The loneliest week of my life was at the Dick Baumgartner Shooting Camp the summer after ninth grade. Think basketball, not ROTC. Three-pointers, not clay pigeons.
On the first day of this sleepaway camp, I wore new shoes and got horrible blisters. That night, during some get-to-know-you talk, my roommate told me his girlfriend had shaved her pubes for him. This spooked me—why would he tell me that? Why would this be the first thing he told me?—and he must have sensed my discomfort because I barely saw him after that night.
The next day, I skipped the afternoon pick-up games because my feet felt like they’d been dipped in acid. By that evening, my fate was sealed. The cliques had formed. Everyone had found friends. Everyone but me.
At mealtime, faced with the prospect of sitting alone, I started bolting down my food while walking straight from the buffet line to the tray return. Then I’d head straight to the gym to shoot baskets. Afternoons, while everyone else played pick-up games, I shot baskets by myself, even after my feet healed. In the evenings, when other campers played euchre or hit the weight room, I kept shooting.
These days, I work with a teacher named Brynnar, who loves to drop Freudian sexual theory on his students. “When you were a kid, did you shoot baskets?” he asks these young Midwesterners, and of course, they say yes. “So there you were, going through puberty, putting a ball in a hole, over and over and over again. What do you think that was really about?” He cackles as their faces bloom with horror.
My obsessive practice wasn’t about sex, I don’t think. At least not that week. But maybe I was trying to fix something. To unscrew whatever I had screwed up. To get it right, over and over again.
At the end of the week, there were a handful of contests. The big one was The Sharpshooter Challenge—twelve shots from the top of the key.
My first shot clanged off the back iron. Immediately, I relaxed. If I ever had a chance, it was gone now.
Then I hit shot after shot. The bucket grew and grew until it was as big as a cornfield. I wasn’t even focused. My mind wandered away from my body, which continued to put the ball in the basket. Someone said, “Who is that guy?” but it didn’t bother me. At some point, it didn’t even feel like I was shooting anymore; I was diving through the hoop every time I threw up my arms—like a dolphin, like water, like a fall of light. Get it right, get it right, get it right.
In the end, I hit eleven shots in a row and won the contest. Was I happy? Not really. Not even when a coach—Dick Baumgartner himself? Who knows.—put his hand on my shoulder during the awards ceremony and talked about my dedication and persistence and blah blah blah. Looking at the campers in front of me, bored out of their minds, I saw I had succeeded in setting myself further apart. The trophy was a consolation prize.
I saw something else—something I still hope isn’t true, though I’m afraid it is—about shooting and other solitary pursuits like writing. Excellence is the flower of loneliness.
And yet, after the coach clapped me on the shoulder, pushing me back into the crowd of boys, I wished the gym was empty. I wished it was just me, that cold iron rim, and a ball in my hands.
Bryan Furuness is the author of a couple of novels, The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson and Do Not Go On, and the co-author (with Sarah Layden) of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing. He is the editor of several anthologies, including My Name was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Remixed. His stories have appeared in New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Nonrequired Reading and elsewhere. He lives in Indianapolis, where he is a writer in residence at Butler University.
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