When I boarded a plane out of San
Francisco on August 11, I had no idea anyone had died. I’d been in town for a
pair of baseball games at O.co Coliseum, just one BART stop away from the
notorious Fruitvale Station, but I’d been too caught up in the moment to follow
any news. My father and I were busy talking about our upcoming Blue Jays “home”
game in Seattle; we were talking about next year’s planned trip to St Louis; we
were talking about the electrifying Blue Jays game that we’d missed, which had
actually extended longer than the A’s game we’d paid to see, despite starting
three hours earlier.
Two people died within 50 miles of
that airport. One was a man with whom I’d only ever had secondary contact: some
former coworkers had watched Robin Williams sit quietly in a booth at some
ritzy Yorkville bar in 2005 or 2006. I don’t know whether he was off the wagon
at that point. Could be he was enjoying the company of some charming locals. Or
just bored, rich and in the neighbourhood.
The other was a man who knew me
from afar, but I don’t know that I’d trust him to remember my name. Brian
Hendricks already had cancer by the first time I enrolled in a film class with
him. In fact, he missed the bulk of that semester for treatment while his TA
mentored the class. He was present for the rest of my academic tenure, but
remote. In all four courses, his method of teaching was the same: show us a
film – some obscure, some not-so-obscure –; spend half an hour proselytizing on
the meaning of life; tell us to go be creative. There was no discourse and no
academic standard to uphold. The rules were simple: if we turned in something
spectacular, we got an A; if we turned in anything at all, we got a B; if we
turned in nothing, we got an F. I got one A, one B, and two Fs.
It was
those Fs that rang in my mind when I heard about his death. Not as schadenfreude, mind you – just as a complicating
factor. How do you memorialise someone who was occasionally inspiring, but often
as not the opposite? I conceived a brilliant story in one memorable course, but
the classes that didn't mean as much left me feeling cold and existential.
Obviously my professor knew his personal road ahead was bleak, which is why, as
I failed his last-ever course, he prepared to take his leave for the California
sunshine. Every half-assed paper to which I might devote my time was only a
reminder of how that time might be better spent enjoying the little moments of
life on this earth – if anything, his teaching emphasized the ideal of not
working.
I
remember the Robin Williams from my childhood probably not as well as I should.
I must have seen Mrs Doubtfire and Hook at some point, but the ones I
remember are Jack and Flubber. They surfaced a little later in
my childhood, around the time I began to memorize ad campaigns. In retrospect, they’re
fluff movies, stuff that should probably never have been made at all, but they
are Robin Williams movies. With a few
notable exceptions, prime Robin Williams was a most dominant actor in the sense
that his movies were always about him. Even his serious and/or supporting roles
seemed to possess not so much character traits within the universe of the film
at hand, but character traits within the Robin Williams universe. The various
Robin Williams iterations are mostly heavy on id and light on ego, which might
explain why he appealed so often to children.
I was half-asleep
in my Seattle hotel room when I heard the news. “Who died?” I said aloud. Not out of unfamiliarity with the man, but
because the name is so homonymic I thought I was mistaking him for the singer
or some other similar-sounding human. Upon ascertaining that it was, in fact, that Robin Williams, I quickly assumed
an overdose or something otherwise drug-related. But then his suicide seems
almost more self-evident than some more direct symptom of drug abuse. The Wire showrunner David
Simon articulates uncovering a deeply unhappy side of the man in his account of
meeting Williams on a TV set; truly, Williams’ endearing mania always seemed
somehow fundamentally unstable. Such effervescence must have its logical
counterpoint. It’s easy now to look back through old photos and interview
footage and find glimpses of the grimace that Simon references.
This
trip was a combination of my annual baseball sojourns: every year I make sure
to get home to Toronto for a couple of games and annually my father and I hit
up a different road ballpark. Traditionally, Toronto happens in early July and
we go to the States for Labour Day, but this year they ran together: the Jays
were home for my last three days in town, and we were to hit San Francisco and
Seattle on my way back to British Columbia. Moreover, this year the games were
to have meaning – in years past the
Jays have been a longshot by July and running out rookies by early September.
This year, by contrast, the early-August series pitted the second-place Jays
against the first-place Orioles, and after our stop in San Francisco to see the
league-best Oakland A’s, we were to see the Jays take on the suddenly
wildcard-contending Mariners.
Ah, but
timing is everything, and the problem with meaningful games is that they hurt
more than meaningless ones. My first Jays game of 2014 came on my birthday. It was awful. After closing within a game and a half of first place, the Jays had
laid an egg against the brutal Astros and they came home limping. On JoseBautista T-shirt giveaway day, Mark Buehrle gave up 13 baserunners in just four
innings, the infield made two awful misplays and Bautista meekly popped up both
times he was given the opportunity to get the Jays back in the game. By the
eighth, things were out of hand and I didn't even have the stomach to sneak
into the front row for the last fifteen minutes. The Jays won the next night,
but lost the series and any hope of gaining ground on first place. I left for
San Francisco as they welcomed the stumbling Tigers in for a three-game set.
And
what a series it was! Friday night’s game featured stellar closer Casey Janssen
blowing a 4-2 lead in the ninth. Saturday’s game saw the Jays tie it in the
ninth and win it in the tenth. And Sunday was the game to end all games, the
game referred in the opening paragraph of this article – in the words of ESPN
writer David Schoenfield, “the best game of the year.” The Jays looked primed
to lose in the ninth when Anthony Gose was caught stealing, but challenged the
play, saw the call overturned and tied the game. They then played an entire
extra game before the Jays finally walked it off in the nineteenth inning – about
half an hour after the scoreboard had gone down at my west coast game.
It was
a great game to put an end to a stupendous series, but the Jays were exhausted
by the time they met me in Seattle. The electric crowd of travelling British
Columbians (a Seattle newspaper estimated 60% Jays’ fans in attendance, which
seems low) seemed the boost them for three or four innings – they even built a
1-0 lead against the best pitcher in baseball, Felix Hernandez – but it was not
to be. The Mariners offence exploded against an overmatched minor league call-up,
and the game and series quickly turned into a laugher. In the course of six
games over seven days, I’d watched the Jays tumble from holding a wildcard slot
while contending for the division to 2 games out of the wildcard and 5 out of
the division. The three losses on either side of that seven-game stretch
painted an even bleaker picture – a reduction in playoff odds from around 56%
on Aug 1 to less than 10% on Aug 15.
What most struck me about the fan base
at the Coliseum was the palpable inferiority complex. Not its presence – every city
that boasts two teams has its favourite and its also-ran – but its vocal
intensity. It wasn't the domain of bored talk-show hosts, it was the defining
feature of every A’s fan I encountered. They complained that Giants fans were
the downtown crowd, people who didn't know anything about the rules of the
history of the game. They complained about how nice the park was, how you
couldn't get good seats. It didn't seem to matter that the A’s were the best
team in baseball while the Giants were in the midst of a slow fade: to be an A’s
fan was to be anti-hipster.
It’s not a perfect analogy for race
relations – the A’s have been a powerhouse franchise for much of their history,
with more overall championships than the Giants if none quite so recent – but it’s
easy to see why being a Giants fan might seem more first-class. The Giants play
in a beautiful modern stadium rather than a converted football field from
another generation; they’re just steps from the harbour and a thriving downtown core;
they even have a natural California rival that pre-dates California baseball
altogether. The A’s have none of those things – the park is surrounded by industry
and a parking lot and their most natural divisional rival is a former expansion
team.
How fitting, then, in light of the
Michael Brown incident, that St Louis was to be our next baseball destination? Racialism
in America is a strange subject for me. Income inequality is not the same as
institutional oppression, and while Canada has its share of the former I often
idealistically imagine the latter to be a thing of the past. Racism in my world
is the domain of hicks and dropouts, and both rich and poor come in all shapes
and sizes. I saw the news coverage on the same day I heard about Robin
Williams. Later, I read Rembert Browne’s first-person account of the aftermath. He describes
going to the front lines in Ferguson on a lark, in part as a journalist, but
also as a rubbernecker. He describes an environment shockingly peaceful until
it wasn’t: tear gas, smoke bombs, rubber bullets, and journalists under arrest.
I've seen similar over-enforcement only once in my lifetime, at the 2010 G-20 summit protests in
Toronto. But while then I could empathize with my friends’ middle-class outrage
at being thrown in jail without water or due process, I can never have true
comprehension of Browne’s sudden revelation in the chaos that he was “just
another black man in Ferguson.”
My most indelible memory of our
baseball trip to Milwaukee was boarding a transit bus to discover I was the
only white person on board. Major urban subways are more integrated, but it’s no
coincidence that the film Fruitvale
Station centres on the story of a black man killed by a white police
officer. An early scene in The Shield
depicts a white police officer killing someone while mediating a dispute
between a black woman and an Arab man, and being told afterwards that it was a
good thing she killed the right person so as not to incite a race riot. That episode may have
been fictional, but the series of events that led to the conception of the show
was not – a white police officer shooting and killing an undercover black officer.
That doesn’t touch on Rodney King,
or 30 previous years of racial strife beforehand. It doesn’t touch on Trayvon
Martin, or Eric Garner, or thousands of unnamed victims who survived police
oppression or fell down a different type of rabbit hole. In isolation, any one
of those events could point to an individual stepping over a line in a moment
of extreme stress. Taken together, they underscore all the conflicts that can arise when racism and classism intersect with a culture of violence. While on
the BART in San Francisco, I happened to overhear a conversation between a
cluster of rich young (white) professionals. In between intense debate over
which bar to hit and who they were[n’t] going to bang that night, one guy offhandedly
recounted his buddies getting robbed at gunpoint in an alley. “Fools,” he said,
condescending. It wasn’t the event that I found shocking – I've been robbed before
– it was the cavalier tone of the storyteller. The occurrence didn't even warrant a
true recounting. It was a joke.
It was
in a Brian Hendricks film class that I first discovered the work of Jim
Jarmusch. At his best, Jarmusch specializes in what I would term “quiet
absurdism.” They’re moments that don’t really make sense against the broader
canvas of the film, but that do make sense if you understand the characters in
question. Sometimes that means asking someone for a cigarette while the house
is burning down. There’s an exchange in Stranger
than Paradise where the protagonist buys a dress for a girl, and she tells
him it’s ugly. The dress doesn't matter to the film; it’s the momentary
subversion of our expectations of the character that makes the moment sing. Talking
about death is like that. Sometimes there’s nothing at all to say about enormities.
Just bizarre fucking moments to relive.
