The Young Achilles
Jan. 10th, 2004 09:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraLee Newell is a land developer with two ambitions. He’d like to see the entire stretch of Corral de Tierra – that’s Pastures of Heaven for you Steinbeck fans – turned into private, gated enclaves with Jack Niclaus-designed signature golf courses. And he’d like to coach a winning high school basketball team.
To that end, Max has been tapped to fill the point guard vacancy left when one of the sports scholarship kids stormed off the RLS varsity. Lee dressed the kid down at one of the pre-season tournament games with Seaside and evidently Anthony felt he’d lost face in front of his old homies. He quit. Goodbye UCLA scholarship; hello pumping gas at seven bucks an hour till the cops pick you up for intention to sell. Sigh… The choices kids make when they’re young, when they still believe options are limitless.
Max had always intended to do basketball in the winter but the doctor I dragged him to for follow-up on his knee surgery stipulated no sports for six months. It’s been five. The RLS risk managers refused to sign off on him at first. But that was then. Before Lee Newell. And this is now.
So his first game was last night. I’m surprised by how much I like watching high school basketball. The kids sweat and glisten and clench their teeth and trash-talk sotto voce so the refs won’t hear, and since I’ve known many of them since they were nine years old, there’s the weirdness factor of watching little boys inhabit muscular adult bodies. So Hecuba must have felt on the parapets of Troy. This is one of the percs of parenting: you get this very odd sagittal slice through time.
PG slaughtered the RLS team. Pretty much what I expected. But Max played well, was the third-highest scorer on the RLS side even though he only played the last quarter.
As a reward for stepping up to the plate, the Newells have invited him on an all-expenses-paid Caribbean cruise over spring break. We are moving up in the world. Just five years ago, Max got the youngest Newell heir – the handsome, though saturnine and spectacularly shallow Travers – into Big Trouble when they raided somebody’s vegetable patch for oregano which they lit up in the All Saints boys bathroom. Then there was the time Max threw Dr. Somebody-or-Other’s lawn furniture into the pool late one night in a testosterone-fueled display of class warfare. I had a series of uncomfortable phone conversations with Lee during which I had ample time to visualize every detail of his spacious office – surely he has one of those hideous, oversized globes of the world done entirely in semiprecious lapidaries, and a ceiling-to-floor plate glass window overlooking the eighteenth hole.
"So. Have you tried smoking dope?" I asked Max, not so very long ago, on one of my chauffering stints to or from Pebble Beach.
"Yes."
"And what did you think?"
He shrugged. He looked out the window. "It didn’t do too much for me. What time is it?"
"Three-thirty. Why?"
"Well, Mom, those Partnership For a Drug-Free America ads say you should talk to your kids about marijuana every day at five o’clock, don’t they? You're early."
"You know my feelings about drugs, Max. I mean if it were up to me, they would all be legal and the government would tax the hell out of them. Bingo! Deficit solved and as an added bonus, Prozac sales would go down. But it’s not up to me. And you have to weigh the momentary pleasure against the risk, and ask yourself: is it worth it?"
Max did something with his mouth to look even more bored. "I’m hip, Mom, I’m hip. Can we talk about something else?"
To that end, Max has been tapped to fill the point guard vacancy left when one of the sports scholarship kids stormed off the RLS varsity. Lee dressed the kid down at one of the pre-season tournament games with Seaside and evidently Anthony felt he’d lost face in front of his old homies. He quit. Goodbye UCLA scholarship; hello pumping gas at seven bucks an hour till the cops pick you up for intention to sell. Sigh… The choices kids make when they’re young, when they still believe options are limitless.
Max had always intended to do basketball in the winter but the doctor I dragged him to for follow-up on his knee surgery stipulated no sports for six months. It’s been five. The RLS risk managers refused to sign off on him at first. But that was then. Before Lee Newell. And this is now.
So his first game was last night. I’m surprised by how much I like watching high school basketball. The kids sweat and glisten and clench their teeth and trash-talk sotto voce so the refs won’t hear, and since I’ve known many of them since they were nine years old, there’s the weirdness factor of watching little boys inhabit muscular adult bodies. So Hecuba must have felt on the parapets of Troy. This is one of the percs of parenting: you get this very odd sagittal slice through time.
PG slaughtered the RLS team. Pretty much what I expected. But Max played well, was the third-highest scorer on the RLS side even though he only played the last quarter. As a reward for stepping up to the plate, the Newells have invited him on an all-expenses-paid Caribbean cruise over spring break. We are moving up in the world. Just five years ago, Max got the youngest Newell heir – the handsome, though saturnine and spectacularly shallow Travers – into Big Trouble when they raided somebody’s vegetable patch for oregano which they lit up in the All Saints boys bathroom. Then there was the time Max threw Dr. Somebody-or-Other’s lawn furniture into the pool late one night in a testosterone-fueled display of class warfare. I had a series of uncomfortable phone conversations with Lee during which I had ample time to visualize every detail of his spacious office – surely he has one of those hideous, oversized globes of the world done entirely in semiprecious lapidaries, and a ceiling-to-floor plate glass window overlooking the eighteenth hole.
"So. Have you tried smoking dope?" I asked Max, not so very long ago, on one of my chauffering stints to or from Pebble Beach.
"Yes."
"And what did you think?"
He shrugged. He looked out the window. "It didn’t do too much for me. What time is it?"
"Three-thirty. Why?"
"Well, Mom, those Partnership For a Drug-Free America ads say you should talk to your kids about marijuana every day at five o’clock, don’t they? You're early."
"You know my feelings about drugs, Max. I mean if it were up to me, they would all be legal and the government would tax the hell out of them. Bingo! Deficit solved and as an added bonus, Prozac sales would go down. But it’s not up to me. And you have to weigh the momentary pleasure against the risk, and ask yourself: is it worth it?"
Max did something with his mouth to look even more bored. "I’m hip, Mom, I’m hip. Can we talk about something else?"
