Finding joy at the end of a sporting career

The big man is taking his little son to the zoo, along with three other lads also aged four years old. These goat-jointed boys strut about as if the world is their private beach: invigorating by virtue of everything good that it holds, but of no great mystery to their wisdom-rich selves. Their favourite expression appears to be: “I know that.”

“What do you want to see first?” says the big man.

The little boys are engaged in some secret smiling game and are momentarily unreachable. The big man stands and watches with affection their closed society.

“We’ve got the whole morning,” he says as they begin a game where they lightly pinch one another and take two steps away to avoid being pinched themselves. There’s no malice, a lot of chuckling.

The big man stands in the middle of the game like a maypole. He likes kids. As a football player he was frequently pictured in the newspaper, smiling like the Milky Way, visiting sick children in hospital. The big man keeps his charity work under the radar these days. Just the week before he’d been playing football with little Africans. They’d taught him how to dance like a rainbow in gratitude for the fresh water now flowing into their village. He’d shown photographs of the little Africans to his son; the boy had wondered why he couldn’t live in a mud hut too. Now he and the boy were at the Melbourne Zoo together with a knot of the boy’s small friends; the big man keen to show them some of the animals he’d seen on safari.

“You know, I think they’ve got impala here,” he says. “When I came down from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, the first thing I saw was …”

“But I wanna see the gorillas, Daddy,” says the big man’s son, snapping out of the game and looking vaguely troubled.

“Yeah, the gorillas,” chorus the boy’s friends.

It’s a cool morning, with the high, open sky and the sun pretty as a new coin. Already the zoo is filling with a little piece of everybody. A variety of shoe quality. The big man, in a three-quarter length belted jacket of waxed cotton, had thought to give himself an expeditionary focus for the sake of the boys, but now he’s grateful to wear something warm and comfortable. The Victoria’s Secret model philosophy student he’d married six years ago regards the plaid lining as a hidden measure of status, lest he fall unconscious and there is some confusion as to what kind of man the paramedics are dealing with.

“The gorillas? What a great idea,” says the big man.

They leave the open square of the bubbling fountain, the palm trees and the snack shop, and they march down a damp clay path. He feels a small body crash into the back of his legs and he good-naturedly puts out a hand to steady the little fellow whose name escapes him. He wonders why so many children are named Tarquin and Grayson these days and what the heck happened to names like Scotty and Mark? He’d argued that Mark was a good name for the boy he calls his son, but his wife had felt, with much conviction, that for too long the world had been without a great man called Socrates.

It was true enough: their son was a thinker.

There he is now with a thumb in his mouth, just the tip of it, beholding the gorillas. The boy and his little mates have clustered together against the moving wire fence that looks over the moat and down into the enclosure. There are eight gorillas in total; five of them females, one male who is about twice their size, and sits apart, looking away from the spectators. Save for two females grooming one another, the adults are at their ease, giving the impression of strangers on a train. There’s a youngster lying on his back, with his leathery dark feet in the air. The star of the show is a small baby clinging to the back of his mother.

“He’s like Aunty Kate’s baby,” says Socrates.

“He really is,” says the big man too cheerfully.

“My Aunty Katie has a gorilla baby,” Socrates tells his little friends. The boys don’t follow his meaning but they make funny chimp noises and chuckle anyway. “My mum’s a gorilla,” says one of the friends, a copycat blurting of no veracity, and so the hilarity bubbles up in the pretty fashion of morning birdsong. It is contagious and the big man chuckles easily, but with a strange stab of longing, for there it is, that which he seeks: to have once again that little-boy ease with the world. He makes a grunting ape sound and the boys join in:

“Ooh! Ooh!”

Aunty Kate is the big man’s sister. She’s caught the attachment mothering craze where she keeps the baby attached to her 24 hours a day. She wears a harness to simulate the appearance of gorilla-style mothering. More, she’s subtly seceded from engaged human society, holding herself and her baby at a discernible distance from whatever gathering she is ostensibly a member of, much as you might see an eccentric hovering at the edges of a conversation and yet wholly satisfied in being the centre of attention. Kate’s husband Rudyard has been banished to a spare bedroom for the last six months, a situation that shows no sign of changing. Rudyard, plump with money and thin with nuanced thinking, is becoming more boorish under pressure of irrelevance. The big man shudders because his own wife is pregnant again; she’s been talking to Kate and seems keen to follow Kate’s example. Her feeling is that Socrates is turning out to be very much his father’s son and she wants to rebalance things with this second baby.

“My mummy’s gotta baby in her tummy,” Socrates yaps at his friends.

“Ooh! Ooh!” grunts the big man, flushing from a wave of bad feeling he cannot put a name to but, on the face of it, acting brilliantly the part of the big male gorilla, beating his chest, all of which evaporates when he realises the gorillas in the enclosure have all turned their backs on the aping humans, save for the baby gorilla who has locked on to the big man with something akin to recognition. It is a devastating moment. The tiny creature is no more than a pair of eyes in a wispy rag of darkness. Too beautiful, too gentle: all-knowing. The baby stares back at him, their eyes engaged in a warm communion. And here it comes, framed in the eyes of the baby gorilla, the very same question that every morning barks from the bathroom mirror when the big man is shaving:

“So you’re king of the world? How is that working out for you?”

The mother gorilla at this point reaches around and pulls the spindle-limbed bundle from her back and presses him to her chest. Still, the baby peeks out from the embrace and fixes those eyes once more on the big man so the question hangs in the air.

“Ooh! Ooh!” cries Socrates, but his friends have settled and the game is done.

What rises like bile under this sweetly mocking and equally accepting gaze is a nameless anxiety, a mild panic that of late has sent the big man, a household name by virtue of sport, to taking long walks and talking to himself. Unknown to his closest friends and family the big man has become acutely sensitive to the big questions of life. Even on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, where the air is thin and one’s exhausted mental acuity is reduced to that of a lizard, the big man, in a moment of awful loneliness, had pondered the view of the plains below as the birthplace of mankind and wondered if there was perhaps some ancient user’s manual buried beneath a rock or a tree. But up on the mountain, addled one might say, or rather under the visionary workings of high-altitude, he’d been moved to pull his drawing pad and stick of charcoal from his backpack and attempt to record the scene below as a map of sorts to the human condition. After a few scratches and ambiguous patches of shading he’d suddenly scrawled in a somewhat desperate hand:

“We came to be, but what were the men we were meant to become?”

Well, for one thing, he was never meant to become an artist: the family doctor, the one person to whom the big man had confessed his feelings of disquiet, having ruled out depression or any other ailment that could be served with pills, had suggested the big man try finding some creative fulfilment for his angst. Hence, the drawing pad. There had followed a gentle lecture of no authority, for the doctor was as much a fan of the big man as anybody else. He’d even mentioned, the old doctor, a couple of legendary moments from the big man’s football days. Now, save for some low-profile consulting and motivational speaking, the sporting career was over, the week-to-week spotlight turned elsewhere.

“And that must be hard for you, think about it,” the old doctor had insisted, missing the point. The big man wasn’t missing the spotlight; he was missing the kind of intimate life that the spotlight washes out. No matter the demands of the game and the attendant hoopla, he’d kept up his studies, invested his money sensibly and, having learnt from his mistakes, made a move into business that was as natural as running and kicking a ball. As his father put it crudely, “Mate, you’ve got more pies than fingers to poke them with. Hope you’re putting some of it away in a trust account in case Sally shoots through on you.”

Sally was the big man’s wife. Sally and the old man saw themselves as rivals for the big man’s ear. He had in fact married his father rather than his mother. Sally and the old man were both inclined to encourage the big man to talk openly, only to throw back in his face in a later argument any shared intimacy, weakness or worry.

“You know, mate,” his father had told him more than once, “there are plenty of good sorts around who don’t have to pretend to know every damned thing. I gave you two bits of advice: don’t marry a mad woman and don’t marry a woman who is smarter than you. Now I’m not saying that she is … but she certainly bloody thinks she is.”

The big man had explained to his father, “I wanted someone to talk to.”

“Mates,” his father chided, “You can talk to your mates, can’t you? You can always talk to me.”

And so came the evening, a few days before he’d flown out to Africa with a group of corporate clients, he’d dropped by to see his parents and the old man said, “Your mother reckons you’ve got something on your mind. She’s thinking it’s Sally acting up.”

The big man didn’t get far explaining the frustration of being the big man where, having achieved success in the eyes of others, he was expected to shut up and be thankful, even though in his heart, and against all material evidence, he felt his life was empty and meaningless. His father had blundered in with, “That’s ridiculous. Your mother and I gave you a set of values to live by and if you’d stuck by them you wouldn’t have a whinge in the world. Most men would give their left testicle to have what you’ve got. When I was your age, I was raising four kids on three-fifths of bugger all and …”

When the old man ran out of steam, the big man attempted to explain that his was a relatively rare situation, where he took nothing for granted and was to some degree burdened by a form of success–guilt, because so much had come so easily to him and while it could be apparently easy to cruise along and enjoy the fruits of his endeavours, what he longed for most was to be challenged by others to a higher standard, but that wasn’t possible because he’d long outgrown his friends, regardless of the affection that he felt for them. The old man, before heading off to the bathroom, had said, “If you’re that far up yourself, you may as well go into politics. Let me know and I’ll make some calls.”

If you’re that far up yourself … it wasn’t an original thought.

There was a time when the old man’s ranting would have hurt but, strangely, as the big man felt himself increasingly lost and questioning his place in the world, he’d realised that his father, his wife and his friends were simply out of their depth. They weren’t exactly victims of his success but they were captives to it. They had a stake in what he was as a commodity that coloured their view of him as a person. It was subtle in the case of Sally or his parents but with his friends, good-hearted as they may be, they couldn’t resist dropping his name at parties or when doing business and be buoyed by the response. They weren’t leeches or fair-weather friends, it was more they were limited in what they could give: if he asked any of them a practical favour, they’d be there in an instant; if he asked them to understand his existential angst, they’d think he was, as his father put it, getting up himself. He’d read enough biographies of the really big men to see this was a common story. He’d even read a couple of self-help books, only to toss them aside as junk. And always there were cultural prods that suggested, yes, he should simply get over himself.

On the flight back home from Kenya, the big man trawled the menu and found Oliver Stone’s Wall Street listed on the classic movies channel. He’d heard about the movie but he’d never got around to watching it.

About halfway through, ambitious broker Bud Fox is in his brand new designer kitchen, mixing salad, singing like a cloddish barber to Verdi (“rumpa-rumpa-pumpa”) and smiling in a fly-catching manner to the bone-white woman who happens to be his beautiful girlfriend. She laughs along and there is a childish hopefulness in the way Bud Fox giggles because in such a contrived relationship between the beauty and the bone-head there is always doubt as to whether the two people are laughing at the same thing.

Later in the evening, Fox and his wraith-like lover are in bed. She moves her legs with such choreographed elegance that their communion is less like sex than a horizontal tango lesson. As the girl curls into a love-me-please sleeping posture Bud Fox sits out on his balcony, surveying the fallen constellation that is Manhattan in the faux-democratic, be-all-you-can-be 1980s, and he says out loud, in a voice that has barely broken, “Who am I?”

The big man finds himself laughing at this ludicrous, clueless call to the heavens because the answer is obvious: Bud Fox is an idiot who has sold his soul to the devil for a chance to get rich and snort cocaine from a string of gold-plated whore bellybuttons before devoting himself to a beautiful girlfriend who has filled his apartment with art that has little to recommend it and can’t hold a conversation that isn’t underscored with venality.

If the big man had been old enough to see Wall Street in a cinema when it was first released, he would have found a good part of the audience had laughed along as well. It was the standard reaction. Unnervingly, he realises laughter of that sort is the standard reaction to his own questions of identity, loneliness and what it might take to live an authentic life. In fact, he can see the laughter in his case is more quizzical and uncomfortable because he isn’t a Bud Fox.

If you’re that far up yourself …

Not true. He is in many ways a splendid human being. Just ask those little Africans with the new well and herd of goats. He wasn’t seeking glory for helping out those kids; there’d be no leak to the media if he could help it. On the other hand, the fact that he was travelling to Kilimanjaro in the first place had been squeaked into the gossip columns by a nearest and dearest of no confession. Which only proved the point he was trying to make to his circle of intimates: any of them were entitled to ask of themselves who am I? but apparently it wasn’t a question that came to mind because, if you were to take a harsh reading of their self-awareness, they knew who they were by virtue of the mighty shadow in which they cooled themselves. For the big man, the question would have not only sparked howling laughter but perhaps even some outrage if voiced in a public forum:

Weren’t the ancient gods lonely too?

The movie ends with Bud Fox going to jail and somewhat grateful for his comeuppance, and so therein lies another reworking of Icarus flying too high and plummeting to earth. Not my story, thinks the big man as he switches off the video and orders a drink from the flight attendant. She asks if he’d like to read something, The Wall Street Journal, Time, The New York Times Review of Books or the New Yorker. He selects the latter two and is excited to find the New Yorker has a substantial piece about prosperous, socially-engaged people hitting a wall in terms of how they feel about themselves.

He’s particularly moved by the following passage:

“They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique and calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important decisions — whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise — they are on their own. Nor, for all their striving, do they understand the qualities that lead to the highest achievement. Intelligence, academic performance, and prestigious schools don’t correlate well with fulfilment, or even with outstanding accomplishment. The traits that do make a difference are poorly understood, and can’t be taught in a classroom, no matter what the tuition: the ability to understand and inspire people; to read situations and discern the underlying patterns; to build trusting relationships; to recognize and correct one’s shortcomings; to imagine alternate futures. In short, these achievers have a sense that they are shallower than they need to be.”

The big man is excited in part because some of these traits he’s already recognised and, if not mastered, is at least open to a tutor if such a thing existed. That he could be schooled to build trusting relationships is as thrilling a promise as a first kiss.

To imagine alternate futures is a wondrous revelation; simple and powerful. The big man circles the phrase with his pen and draws an arrow to the margin of the magazine where he writes:

“Yes”.

Followed by a querying:

“How?”

Even so, the big man doesn’t agree that these achievers have a sense that they are shallower than they need to be quite captures the true colour of his personal ennui, his disquiet. But he allows that it pushes a bruised button, the chiding of his father:

If you’re that far up yourself…

He continues to plough through the article, finding no simple solution per se, but more a series of references to advances in brain science, genetics, psychology and sociology gained over the preceding three decades. He circles the following passage:

They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say … A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more subtle ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q.

In the margin of the magazine, he writes:

“What’s driving me nuts isn’t a thinking thing!! It’s a feeling thing!!!”

For the first time since he was playing football, the big man finds himself happily tired, an easy mark for sleep.

And now, a week later at the zoo, he is engaged in a quasi-telepathic conversation with the baby gorilla. From his mother’s breast the baby continues to fix his gaze on the big man’s face with a loving recognition of what has been relentlessly knocking at the door of the big man’s heart: “What are you going to do now?”

“Come on, little baby, have a piggy-back,” cries one of Socrates’ little mates.

“My dad gives me piggy-backs,” says another.

“Can you give us a piggy-back, Daddy?” says Socrates.

“We’ll give it a go,” says the big man as he feels a prodding from behind.

“Look at the cute chimpies, Cody,” calls a chubby woman who has pushed forward with a chubby baby on her hip. She seems to be breeding on the spot as more and more children bearing her milkmaid jowls press forward. Big kids trampling blindly. The big man plucks his four little charges out of harm’s way and sits two boys on each hip. He stands like the mast of a human boat. The chubby woman now recognises the football hero.

“Jesus! What are you doing here?” she says.

A kind of conversation passes that he’s had many times before: what’s required is liturgy more than considered conversation. He surrenders patiently. The chubby woman will later say how lovely the big man was to her, as if it were a first date. She’ll get what she needs. A signed photograph to show friends. As for the big man, folded in his trouser pocket is a crushed page from The New York Times Review of Books, a passage circled in blue ink. He’d read the piece that morning over breakfast, a review of a book called Portraits of a Marriage by someone called Sandor Marai. After reading this passage, there’d been the knock at the door and an excited rabble as the three boys arrived for a play-date with Socrates. And that’s when the big man had said, “Hey honey, take it easy this morning. I might take the boys to the zoo.”

The passage from the book review reads as follows:

The greatest human yearning … is to recover the sense of belonging and possibility that attaches to childhood, that ghostly sensation of how things felt when life was most promising: “simpler, but more mysterious and more important.” “It is the memory of expectation that lies at the bottom of all our lives,” Marai explains, adding: “That is what we love, what we are forever seeking. And for an adult, perhaps only love can conjure something of that tremulous hopeful sense of waiting.”

And now the big man walks off. More than ever he knows what he’s waiting for: a long conversation imbued with the trust of a child. The boys want to see the lions. They have asked to sit on the big man’s shoulders which are broad enough to safely accommodate them. They hang on to his hair and his ears. They marvel at how high it is up there. They say how scary it is, how wonderful.