Dirty, Dirty Hands

I was a teenage basketball junkie. I watched it. I read about it.

I played.

I remember my hands, most of all. I remember the way in which, day after day, my palms and fingertips turned from their natural shade of tan a cloudy brown-black mix that smelled of dirt and sweat, and occasionally the rubber of the basketball if I’d gotten enough touches that afternoon.

I remember those days, immediately after winter when the ice and snow had melted enough for us to return to the park (or the occasional particularly absurd winter day when we shot hoops and raced after the ball after it caromed from the backboard, to try to catch it before it fell into a snowbank). Those days my hands transitioned from cold, to painfully-stabbing-cold, to numb. I remember running warm water over them in the kitchen sink afterward, until they started to thaw.

I remember that desperation to play. Through dirt and frostbite. That when I fractured my thumb the gym teacher had to actively tell me I wasn’t allowed to play basketball, and pull me from the game as I dribbled left handed.

I’m in my early thirties now. I can only remember playing basketball twice in the last few years. A half-hearted, flirty game with my fiancée after we discovered a basketball court in our new apartment complex. A game with a group of her colleagues when they needed an extra player, and I discovered myself more out of practice than I would have imagined.

I imagine my younger self feeling betrayed at this turn. That my crossover dribble, fade-away jumper, and the maneuver in which I thrust the ball between my knees in mid-air en route to a layup (an impoverished man’s nod to Isaiah Rider’s East Bay Funk Dunk), all hard-earned via hundreds of hours of practice, have all eroded with the time passage of time and disuse.

But I still write.

I’ve written stories for about as long as I’ve been literate, but I first came to fervently identify as a writer in synchronicity with the rise of my love for basketball. At fourteen, I went to work on my first novel, Free Throw, an epically bad two-hundred-page compilation of clichés from sports movies and teenage love stories, unevenly peppered with fragments of autobiography.

So many of those days, after I had washed my hands clean, and rubbed them out of their numb state, one of the first things I did was to take a black Bic pen in hand, and a pad of the grid paper my mother used to steal from work for me, and set to writing.

I keep my hands cleaner these days. Washing them on the regular to stave off the germs of teaching and from the university weight room. Never getting them as dirty, in the first place, as I once did. Even the smudge of ink I used to accumulate on the side of my hand from leaning it against the page as I wrote is something of a relic. Nowadays, I compose almost exclusively on keyboard.

I write in order to create, I say sometimes. I say that I have a compulsion to feel productive. It’s not untrue. But it’s no less true that I write in order to remember. To remember the raw ache of my knees after jumping one too many times, the dead spots on a black top court that I knew better than anyone, and always those dirty, dirty hands.