Nov. 1

The lights on the court were pinpricks, but the buzzing was reassuring. I sat down on the bench and pretended to stretch for 15 minutes.
The lights warmed, clicked and blazed. I pretended to loosen up my hip flexors. I pounded some forehands against the chain link fence. I bounced a ball off my strings 40, 50, 57 times straight.
Still, nobody came to play with me.
I had joined an online tennis ladder two weeks before, tying carefully altered personal information – close, but lies – into the required fields. Name, address, age, hours of availability, playing experience. Rating? After consulting the chart, I punched myself down as a 3.5, which was described something like, "recreational player, can sustain strokes, beginning to think about developing winning shots."
My hours of availability: daytime, when you’re all at work. A week later, I quit my newspaper job. I’d be lying if I said that a better chance at playing tennis against complete strangers wasn’t part of the attraction.
So I clicked the "submit" button, which sounded harsh at the time. Visions of latext-coated tennis players handing out racquet spankings for every unforced error, and the obedient submissives meekly shanking the ball wide just short of orgasm. The vision lingered as the website considered me, my specifications, and eventually laid before me a four-person ladder.
Fourth on the list: Joss Paton, Collingswood, New Jersey. I was suddenly a documented partner-seeker.
Two mornings later, I slept until noon. Little did I know that my marriage was waking -- probably for the first time in years -- getting dressed and walking out the door. The email from Jacklyn waited for seven more hours, until I picked it up at work.
So I forgot all about the online tennis ladder for a few days, but it’s always a surprise how quickly and easily the mind turns from pain. Just flinches in the direction of minutia.
Mom died? I’m so sad, I’ll never be the same. But the West Wing starts in half an hour.
I’m 45 minutes late for a doctor’s appointment? Just five more minutes of TV. Is there anything on?
Jacklyn is in the hospital? I’ll be right there. Wait, I can’t find that CD I just burned for the car.
My wife was apologetically gone forever, but that just left more time for tennis, I figured as I logged back on to the website. I did’t have to "try" anymore, whatever that ever meant. I felt like I was "trying" constantly, so it must have taken up a sizable chunk of my time. Right?
I had not played tennis in at least nine months, but now that the nagging marriage injury had cleared up, there were no limits.
I guess I expected to be invited to play pretty quickly. Fresh meat, right. But Bennett McFall of Medford, who was somehow at the top of the ladder, had not challenged me. Not had Lee Zhang of Pennsauken, or Jerry Clark of Haddon Township. These men were older than me, I surmised, patient. Let the kid come to us, they must have thought. If he;s so full of piss, let him entreat me.
Three days later, my job went the way of my marriage.
It wasn’t that I was fired or anything. I did screw up, so I left more out embarrasment. There was a seam in the schedule, my boss said. No two weeks notice necessary. The newsroom gathered around for store-bought cake before my last shift the next day. These were people that I could not call by name because I did not know their names. But hey. Free cake.
I woke the next day at the some old time, right around noon, and immediately regretted not getting good and trashed the night before. The moment of resignation deserved a commemorative evening of stupid consumption, but now that moment had passed. I tried the bar among the moth-eaten day drunks, but it was as if the beer had been waiting for me to seize the moment, and had gone flat waiting.
So I went crawling back to the tennis website, this time fully prepared to offer myself to one of these middle-aged men. If they played me on the condition that I let them win, I decided, that would be fine.
With nothing to do, my schedule open, I submitted to all three. Bennett, Lee, Jerry. Mr. Clark, even. It was then that I first read their profiles closely, and found out that none of them had every played a match set up by the website. Or at least they had never entered a score. The software has just placed us in this order, and there was no reason for me to be fourth and last except that I was the new guy.
I instantly regretted the desperate tone of the messages I had left. This was not some stratified fortress I was seeking entry to. The was a contest to see who could care less.
Five days went by and no one responded. I began wondering if I’d gone about this all wrong. Maybe, I hypothesized, I should create a new profile, one proclaiming myself not as a 32-year-old suburban-dwelling male, but as a 23-year-old female, new to the area and looking for something to do. The players would flock my way under the unassuming cloak: we just want a good game, anything for few nice sets. Then they’re all really thinking: all we want is some play. It would help if you had a nice set.
The time and place would be set via email, and they I’d show up. "Candy couldn’t make it, but she didn’t want to waste your time so she asked me to fill in. You just wanted to play some tennnis, right?"
Easy. Sexual-predator-in-reverse easy. Like a cop in a chat room, except this cop actually WANTS to have sex with the perverts.
For two days I amused myself this way, making myself feel like I was back in my phase of starvation, planning the ouster of the consumer culture. And then came the email from Lee Zhang.
To Josh– I’d like to play tennis with you to. Hows about the courts at Cove Road in Pennsauken. 9 at nite Tuesday? Is this good for you, yes or now? From Lee.
I replied with superior concision: "9 p.m., Cove, Tuesday. I’ll be there."
Nine thirty rolled up, but no Lee Zhang. The lights, which I had switched on after nearly killing myself in a crowded room of a crumbling municipal building, were burning bright. As the lower-ranked player, I opened my can of balls, hit the fence for a while, bounced them in the air for a while, and then wnet to hit a few serves.
One to the deuce court: wide. Another to the duece court: shanked but in. One of the ad court: into the net.
I was about to start again from the other side when I saw the headlights and heard the crunch of gravel under wheels.
"You’re here long," Lee Zhang said.
I wasn’t certain if it was a statement or a question. I told him I’d been here since 9, like we had planned.
Nine, he said. I say 9;30. I say 9:30 right?
Actually, you wrote nine.
Ah, shit, he said softly, as if he was trying to solve a problem. Then he looked up alertly. You still want play?
Lee Zhang had been in the United States for five years. He made a living as a violin teacher, he had no wife or children, and his serve had an awkward-looking loop in the backswing.
He had come to this country knowing almost no English, and had learned the language idiomatically, talking to regular people in regular life. This education did not come complete. He had, for instance, no comprehension of various social and cultural nuances like curse words.
So occasionally, he’d say something that would have mortified anyone else, and never notice the discomfort around him.
"Ready?" I called to him from across the net, after 10 minutes of warmup hitting.
"Fuckin’ A," he responded, matter-of-factly.
"What was that?"
"Fuckin’ A," he called, with a little wave. "You serve."
The first game was nervous and herky-jerky. I sprayed the ball all over the court, like a little girl trying to learn how to pee standing up. Lee Zhang broke my erratic serve right out of the gate, and his goofy-looking contraption turned out to put a fair amount of work on the ball. For a while, I was having trouble not looking silly.
Three-point-five, indeed.
I did manage to win a couple of games late in the first set, but still coughed it up 6-2. My forehand sidled back, regarding me with suspicion after all this time, and finally agreed to take my case. Eventually, I learned that my backhand would be unavailable for the next five sets or so, that my serve was working hard on a nervous breakdown and that my volleys had left the firm months ago, and were last seen on a beach in the South Pacific.