As we continue to wait for our backlog of manuscripts to clear the publication queue, I’m excited to share an essay from Zack Ford that will appear in NDQ 93.3/4!
Fear and Loathing in Pickleball
I’m anti-fascist, but if Leni Riefenstahl had seen me play pickleball last Tuesday, she’d have pulled her eye away from the viewfinder of her Arriflex to gasp at my virtuosity. She would not have needed to employ her slow-motion, mathematical film-editing techniques to make me appear a demigod— I simply was.
But my éclat on the court was beginner’s luck. It was my first time playing. The friend who’d invited me was a no-show. So I paddled up as a single, slotting my new Glarollirace paddle in the rack. I’d also brought a Wilson tennis racket in case there weren’t any other pickleballers.
But of course, there were— there were only pickleballers! I’d forgotten about the controversial turf war sweeping the nation. Tennis players were losing this conflict. Across the United States, tennis courts were being repurposed into pickleball courts, the incessant dink-dink-dinking of plastic balls on fiberglass paddles like the sound of so many hammers constructing a new era upon old bones.
Rather, the old bones were building this new era. Of the hundred players here, most were senior citizens. The majority were sexagenarians, some joking about having sex with each other’s spouses while waiting to pickle. There were even septuagenarians, and dare I say octogenarians?
Those old folks not flirting in the shade of the bleachers were focused on those playing, like scouts on reconnaissance. That’s what I noticed first, from afar, locking my bike to a palm tree: that militant focus. Even when a near-geriatric man tripped in the bleachers and tumbled onto his head in the sand, he was pulled to his feet with haste, and the scouts immediately snapped back to scouting. A New World Order was upon us.
Then I realized I was being scouted. Jo, a woman my senior by two generations, approached with a friendly smile. But I knew she was sizing me up, an emissary sent by the polychromatic Lilly Pulitzer-and-Lululemon-clad hive mind. She broke the ice with a joke that I’d brought the wrong racket, pointing at my tennis racket. I told her I was new, and I asked her how to play.
Jo explained the basics about scorekeeping, the lines of the “kitchen,” the serve order, and the requisite two bounces before a volley was allowed. Then her smile turned to a grin as she explained angular advantages and the opportunities left in the wake of knocking your opponent off-balance. “You exploit those weaknesses,” she added sadistically, testing my mindset. And having identified my competitive nature, she slotted her paddle next to mine in the color-coded queue.
Jo looked like a golfer. She wore a white visor over her strawberry hair and a pink taffeta skirt. Her fair skin was freckled from years of sun sports. I could tell, in civilian life, she was a very sweet lady. She gave favorite-grandma vibes. But on the court, she barked orders at me to move up or back as serves were flimflammed with topspins and volleys intensified. With her as my sergeant, my serves found canny placements in the corners and on the edges of the lines, and my returns were indefensible.
Across the net was Bill, a dreadnaught of a man whose paddle-hand moved like a fluttering swallow. His face was fixed like it was whittled from driftwood by a lonely sailor. Only the corners of his mouth moved, flickering sardonic wit like the tongs of a serpent’s tongue— but he could not sniff out our weaknesses. Today, somehow, Jo and I had none.
Indoctrinated into Jo’s methods of mercilessness, I exploited Bill’s artificial ankle and his hip replacement. With each point I learned more about how to deconstruct his footwork and dismantle his game. Bill compensated for his handicaps with vicious spins and glancing angles sharp as broken glass. He attempted to exploit my high, lanky center of balance to lure me into the “kitchen,” the no-man’s-land adjacent to the net. Stepping into the kitchen to hit a volley loses the point. Bill got me once or twice, but I recalibrated, set my feet like fortresses on the threshold of the kitchen-line, and fired back electric-yellow cannonballs that bounded past him.
I can’t remember all their names, but I remember their faces by the light of the hellfire I rained down upon them. I developed a lob, popping the ball way up high into the sun, blinding cataract-suffused eyes through prescription sunglasses. My back to the net, I flicked my paddle blindly, sending a searing shot right down the middle. I windmilled my gangly arms, reaching balls I should not have been able to reach, causing someone to grumble, “Call ESPN.”
Bill had tried to get into my head by telling me my serves were illegal, that I was hitting the ball above my waistline. I didn’t think I was, and a jury of peers avoided conviction or acquittal. But I adjusted anyway and fired off nasty meatballs that neither he nor his partner could put on a bun. Sometimes, as a counterpoint to my balletics, I bludgeoned the ball with ugly brute force, jamming up arms with gut shots.
And Jo and I won. I won my first four games and only lost my fifth because my partner was high on Benadryl. We still brought it down to the last point though.
As a tennis player, I’d mocked the pickleballers. And I’d always imagined, back in California, that they’d stolen reverent glances at me as I marched past their childish little nets, my tennis racket set on my shoulder like a bigger gun. But now, with these retirees in Key West, I had contracted pickleball fever. My sweat even tasted like brine. And after my triumphant first campaign, I couldn’t wait to get back on the courts.
It was a strange week. I was forty-two, living in the guest bedroom of my parents’ retirement bungalow, growing an unkempt beard and taking a sabbatical from life in general. My family tree is a gnarl of unrooted estrangement, and my parents are the only consistent relatives I have in my life. My blood-relation grandparents are all gone, and I never knew any of them all that well. That week, I walked into the house to find my dad talking on the phone to my step-grandmother. In our family lore, she was credited with repatriating my dad with his dad, my grandfather, who’d been a serious alcoholic. She was a Christian, had helped my grandfather get and stay sober, and had reconnected him with my parents, thus I got to meet him before he died.
These days, my dad rarely spoke with her. Now, they were involved in a tense speakerphone conversation. My grandfather had passed two decades ago, but there was some just-now-discovered issue with his will. A detail had been overlooked, and it was not clear whether my late grandfather’s 1956 Chevy—India Ivory with Nassau Blue fins and cherry-red space-age brake light cones—legally belonged to my dad or some other relative, even though my step-grandmother had given the car to my dad. As this conversation transpired, a hearse-black Chevy from the 1950s pulled to a stop in front of my parents’ house and stood idling. It was one of those spooky moments where the universe seems to be shifting in its seat. The ’56 was a major emblem of catharsis in my dad’s life; my dad had rebuilt the engine himself after my grandfather’s passing, though gas fumes still leaked like grief.
The will was suddenly located, the ’56 legally belonged to my dad, no family members would come out of the woodwork to claim it, and when I looked out the window, the chthonic black Chevy had evaporated. But now I ruminated about being an only child, with no siblings and no good relations with cousins to speak of, with two pickleball-aged parents. At night, I dosed myself with THC gummies to mollify undulous nightmares of mortality and aloneness.
And I focused on preparing for my return as a Newbie Napolean. I lifted weights and stretched. I avoided alcohol and drank electrolytes. When I got a shot from the doctor (not for pickleball fever, which is incurable), I made sure to take the needle in my left arm, lest any soreness affect my paddle-arm.
Finally, the day arrived. I awoke to “Reveille” and the national anthem played through the loudspeaker at the nearby naval base. I made my bed so neatly it would pass a drill sergeant’s muster. And as battle-hardened soldiers can be superstitious, I took my café au lait and pastry from the same café as on that victorious Tuesday. With buttery flakes of croissant in my beard, I rode down to Higgs Beach on my fixed-gear bike like Genghis Khan, ready to conquer, conquer, conquer.
But there was something premonitory in the air. I felt its heaviness as I pedaled past the brick wall of the Hemingway House; this wall was listing so much it looked ready to topple. And like a figment in a fever dream, the words death in the afternoon lit up neon in my brain. I rode past a hearse parked outside a funeral home. And when I reached the pickleball courts, I was struck with a clammy déjà vu— because they were all there again. Had they been there every day since, waiting for me? I felt like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, as her paranoia sets in. I returned their smiles, camouflaging my lack of confidence. But I couldn’t figure out if they wanted me to join them, or if they wanted tosacrifice me. Bill lumbered over, bending a smile on his face like a strongman bends a steel pipe, and he gloated, “Did you learn the rules yet?” cementing himself clearly now as my arch-nemesis.
I knew they had been preparing. Today, they were not just spry, they were fucking agile. Is there a book in the Holy Bible in which He reaches down with His hand and converts by miracle stainless-steel pins and titanium hips and plastic kneecaps into His flesh and His blood? It was like the movie Cocoon, where old is new again. I was a jiggly plastic bag of protoplasm, and they mopped the court with me. I went down hard like a deadfall oak in the first match. And when I saw three other players had surreptitiously removed their rackets from the queue, leaving my racket alone, I tried to tell myself it was nothing, that people had their preferred partners and there was no conspiracy. But a crooked icicle extended down like a finger from the centroid of the Florida sun, to tap my shoulder, to mainline Icy-Hot menthol cream into my aorta, and I shivered.
Then my queued paddle was up again, and I headed back to the slaughter, too cowed to muster any revanchism I might use as fuel (morituri te salutant, as they say). After another match, lost, in which I flopped and thrashed over the court like a mahi-mahi dropped onto hardpacked clay, I caught a Frenchman named Michel moving my racket in the queue again. How far did this thing go? Had they discussed me in a secret meeting, like a coven?
In my next game, I muttered apologies to my partner as we fell to a man named Soren and his wife; she played with a bulldog’s tenacity. I developed a nervous tick, bending over with straight legs to touch my toes after each unforced error I made. I imagined redeeming myself with highlight-reel plays, only to whiff. I only had one good shot, a perfectly placed pop-up that landed a hair’s breadth inside the back line, about which Bill, spying from an adjacent court, grunted, “Luck!”
On the way off the court, I explained to my partner my rivalry with Bill. She suggested (in a whisper, a seditious turncoat) that if I wanted to engage in psychological warfare, I could tell him I’d once achieved a Golden Pickle. I asked, “What’s a Golden Pickle?”
A Golden Pickle is a perfect game, in which the first player serving runs the court, scoring eleven consecutive points, without losing the serve. It rarely happens, like a no-hitter in baseball. I pictured a yellow-gold gherkin appearing in the air like a holy vision, its warty bumps and shallow crevices running a slightly darker russet. “That’ll shut him up,” she said. Apparently, Bill had always dreamed of achieving a Golden Pickle.
Back at the queue, Soren pulled me aside to give me advice. He advised me on my paddle grip and my footwork. Maybe they weren’t all out for my blood, or perhaps some of them simply respected me like how soldiers admire a hard-fighting enemy.
But suddenly Soren started telling me about his family. I can’t remember how or why our conversation became so personal. Perhaps I was still stunned from the brutality I’d faced on the courts. Soren told me that he was all alone, because his mother had died the year before, and he had no siblings. Soren announced to me that he was now an orphan. There’s something jarring about someone past retirement referring to themselves with that word; I thought of Larry David insouciantly eating an ice cream cone while mocking Marty Funkhouser for claiming the same terminology.
Soren’s mother had died on his birthday. And he had no siblings, because his sister had died a few weeks before his mother. During the last years of her life, Soren’s sister had been unhoused, living in a tent city in Nevada. She was so troubled, Soren explained, that she’d been kicked out of that tent city. “There’s rock bottom, and then there’s rock bottom,” Soren said with elegiac melancholy. I thought of my own family lore, about my grandfather out drunk on the streets, so cold in the snow one night that he’d rapped his knuckles on the window of a parked police cruiser and told the officer to go fuck himself, just so he’d be arrested and have a warm place to sleep.
Life and lore can be difficult to reconcile. I only remember my grandfather as a teetotaler; his penchant for hand-carved walking sticks; frying bass and trout we caught together in the lake; him always ready with a joke, especially the one about the parrot who ends up imprisoned in a freezer; watching the film Alien on VHS, and his remark that the film was so scary that the few hairs he had left on his head had stood straight up. I never knew the other part of him that had fractured familial ties, before I was born.
Anyway, the silver lining in the deaths Soren had endured, as he put it, was their order. His mother had always been wracked with worry about his sister, and his sister dying first, Soren said, had allowed his mother to finally let go. He’d broken down in tears at his mother’s eulogy, when he’d read a poem he’d written. “I used to be too prideful to cry,” he told me, and I was caught off-guard by his vulnerability, not expecting such a heartfelt reassessment of masculinity. Soren’s eyes welled with tears, and I stammered something unhelpful about having to let the emotion out or it will stick in you. Then Soren’s wife stepped up and he said, “Her son died last year.” I almost cried too until he said, “Her son was a cat.”
“But still,” she said.
I went to queue up my racket again, but noticed I’d be rejoining Soren and his wife. Self-consciously, I moved my racket to the next four-slot segment, embarrassed at the idea of putting on another futile show of Bambi-on-new-feet galumphing for the same audience. The name Soren means “severe” in Danish. But Soren, my new friend, kindly insisted we play together again. And when we got onto the court, Soren further insisted on being my teammate. “I hope he doesn’t yell as much at you as he does at me,” his wife sighed, even though she seemed to be the one in charge off the courts.
The match began, as always, with a beachside serve. And though I was drained, my legs like hollow pipes, Soren and I locked in. I did my best, but this time, instead of our opponents mopping the court with me, Soren mopped up my messes, returning balls I should have reached, making sure to consistently score points on his serves after I’d faulted mine. I watched Soren perform minor miracles, working in an uncanny alchemy of spiritual pain and pickleball placement. He magisterially administered his trademark chamfered flicks like exclamation points upon his imperious paddle-punches. And we won, orphan and one day an orphan-to-be, side-by-side, alone together, playing with our backs to the sun, the Golden Pickle looming somewhere up there above us like the face of God.
~
Zack Ford wrote/produced the film Watcher starring Maika Monroe. His nonfiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Evergreen Review, The Nelligan Review, and Oxford American. Vanderbilt University Press is publishing his book Paranoid Island, about the presence of ICE and Border Patrol in Key West.
