Ira and his mother, Victoria, are finishing their New Year’s Eve dinner she had cooked for just the two of them.
Victoria is doing the dishes, and Ira is sitting at the dinner table of their uptown Manhattan flat minding his p’s and q’s, when the front door crashes open and in wobbles Victor Spade, loaded for bear and with a belly full of Old Grand Dad.
Victor’s breath, reeking of cheap bourbon, fills the entire Spade apartment quicker than you can say
felony charges
for being an abusive husband and father.
The soused abuser peers at his son, ten years of resentment and frustration fueling his inner fires. He teeters up to the dinner table until he is within eighteen inches of his only child, and Victor is glaring out of those unforgettably wild eyes, eyes right out of the movies and the world of art, a satanic combination of Regan MacNeil’s in
The Exorcist
and Mr. Gower’s in that heartrending “poison capsules” scene with young George Bailey in
It’s a Wonderful Life
and those of the pitiful firing squad victim raising his arms aloft in Goya’s
Executions of the Third of May, 1808.
Victor Spade looks deeply into Ira’s eyes, the eyes of this son he never really knew or loved, and bellows, with a passion fueled by cheap bourbon and anger, “You’ll never be
anybody
!”
The four words sear into Ira Spade’s ten-year-old brain as if they were imprinted there by a branding iron.
Ira’s cell TelevideoPhone rings, rousing him out of his reverie. As he opens the phone, he wipes the lobster juice from his mustache and silently swears for the trillionth time that he will make damn sure that
his
only child will turn out to be somebody,
and
how
.
“No, Odi. No, this is really a bad time. Just sat down to dinner,” Ira says to the screen, where Odi Mondheim’s ugly puss looks out at him. “Then Jack and I are gonna hit for a coupla hours at the club. Gimme a call back around ten. Righto. Yeah, I heard a few things about him. Oh, just that he’s Jack’s age and he’s a hot shit over there in Italy. Gotta go now. Speak later.”
“That Odi?” Avis asks.
“Yeah, that sonuvabitch,” Ira says, his left eye twitching like hell. “Wants to talk. Told him a million times not to call me during dinner. What a
loser
!”
“Yeah, what a
loser
!” Jack parrots, stroking his make-believe mustache.
Jack at last solves the mystery of cracking open his lobster claw and he tosses a proud look to his father and Ira returns a look of tough love and Avis is watching all this feeling like the odd woman out and sits there sighing deep inside and sucks the juice out of one of those funky little feet with the knees on the side of her lobster.
“Sonuvabitch loser,” Ira murmurs. “Doesn’t have a clue about what it takes to be number one, to be on top of the world.”
All Avis can think of is that final scene in
White Heat
where Jimmy Cagney, playing Cody Jarrett, shouts from atop the gas tank, as he is being gunned down, “Made it, Ma!
Top of the world!
”
The time has now come for Ira Spade’s nightly What Is Right with Us and Wrong with Them Session.
“Did I ever tell you that quote of Tom Seaver’s?”
Yeah, about a gazillion times,
the look on Avis’s face says.
No, Dad, tell it again,
the look on Jack’s face implores.
“Well, sir,” Ira says, answering his own rhetorical question, “the great Mets pitcher once said, ‘There are only two places in the league—first place and no place.’ Do you know what that means, son?”
Avis sighs deep inside herself.
Jack says, “Yeah, if you can’t win,
go home
!”
“Bingo!”
Ira says, and the two males at the table high-five and fist-bump.
Then they play their favorite game of taking turns naming winners.
“Jack Nicklaus!” Ira begins.
“Tiger Woods!” Jack adds.
“Pete Sampras!”
“Roger Federer!”
“Old Yankees!”
“Old Celtics!”
“Wayne Gretzky!”
“Muhammad Ali!”
“Vince Lombardi!”
“That’s my boy!” Ira says, before taking a gulp of his $4,000 Château Pétrus.
“And now,” he continues, wiping the scarlet residuum from his black mustache with his Pierre Cardin sleeve, “it’s time to play—”
“Fill in the blanks!”
Jack interrupts gleefully.
Avis Spade sighs backward, deep inside her soul.
“Okay now, ready?” Ira asks.
Jack is.
“Let’s start out with Americans, who love to win!”
“Yay!”
“Okay. Leo Durocher once said, ‘Show me a good loser in professional sports and I’ll—’”
“‘Show you an idiot!’”
Jack shouts.
“Good. Okay, let’s see. George Brett once said, ‘If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like—’”
“‘Kissing your grandmother, with her teeth out!’”
The soul of Avis is mortified and, unnoticed, turns a deep crimson.
“Two-for-two!” Ira says proudly. “I can’t stump this boy, Avis. Let’s see. Deacon Jones once said, ‘When I hit someone, I want to put them in the—’”
“‘Cemetery, not the hospital!’”
Avis would slide under the table and be with the dog, if she could.
“Okay, one more American. Johnny Pesky once said, ‘When you win, you eat better, you sleep better, and your beer tastes better. And your wife looks like—’”
“‘Gina Lollobrigida!’”
the two Spade males shout with machismo and in unison. More high-fives and fist-bumps.
Avis slides halfway down her chair and closes her dewy eyes.
“And now,” Ira says, making that trumpety sound by expelling air out of the left corner of his mouth, “it’s time for…
the European
losers
!”
“’Ray!” Jack shouts.
“Okay, ready? Boris Becker said, ‘I lost a tennis match. It was not a war—’”
“‘Nobody died!’”
Jack shouts.
“Right again! Let’s see…French golfer Thomas Levet once said, ‘It was pretty good to—’”
“‘Come in second!’”
“Correctamundo! All right. German luger Georg Hackl once said, ‘I go in there thinking, well, if I lose, it’s not—’”
“‘The end of the world!’”
The end of the world.
A hunk of lobster, attached to Avis Spade’s little fork, hangs suspended two inches from her mouth, and she is sitting there ostensibly calmly but inside there is a fire burning, a fire of indignation and humiliation that has been smoldering all these years, and she is reliving in her mind a whole string of Ira’s rants, about Bush 43’s
stay the course
and why we should still be hunkered down in foreign lands spreading democracy and winning wars and how losing is never an option in this country and Vince Lombardi’s philosophy of life and why do anything if you can’t be number one? and then there was that time when he punched his fist through the bedroom wall after Jack lost that match at the age of six and what effect will all of this have down the road on my darling son? and Avis looks across the table at her husband of two decades whom she somehow has continued to stay with through thick and thin come hell or high water only because of her ingrained loyalty and grace.
But she does not see the real, physical Ira Spade now, the guy with the Groucho mask she somehow still loves, but instead she pictures first the image of Pat Hingle in
Splendor in the Grass
in the role of Ace Stamper, the driven father who pushes his son Bud mercilessly to be a winner and a big football star and to go to Yale and he ends up nearly driving his son mad and in fact driving himself to suicide, and then she pictures the image of Karl Malden in
Fear Strikes Out
in the role of John Piersall, the driven father who pushes his son Jimmy mercilessly to be a winner and a Major League Baseball star and he ends up literally driving his son to the brink of madness, and now Avis remembers how Ira was before they had Jack and how much more easygoing he used to be in the early days and sure there were harbingers of his red-blooded All-American hypercompetitive nature but somehow she didn’t mind them that much and boys will be boys and all and then came Jack and before long the tennis and the obsession with being number one and how much harder and more driven Ira seems now and what will
Jack
become?—she sure as hell hopes not a Bud Stamper or a Jimmy Piersall—and now she snaps back to reality and puts the last bite of lobster in her mouth and stares blankly across the table at her darling husband and his prize possession.
Ira Spade removes the last piece of lobster meat off his fork, waves it under the table in front of a patient Akuma’s nose, pulls it back up to his own mouth, and pops it in.
And, as a special treat, he tosses a diabolical little smile to his ever-faithful dog.
* * *
In the garage of the Midtown Racquet Club, Ira parks his black 2040 Mercedes 19000SE in his spot in front of the metal plaque that says
IRA SPADE/CHAIRMAN, EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE.
The two Spades enter the club, say howdy to the receptionist, the head tennis pro, the assistant pro, the shoeshine guy, the locker room attendant, and the masseuse.
Once on the court, they take off their warm-up pants and meet at the net for a little pre-hit powwow.
Their court is flanked by two on each side, every one of the five immaculate courts fashioned out of dark blue SuperDecoTurf 9, the best hard surface the technology of the mid-twenty-first century has to offer.
It is a Friday night, and the conditions are difficult: Between the echoes of balls reverberating against the walls and ceiling and the sub-sixty temperature and the chatter of the raucous mixed doubles games on the other four courts, concentrating is definitely a challenge.
At the net, Ira gives Jack his usual pep talk.
“Now listen up, you sonuvabitch,” Ira begins, looking at his son with a stare that could melt tungsten. “Remember what I told you. No more Mister Nice Guy, okay? Outside of this tennis court, I am your father. But once we begin playing, on the other side of the net from each other, I am no longer your father, goddammit. I am your
enemy
. I am not to be respected. I am to be beaten. I am to be
crushed
. You got that?”
Jack gets that.
“Okay, now all you have to concentrate on for the next hour,” Ira continues, “is not letting the ball bounce twice on your side of the net.
Nothing else
.”
On Jack’s way to the baseline, something on the order of the supernatural is happening to him. With every step, Dr. Jack Jekyll is turning into Mr. Jackson Hyde, the nice, clean-cut young man yielding to his doppelgänger—a Tasmanian devil with an iron will and a hankering to create havoc.
Mr. Hyde’s compact, muscular body was made for tennis. It possesses strength. It possesses flexibility. And now, it is just possessed.
On the other side of the net, doing his stretches, is Ira Spade, former club champion. This oxymoron doesn’t seem even remotely possible, given Ira’s looks and physique. But tennis is a funny game, the ultimate proof of that aphorism about the book and the cover. Ira is one of those players—there is at least one member like this at every club on the planet—whose looks are exquisitely deceiving. On the outside, he resembles an accountant and a hack player, seems to have no form, no speed, no power, no stamina, no charisma. But scratch the surface, and he is savvy and wily and crazy like a fox and has all the shots in the book and knows how and when to use them and will employ every means possible to piss you off and to drive you out of your gourd and to beat you to a pulp and into the ground. Like the great American champion Bobby Riggs, Ira looks like a Nash Metropolitan but plays like a Mercedes.
Jack stretches, too, and takes a few practice swings from both wings. He is that rare and dangerous commodity nowadays, especially for one at such a tender age: a lefty with power and finesse and killer groundies.
Other hitting sessions between father and son have stressed the various fundamental facets of the game—stroke production, technique, and tactics—but this one will be devoted solely to focus, to concentrating on retrieving and winning points, whatever it takes. In short, to
ugly survival tennis
.
For forty solid minutes, Bobby Riggs runs Jackson Hyde’s thirteen-year-old sorry ass ragged, mixing up drives, drop shots, lobs, half volleys, slices, and topspins, all struck from the backcourt with the masterful control of a puppeteer.
But Ira’s marionette is retrieving nearly every single ball and is countering every wily shot with one of his own. In one punishing three-minute rally, Ira hits five consecutive drop shots, each one followed by a deep lob, and finishes it off with perfect drop shot number six, which Jack somehow returns before collapsing at the net in a heap.
“Get up and get your butt back to the baseline, you sonuvabitch. I’m not quite finished with you!” Ira barks.
Jackson Hyde refuels his little thirteen-year-old tank, trots dutifully to the baseline, and is ready for more punishment.
“Ben Hogan once said, about why he was so good, ‘It’s in the—’” Ira shouts to him.
“‘Dirt!’”
Jack shouts back, filling in the blank.
The doubles players on the surrounding courts give them sixteen dirty looks.
But Hogan was right, and Jack gets it and spends the next ten minutes digging and scratching and clawing and scampering and refusing to give in.
During the break, on the bench near the net, Ira has a little surprise for Jack, which he removes from his tennis bag. It is a pile of old action photos of past tennis champions, bound together with a rubber band. He removes the band and, one by one, shows the photos to Jack: Norman Brookes, Jaroslav Drobny, Rod Laver, Guillermo Vilas, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Rafa Nadal.
“So, what do you notice about every one of these players?” Ira asks.
“Hmmm, well, they’re all good-looking—”