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Authors: David Shields
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certain stickiness on the sole of my shoe. It was July, I hadn’t brought a sweater, but when I said, “I think I left my sweater on the s-s-seat, I’ll meet you back at the car,” they nodded and kept walking because Charles was never any more observant than Father was.
Another showing of
Citizen Kane
was already on. I walked up and down the aisle in the dark till I found my little sled, I mean till I found my seat, which was occupied by a man with a monocle. He whispered to the girl next to him, young William Hearst looked at page proofs, and I rubbed my foot on the candy-coated floor until I felt I’d returned all the sweet viscidity to where it belonged.
This was definitely a low point. But the dementia had its rewards. Racing around as much as I did to return soil to its source, I turned into a runner. My legs were tan, hairless, and beautiful. My legs were legacy. Classmates would boast about my legs to their friends at other schools, and Mother said a lot of girls would give their right arm to have legs like mine, which was a messy accumulation of anatomy, but I got the point, and Beth, with fat white thighs at thirteen, agreed. Once, in my bare feet, on grass, at Currier, I ran fifty yards in six seconds, which is unheard of for a nine-year-old white boy. Black boys would cross town to challenge me and return to Hunters Point saying they got a bad start, man. It wasn’t the races, though, or the timed sprints that mattered. What mattered was running alone when no one was watching, running up and down the hills of San Francisco into a sun that was setting the golden bridge on fire and that I wanted to burn me alive, running until there were no distinctions to be made any more between feet and legs and arms and hands, and my entire body was all only fluid movement forward, running until I felt I could run forever and let out my kick and never look back and no one could catch me.
7
FATHER WOULD GO to sleep at nine o’clock and awake to darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit—navy blue pants with zippers up and down both sides, his smelly sweatshirt, and on top of that his sweat jacket with
Speed of Sound
stitched across the back. Birds would be just starting to call, black would still streak the colored pencil soft blue of the sky, Father would be jogging. In an hour he’d run twenty times around a track which was without bleachers or lighting or lanes, which had weeds in the center and a dry water fountain at the end of the far straightaway and a running path littered with glass and rocks. It wasn’t what would be called a fast track. He didn’t care. He pounded his feet through the dirt and pumped his arms and kept his rubbery legs moving until, by the very stomping of his feet, night withdrew and morning came. He jogged because he preferred to go to sleep before Mother did and awake before she’d even begun to dream. What did she dream about? I suppose she dreamed about justice.
Father once wrote me, apropos of nothing: “I am, no surprise, that same skinny kid who ran with the speed of Pegasus through Brownsville’s streets in quest of a baseball.” He doesn’t really run anymore, so what did he mean other than to turn himself into a figure in a frieze? We share that trait, we Zorns, all the way down the nondistaff side. A little too often for my taste Father likes to say,
Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again just for tonight!
Father’s mother, after whom Beth is named, died when he was eight, and it’s fashionable in certain psychiatric circles to see this as the formative event of Father’s life. It was not. The formative event of Father’s life was this: he and his friends were crossing train tracks when little Teddy, last in line, stepped directly on the third rail, which transformed him from a happy vertical child into a horizontal conductor of electric current. It’s difficult to think of
Another showing of
Citizen Kane
was already on. I walked up and down the aisle in the dark till I found my little sled, I mean till I found my seat, which was occupied by a man with a monocle. He whispered to the girl next to him, young William Hearst looked at page proofs, and I rubbed my foot on the candy-coated floor until I felt I’d returned all the sweet viscidity to where it belonged.
This was definitely a low point. But the dementia had its rewards. Racing around as much as I did to return soil to its source, I turned into a runner. My legs were tan, hairless, and beautiful. My legs were legacy. Classmates would boast about my legs to their friends at other schools, and Mother said a lot of girls would give their right arm to have legs like mine, which was a messy accumulation of anatomy, but I got the point, and Beth, with fat white thighs at thirteen, agreed. Once, in my bare feet, on grass, at Currier, I ran fifty yards in six seconds, which is unheard of for a nine-year-old white boy. Black boys would cross town to challenge me and return to Hunters Point saying they got a bad start, man. It wasn’t the races, though, or the timed sprints that mattered. What mattered was running alone when no one was watching, running up and down the hills of San Francisco into a sun that was setting the golden bridge on fire and that I wanted to burn me alive, running until there were no distinctions to be made any more between feet and legs and arms and hands, and my entire body was all only fluid movement forward, running until I felt I could run forever and let out my kick and never look back and no one could catch me.
7
FATHER WOULD GO to sleep at nine o’clock and awake to darkness in order to lace up his sneakers and tug on his jogging suit—navy blue pants with zippers up and down both sides, his smelly sweatshirt, and on top of that his sweat jacket with
Speed of Sound
stitched across the back. Birds would be just starting to call, black would still streak the colored pencil soft blue of the sky, Father would be jogging. In an hour he’d run twenty times around a track which was without bleachers or lighting or lanes, which had weeds in the center and a dry water fountain at the end of the far straightaway and a running path littered with glass and rocks. It wasn’t what would be called a fast track. He didn’t care. He pounded his feet through the dirt and pumped his arms and kept his rubbery legs moving until, by the very stomping of his feet, night withdrew and morning came. He jogged because he preferred to go to sleep before Mother did and awake before she’d even begun to dream. What did she dream about? I suppose she dreamed about justice.
Father once wrote me, apropos of nothing: “I am, no surprise, that same skinny kid who ran with the speed of Pegasus through Brownsville’s streets in quest of a baseball.” He doesn’t really run anymore, so what did he mean other than to turn himself into a figure in a frieze? We share that trait, we Zorns, all the way down the nondistaff side. A little too often for my taste Father likes to say,
Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again just for tonight!
Father’s mother, after whom Beth is named, died when he was eight, and it’s fashionable in certain psychiatric circles to see this as the formative event of Father’s life. It was not. The formative event of Father’s life was this: he and his friends were crossing train tracks when little Teddy, last in line, stepped directly on the third rail, which transformed him from a happy vertical child into a horizontal conductor of electric current. It’s difficult to think of
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