playing first base, comes over and asks, “Are you OK?” And briefly forgetting that I am not prone to profanity and momentarily losing sight of the fact that this is indeed a church league, and to no one in particular and not necessarily in response to her question, I drop the F-Bomb, which pretty well summarized how I felt at that moment.

As I’m lying there for the next minute, I have myself convinced first that I’ve torn my hamstring to smithereens, then that I’m not hurt at all, and finally, that I can keep playing. This is actually the natural thought progression in these situations. Unfortunately, my theory that it was just a cramp doesn’t last much past my realization that I can’t walk off the field. And in the unlikely event that someone ever stabbed me in the back of the leg with a knife as I ran to first base, I imagine that it would feel exactly like this, which in turn signals to me that I cannot, in fact, keep playing. But the sad part is not that I got hurt - it’s what occurred after I got hurt. First, an old guy comes up to me and says, apparently speaking from experience, “Oh boy, once your hamstring starts going, you know you’re getting old.” Second, I have the realization that I’ve managed to injure myself playing the non-contact sport of softball, the rules of which were specifically designed so that even old people would not hurt themselves. Third, when my coach comes over to check on me, I confess, “Well, maybe it serves me right, trying to beat out an infield hit at softball practice.” And that’s when I realized, here amongst all these old guys with pads on this and that, braces on every joint, and slow and purposeful gaits, that softball fields are where Charlie Hustles go to grow old and die.

I’ve been limping around town for the past 4 days and I’m not quite sure how long it will be until I can run again. Two weeks? A month? Whatever the case, I know it will be sooner if I resign myself to playing the game like an old person, which I guess I’ll have to do sooner rather than later, if I haven’t already made the transition in my mind. I suppose it’s too late in life to cultivate a Clyde Drexler-esque grace. Does old age befall a person that quickly? Somehow I always imagined it would take longer than the three or four seconds it takes to run the 60 feet between home and first. But that’s how quickly it happened. Still, even after admitting to myself that maybe I’m too old for this, even as Charlie Hustle is hanging up his spikes for the last time, I can’t shake that faint, raspy, defiant voice inside me…

Just rub some dirt on it.