The Curtain Then
The Curtain Then was dropped at an appropriate time, circa puberty, when bugs and rocks became less of a distraction than, for example, visual intrusions you might refer to as “the Pollock twins.” We were 13, baseball players, we were noticing them and they were noticing us, attending our games. Our dads were not dumb, and they were probably noticing the girls, too, being the red-blooded, meat-eating fans of Nabokov they were. A particular springtime Saturday afternoon double header had brought out the best and worst of both us and them; they in their spaghetti-strapped sundresses, exposing their skins for the first suntanning opportunities of the season and us in our ass-emphasizing polyester baseball pants and plus-sized protective cups. Brad, our pitcher, had been sent to the bullpen to warm up for game one, but Brad detoured at the concession to chat up Lisa, a brunette early-blossomer who the previous night had passed for an 18 year old and gotten us in to see Basic Instinct. She was gorgeous, playfully flirting and maintaining her connection to the surrounding pack of gigglers with exacting social precision, and I knew even then that a nature show host would have been salivating and mock-framing this shot with his fingers. In retrospect, a pretty bold move for Brad, a fellow victim of Our Most Awkward Age, but Brad had the moxy, the kavorka, the whathaveyou that allowed him to walk up to a group of 6 beauts and chat up the particular one he wanted without a hint of self-consciousness. Either that or he was too dumb to know when he should be cowering before a (potentially vindictive) goddess. Either way, “he got the girls” so to speak, or at least they paid an awful lot of attention to him and he told us very engrossing stories at camp that summer.
Chatting up Lisa, at least in the coach’s suspicious (and leacherous?) eyes, was not warming up in the bullpen, and slick Coach took a few steps toward the situation. He stopped midstride, remembering his own not-so-recent participation in the adolescent mating game, and in a gesture of brilliant empathy for Brad decided not to drag him away from the pack by the ear. In lieu, he went another route, and onlookers may have accused him of playing Brad’s wingman.
“Hey ace, we need you to get that cannon loose. Get in the bullpen, bud.”
“Sorry Lisa, gotta go, Coach needs me. Catch ya after the game…?”
Copious eyelash bashing and affirmatives followed. Brad strode/strutted to the pen, got his warmup on, all the while a shoulders back head cocked smugness about him. A god in pinstripes, as it turned out. But a god who kept bouncing his 13 year old curve 5 feet in front of the plate. Coach saw the problem, thought of a solution. After handing our lineup to the 17 year-old umpire, he rounded us up, sat us all on one knee in a semi-circle around him, and commanded our eyes and ears for attention.
“Fellas, I know what’s happening here. You must be pretty good, huh? After all, there’s some might pretty young ladies in the stands today.” He glanced at Brad. “And I know maybe some of you would rather be, um, holding hands and kissing and whatever else the hell.”
Uncomfortable… well, not exactly laughter from us. Just discomfort.
“Well guys, it may have been a while for me, but I do remember. And what I’m gonna tell you, you gotta remember. This is a good team, you guys are good players, and you are headed places, varsity baseball, college, pros, who knows. But if you want to get there, you got to learn something. There is a time for playing grabass (!) with the ladies, and there’s a time to play ball. And those are not the same time. Take a look at those stands, those pretty girls, take a good little look.”
That was not a problem. We looked, and felt the film burning of a perfect nostalgic shot. Afternoon sun broken up by chainlink and glancing off the legs, arms, butter-soft bodies of the ones we all knew were dreams, the best we could possibly hope. Some of them had sunglasses, most up to hold their hair back. Easy on the eyes, for sure.
“Now.” Coach regrabbed our attention. “From this day forward, when you are on a ballfield, you are only on a ballfield – you are focused on what happens on the green, the sand, down the basepaths, the signs your coaches are giving you, the flight of the ball. Focus on what you need to do, and don’t even see what sits outside those lines. For you, from now on, picture a giant black curtain that is draped along the fence, completely surrounding the park. It is dark black, it is higher than you can imagine, and nothing that is going on behind it has anything to do with you. Not those girls, not your parents, and down the line, not any other coaches or scouts or newspaper people or whatever. Just black, the black curtain. When you are on this field, there is no rest of the world. All that matters happens on this field, for the three or so hours you’re playing, or whenever you’re practicing. Lock the rest of the world out gentlemen. It’s all behind the black,
black curtain.”
I can’t remember whether we won or what that day, but I do remember the looming black shroud that encompassed the field. I remember that black curtain or no, Brad did wow Lisa that day, and reportedly wowed her more later on (in retrospect, likely a 13 year-old’s retelling of something seen on Showtime). I remember an eerie calm, a sinking down into myself as I tried to envision the rest of the world fading away and only this vibrant green grass and blue sky playfield taking up our panoramic landscape. A big black curtain, billowing as an obscuring backdrop.
A big black curtain, keeping the world out, our eyes and minds focused within.
Black and big: keeping us in.
The Curtain Now
The Curtain Now is not accompanied by impression-making speeches or (leacherous?) thoughts of possibility. The Curtain Now does not enshroud the field, does not come before the game, does not bring a sense of eerie calm that allows for excellence in performance. The Curtain Now does not frame horizons, does not serve as backdrop. It is not off in the distance.
Today, the big, black curtain drops somewhere between my brain and the eye, slicing optic nerves perpendicularly. It obscures everything beyond my orbits, and is too close to allow its ruffles to be made out. Billowing resembles earthquake, begets nausea.
It is opaque. Dense. It serves no timetable; comes and goes as the cord-puller wills. Not confined to game time, it releases when I wake, sleep, when I am bench-pressing, jogging, typing, watching a film or listening to music. It knows no pattern that I can detect, and the man behind the curtain obeys no stimulus. He just pulls when he will.
It rolls down front, back, and sides, blocks out the sparks of aural frequency and numbs the air to my touch. Kills taste. Slows my heart, and breathing. Robs life, lust, a Viagra antidote. Kills clocks and time, brings all grinding, slowly, to cessation.
There are no memories of sundresses and pretty girls, only Herculean effort to get out of bed. Life between the ears and all the clarity that mandates: credit, reward for nothing, blame and pain for everything. Clarity. Faith that the beauts still sit in the stands, that these hours drenched in this cloak will ultimately bring something. That my weary, zombie pace with this horrid blanket over my head is not an exercise in morality driven behaviorism. That this is not some sick experiment. Not punishment. Perhaps a momentary dream with the rest the real, or worse, vice versa. Either way it oscillates with uncomfortable frequency.
This big black curtain keeps my mind and eyes focused within. It keeps yours out. Makes miserable attempts at poetic sentiment at reality, the dream of cliff-crashing my car a viable conclusion. And you can’t possibly know that. You see a walk to the kitchen to fetch a glass of milk; I see colossal victory, triumph over the improbable. I cannot tell who is correct.
The big black curtain: keeps the world out, my mind, and only my mind focused within.
Black and big: wear it like a sentence I don’t want, didn’t ask for, deserve.
Big and black: I should gather the strength to unfoil it, blast through, living encapsulation of the glory of human spirit, the victor, the bold and vociferous, the one who makes bards scream “what a piece of work is man.” In order to disentangle myself from the very trap about which I bitch, I should fly, fist forward with an optimistic conclusion, closing.
Instead I wait for it to change, to go back. For the curtain to lift. To oscillate.
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