Basketball

Charlie loved basketball.  My sport was always surfing, his was basketball.  He played in as many as four leagues a week.  He played at the Jewish Community Center a couple of years.  He said the team roster was like an IQ test:  which name doesn't fit?  Goldstein, Epstein, Ginzburg, McKain...

He played in the Coronado league on the beautiful and prosperous island of Coronado.  He observed that the school district there spent lavishly on athletic facilities with a tendency to let everything else slide.  Coronado was always the town with the highest percentage of registered Republicans in the country, a lot of retired military and active military there.  One night he came home greatly shaken from a league game, one of the players had died.  Only about age 35, had a seizure and before paramedics could arrive he was gone.

He played in a league way up in Scripps Ranch, he'd fight afternoon/evening commuter traffic up I 15 to get to his games.  He played in the gay league.  He played on the San Diego gay team in the Sydney Gay Games (you can't call them the Gay Olympics) in 2002, and had a great time including a tour of Australia.  One of his best, funniest stories was from the gay league.  One year the league played at a gym in Balboa Park.  A friend of ours, a tall Black man, a seriously good basketball player, showed up at the gym one night to shoot a few hoops, saw Charlie and they talked and hung out.  He has a strong resemblance for a famous pro basketball player.  So the rumor got started that he WAS that famous basketball player and Charlie was his boyfriend.

We were visiting our friends in the Haight once, and the brother of the guy was visiting from some not too liberal town in the central US.  He was not overtly hostile to gays but had some attitude.  He, too, was a basketball player and he and Charlie went down to the gym to shoot some hoops.  Charlie said the guy was blown out, kind of miffed, that a gay guy could shut him down and out shoot him.  Charlie always said defense was the most important part of the game.  I saw Charlie play, he was good.  I saw him shoot the winning basket for his team.  One of the first things I noticed that made me think things were not quite right with Charlie was when someone threw him a pass and it bounced off his chest, it was an easy pass and he could not handle it, almost didn't react to it.  There were a lot of other signs that things weren't right.  Charlie was always so stable, so healthy, so sensible, so right on things that even while he was going down hill I tended to doubt my own impression that something was wrong:  its Charlie, he must be OK.  He was very healthy.  His labs always came back perfect.  Kaiser sends you results with a range, to be healthy you want your results within that range, and his were always perfect, right in the center.  And yet that magnificent brain was deteriorating.

I took him surfing.  He did very well for a beginner.  All this seems like just yesterday.  It always seemed so remarkable, when I was a little kid, being with my grandfather, that he could flash his memory back 50 or 60 years, and now I can do that, too.  I can easily remember incidents from my childhood.  I remember the day Sputnik went up, the day Russia invaded Hungary, the 1960 election, the day Kennedy was shot, that is coming up on 50 years this November 22.  Wow.  And it does seem like yesterday.  It seems like only yesterday Charlie and I met at that party in North Park, only yesterday we did all that precinct walking, all those CDC and Democratic Club meetings, all those precinct walks, those conventions, the great trips together.