tennis was my only joy

Thad, where are you now?

 

I met you once or twice when I was younger. The last time was in the late 2000s. You were visiting my mom, staying in her spare bedroom. I lived in the guest house off the driveway. I remember you were wearing a blue, flower-print bandana, and your wild hair was poking out all over the place, and your shoes were wrapped in duct tape for some reason. You wore holey cargo pants and a shirt that was way too big. You looked like some sort of grungy 21st-century shaman. There was an aura of dangerous wisdom surrounding you. I never knew what you were going to do or what you were going to say. And you never seemed to be all there, like your body had trouble containing your soul or something, like your soul was just drifting around in some far-off place. When we hung out that time, you were chain-smoking cigarettes with these trendy detachable filters. You swore by these filters. “These things take out all the bad stuff. I’ve been using them for only a week and I already feel like a teenager again. They get rid of all the cancer. Try one.” You handed me one, and I slipped my Marlboro Light into it, and then we sat there on the guest house porch, smoking. You talked a lot about tennis. I got the impression you were like some sort of tennis savant. “I live for tennis, it’s the only thing that gives me joy.” You knew all about the different tactics, the different grips, the different serves, the topspin, slice, lobs, and volleys. “It’s like war out there on the courts, with sweatbands instead of Kevlar helmets, rackets instead of semi-automatic rifles, and balls instead of bullets,” is something you said to me. You had a way with words. You seemed really smart. We also talked about what we were reading at the time. You had been reading something by Stephen King. I had been reading The Sandman graphic novel, so I quoted something from it, trying to sound smart myself. “Sleep, the little brother of death.” And I remember, after hearing that, you stood there all pensive for a moment, then you said something I’ve never forgotten, something I can still hear you saying today, in my head, clear as crystal.

 

You said, “I like that. That’s a really good quote.”

 

Sometimes I wonder, when it happened, did you think about that quote?

 

I know your whole story, or at least the mythologized version, the one passed down from your sisters, specifically my mom when she had been drinking a little bit, which was the only time she would ever open up about anything.

 

“Thad was the jewel of the family. I think Dad loved him most of all. He was always sarcastic and rebellious, things Dad normally hated in me, but he found these things endearing in Thad, celebrated them even. Thad wasn’t the best at school, but he was a star tennis player, on all the big school teams. He could have been a professional player, if not for the accident. One day, when Thad was in his early 20s, he and his friends were driving a big truck in an abandoned parking lot. Thad thought it would be fun to stand on the tailgate while the truck was going like 50 mph. He fell off, hit his head. He was in the hospital, in a coma, for 3 days. We all thought he was going to die until, randomly, he just woke up. Dad said it was a miracle. But the person who woke up was not Thad. He was still my brother, but it was like he was a completely different person. His mind didn’t work right. He was crazy, erratic, angry all the time, couldn’t think straight, said things that made no sense. He couldn’t take care of himself, couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t be bothered to bathe himself. The doctors said he exhibited signs of schizophrenia or dissociative personality disorder or something like that. He thought people were out to get him and would spend days in his room, alone, talking to himself. It destroyed my Dad, he didn’t understand it. He loved Thad, took care of him, paid for all his expenses, his apartment, food, clothing, all of it. But Dad was never the same after that. His jewel had cracked, lost its shine, or something. But your grandma, Susu, she didn’t seem to care about any of that, she was just grateful that Thad had survived, doted on him and treated him like a king, like she always did. They even played tennis together sometimes, because, despite everything that had happened, Thad still loved to play tennis. It was his only joy in life.”

 

When we smoked together on the porch that night, you didn’t seem crazy to me. I mean, you seemed a little eccentric, but you didn’t seem crazy. What is crazy, even? A social construct? Whatever doesn’t fit into the cultural norm? Of course, I didn’t know you before the accident, so I have nothing to compare you to, but you weren’t rambling mad or screaming at me, which is what I think of when I think of “crazy.” To me, you were just the cool uncle, someone who broke the family mold, someone who didn’t seem to care about the rat race that so preoccupied my family’s attention. You were an outsider, someone I could have a conversation with about books and philosophy and the weirdness of the world. In a way, I kind of looked up to you, as I fancied myself a little crazy, too. And you were supposed to be the authority on the subject, you lived with the crazy, you knew what it was really like, and me, well, I just pretended, like you so often called out. I remember, one time after looking at my ripped-up jeans and band T-shirt, you told me, “You like to pretend you’re not from a wealthy family, don’t you? You think being wealthy delegitimizes you as an artist or something, cheapens your mystique, makes you a faker, so you try to hide it, you fake that you’re not wealthy, but either way you still end up being a faker, which is kind of crazy, isn’t it? You should just be yourself, man.” You would say stuff like this totally unprompted, as if you had no awareness of social niceties. But you were never wrong. Maybe the quote-unquote “crazy” people are more sane than we like to think? But the truth is, I had no idea what you were going through. I didn’t even think about it back then, as I was too obsessed with myself to even care. It wasn’t until later that I learned the extent of your condition. My mom told me, when she was drunk one night.

 

“Thad was on all sorts of anti-psychotics, to make him functional, and even then, he was barely functional. He one time left the bathtub running in his apartment for three days straight. He just turned the water on, walked away, and forgot about it. It racked up a thousand-dollar water bill, and even more in damages. This was what he was like. He would cut his own hair, sometimes leaving huge bald spots. His whole place was full of broken junk, old food, boxes, bike parts that would never get used, tennis stuff. You would trip over tennis balls just walking through his living room. And he loved spray paint for some reason. He would spray-paint crazy pictures all over the apartment walls. One time, when he was visiting Susu, he spray-painted the letter ‘T’ on a big oak in the backyard, and when asked why, he said, ‘So you will never forget me.’ The ‘T’ is still there. And then, without even asking, he spray-painted Susu’s bike black, without a finish, so it was all sticky and gross. She had to buy a new bike. And he loved duct tape, too. He would wrap his shoes in duct tape, for example, and if any of his clothes got a hole in them, he’d just duct-tape the hole. And when he was in his 30s, his ex-wife, who was just as crazy as he was, shot him in the stomach 3 times. Thad fought back somehow, wrestled the gun out of her hands, called the police. He was in surgery for 7 hours. The doctors said he lost so much blood that he should have died right there on the spot, but somehow, due to his athletic physique, which was due to all the tennis, he survived. It was another miracle, my dad said. He was like a cat or something, with his 9 lives.”

 

To be honest, Thad, I hadn’t thought about you in a very long time. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, when a teacher friend of mine texted me a story about one of his students, that I was reminded of you. My friend told me that one of his students, who was a bright, promising young man, one day drove his motorcycle down the road at 100 mph, crashed into a tree, and nearly died. This young man was in a coma or something, just like you had been, and when he woke up, he was seemingly a different person. My friend said that he hadn’t seen this young man until high school graduation, when the young man showed up out of the blue to watch the ceremony. My friend described this young man as blank, void-like, a shell of who he once was. The kid didn’t even recognize him. This reminded me of you, Thad, so I told my friend about you, and we had a lengthy discussion about this unsettling phenomenon, this whole “you can get knocked on the head and become like a different person” thing. We talked about the story of Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman who had a rod blasted through his skull, tearing apart half of his brain. Gage didn’t die, but those who knew him said he was almost like a completely different person after the event. Impulsive, angry, hard to get along with. I said to my friend, “I don’t think Gage, or your student, or even Thad truly changed. I think their bodies may have changed, but their souls remained the same. Maybe the body is just a receptacle for the soul, and when the body gets severely damaged, the soul can no longer be expressed like it normally would. So, even though the person seems different, they're actually the same, just unable to express themselves properly.” I don’t know if I believe that, but it’s a nice thing to think about.

 

What do you think, Thad? Do you think the body is just a shell, some sort of biological husk designed to contain our true selves, our souls? Do you think our brains interpret our souls and then use the rest of our bodies to express them? Do you think this could explain why, when some people get hurt, they seem to change? Do you think that, because their bodies are broken, they can no longer express their souls properly? Do you think that maybe, when a baby is born with a severe handicap, there was some sort of fuck-up at the soul factory? That maybe their soul was placed into a defective body, by accident? And if so, do you think that when we die, our souls are released from these faulty containers, finally free to fully express themselves? And if so, where do our souls go? Do they just drift around in the void of space, communicating with other souls? And when you're like this, in soul form, can you drop in on people who are still alive, watch them from some disembodied, bird’s-eye view, flip through their lives as if flipping through TV channels? Or are we sent back to the soul factory, recycled in some way? Or do we go to heaven, hell, some sort of Valhalla? Or maybe it's just a really long sleep? What do you think? Where are you now?

 

I wish I could ask you these questions for real, Thad. I really do.

 

My mom told me what happened. She said, shortly after that visit when we smoked together on the porch, you had an accident, you broke your ankle pretty bad. The doctors said you could never play tennis again. So you took all your anti-psychotic pills at once, released your soul from its faulty biological container. 

 

You left a note, and my mom told me what it said.

 

It said, “Tennis was my only joy.”