Playing Days Read Free

stars. When the game starts, they talk about how many drinks they had the night before. They want you to play nice. Let me give you a word of advice, young man. Don’t play nice.’
    Then, laughing, one of them answered, ‘Yes, but we’re happy.’
    â€˜Na, you ain’t happy, Milo, you won’t be happy when I’m done with you.’
    Milo had a boxer’s face, thick-fleshed, with a broken-backed nose. Smiles tended to stick on it. As I was eating, a middle-aged man with a flourishing moustache made his way between the chairs to our end of the table. I must have been in his seat, for he looked at me queerly for a moment, until Charlie spoke up, ‘That’s all right, Coach. Our boy was hungry, so I told him to sit with me.’
    I recognized Herr Henkel from the tryout and rose to shake his hand.
    â€˜Where’s Hadnot?’ he asked me.
    â€˜He had to pick up his daughter.’
    â€˜He never picks up his daughter,’ Henkel replied and looked around briefly at the rest of the team.
    There was something fatherly in his cursory glance, and something filial and homesick in me responded to it. ‘Do you want your seat back, Coach?’ I said to him, making my appeal in German, but he replied in his abrupt English, ‘Don’t give up your ground, isn’t that right, Charlie?’ And then, to one of the boys at the table, ‘Move over Darmstadt.’
    Darmstadt was a high school kid with an uncut blonde bob. He pushed back his chair and stood up, and for the rest of the afternoon remained leaning with his shoulders against the wall; nobody said anything. In the silence, Charlie decided to pick on some people – his own phrase. He had a restless manner, which seemed to me even at that first meeting not particularly happy. You sensed that he wanted bigger fish to fry and was makingdo with what he had. But he amused himself along the way. The man he’d introduced to me as Plotzke was a fat, long-armed German with the slightly exaggerated features of a pituitary disorder: a hanging, oval face; large cow eyes. ‘How much weight was you gonna lose this summer, Axel? Or was you working on gaining?’ This kind of thing.
    â€˜Ja ja,’ Axel said. An educated voice, peevish, too. But nearly everybody at that table came in for his share of attention. Darmstadt he left alone, until provoked; but there was another high school kid Charlie planned on ‘claiming as his best friend.’
    Let’s just call him Karl. There’s the legal question, for one thing, but quite apart from that his present fame would obscure the charm he had then, in his first professional season, when he was still more or less undiscovered. ‘You and me got a lot to talk about,’ Charlie said. Karl smiled at his banter and didn’t much listen and didn’t much seem to care. He had the kind of flat large face that isn’t particularly pliable to emotions. There was something very German about him, especially about his taste in clothes, which seemed almost officially casual: brown denim trousers, leather sandals and a bright yellow T-shirt with the words HIGH ANXIETY printed across it in smoky letters.
    Later, when he ducked into the bathroom, I recognized the most remarkable thing about Karl: he was seven feet tall and looked normal. It was the rest of us who seemed shrunken or out of proportion.
    Since Charlie couldn’t get to him, he shifted his attention to Olaf, the other dark-skinned player at the table. ‘You still eating?’ he said. ‘Want a little more time?’ Then, in an undertone: ‘Man’s too lazy even to feed himself.’
    Teams are full of toadies – people began laughing. I had to cover my own lips with a fist. Olaf continued to pick at his food. He had the muscular patient air of a Greek sculpture, a six foot seven, black, two-hundred-fifty-pound Greek sculpture. Patience wasn’t Charlie’s word