Open: An Autobiography

Speaking of heat, Gil mentions casually that he hates the warm weather. He can’t bear it.

He’s unusually sensitive to high temperatures, and his idea of torture is sitting under the direct sun. He turns up the air-conditioning.

I make a note.

I tell him about running with Pat on Rattlesnake Hill, how I feel I’ve hit a plateau. He asks, How much do you run every day?

Five miles.

Why?

I don’t know.

Have you ever run five miles in a match?

No.

How often in a match do you run more than five steps in one direction before stopping?

Not very.

I don’t know anything about tennis, but it seems to me that, by the third step, you’d better be thinking about stopping. Otherwise you’re going to hit the ball and keep running, which means you’ll be out of position for your next shot. The trick is to throttle down, then hit, then slam on the brakes, then hustle back. The way I see it, your sport isn’t about running, it’s about starting and stopping. You need to focus on building the muscles necessary for starting and stopping.

I laugh and tell him that might be the smartest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about tennis.

When it’s time to lock up for the night, I help Gil clean the gym, turn off the lights. We sit in my car and talk. Eventually, he notices that my teeth are chattering.

Doesn’t this fancy car have a heater?

Yes.

Why don’t you turn it on?

Because you said you’re sensitive to heat.

He stammers. He says he can’t believe I remembered. And he can’t bear to think I’ve been suffering all this time. He turns up the car heater full blast. We continue talking, and soon I notice that beads of sweat are forming on Gil’s brow and upper lip. I turn off the heat and roll down the windows. We talk for another half hour, until he notices that I’m starting to turn blue. He turns on the heater full blast. In this way, back and forth, we talk, and demonstrate our respect for each other, until the early hours of the morning.

I tell Gil a little about my story. My father, the dragon, Philly, Perry. I tell him about being banished to the Bollettieri Academy. Then he tells me his story. He talks about growing up outside Las Cruces, New Mexico. His people were farmworkers. Pecans and cotton. Hard work. Wintertime, pick the pecans. Summertime, cotton. Then they moved to East LA., and Gil grew up fast on the hard streets.

It was war, he says. I got shot. Still have the bullet hole in my leg. Also, I didn’t speak English, only Spanish, so I’d sit in school, self-conscious, not talking. I learned English by reading Jim Murray in the Los Angeles Times and listening to Vin Scully calling Dodger games on the radio. I had a little transistor. KABC, every night. Vin Scully was my English teacher.

After mastering English, Gil decided to master the body God gave him.

He says, Only the strong survive, right? Well, we couldn’t afford weights in our neighborhood, so we made our own. Guys who’d been in the joint showed us how. For instance, we filled coffee cans with cement, stuck them on the ends of a pole, and that’s how we made a bench press. We used milk crates for the actual bench.

He tells me about getting his black belt in karate. He tells me about some of his twenty-two professional fights, including one in which he got his jaw shattered. But I wasn’t knocked out, he says proudly.

When it’s time to say goodnight, because the sky is growing lighter, I reluctantly shake Gil’s hand and tell him I’ll be back tomorrow.

I know, he says.

I WORK WITH GIL throughout the fall of 1989. The gains are big, and our bond is strong.

Eighteen years older than I, Gil can tell that he’s a father figure. On some level I also sense that I’m the son he never had. (He has three children, all daughters.) It’s one of the few things that go unspoken between us. Everything else gets hashed out, spelled out.

Gil and his wife, Gaye, have a lovely tradition. Thursday nights, everyone in the family can order whatever they want for dinner and Gaye will cook it. One daughter wants hot dogs?

Fine. Another wants chocolate chip pancakes? No problem. I make a habit of stopping by Gil’s house on Thursdays, eating off everyone’s plates. Before long I’m eating at Gil’s every other night. When it’s late, when I don’t feel like driving home, I crash on his floor.

Gil has another tradition. No matter how uncomfortable a person looks, if they’re asleep, they can’t be all that uncomfortable, you should leave them be. So he never wakes me. He just throws a light afghan over me and lets me sleep until morning.

Listen, Gil says one day, we love having you here, you know that. But I have to ask.

Good-looking kid, wealthy kid, kid who can be lots of places - and yet you come to my house for Thursday-night hot dogs. You sleep curled on my floor.

I like sleeping on floors. My back feels better.

I’m not talking about the floor. I mean, here. Are you sure you want to be - here? You must have better places to be.

Can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be, Gil.