THIS MY VOCATION

This is for the Washington Generals,
who between 1953 and 1995
played the Harlem Globetrotters
six times a week, winning
six of those games and losing
over thirteen thousand.
Still, we cannot call it absolute
futility; there were those six wins.

In an episode of the Simpsons
that some consider memorable,
Krusty bets all his money on
the Generals, “because they’re due.”
In another, Homer calls the Luftwaffe
“The Washington Generals of
the History Channel.”

What kept them coming back
night after night after night only to lose night after night after night
for thirteen thousand nights?

Sure, they got paid. And they got
to call themselves professional
basketball players, and it was true,
technically, though I’d hesitate to call it
an obvious career move for anyone.

But is that really sufficient answer?
The Generals didn’t just lose
those thirteen thousand games,
their plodding marginal competence
was at every turn humiliated
by the consummate grace, skill,
showmanship and imagination,
sheer physical and comic genius
of the Trotters. The Generals had to
appear to do their best yet fall,
always and forever, short.
Am I the only one can
feel some kinship with that?

And how does race figure in this?
The Generals are mostly white—
as are the audiences—
the Globetrotters all Harlem.
Incongruous and counter-intuitive
that white audiences pay to watch
white men humiliated by blacks,
surely not a slam-dunk business model.
I’m humble enough—barely—
to leave explaining it to scholars;
but if and when that explanation comes, I’ll be surprised if it does not discover
a hitherto undocumented healthiness
in almost everyone involved.

Still, if there’s a heaven, and if all
the Generals make it there—
as, for there to be any karmic balance, one thinks they must—what visceral reaction will poison for them even Paradise, when the angels’ choir,
in the Songs of Your Life tribute, launches into a beatific rendition of
Sweet Georgia Brown?

For what must go through the head
of a little man with four-inch vertical leap
whose spotlight hapless role is jumping
time and again in the general direction
of a basketball spinning on an extended fingertip at the end of the upraised arm
of a far taller man? Does he think

How long can this go on?
Please pass the ball; please shoot;
don’t make me do this one more time;
we’ve done this show sixty-five hundred nights before; we’ll do it sixty-five hundred more; this is not
improvisation, not wit, this is
the seventh circle of hell.

But no; I know what keeps him going: He thinks, The crowd is laughing;
that woman in the second row,
a little skinny for my taste, but lovely,
I’ve named her Laura, Laura Lovely—
she just fell literally out of her seat
with all her laughing. I hope she wasn’t
hurt—no, she’s OK, she’s getting up,
a little red of face, but laughing still.

He thinks, We are good at this,
you and I, you with the spinning,
I the leaping. Without my leaps,
your spinning would be merely narcissistic. Only together
do we make Laura Lovely laugh.
But she doesn’t know that;
she thinks she’s laughing at me.

I can deal with that, I’m professional,
this my vocation. For this moment
I have half of her lovely attention.
Tomorrow night another city,
other Laura, another half;
times thirteen thousand;
it all adds up.