gpc

“So how’s the pinkie?” asks the orthopedic resident. 

I tell him I can type okay but can’t yet finger an E7 chord. I can pick things up with my left hand, but if it’s something heavy I can’t hold it for very long.

“Yeah, you’re going to need to do some stretching exercises,” he says. “Here, make a fist with your left hand for me.”

I curl my fingers into a fist. The pinkie won’t close tightly so he clamps down on it. 

“Ow.”

“Yeah, it’ll hurt a little. Just hold it down like this with your other hand.  Force it to go down and hold it for about ten seconds” — ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow owww — “and then do that five or six times.”

He lets go and I have to think almost out loud — Brain, please unclench pinkie — in order for the finger to straighten out again.

“The other thing you can do is one of these karate chop moves.” He puts his elbow on the table, and retracts his fingers back into a vicious-looking claw — like Hong Xi-quan going for Pai Mei’s eyeballs.

“You want to tense up your fingers as much as you can, and you’re trying to get that tip of the pinkie to touch your palm.”

I try to make the same tiger-boxing “claw” with my left hand. The pinkie doesn’t quite get there, so again the doctor presses it into position. (The scar tissue laughs at us.)

“Not bad,” he says. “You’ll get there.”

“I’ll practice while watching some kung-fu movies.”

I will never know exactly what set it off. It might have been the panic I felt in the cab ride to the ER, or the sight of a syringe of lidocaine being emptied through the callus at the base of my left pinkie, or the audible squoosh as the orthopedist yanked the joint back into place. (“Makes a funny sound, doesn’t it?”) Maybe it was the tetanus shot. Or a reaction to the antibiotics. 

But something kicked in and then kicked up — first as a sharp pain in my ribcage, and then a few red bumps. A day later, it started to look like chicken pox. 

“In a way, it is chicken pox,” said the doctor. “But different.”

I remember in high school there was a rumor that one of the English teachers had shingles. (What is it, anyway? We didn’t know. We didn’t bother to look it up or ask our parents.) She was out for an entire quarter, a few months after she had graded our papers on Othello and Streetcar.

What had set it off for her? It would make more sense to me if I could trace it back to one thing — an incident, a memory, a reaction to something she heard.

I’m guessing there is a doctoral candidate somewhere who will be able to tell me the answer in a few years. There would be an interrogation: What was on your mind during the week you got sick? Was it someone? A place? A general feeling? I would be hypnotized to remember what happened during that week, and each of the days would be painstakingly reconstructed in fifteen-minute intervals on a spreadsheet. The data would be fed into a magic algorithm that would eventually spit out the one item, the one culprit, that had caused my misery.

And I am positive that I would be completely underwhelmed by the answer.

I share the post-game table for five with the Captain, a newlywed, and a secret couple that has been recently outed.

This couple met on the court, and I was there. Actually, all five of us were there, but it happened right in front of me, close enough that I almost feel like I was part of it. He was late for the game, she was the new kid on the roster, and as he walked onto the court she asked for his name.

The Captain warns them that adding another game to something that is already a game is not for everybody. For example, he probably would not enjoy playing on a team with his girlfriend — for reasons that I will not get into here.

“What do you think, 張? Can we play together and stay together?”

“Eh, I’m the wrong person to ask,” I say. 

“Oh? Why?”

“He’s shy, man,” the Captain explains with a laugh. “He ain’t gonna tell us anything.”

“Order another round. Maybe I’ll talk.”

At the other end of the table, the newlywed flags down the waitress and orders another pitcher. Then she turns toward me.

“Why don’t you start by telling us why you are single.”

At the post-game table for three, the captain reveals to us his plan for Thursday — pick her up at the airport, flowers, Shari’s Berries, late dinner.

“Whatchew guys up to for Valentine’s Day?”

“Nothing going on,” I say. (This could be a lie, I realize.)

“I’ve got a B-school mixer on Friday,” says our ringer. “Not so sure about Thursday…”

“C’mon, man,” says the captain. “You two just gotta go out, meet somebody.”

The ringer continues: “I know I’ve got friends going out that night, but it would be like…seven girls and two guys at the table.”

“What, that sounds perfect!”

“Not really. I mean, let’s say I got myself invited to that. So…well let me put it this way: What if it turns out you’re more interested in one of the other girls at the table than the one who actually invited you? I’m thinkin’ that could be, well, not so good.”

I tell them that earlier in the day I discovered that I might be in the wrong neighborhood. “According to the research, you’re in the right place,” I assure the ringer, who lives in the Upper East Side.

“So where else the ladies at?” the captain asks me.

“Canarsie…Forest Hills…”

The ringer’s eyes suddenly widen. “Oooooh, you know who lives in Forest Hills, don’t you?”

Yeah — we do.

On the walk over from the gym, I notice a guy from one of the opposing teams tagging along with us. He’s a friend of a friend of someone I know, and now he is talking to me.

“You got hops, man,” he says.

“Thanks…Uh, you play in one of the leagues?”

“Naw, naw. In fact, this is the first time I’ve played in twenty years.”

“You played in high school?”

“Yeah,” he says. “High school.”

“Around here?”

“Naw. It was a…a boarding school in Connecticut.”

I don’t press him. Choate? (Probably — he looks and speaks the part.)

I think about what is going through this man’s head. He shows up at a pickup game that was suggested by the friend of his friend, and he gets schooled (at a game he used to know well) by a bunch of people whose median age is a good ten years younger than his.

“It’ll come back to you,” I tell Junior. “I quit playing for twelve, thirteen years. I got back into it after I moved here. It comes back to you.”

Junior nods. I’m pretty sure he’ll be back next week — and he will get his ass kicked again.

Over a post-game slice on the Upper West Side, I listen as the driver grills a marketing strategist on her trajectory from entrepreneur to tech start-up hire to Bain Capital consultant to MBA student to her current gig at an incumbent bureaucratic hierarchy.

I suppose it makes sense — that after exhausting yourself on the court, you let the workout mentality bleed into life outside the gym. How can I make my game better? How do I climb the ladder?

But I wonder if the driver is buying it.

“Choose an executive MBA program that works for you,” advises the strategist. (She has given this pep talk many times.) 

The driver nods. I’m not sure I can picture him delivering product spiel in front of a deck. But clearly he wants to reinvent himself in some way, and he’s taking suggestions. At some point I’ll have one to offer. I haven’t fleshed it out yet, but most likely it will start with, “Don’t do what I did — which is wait.”

The driver and the postdoc join us at the table after finishing their cigarettes. The postdoc seems overwhelmed by the menu; she hesitates before ordering pad see ew without pronouncing it. For the driver, an order of drunken noodles. For the designer, a coconut rice combo. And for the Chinaman, chicken rice with garlic sauce.

I’ve missed these post-game dinners — I’ve forgotten how much I milk them for gossip, pop culture references, and the occasional character for observational study…

We discuss the property of inertia. The designer is two years into his mortgage; the driver has been waffling on the idea of buying a place. Both have family roots here, so they plan on staying.

The postdoc, meanwhile, is trying to return to the city after being away for a year. She’s in town this week for faculty interviews, and is already thinking about which neighborhoods she could imagine herself living in.

“What about you?” she asks. “How long will you be in New York for?”

This is a hard question for me. My roots here do not go deep, and I’d be lying if I were to say that I am staying for good. But I also don’t feel like one of those jaded people who have given up on New York. 

“I’m not sure,” I say. “I mean, I like it so far — but at the same time I don’t know if this is where I’m meant to be.”

As soon as I say it, I realize how half-assed an answer it is. You make it a place that’s meant to be — isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? If you choose to stay here, you should accept it as the place where you’re meant to be. Right? 

But a certain self-defense mechanism kicks in, and before anyone can ask me anything else about my insecurity about being settled in New York, I have already changed the subject. 

“Does anyone have any ibuprofen? My knees are fucking killing me.”

In the afternoon, Dr. Grabowski calls about the MRI.

“Look, you need to go easy on the leg, okay?” he instructs. “Instead of the stairs, you take the elevator. And don’t overdo it with the walking. Go easy.”

As he listens, the Chinaman thinks about the last time he walked over the bridge from Long Island City. It was a month ago, on his way back from the Upper East Side; a Thursday. He got off the 7 train at Vernon-Jackson, headed up 50th Avenue (“Yev-uh-nyew — is that how she says it?” he thought) and onto Jackson, and then up the ramp that curves around Manetta’s. He glanced to his right, at the L.I.E. tolls, and then at a biker racing down the bridge toward 11th Street.

Some pedestrian punk is gonna clothesline you one day and it’ll be ugly…

At the midpoint — where the leaves of the drawbridge come together — he looked across the water at the last block of Manhattan Avenue and the building where he used to work. To his left, at about ten o’clock, was a quaint view of the sewage plant.

Home.

He took the stairs down to the corner of Ash and McGuinness, and a few minutes later found himself sitting at Acapulco, waiting to begin the ritual of dipping hot french fries into cold salsa verde. With a frosted mug for the beer — a Pacifico…

“張? Are you still there?” Dr. Grabowski asks.

“Yeah, I’m here,” the Chinaman answers. “I’m just thinking…this would be a little easier if I weren’t still on the antibiotics. I could at least have a beer while I’m waiting for all these elevators.”

“Yeah, well — look, just a couple more days, okay? To be safe.”

“Sure, sure,” says the Chinaman. “Let’s be safe about it.”

The surgical resident reminds me of the pre-meds who used to sit in the front row of Maitland Jones’s orgo class in Frick Hall. I bet she was the quiet girl who took more notes than everybody else.

“Hi. My name is Dr. Wei.”

I am sitting with my right knee propped up, La-Z-Boy style. Dr. Wei is standing five feet away from me but it feels like a mile.

“So how is the fracture?” she asks. “You can walk on it okay?”

“Yeah, it’s all right. Sometimes it kinda locks up on me though.”

She cocks her head to the left to take a closer look at my knee cap.

Please don’t wince. You’re making me worried...

“How long have you been using the silver sulfadiazine?”

She is holding my chart, which contains the answer, and which I know she has read. It’s like orgo class; she knows the answers because she’s already read the book. But in here you need more than just answers — you need a good routine. The people-skills stuff. We both kind of suck at it.

“About two weeks,” I say.

“And how did you get the burn?” (Also answered in the chart.)

“A friend of mine ran off to get ice after I hurt my knee. But he got it from an ice cream vendor in the park and didn’t realize it was dry ice.”

“Why did the ice cream vendor have dry ice?”

Did you place out of general chem? Yeah, you probably did…

“It’s an efficiency thing,” I say. “If you use dry ice, you can keep the cart cold without weighing it down. The lighter the cart, the more ice cream you can carry, the more you can sell.”

“Um…I see. And you saw your friend get this ice?”

“No. I was down on the ground, I thought I tore my ACL or something. I didn’t know where he got the ice from. He wrapped it, and it got numb. Fifteen minutes later, my knee turned into a popsicle.”

Again, Doc — wincing is bad. B-A-D. I need you to work on that one for me.

She writes down some notes in the margin of the chart. P-o-p-s-i-c-l-e…

The door to the exam room opens, and the attending walks in — a thin man in a bow tie. He shakes my hand and sits down across from me. Dr. Wei remains standing.

The attending looks at the wound, pokes at it a few times with his index finger, and then turns to his apprentice. “So Dr. Wei…whaddaya think?”

She looks down at the chart (I, too, would need a prop), then at me, then at the attending.

“Well, I think the silver sulfadiazine might not have been very effective since it was applied over the—”

“No, no. I wanna know what you think. How’s it look to you?”

She pauses. “I mean, it’s not bad—”

“I think it looks pretty good,” the attending says. Then he looks directly at me and says, “You’re gonna be fine.”

He spends the next five minutes telling us a story about a woman who was flying from London to New York many years ago. She had a sore back, so she asked the flight attendant for some ice. The woman sandwiched the bag of ice between her lower back and the seat, and then she took a nap. But a funny thing happened — the ice never melted. She arrived in New York with a dry ice burn that was a lot worse than mine.

“That was one of my first patients here,” the attending says. “The thing with ice burns is that the cold just numbs you, so you have no idea what’s happening. It can be very dangerous.”

I nod. Dr. Wei nods.

I think ahead to fifteen, twenty years out, when Dr. Wei will be pulling the same line on one of her residents: “I wanna know what you think…How’s it look to you?” She’ll then wrap up the diagnosis with an anecdote about an unfortunate Chinaman who went to Prospect Park on a Sunday afternoon in May and left with a broken leg — and frostbite.

I used to know a woman whose mother had been a Singapore Girl.

“Eventually they ground you,” she told me.

“What is that — like a suspension?”

“No lah, it means they put you on ground. Cannot fly anymore.”

Right now I am imagining what it would be like to fly out of this chair. I am going to be stuck in it for a while — not sure for how long. I will have to decline a few rounds of mercenary shift offers. I will fall off the post-game radar…

One of the skeptics tells me that I should try to make good use of the time.

“You could write something, you know.”

“I could,” I say. “But it always ends up being nothing more than an attempt to write. There is never actually anything that ends up being written.”

“Okay, fine. Go cry over your stupid knee.”

She is from out of town, a friend of an acquaintance from game night. An auburn bob, dark eyes. I met her early in the day when the park was crowded. Now it’s quieter. Her friend is a few steps away talking to his girlfriend.

The girl from out of town turns her head my way.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I forget your name.”

I tell her, and she apologizes again.

“Sorry. I meet so many people today…”

“It’s okay, it’s like this every weekend,” I say. “They invite a bunch of people to play, you meet them for the first time and it’s hard to remember all the names.”

“Oh, I see.”

I let her start in with the questions: Where do you live in New York? What do you do? How long have you been living here? Where did you used to live?…

“Oh, my auntie live in Boston,” she says. “She tell me it’s very” — she covers her mouth with her hand — “white.”

“It’s okay, you can say it louder. You won’t get in trouble.”

“But it’s true, right?” she whispers.

More questions, more answers. I’m a bit out of practice with my biographical details. Yes, I’ve been to Hong Kong…it was around the time of the handover…I was in Singapore for a while—

“Singapore,” she interrupts. “Singapore got really nice fish ball — fish ball noodles there. I think I miss that the most. You miss Singapore?”

“Sometimes,” I say. “Well, not really…uh, how long are you in New York for?”

“Oh, just one week.” She looks over at the last game that’s finishing up. “That girl playing, she is very tall.”

“Yeah.”

“She has very interesting accent. I talk to her earlier.”

“Oh, really? What does it sound like? I don’t really know her.”

“Hmm…I think Russian, maybe? But I cannot believe so tall! In Hong Kong we never see people so tall.”

I nod. Her next question throws me.

“So how come you are sitting here by yourself?”

Another sub gig, this time with the sinologists. I know these guys, so it’s an easy sweep: 3–0.

At the post-game sushi table, someone mentions the Year of the Dragon, which leads to Hey, what are you?

“I am monkey,” says the Monkey.

“I’m…a pig,” says Piggy.

“I’m a horse,” says the Horse.

“So what are you?” the Monkey asks me.

“I’m a bison.”

“Bison? I didn’t know there was such thing as bison. What year is that?”

“Go ask your phone.”

“Fine, I will…Siri, what is the year of the bison?”

Siri doesn’t quite understand. The Monkey is getting impatient. “So why don’t you just tell us the year instead of making us guess?” she says.

“That would take the fun out of it.”

“Oh come on,” says the Monkey. “This is so unnecessary.”

A diversion would be good here. I turn to Piggy. “So you turn…twenty-nine this year?”

“Yes,” she says.

“You know,” the Monkey points out, “I hate to tell you, but twenty-nine was a horrible year for me.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because you just think about thirty being right around the corner. And you’re wishing to have done more by the time you’re thirty, that you’d have established yourself more. That’s why. When you actually turn thirty you’re just glad it’s over with.”

Piggy nods; she has five months to prepare.

Someone’s cellphone rings. The Horse answers — it’s his girlfriend. The rest of us quiet down to overhear their conversation. (Piggy, Monkey, and Bison all appear to be single. And nosy.)

“Love you, too,” says the Horse before he hangs up.

“Awwwwwww,” coos the Monkey.

“Shut up,” the Horse snaps.

“That’s just so cute.”

“Shut up. All-a-you shut up.” The Horse returns to poking at his sushi and blocks out our laughter.

I look over at Piggy and Monkey and think back to several months ago when the Ratio was first explained to me. Is the Ratio to blame (or partly to blame) for each of these women not being in love? Or is it more complicated than that? I don’t know them that well — I know some of their friends, but not many of the details. I’m not sure they would trust me with specifics right now, especially since I keep so many of mine locked up here.

“So really, how come you don’t tell us your age?” asks the Monkey.

“It’s bad luck,” I riff. “It’s like bad feng shui. You don’t put the bed facing the door, and you don’t tell people your age. Same principle.”

“That’s sounds, eh…bullshit to me.”

“Ask Siri if it’s bullshit.”

Technically I’m off the court during the winter season resting the pre-arthritic knee, but every now and then I will pimp out my services to the highest bidder. Every team in the rec league wants to win, of course. But nowadays you also get style points if you’ve got an Asian ringer on your team. Let’s just say demand is high.

What does the lucky bidder get? My current marketing propaganda guarantees the following:

• Instant offense
• So-so defense
• At least a handful of flashy plays to make up for the fact that I’m not a good floor general. (In other words, if we lose, at least I know how to make the other team look bad.)

Tonight I get the call from an investment banking analyst I met at a scrimmage a few weeks ago. “Can you sub for me, man?” he asks. He tells me he’s got a good co-ed team: “The two girls, they played in college. They’re really good.”

I notice he doesn’t say anything about the guys on the team. But fair enough. Sold.

“Awesome. Thanks, man.”

I get to the gym, and I’m looking for the mystery team. I suspect they must be looking for me. Finally, it clicks: Hey, we just have to spot the Asian guy…

I meet my four teammates in quick succession. They all have names beginning with the letter A. I am unable to remember any of them. But that’s all right. Let’s play.

This team turns out to be a bit rangy. The two girls are indeed very good. They also have amazingly well-defined eyebrows. My brain is busy trying to process the shape. I know I’ve seen it before.

Adidas? No…Nike? No…Fila? No…

The two guys average out to be just average. One has got serious hops and pretty good ball control. The other one is going to get picked apart by our opponent. His footwork, his timing, his coordination all need some work. He is, as they say in ESPN editorial, the chink in the armor.

The ref blows the whistle. Game on.

As is often the case when I sub on a co-ed team for the first time, the men will overdo it to prove themselves to me, while the women will be very patient and work with me.

We lose the first game quick. Bad defense. Horrible passing. Offense is just not in sync yet.

I approach the taller of the two girls before the second game starts. “Should we switch up the rotation?”

“No, I like it how it is,” she says. “We just need to tighten it up, play smarter.”

Good answer. I look at her eyes again. New Balance? No…Converse? No…

The second girl — she’s younger, with a slighter build and a craftier style of play — interrupts our private little huddle: “No, let’s change it up.” She decides to play out of her usual position for the entire game — in order to help get the win. I am really rooting for this team now. I look her in the eye.

PUMA? No…Mizuno? No…

We pull ahead briefly in the second game, but then the other team starts poking at the chink. Over and over and over. We lose again. But it’s a good kind of loss — the team is getting a lot better. We’re almost there.

On to game three. We have nothing to lose now, so it’s all about making them look bad. This is when I tend to play my best: fast, reckless, angry, risky, showy, high-wire, hustling, yelling, keeping us alive. I’m able to stave off the poke-a-chink strategy for much of the game. But when it comes down to it, this is a team sport. Someone else is going to have to step up to win it, and we’re getting tired now. We finally run out of gas and drop the third game. 0 and 3 for the night.

But I look around and my teammates are happy. They all had fun. They’re going to do better at the next game. (And if I ever play with them again, maybe I’ll learn what comes after the A in each of their names.)

The crafty one comes up to me after the game. “I know we lost, but that was still awesome,” she says. “Did you play in college?”

I smile because I’ve suddenly noticed her sneakers.

Reebok. It’s like half of a Reebok logo.

“No,” I tell her. “I was never good enough to play in college.”