Winter here is a pitiless bitch, but in the warm months Bloomington is a lot like a seaside community except here the ocean is corn, which grows steroidically and stretches to the earth’s curve in all directions. The town itself in summer is intensely green—streets bathed in tree-shade and homes’ explosive gardens and dozens of manicured parks and ballfields and golf courses you almost need eye protection to look at, and broad weedless fertilized lawns all made to line up exactly flush to the sidewalk with special edging tools. Ý To be honest, it’s all a little creepy, especially in high summer, when nobody’s out and all that green just sits in the heat and seethes.
Like most Midwest towns, B-N is crammed with churches: four full pages in the phone book. Everything from Unitarian to bug-eyed Pentecostal. There’s even a church for agnostics. But except for church—plus I guess your basic parades, fireworks, and a couple corn festivals—there isn’t much public community. Everybody has his family and neighbors and tight little circle of friends. Folks keep to themselves (the native term for light conversation is visit). They basically all play softball or golf and grill out, and watch their kids play soccer, and sometimes go to mainstream movies …
… And they watch massive, staggering amounts of TV. I don’t just mean the kids, either. Something that’s obvious but important to keep in mind re Bloomington and the Horror is that reality—any felt sense of a larger world—is mainly televisual. New York’s skyline, for instance, is as recognizable here as anyplace else, but what it’s recognizable from is TV. TV’s also a more social phenomenon than on the East Coast, where in my experience people are almost constantly leaving home to go meet other people face-to-face in public places. There don’t really tend to be parties or mixers per se so much here—what you do in Bloomington is all get together at somebody’s house and watch something.
In Bloomington, therefore, to have a home without a TV is to become a kind of constant and Kramer-like presence in others’ homes, a perpetual guest of folks who can’t quite understand why somebody wouldn’t own a TV but are totally respectful of your need to watch TV, and who will offer you access to their TV in the same instinctive way they’d bend to offer a hand if you fell down in the street. This is especially true for some kind of must-see, crisis-type situation like the 2000 election or this week’s Horror. All you have to do is call someone you know and say you don’t have a TV: “Well shoot, boy, get over here.”
TUESDAY There are maybe ten days a year when it’s gorgeous in Bloomington, and 11 September is one of them. The air is clear and temperate and wonderfully dry after several weeks of what’s felt very much like living in someone’s armpit. It’s just before serious harvesting starts, when the region’s pollen is at its worst, and a good percentage of the city is stoned on Benadryl, which as you probably know tends to give the early morning a kind of dreamy, underwater quality. Time-wise, we’re an hour behind the East Coast. By 8:00, everybody with a job is at it, and just about everybody else is home drinking coffee and blowing their nose and watching Today or one of the other network AM shows that all broadcast (it goes without saying) from New York. At 8:00 on Tuesday I personally was in the shower, trying to listen to a Bears postmortem on WSCR Sports Radio in Chicago.
The church I belong to is on the south side of Bloomington, near where my house is. Most of the people I know well enough to ask if I can come over and watch their TV are members of my church. It’s not one of those churches where people throw Jesus’ name around a lot or talk about the End Times, but it’s fairly serious, and people in the congregation get to know each other well and to be pretty tight. As far as I know, all the congregants are natives of the area. Most are working-class or retired from same. There are some small-business owners. A fair number are veterans and/or have kids in the military or—especially—in the Reserves, because for many of these families that’s what you do to pay for college.
The house I end up sitting with shampoo in my hair watching most of the actual unfolding Horror at belongs to Mrs. Thompson, who is one of the world’s cooler seventy-four-year-olds and exactly the kind of person who in an emergency even if her phone is busy you know you can just come on over. She lives about a mile away from me on the other side of a mobile-home park. The streets are not crowded, but they’re also not as empty as they’re going to get. Mrs. Thompson’s is a tiny immaculate one-story home that on the West Coast would be called a bungalow and on the south side of Bloomington is called a house. Mrs. Thompson is a long-time member and a leader in the congregation, and her living room tends to be kind of a gathering place. She’s also the mom of one of my very best friends here, F—-, who was in the Rangers in Vietnam and got shot in the knee and now works for a contractor installing various kinds of franchise stores in malls. He’s in the middle of a divorce (long story) and living with Mrs. T. while the court decides on the disposition of his house. F—- is one of those veterans who doesn’t talk about the war or belong to the VFW but is sometimes preoccupied in a dark way, and goes quietly off to camp by himself over Memorial Day weekend, and you can tell that he carries some serious shit in his head. Like most people who work construction, he wakes up very early and was long gone by the time I got to his mom’s, which happened to be just after the second plane hit the South Tower, meaning probably around 8:10.
In retrospect, the first sign of possible shock was the fact that I didn’t ring the bell but just came on in, which normally here one would never do. Thanks in part to her son’s trade connections, Mrs. T. has a forty-inch flat-panel Philips TV on which Dan Rather appears for a second in shirtsleeves with his hair slightly mussed. (People in Bloomington seem overwhelmingly to prefer CBS News; it’s unclear why.) Several other ladies from church are already over here, but I don’t know if I exchanged greetings with anyone because I remember when I came in everybody was staring transfixed at one of the very few pieces of video CBS never reran, which was a distant wide-angle shot of the North Tower and its top floors’ exposed steel lattice in flames, and of dots detaching from the building and moving through smoke down the screen, which then a sudden jerky tightening of the shot revealed to be actual people in coats and ties and skirts with their shoes falling off as they fell, some hanging onto ledges or girders and then letting go, upside-down or wriggling as they fell and one couple almost seeming (unverifiable) to be hugging each other as they fell those several stories and shrank back to dots as the camera then all of a sudden pulled back to the long view—I have no idea how long the clip took—after which Dan Rather’s mouth seemed to move for a second before any sound emerged, and everyone in the room sat back and looked at one another with expressions that seemed somehow both childlike and terribly old. I think one or two people made some sort of sound. I’m not sure what else to say. It seems grotesque to talk about being traumatized by a piece of video when the people in the video were dying. Something about the shoes also falling made it worse. I think the older ladies took it better than I did. Then the hideous beauty of the rerun clip of the second plane hitting the tower, the blue and silver and black and spectacular orange of it, as more little moving dots fell. Mrs. Thompson was in her chair, which is a rocker with floral cushions. The living room has two other chairs, and a huge corduroy sofa that F—- and I had had to take the front door off its hinges to get in the house. All the seats were occupied, meaning I think five or six other people, most women, all these over fifty, and there were more voices in the kitchen, one of which was very upset-sounding and belonged to the psychologically delicate Mrs. R—-, who I don’t know very well but is said to have once been a beauty of great local repute. Many of the people are Mrs. T.’s neighbors, and some are still in robes, and at various times people leave to go home and use the phone and come back, or leave altogether (one younger lady went to go take her children out of school), and other people came. At one point, around the time the South Tower was falling so perfectly-seeming down into itself (I remember thinking that it was falling the way an elegant lady faints, but it was Mrs. Bracero?
??s normally pretty much useless and irritating son, Duane, who pointed out that what it really looked like is if you took some film of a NASA liftoff and ran it backward, which now after several re-viewings does seem dead on), there were at least a dozen people in the house. The living room was dim because in summer here everyone always keeps their drapes pulled. *
Is it normal not to remember things very well after only a couple days, or at any rate the order of things? I know at some point for a while there was the sound outside of some neighbor mowing his lawn, which seemed totally bizarre, but I don’t remember if anybody remarked on it. Sometimes it seemed like nobody said anything and sometimes like everybody was talking at once. There was also a lot of telephonic activity. None of these women carry cell phones (Duane has a pager whose function is unclear), so it’s just Mrs. T.’s old wall-mount in the kitchen. Not all the calls made rational sense. One side effect of the Horror was an overwhelming desire to call everyone you loved. It was established early on that you couldn’t get New York—dialing 212 yielded only a weird whooping sound. People keep asking Mrs. T.’s permission until she tells them to knock it off and for heaven’s sake just use the phone. Some of the ladies reach their husbands, who are apparently all gathered around TVs and radios at their various workplaces; for a while bosses are too shocked to think to send people home. Mrs. T. has coffee on, but another sign of crisis is that if you want some you have to go get it yourself—usually it just sort of appears. From the door to the kitchen I remember seeing the second tower fall and being confused about whether it was a replay of the first tower falling. Another thing about the hay fever is that you can’t ever be totally sure someone’s crying, but over the two hours of first-run Horror, with bonus reports of the crash in PA and Bush being moved into a SAC bunker and a car bomb that’s gone off in Chicago (the latter then retracted), pretty much everybody either cries or comes very close, according to his or her relative abilities. Mrs. Thompson says less than almost anyone. I don’t think she cries, but she doesn’t rock in her chair as usual, either. Her first husband’s death was apparently sudden and grisly, and I know at times during the war F—- would be out in the field and she wouldn’t hear from him for weeks at a time and didn’t know whether he was even alive. Duane Bracero’s main contribution is to keep iterating how much like a movie it all seems. Duane, who’s at least twenty-five but still lives at home while supposedly studying to be a welder, is one of these people who always wears camouflage T-shirts and paratrooper boots but would never dream of actually enlisting (as, to be fair, neither would I). He has also kept his hat, the front of which promotes something called SLIPKNOT, on his head indoors in Mrs. Thompson’s house. It always seems to be important to have at least one person in the vicinity to hate.
It turns out the cause of poor tendony Mrs. R—-’s meltdown in the kitchen is that she has either a grandniece or removed cousin who’s doing some type of internship at Time, Inc., in the Time-Life Building or whatever it’s called, about which Mrs. R—- and whoever she’s managed to call know only that it’s a vertiginously tall skyscraper someplace in New York City, and she’s out of her mind with worry, and two other ladies have been out here the whole time holding both her hands and trying to decide whether they should call her doctor (Mrs. R—- has kind of a history), and I end up doing pretty much the only good I do all day by explaining to Mrs. R—- where midtown Manhattan is. It thereupon emerges that none of the people here I’m watching the Horror with—not even the couple ladies who’d gone to see Cats as part of some group tour thing through the church in 1991—have even the vaguest notion of New York’s layout and don’t know, for example, how radically far south the Financial District and Statue of Liberty are; they have to be shown this via pointing out the ocean in the foreground of the skyline they all know so well (from TV).
The half-assed little geography lesson is the start of a feeling of alienation from these good people that builds in me all throughout the part of the Horror where people flee rubble and dust. These ladies are not stupid, or ignorant. Mrs. Thompson can read both Latin and Spanish, and Ms. Voigtlander is a certified speech therapist who once explained to me that the strange gulping sound that makes NBC’s Tom Brokaw so distracting to listen to is an actual speech impediment called a glottal L. It was one of the ladies out in the kitchen supporting Mrs. R—- who pointed out that 11 September is the anniversary of the Camp David Accords, which was certainly news to me.
What these Bloomington ladies are, or start to seem to me, is innocent. There is what would strike many Americans as a marked, startling lack of cynicism in the room. It does not, for instance, occur to anyone here to remark on how it’s maybe a little odd that all three network anchors are in shirtsleeves, or to consider the possibility that Dan Rather’s hair’s being mussed might not be wholly accidental, or that the constant rerunning of horrific footage might not be just in case some viewers were only now tuning in and hadn’t seen it yet. None of the ladies seem to notice the president’s odd little lightless eyes appear to get closer and closer together throughout his taped address, nor that some of his lines sound almost plagiaristically identical to those uttered by Bruce Willis (as a right-wing wacko, recall) in The Siege a couple years back. Nor that at least some of the sheer weirdness of watching the Horror unfold has been how closely various shots and scenes have mirrored the plots of everything from Die Hard I-III to Air Force One. Nobody’s near hip enough to lodge the sick and obvious po-mo complaint: We’ve Seen This Before. Instead, what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. No one in Mrs. Thompson’s crew would ever be so nauseous as to try to get everybody to pray aloud or form a prayer circle, but you can still tell what they’re all doing.
Make no mistake, this is mostly a good thing. It forces you to think and do things you most likely wouldn’t alone, like for instance while watching the address and eyes to pray, silently and fervently, that you’re wrong about the president, that your view of him is maybe distorted and he’s actually far smarter and more substantial than you believe, not just some soulless golem or nexus of corporate interests dressed up in a suit but a statesman of courage and probity and … and it’s good, this is good to pray this way. It’s just a bit lonely to have to. Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around. I’m not for a moment trying to suggest that everyone I know in Bloomington is like Mrs. Thompson (e.g., her son F—- isn’t, though he’s an outstanding person). I’m trying, rather, to explain how some part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America, and F—-’s, and poor old loathsome Duane’s, than it was these ladies’.
2001
HOW TRACY AUSTIN BROKE MY HEART
BECAUSE I AM a long-time rabid fan of tennis in general and Tracy Austin in particular, I’ve rarely looked forward to reading a sports memoir the way I looked forward to Ms. Austin’s Beyond Center Court: My Story, ghosted by Christine Brennan and published by Morrow. This is a type of mass-market book—the sports-star-“with”-somebody autobiography—that I seem to have bought and read an awful lot of, with all sorts of ups and downs and ambivalence and embarrassment, usually putting these books under something more highbrow when I get to the register. I think Austin’s memoir has maybe finally broken my jones for the genre, though.
Here’s Beyond Center Court’s Austin on the first set of her final against Chris Evert at the 1979 US Open: “At 2-3, I broke Chris, then she broke me, and I broke her again, so we were at 4-4.”
And on her epiphany after winning that final: “I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled.”
Tracy Austin on the psychic rigors of pro competition: “Every professional athlete has to be so fine-tuned mentally.”
Tracy Austin on her parents: “My mother and father never, ever pushed me.”
Tracy Austin on Martina Navratilova: “She is a wonderful person, very sensitive and caring.”
On Billie Jean King: “She also is incredibly charming and accommodating.”
On Brooke Shields: “She was so sweet and bright and easy to talk to right away.”
Tracy Austin meditating on excellence: “There is that little bit extra that some of us are willing to give and some of us aren’t. Why is that? I think it’s the challenge to be the best.”
You get the idea. On the upside, though, this breathtakingly insipid autobiography can maybe help us understand both the seduction and the disappointment that seem to be built into the mass-market sports memoir. Almost uniformly poor as books, these athletic “My Story”s sell incredibly well; that’s why there are so many of them. And they sell so well because athletes’ stories seem to promise something more than the regular old name-dropping celebrity autobiography.
Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere—fastest, strongest—and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter, or female tennis player is, at any given time, a matter of public statistical record. Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.
Plus they’re beautiful: Jordan hanging in midair like a Chagall bride, Sampras laying down a touch volley at an angle that defies Euclid. And they’re inspiring. There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man. So actually more than one theory, then. Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable. To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.