When I was at UNC-Greensboro getting my MFA, I somehow met a fellow named Sylvester. I’ve totally forgotten his last name. It’s not on the tip of my tongue or anything. That last name has been gone for years.
I’m guessing that we met through a girl named Margrace, an undergraduate who lived in the apartment below me in an old white house. Margrace and I were friends, and Sylvester and Margrace were friends, and that’s the only connection we had. So that seems most likely.
Sylvester was noticeable. He was probably around 6’7”. He was well-built but not overweight, so he was at least 225 pounds and possibly 240. He had long black hair and a black moustache and a goatee. I remember him wearing wife-beaters and shorts. He was physically intimidating, but smart, approachable, and had a remarkably gentle voice. I never recall talking about much of anything with him; memory is an odd matter.
I don’t know what his relationship to Margrace was; mine was ambiguous enough. They may have been friends because both may have been from Kentucky. Margrace was from Paris, Kentucky, and she told me that Sylvester was interested in working with horses. If so, he could do so essentially eye to eye. She was a fashion major; I never knew what he was studying.
This was in 1974 or so, and I’m dizzied to think that means it’s been a half-century. Once upon a time, it hadn’t been ten years in my life since the end of World War II. Now, it’s 85 years since Germany invaded Poland. Forgive my growing obsession with timelines in this blog. I just never imagined that I’d get so old. And that Sylvester and Margrace would seem but a dream.
Margrace had an ambivalent attitude toward sex in those sex-bedazzled years. She told me that her mother had died of cancer. On her death bed, her mother had enjoined Margrace not to be a slut. One night when she was having a particularly noisy party in her apartment, late in the evening, I could hear her yelling at, presumably, some fellow, “You’re putting me in a bind!”
I don’t know how I recall this, but I believe that was Margrace-speak for “you’re pressing me to engage in some sexual act or another and I don’t do that.” I’m guessing she was behaving for her mother. I never put her in a bind, so I don’t know why I would know that interpretation. I’ve no idea whether Sylvester ever put her in a bind.
Sylvester was a wonderful athlete. I don’t know how this happened, but I introduced him to the Saturday afternoon touch football games that I so enjoyed. At some point, the team let him play quarterback. As a wide receiver, I would run inconceivably long routes, and he would put the ball right into my hands. The defender would essentially give up, not believing that Sylvester could throw the ball that far long and to the outside. It was great fun. For a big man, he had graceful moves and a lovely touch on the throw of a football; it fell softly into my hands, just as I stepped out of bounds.
At some point, Margrace and I began playing tennis. UNC-G had a long line of very well-maintained courts, and I played with a lot of people there. My friend Doyle (see “A Best Friend of Long Ago”, September 22, 2023) played a chubby fellow called Rorin Platt on those courts. I remember Rorin playing in tennis whites and some kind of vest. Rorin played with a pipe and regularly thrashed Doyle, who was the superior athlete but not much of a tennis player.
Rorin started law school at North Carolina Central, then quit. It’s ironic that I watched him open those thick case books and thought, not for me!
Then he got a Ph.D. in history at the University of Maryland. I laughed at the title of his book, Cavaliers in Cloaks, about Virginian spies in World War II. But I just learned to my dismay from his obituary that he was quite a fine teacher and something of a scholar. He died seven years ago of cancer. Rorin belongs to that treasured part of my life, getting my MFA. He was a hoot.
Back to my tale. Margrace and I enjoyed hitting together; she was slender, graceful, her short blonde hair ruffing to and fro as she ran. She had startling light blue eyes. I do recall one session ending in some anger. I also remember once walking back to our apartments on the other side of campus and her slipping a sly hand around my waist, which I mirrored.
Sometime later, the moment I walked into my parents’ home in Auburn after they drove me from the Atlanta airport, the phone rang, and it was she.
“It’s just not the same without you here,” she said. It was cliché, yes, but touching, and totally unexpected, not like the guarded Margrace at all. I don’t recall how I responded, but, at that early stage of my romantic self, it couldn’t have been satisfactory for her.
In fact when I got back to Greensboro, things seemed to have fizzled out.
Time has blurred a lot of this; you must wonder why I’m writing this blog at all. But there was a moment that stands out.
I had an inconsistent and unspectacular if not dismal social life that second year—recall from the last post that I skipped an unconscionable number of the writing classes. So I wasn’t surprised to find myself in the gym—where UNC-G played its basketball games—on a Saturday night with Sylvester, playing one-on-one.
Doyle told me, and I believe this as Doyle was always performing quasi-illegal if not downright felonious acts, that one afternoon he and a friend climbed up on the roof of this gym. Doyle claimed that they gazed through the skylights at a UCLA team coached by the legendary John Wooden practicing ahead of a match-up with UNC-Chapel Hill an hour down the road. My sloppy research doesn’t go back far enough to reveal this game; we’ll have to take Doyle’s word for it. UCLA must not have wanted to stay in Chapel Hill.
Doyle said that he saw UCLA players, then in their glory days, take nothing but bank shots: a shot not toward the rim but against the glass then bouncing through the hoop. He claimed he never again took anything but a bank shot.
So it was in those august surroundings that I at then a respectable 5’10”, took on a 6’7” Sylvester. I don’t remember much of the game, but it couldn’t have gone well for me. I do wonder why, on a Saturday night, there weren’t enough fellows to make up a four-on-four.
All I do remember is that at some unimaginable moment, I drove around him (I had to take three steps to match his one) and made it to the basket. My theory, my impeccable strategy, was to drive past the basket and then use the hoop as a defense: I would start my reverse lay-up just on the other side of the rim from him, and the basket would serve as a defense against his block.
I leaped, raised my arm to lay the ball off of the glass and in, and he stood, not leaving his feet, and put his hand on the ball. I pushed; he pushed back. I pushed harder, though at this point it’s difficult to wonder why, and then all at once I came crashing to the ground on my hip. Just what I deserved. It hurt.
I don’t recall the game ending at that point, and, as a point of masculine pride, I may have forced it on. The outcome was never in doubt, though Sylvester was a gentle soul.
The semester had to end at some point, and Margrace went home to Kentucky, either as a graduate or not, I have no memory. I don’t think our friendship survived a night when I complained about a party that she gave that continued too loudly and too late. She may even have said that I was putting her in a bind, which lends a much more agnostic meaning to the phrase. I never saw either of them again.
Decades later, I had to have my right hip replaced. As my left hip was perfect, the doc asked, “Did you suffer any trauma to this right hip?”
I thought hard back to all of my athletic endeavors and couldn’t remember anything. I shook my head and said no.
Of course months later I remembered. Yes, falling on that hard wood floor had really hurt. That started the process that began to culminate when I was flying to San Francisco in the mid-1990’s for work and had to stand in a long line to get reticketed (odd word) when the flight was cancelled. Suddenly my right hip began to throb, and I wondered why. By 2001, I had my answer.
Sometime in the last twenty years, I was on Facebook and I found Margrace, obviously she, in Kentucky, maybe even Paris. I sent her a message and never heard back. I’ve learned that that’s what happens sometimes. I’m sorry, Margrace, for putting you in a bind. You and Sylvester were sweethearts.
Sometimes it is edifying to remember two singular people from your past who have probably forgotten you and whom you will never forget.
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