James Albrecht Lockley Struck Jr. of Orinda CA prefers one long Q&A-type interface, with V.R.8’s viewer playing ambient stuff against relaxation-vistas of surf, shimmering ponds, fields of nodding wheat.
‘Time for about maybe two more, me droogies.’
‘Say it’s close and the guy starts kertwanging you. Balls are way in and he’s calling them out. You can’t believe the flagrancy of it.’
‘Implicit this is a no-linesman situation, Traub, you’re saying.’
Creepily-blue-eyed Audern Tallat-Kelpsa chimes in: ‘This is early rounds. The kind they give you only two balls. Honor systems. All of a sudden there he is kertwanging on you. It happens.’
‘I know it happens.’
Traub says, ‘Whether he’s outright kertwanging or just head-fucking you. Do you start kertwanging back? Tit for tat? What do you do?’
‘Do we assume there’s a crowd.’
‘Early round. Remote court. No witnesses. You’re on your own out there. Do you kertwang back.’
‘You do not kertwang back. You play the calls, not a word, keep smiling. If you still win, you’ll have grown inside as a person.’
‘If you lose?’
‘If you lose, you do something private and unpleasant to his water-jug right before his next round.’
A couple of the kids have notebooks and studious nods. Struck is a prized tactician, very formal in B.B. group-sessions, something scholarly and detached about him his charges often revere.
‘We can discuss private water-jug unpleasantness on Friday,’ Struck says, looking at his watch.
A hand raised by the violently cross-eyed Carl Whale, age thirteen. Acknowledgment from Struck.
‘Say you have to fart.’
‘You’re serious, Mobes, aren’t you.’
‘Jim sir, say you’re playing out there, and suddenly you have to fart. It feels like one of those real hot nasty pressurized ones.’
‘I get the picture.’
Now some empathic murmurs, exchanged looks. Josh Gopnik is nodding very intensely. Struck stands very straight to the right of the viewer, hands behind his back like an Oxford don.
‘I mean the kind that’s real urgent.’ Whale looks briefly around him. ‘But that it’s not impossible it’s actually a need to go to the bathroom, instead, masquerading as a fart.’
Now five heads are nodding, pained, urgent: clearly a vexing sub-14 issue. Struck examines a cuticle.
‘Meaning defecate is what you mean, then, Mobes. Go to the bathroom.’
Gopnik looks up. ‘Carl’s saying the kind where you don’t know what to do. What if you think you have to fart but it’s really that you have to shit?’
‘As in it’s a competitive situation, it’s not a situation where you can go bearing down and forcing and see what happens.’
‘So out of caution you don’t,’ Gopnik says.
‘—fart,’ Philip Traub says.
‘But then you’ve denied yourself an urgent fart, and you’re running around trying to compete with a terrible hot nasty uncomfortable fart riding around the court inside you.’
Two levels down, Ortho Stice and his brood: the little libraryish circle of soft chairs and lamps in the warm foyer off the front door to subdorm C:
‘And what he says he says it’s about more than tennis, mein kinder. Mein kinder, well it sort of means my family. He eyeballs me right square in the eye and says it’s about how to reach down into parts of yourself you didn’t know were there and get down in there and live inside these parts. And the only way to get to them: sacrifice. Suffer. Deny. What are you willing to give. You’ll hear him ask it if you’re privileged to ever get an interface. The call could come at anytime: the man wants a mano-to-mano interface. You’ll hear him say it over and over. What have you got to give. What are you willing to part with. I see you’re looking a little pale there, Wagen-knecht. Is this scary you bet your little pink personal asses it’s scary. It’s the big time. He’ll tell you straight the fuck out. It’s about discipline and sacrifice and honor to something way bigger than your personal ass. He’ll mention America. He’ll talk patriotism and don’t think he won’t. He’ll talk about it’s patriotic play that’s the high road to the thing. He’s not American but I tell you straight out right here he makes me proud to be American. Mein kinder. He’ll say it’s how to learn to be a good American during a time, boys, when America isn’t good its own self.’
There’s a long pause. The front door is newer than the wood around it.
‘I’d chew fiberglass for that old man.’
The only reason the Buddies in V.R.8 can hear the little burst of applause from the foyer is because Struck won’t hesitate to pause and consider silently as long as he has to. To the kids the pauses spell dignity and integrity and the still-water depth of a guy with nine years in at three different academies, and who has to shave daily. He exhales a slow breath through rounded lips, looking off up at the ceiling’s guilloche border.
‘Mobes, if it’s me: I let it ride.’
‘You let it out come what may?’
‘A la contraire. I let it ride around inside all day if I have to. I make an iron rule: nothing escapes my bottom during play. Not a toot or a whistle. If I play hunched over I play hunched over. I take the discomfort in the name of dignified caution, and when it’s especially bad I look up at sky between points and I say to the sky Thank You Sir may I have another. Thank You Sir may I have another.’