Obsession

The snow had been falling for nearly an hour, glittering in the dim light, and my feet were beginning to lose their grip on the slippery patches where the ball had tamped down the snow. I'd be called into the house soon for supper and probably be asked to go down to the cellar and shovel some coal into the furnace or bring up some potatoes from a fifty pound burlap sack down there. Just one more shot, one more. I wasn't going to leave until I swished it. The ball had to get through the rim without touching it. And it was oddly satisfying when the ball passed through the net, making a sound comparable to the rubbing of my cordurow pants legs as I moved around in the cold weather. Like one who buys lottery tickets (which, by the way, didn't actually exist back then), I just stayed in the game hoping for that one big payoff. I wasn't going to go back in the house till it was done. I wasn't going to mope my way through the evening, thinking what might have been.

Such was my obsession with the game. I was OCD about it. If I was going to loop a hook shot from the right side, then my next move had to be a layup from the left, and so on. I made up little mini-games in my head. You were always reaching, trying to get better. It was built into the game, with its paradigm of outstretched arms and legs, climbing the air spider-like towards an ethereal goal.

Basketball was all around me. This town danced to the beat of swishes, dribbles and rebounds and the cheers from spectators witnessing these feats. I had to be a part of this.

Basketball players in my town were treated like royalty. In the corner store, on the court at the playground, wherever people would meet, the talk would always come around to what Miller and Superka were doing in last night's game. They, along with other players on the high school team, had led the Rough Riders to state finals and semi-finals throughout the sixties, with Miller ending up on Parade magazine's top five high school hoops players in the country, and then going pro. It was the game of kings, and I was proud to be associated with it in my own small way, though I was just a knave.

Knave that I was, I was not without my signature move, a layup that confounded opponents as it was virtually unstoppable. It was one of the few tricks I had up my short sleeves. I learned it from Kevin Deutsch. It involved a bit of trickery, a fake, a delay, tucking the ball into the ribcage on the ascent to the basket only to release it at the final moment, later than you would in a conventional layup. The opposing player, expecting a traditional layup would time his jump to block accordingly, but by the time I was putting the ball up to the basket, he was already descending. It worked like a charm, and it really did become my charm, winning me some hard earned respect amongst other players my age. I'd see them shake their heads in disgust after each deployment of this secret weapon.

My obsession with basketball really kicked into high gear when Gary Bennett, whose dad owned a sporting goods store in the next town over, said he could supply a rim complete with netting if only I could provide a place to put it. I put my father on the case and had him follow some rough specs I'd drawn up to produce a backing board with some 1x's nailed together. I then instructed him to mount it regulation height of ten feet on the apex of our garage above the overhead door. The whole operation precipitated a major coup in the local sporting world, turning it on its head, and making me the man to talk to if you wanted some extra practice time away from the big courts at the playground.

The basket, hanging high, stood as a beacon for kids from all over town, drawing them in. It was my Field of Dreams moment, and I bathed in its glow. I would arrive home some days, only to find a pick up game in progress involving amateur atheletes from other parts of town, guys I didn't even know. It put our garage on the map. No grousing from neighbors, nor the uneven paving, was going to stem the tide. They came in waves, looking for basketball gold.

It was where I spent some of the high points of my youth, throwing a ball at a ring in the sky. In a sense, basketball was therapy, and a basketball was on my hypothetical desert island packing list.

The area was bounded on one side by a big old barn, the kind you'd see in the country with "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco" painted on it, only this one was right in the middle of town, right next to my kingdom of hoops. If I could have declared eminent domain, this barn would have been razed. In executing a fade away jump shot, we'd slam ourselves backward into the side of the barn. There was a continuation of the door track overhanging the edge of the barn by about three feet, just enough to get in the way of a perfectly good shot from the far right corner.

On the opposite side, there was a pavement drop-off where the driveway met the walkway to the house. The odds were very good that the ball would hit this ledge at just the exact angle to propel it away towards the neighbor's parked car, or worse into the territory of Blackie, Blackie the terrible, Blackie the near rabid mongrel dog the color of night, the nightmare of all our basketball dreams.

Blackie's eyes pierced our souls like the magnifying glass we used to concentrate the sun's rays when frying ants. He policed his turf, held back only by a chain that glided along a wash line. He was the model for all junkyard dogs to follow, actually dogged in his pursuit of us. He'd lunge, he'd jerk, he'd feint to one side then go to another, not unlike a basketball player. We hated to see our own actions mirrored by the troublesome canine. His turf was potholed with his own diggings that were deviously just the right size in which a basketball could lodge. We had to create diversions by teasing the wretched beast on one end of the chain's length while another player would race into Blackie's domain and race out again with the ball. There were inevitably some bitings. It was a mighty distraction, and, come the think of it, could be viewed as an entirely separate game in itself. We didn't see it that way, though. We were terrified, and only the excitement of continuing our game in progress kept us from faltering and giving up.

Of course, it was a real treat to head up to the playground and shoot hoops on the level blacktop. Sometimes we'd play full-court, but mostly just half court, freeing up half for other players. And there would always be several kids, arriving late, who had to stand on the side watching. They had the hungry look of jackals, anticipating their turn to be called into action when someone on the court fell down hard, became too worn and bleary-eyed to go on, or just realized he was late for a dental appointment.

For all the glamour of playing on the playground court, there was something antiseptic and too official about it. Besides, the garage court was so much more convenient. A guitarist doesn't want to go fishing around for his guitar when the inspiration strikes. And so it was with me. I liked the idea of filling in a few extra minutes by shooting baskets without actually having to fish around for a court.

When it came time to try out for the school's CYO team, it was only natural that I give it a go. Most of our practices took place in the school basement with only an eight-foot ceiling and water pipes suspended several inches below that. We got a lot of practice passing, pivoting and crossover dribbling. Shooting? Not so much. It bothered me. I felt cooped up, not just by the basement location, but also by the regimentation and discipline of it all. I soldiered on. Before a team was even picked, I'd already stuck it through several grueling practices, and I wondered if I had what it took.

That question was answered for me subsequently when the prospective team gathered for a trip to a high school game waiting for the bus to leave. It was snowing hard. (Snowing again.) Ice had formed in places. We started a snowball fight, breaking up into two factions on either side of the street. Some of the snowballs contained ice and hardened, not even splitting apart when they hit the pavement. It was one of these that hit me in the side of my knee, and I went down, not just down, but down into a huge puddle of water. While it was painful, to be sure, it was also humiliating. The thrower, Tom Stengel, crossed the street and apologized to me, practically getting down in the water with me. We went on the trip, me sitting on the long bus ride in soaking wet pants. I overheard one of the guys saying, "I'm surprised he came along. If that was me I would have gone home." It got me to thinking, always a dangerous thing for a basketball player.

It wasn't long after that when I quit. I went home. The team hadn't been picked yet, but the scuttlebutt about my quitting was that it was premature, the coach telling the others that he thought I really had gotten game. Game or not, I'd go back to my alleyway court and shoot baskets into the night. It would have been nice to make the team, but the regimented teamwork wasn't for me anyway. In time I began to spend more and more time indoors with my other obsession, reading books, none of them about basketball. The way I drifted away from religion, I drifted away from this game. My story was that of a fading jump shot slamming the backboard, bouncing around, circling the rim but never going in.

In the years following, from time to time I'd visit my old neighborhood and drive down the alley past the old garage, but the backboard and basket weren't there anymore. The new owners just didn't get it. They sucked at trying to grasp the grandeur of the thing. They were the antithesis of the hopefuls you see on Antiques Roadshow, and they didn't realize the treasure they'd thrown away. I thought in passing that maybe I should go knock at their door, my old door, and tell them what they were missing. It was kind of complicated though, and I wouldn't want to have kept them too long in the listening.

Humbuggery

There was that one little trick by my dad, who wasn't generally known for his tricks. Just when I was ready to throw in the towel and denounce Santa, we got a knock on the door one night. It was Santa himself, in the flesh. Of course, some time later, I found out it was one of the guys my dad worked with. They'd conspired to have the man visit our place wearing a Santa outfit.

I went to the airport one Christmas and saw the big guy in red disembark from a helicopter and thought, "This can't be!" But he gave me a Peter Pan board game, which I took home and immediately spread out in the doorway to the kitchen, and I was a believer. While certain other kids were going around Santa-bashing, I kept quiet in the knowledge that I'd actually seen him. It didn't occur to me at the time that something was wrong with this, that Santa had come out of a helicopter instead of the traditional sleigh.

My memory has never been top-notch, but lately it's gotten, as my son would say, ah...sketchy. It's like a filing cabinet. Trouble is, someone's gotten in overnight and rifled the drawers. Some memories, like the Santa stuff, stand out and won't go away. But I always wonder how much I am forgetting and how much sticks like lint to the mind's fabric.

When my son was growing up, I was well aware of this. I drew a map of my Catasauqua neighborhood and posted it on the refrigerator. It could give him a schemata of the places and things I was remembering and telling him about. It was as much to jog my own memory as it was to give him a visual layout of the neighborhood.

Broke down memories aside, the truth will always come out, one way or another. It almost doesn't matter if you get the details wrong as long as you've got the essence of the thing.

Nowadays, you don't know who to believe when news is fiction and so-called reality TV programs that are just so ... programmed. And that isn't all. That's just modern times, man. Back then, in the Elvis era, we knew who to believe. It was the church. Christ, even Elvis believed in that.

To me, as an impressionable kid, happenings around town had an air of unreality about them at times. There were things I found just unbelievable. Like the time when Bear got his penis caught in his zipper and had to go to the ER to get it removed. Or the time when Tips's mom threw me and Soupy out of her house using the F word-- not cool. (That was before the term had gained so much currency among young and old alike.) Or when Kevin taught his Bassett hound to "say" hamburger, and I was momentarily taken in by it.

Our days were laced with petty irrationalities. Kevin and I buried a skate key a foot deep into the alley near his house by pulling stone by stone out of the road surface. (This was before Macadam had become the go-to paving material it is today.) I joined the Struss boys in throwing rocks at a fish they'd hung from the railroad trestle. Once, someone had packed my shoes with snow while I was ice skating the frozen canal, so I walked home in my skates. Cookie, my next door neighbor, shot his friend Jimmy Reed with a BB gun from his third floor window. My mother would ask, "What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?", then, disobeying my request, she'd make the usual marble chiffon cake. The G in the word, god, had to be upper case.

So it wasn't so far-fetched when I was asked to believe that a stranger two thousand years ago was put to death on my account.

I was getting up in the middle of a school night to eat cereal. My dreams were mixing with reality at two, three in the morning. I was launching a promising career as an insomniac. There was a face of Jesus in concave relief up on our wall, constructed in such a way that the eyes seemed to follow you around the room. They were always watching, like some primitive form of the surveillance camera. At night when everyone else was asleep I was awake, and so was Jesus.

The only saving grace was the absolute reality of the church's teachings. The church kept us grounded.

I'd get up at the crack of dawn, fighting performance anxiety, to serve Mass as an altar boy. I mean, I was so into it that I went to visit a seminary to see what it would be like if I, Jim Hoffman, were to fill the shoes of a priest. My mother was really pulling for me, couldn't have wanted anything more. I'd go to confession on Saturday afternoon, rattle off the usual offenses-- bad words, impure thoughts, talking back to my parents. The hard stuff. And I'd feel just great afterwards.

I remember that one afternoon... I came home from confession, feeling all cleansed, and went right out to the alley behind our house. I got on my cluncky Roadmaster bicycle though, up till then, I couldn't even keep my balance on it at a standstill. I'd been out there day after day trying to create some kind of two-wheeled magic, but my mojo just wasn't working. What was the trick? I don't know, but that afternoon, I lifted one leg over the top bar, gripped the rubber ends of the handlebars with assuredness, clenched my teeth, and I began to ride. There was the smell of diesel fuel and the sound of squealing tires. No, that was the traffic in the nearby street. But it was a miracle (ok, a small miracle), and my confession had a lot to do with it, I was sure. If I followed the rules, then good things would come to me.

That was the high point. But slowly, in increments, it began to sink in that I was being deceived. Everything began to unravel about the same time I realized my mother was persisting in serving us canned peas instead of frozen. I felt it was time for an investigation into the final whereabouts of all that cash we collected and gave to the nuns for "pagan babies", as they called them. I became wary of grown-ups and all their chicanery.

Our assistant parish priest allowed his car to smash into the house diagonal from the rectory where a universally disliked, rotund kid lived. We'll call him Tommy, 'cause that was his name. Tommy was known for committing oral sex on a lot of the guys in town. (I hasten to add that I was passed over.) The crash was no simple accident as it turned out. God was punishing the boy for his indiscretions. He was smiting him down by sending a messenger's car to demolish his house. And, lo, the indiscretions stopped soon after this. Perfect! And then I found out about the alcoholism, and it came back to me how the assistant pastor would routinely smack his lips when drinking the altar wine from the chalice during Mass. (You'll recall that I was an altar boy and had a front row seat to this.) This kind of dashed my vengeful god theory.

It was getting harder to believe from then on, that the priest was indeed God's messenger. Not just because of this; I was by then already becoming rebellious and suspicious of this cleverly constructed Rube Goldberg contraption that was the liturgy.

Our assistant pastor disappeared from the scene, replaced by a young, wholesome-looking priest who proceeded to run off with the Irish immigrant housekeeper placed in her position by one of the leading families in the church.

The grand scheme was coming apart. Never mind the Crusades or the Inquisition. It was happening to me on the inside. It culminated in a visit from our pastor one day in the late sixties. My mother had put him onto the case to ferret out why I had been skipping Mass. It was a clever ruse to get me back in the fold. We relaxed in the living room, the room that was made ready whenever company was coming to call. The pastor had already gotten the money he came to collect as part of an annual tithe and was now content to spend a few moments doing the counselling part of his job. I explained that I didn't believe anymore. I couldn't. He stammered, then stated forthrightly that he did.

Of course I knew he believed, but what about me? He had the answers for himself but no real answers for me. I felt I was putting him on the spot, that I'd cornered him, for he started repeating himself. I could see that I was forcing him into a no-win situation, and I felt sorry for this.

One of the earliest memories I have is that of a book of fairy tales. The cover had been torn off, and it was worn as the deck of playing cards my dad always had handy. It had all the classic tales in it. There were characters like Chicken Licken (alias Chicken Little) and Henny Penny, and Goosey Loosey. You may have heard of them. They'd been alarmed that the sky was falling. The name Foxy Loxy too comes to mind. He said he could help and cleverly lured the animals into his cave to be eaten. He was a sly one. Crazy too, I might add.