Famepunk: Part 1: US Open 1987

By Liz Mackie

“Run away. Be Great. Get the best Education.”

Chronicling a fantasy history of women's professional tennis, the multi-volume comic novel FAMEPUNK opens with the victory of strange local unknown over a tournament favorite in an early round match-up at America's premier tennis event. In US OPEN 1987, veteran sports writer Ellen Nagoya heads to South Brooklyn on the trail of the mystery player, only to find herself tangling with an underworld of gamblers, gangsters, exiles, impresarios, and ageless Romeos. And as brash, big-tipping, yellow-eyed teenager Emma Jasohn makes her increasingly outrageous way to a title showdown with the great Freya, who knows everything, they’re joined on the world stage by an international cast of characters that includes:

Amanda McKinley...whose two-fisted backhand made her America’s sweetheart, but whose back has done her wrong;

Ilya Kasimov...talent recruit;

Maria Helm...whose daughter the Wimbledon champion is turning out to be a disappointment;

Shanaya Greene...the Ice House Princess of Coney Island whose tennis scholarship at Stanford University is on the line;

And Z...whose daughter Theodosia is going to set the tennis world on fire—next year, when she turns twelve.

This Nostalgistudio edition of the 2011 secret smash contains new material.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liz Mackie
• Release date: Aug 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466053854

Liz Mackie

With LAMENT: A SOVIET WOMAN AND HER TRUE STORY, author Liz Mackie launched Nostalgistudio, an independent publishing company for high-quality American writing. Three volumes deep into FAMEPUNK, her picaresque historical-fantasy novel set in the world of women’s tennis, she's also published a poetry collection (DUG FOR VICTORY: POEMS FROM RIP-TV), a travel novella called THE HAPPY VALLEY, and the on-line writings collected at www.liz-mackie.com. A long-ago graduate of Swarthmore College, she lives and works in New York City, and has climbed Breakneck Ridge with the kind help of friends.

Book preview

FAMEPUNK

PART 1: US Open 1987

A Novel By

Liz Mackie

Published by Nostalgistudio at Smashwords

Copyrighted Material by Elizabeth Mackie

1st Nostalgistudio Edition, Summer 2018.

Previous Smashwords Editions published in 2011 & 2013.

© Copyright 2011, 2013, 2018, 2019 by Elizabeth Mackie.

Cover materials: Jennifer Jones, James Middleton.

This book is a work of fiction filled with fictional coincidence. Reality was better.

Smashwords Edition | License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.

- Helen Keller

CHAPTERS

Chapter 1 / Night Match

Chapter 2 / Old Man Tennis

Chapter 3 / The Kids Club League

Chapter 4 / Introduction to Psychology

Chapter 5 / Quaker Bajour

Chapter 6 / Mountain

Chapter 7 / Brava

Chapter 8 / Freya

Preview of Famepunk Part 2: Middlemarch

More Famepunk and other books from Nostalgistudio

Chapter 1 / Night Match

Everyone knows the story about how Emma Jasohn only ever saved one thing from her entire career as a tennis champion and that was the front page, framed under glass, of the New York Post’s special four-color edition of Sunday, September 13, 1987. As it happens, it’s not true. She kept other souvenirs; the framed page is real, though. It exists, and hangs in the sunniest spot of her small home’s most public room, near the court-mandated community service calendar. So many people were so kind and sent this to me framed all sorts of ways, so I can still replace them when they get too faded. The famous eyes narrow at the famous smile or maybe its reflection before smiling at the page. Above three text box piers—QUAKE TOLL TOPS 10K; COPS TO POLS: WHO’S BOSS; METS MISSTEP—a slim girl raises the gleaming trophy into the obvious headline:

SUPERSTAR.

She shouldn’t even have been there. The press handouts said she was an American citizen from Brooklyn, New York, seventeen years old, newly graduated from a Catholic high school and selective college bound. She was five feet seven inches tall and weighed 135 pounds. Was any of this true? No one could say. She looked younger, shorter, and lighter than that. No one had ever seen her before: and they’d have remembered. Jet black hair cropped short, eyes of an unearthly yellow color, a friendly-looking wicked smile and a figure that was just perfect; she was playing in handmade dresses (her scanty player details emphasized this part), scoop-necked, sleeveless, not long. Emma Jasohn had never won a title, never played outside New York. She was strictly local, a local qualifier and perennial runner-up who had just defeated a tournament favorite under the lights at Flushing Meadows, Queens in an internationally televised second-round night match, in two emphatic sets.

This outcome did not appear to have surprised the unknown qualifier. If anything, she seemed relieved—more like the favorite who’d survived a scare than the upset winner. No one could figure it out. The press, assembled, corralled, roiling, barely contained, began firing volleys of questions and blinding flash powder as she entered the press room, sat down at the microphones and gestured for silence.

Listen, the first thing I wanna say, and this is important, is that please report I’m doing the best I can to get down to Swarthmore College for my special extra week of disadvantaged freshman orientation. I know I’m missing the first night tonight and the friendship drum circle and everything but I’m just—what can I say? I’m a victim of circumstance. Say that. In fact that’s the message, that’s it, that I’m all victimized by events and everything but I’m trying. Really hard—say that. I mean, you know, please. She smiled. It would help me out. Whatevuh.

She spoke the vowels and consonants of Brooklyn in a clear, low voice but the ears of Americans caught something foreign, disquieting. Was she really local? Or was she an import? No one believed she was Catholic, that was for sure. Some kind of strange refusenik spawn, maybe, cast up on Coney Island Beach:

Were you born in America? This was the first question she ever got asked in a press conference.

She rolled her eyes; all the time she was asked this: Oh brother! Yes I’m born in America—jeez. C’mon!

Up above the press room, a top men’s seed was trying to hold his serve against a top-heavy Uruguayan. The Stadium still roared with talk. The big seed sped to the umpire’s chair and began stamping his feet and shouting: You need to take some control here! Much replayed, this popular tantrum has been used to move product in at least six television commercials, two in Mexico. Where, because it’s undoctored, still audibly inattentive throughout is a crowd left abuzz by the previous match and the tennis playing of a complete unknown, in its presence, on a glorious late-August night at everyone’s beloved US Open: "And she’s a local!"

And they hadn’t even heard The Story yet.

They’d get it from the morning papers, most of them—if they missed the late-night TV news or call-in radio, or weren’t told by someone who’d been watching the men’s match when it broke from the broadcast booth. This was back then. In the press room we used notebooks and pens and small hand-held Japanese tape recorders that we activated with our thumbs; our colleagues used film, flashbulbs, bright lights and videotape. The writing reporters would stand around being loosely obstructive as the tape-makers tried to rush through and steal our thunder with their boxes that seduced eyes. We were convinced that we were participating in a highly advanced civilization.

Two or three of us asked at the same time: What did you say to Vivvy Helm?

This was the second question.

Because Helm had smiled! Unthinkable—nonetheless true—Helm had laughed! On court! In New York! That these facts by themselves constituted the tournament’s biggest and most shocking news to date was our only certainty in the presence of this new unknown. Because if no one knew Emma Jasohn, everyone knew her opponent. Only half a year older, she’d been around what passed with us as forever: Vivienne Helm, the fastest, fittest, tensest 18-year old human female. After a win the crowd might get a wince that passed as a grin, at most a grimace of relief and then the wince. Otherwise Helm wore an ever-deepening frown. Her severity confirmed what many people believed they’d always known about Germans. Inevitably, in words: Helm rolled over early round opponents with her missile-like serve and Howitzer of a forehand; she was iron-willed, steely, and like a machine. Unrevealing with the press she only ever seemed to smile at stupid questions. Although she hadn’t smiled that afternoon on live television when asked for her reaction to her unknown opponent’s calling this a must-win watch—not for Helm, but for herself.

Helm had frowned. I don’t understand this or why she says this.

Looking we thought much less puzzled than peeved when she took the court a bit later, Helm had been frightening. But that she had never looked stronger was lost; that she had failed to win the match was almost secondary. What mattered to the press was that she’d shown merriment—she’d stood at the net with her conqueror, and she had laughed. It was news.

That capacity crowd in the vibrating Stadium, what had it seen? It was still trying to figure it out. Men and women milled about, forming talkative claques in the aisles and out by the beer stalls; people who’d stayed in their seats leaned across empty rows to talk to strangers. The top men’s seed netted a forehand and screamed an obscenity. The crowd returned no response. It was still talking about an hour before. Indeed, the Helm-Jasohn night match had been one in that class of Events which those who could claim, with truth, to have been there would talk about always; while many people who had not been there would lie and say they had—and then they would talk about it, too. As the years rolled by, their recollections would be colored by our narratives, the words we used lapping at and overlapping their own. Then they would mention Helm’s smile and her laughter. But at the time, from the stands, this wasn’t the headline it was for the press (or would have been, that is, if not for The Story). Everyone watching had seen all this but had been otherwise amazed.

Let’s pause here to consider, as I like to, the people that night attending the very first tennis match of their lives—a sizeable number, it’s fair to say. Among professional tennis’s four major title tournaments, the United States Open stood out for its night sessions. Where Wimbledon, Roland Garros and the Australian’s grass courts at Kooyong all shut down at dark, contestants for the United States’ trophies played on. Television obliged with broadcasting from the Stadium court every night the tournament lasted, two weeks on either side of Labor Day. The 7pm scene: hot, smoggy with cigarette smoke, thickened by grilled meat and rubber smells, brimful of alcohol on breath, noisy, echoing, a steep-sided arena loomed over by four banks of high-voltage floodlights. Below, in the center of a green hardcourt, white lines edge and divide a rectangle about eighty feet long that’s split across its middle by a white-topped waist-high net. The walls of the arena floor are ringed with sponsoring brand names on dark vinyl drapery. TV and press cameras crowd the edges. From the Stadium’s cheap seats up by the lights the view down is dizzying. Those so equipped raise binoculars to scan the courtside rows for beautiful and famous faces. New York abounds in them as it abounds in party scenes—and here is one of late summer’s choicest. Party guests look around happily and ask what they’re about to see.

Two singles matches, two women then two men; one of each would move on to the tournament’s third round—third of seven, the seventh being the final. With this night session featuring a title favorite on both halves of the card, chances were good they’d be seeing at least one eventual champion. The women would play first, best of three sets; the men would follow playing best of five.

First to six games wins the set—but a player must win by two. If both players wind up with six, they play a sudden-death tiebreak. A game is to four points, but again the need to win by two; zero is called Love and the points are called, in order, Fifteen, Thirty, and Forty. The next point after 40 wins the game—unless the other player ties the game at 40-all, better known as Deuce—from which again someone has to win by two, two consecutive points.

They hit hollow rubber balls wrapped in clipped fluorescent yellow felt back and forth at one another, one at a time, careful to keep inside the proper painted lines. The first shot in a point is the serve. She or he who hits it is the server, the other receives, the players alternating games. With two chances to serve the ball (one miss makes a fault, the second makes a double-fault and loss of point), the server stands just behind the baseline, tosses the ball in the air and strikes it hard with a racquet trying to send it diagonally across the net into the opponent’s territory. The point from here can continue for any length of time, until a shot lands in the net or entirely outside the lines—an error—or otherwise, with one player hitting an unreturnable shot—a winner. A winning serve is call an ace. Winning a game, the server is said to have held serve. Otherwise the receiver has broken.

Tennis racquets in 1987 could be made of all kinds of things but rarely anymore of wood alone. When producing groundstrokes, players could hold them in one hand or two; they reach forward to hit forehands, and across their bodies to hit backhands. The ball can only bounce once so they have to run fast. A ball taken in the air, often from close to the net, is called a volley. Other shots include the overhead, the lob, and the somewhat unpopular moonball.

For fairness, players switch ends on the court after the first, third, and every two subsequent games, and again between sets. At these times they’re also allowed to sit down to refresh themselves. Placed up high between them on the sideline and directly above the net towers the chair umpire, licensed and proudly so, who’ll announce the score after every point. Audible out calls during play can be expected from the individuals stationed as line judges at key spots around the court. Well-trained stoics, mostly local—as are the girls and boys in shorts who dash around retrieving balls and bearing towels to the players. Night matches tend to run a little slow and late as sitting changeovers get prolonged to accommodate the commercials being broadcast then. The concession stands print money all the way through the national anthem as sung by a past Tony winner.

The crowd’s attention was caught before the end of the warm-up. Between the two teenagers Vivienne Helm might have been considered a known quantity but she was always startling in person. A handsome blonde, almost inhumanly quick, who seemed to work from within an advantageous magnetic field of elemental ferocity, she had a way of appearing unbeatable during warm-ups. It helped her win many matches. She was the current Wimbledon champion.

As for Helm’s unknown opponent, whose player’s box tonight was crammed as a 7 train with the oddest entourage that anyone had ever seen: how unknown was she, in truth? By the standards of the time and the sport, completely. This was her first professional tournament; she’d played no Juniors, attracted no hungry academies; even the most intrepid scouts and agents hadn’t marked her as a buy. She wasn’t a local favorite, nobody local seemed to have heard of her. That her performance in the qualifying rounds had gained her a loyal following was apparent at her unusually well-attended first-round match, against a fragile doubles specialist (my own first look at her). She’d done a handful of quick, vivid radio interviews and then, that afternoon, outside the practice courts, one for the live broadcast which they’d aired right away. Some people in the Stadium would have seen this segment and that she had said, on national television, I must win this match tonight—I just gotta, would have been getting around. A kid, a character: nobody felt sorry for her. She was off to a good school after she lost, as she would, while Helm would go on to win the tournament. Helm was not the current US Open champion and that she wanted to be was not in doubt. That the unknown qualifier could realistically, even properly be said to be standing in Helm’s way tonight would have seemed profoundly untrue, if she had ever once netted a ball during their three minute warm-up. But she didn’t. Helm appeared to warm up harder; same result. Now thousands noticed.

Emma Jasohn was then about two inches shy of her final height which was average for the time; Helm stayed taller. She was slim, a little gangly and long of neck but not ungraceful, and wore her dark hair very short, her curls flat and cap-like. Her no-brand dress (which was blue) and her small, odd, more like deck shoes (white and which, it transpired, she bought in bulk from bin stores on Brighton Beach Avenue) bore no logos, a phenomenon uncommon even then. Like Helm, she had a one-handed backhand. Unlike Helm, who hit a string of twitchy misses in the final moments of the warm-up, she looked calm. The dress was handmade for her, so spread the news through the crowd which wished that it could see her face; but this was years before the giant screens. Her eyes seemed a strange color.

Helm won the toss and chose to serve first: no surprise there. First and second, her serve was usually called murderous: deep, accelerating, supremely accurate; but if she missed, the next one kicked up like a horse hoof. Helm practiced nine hours a day, on average, a succession of whistle-decorated European military types with chest hair tufting out of tans getting rich as her coaches. None lasted long: the parents were the power there; and they never, ever smiled. They were both smokers. Their only daughter had won her first tournament at six; they’d turned her pro at thirteen. Now she was Freya’s most potent challenger for this title and their goal for this gorgeous evening in this brutal city that they both loathed was a quick two-set win without drama or injuries. Unknowns could be dangerous. Their daughter had been told not to let this one come up for air.

Yet Jasohn won a point against a first serve, after a long, intriguing rally. Then while the live broadcast booth rolled out (almost) the last of its chatter about what happy memories the girl from Brooklyn would be packing to take to her small Quaker school, she held her own serve at 30. The Stadium crowd, which wanted, first and foremost, to see a long night of tennis, was deciding that it liked her style. She took two points in Helm’s next service game, one by following a drop shot with a most surprising topspin lob. Changeover. The crowd murmured contentedly. This kid could play. They liked her serve, liked it that she had a working net game. And Helm hadn’t made a move to run back for that lob—it was as if she’d never even seen it coming. What disguise! The kid’s face stayed still, at rest in a thoughtful but pleasant expression it looked to them. Now she was sitting in her chair, quite motionless, her strange eyes closed to them. People stood up and stretched; forgotten beers were recollected—some too late! Nighthawks and bats matched loop-de-loops up near the gigantic light stanchions. Next door on the Grandstand court, the last match of the day session pocked, pocked, roared: men’s tennis.

Time. Two more games, two more holds, Helm losing two more points on serve where Jasohn had lost none. Changeover. Next door two men grunted and four sets of rubber shoe treads squealed. The Stadium was sunk in silence as every person there reflected on the tennis he or she had just seen played. Neither girl had made an error. The one with the boy’s haircut was still again, possibly dreaming.

Time. Jasohn served, and Helm came at her like a lioness. More specifically, like a lioness coming at something she needs to subdue as a young lioness, never so tested—maybe warthogs but no rhinos before this one—curious as much as anything to see what damage she can do before slaying it; an outcome as to which she holds no doubt. Helm was fresh then. She lunged, swiped, parried, rushed the net, signs of her later brilliance showering from her limbs in phosphorescent trails that fell and puddled in her footsteps. Love-15. Helm looked to her box, to her father—her mother was outside, smoking—and saw him gesture with two fists. The server returned to the baseline. She, too, glanced at her box; saw many fists raised. She needed an ace. She produced one. Then she produced another. The voice of the audience is an instrument, she’d explain some years later. And I try to play the best notes. Out of worried silence she had pulled one roar. The second, harder, deeper, fiercer roar had fireworked into shouts, hooting, rhythmic hand clapping, affirmations: the chair umpire had to call for Quiet, please. Helm got her racquet on the next one but only knocked it wide into choppy waves of shrieks and shushes. As the ball bounced once, twice, enormous portions of the crowd were rising in order—not that they necessarily knew it—to jump up and down if need be. Helm could only twitch and they had to: another ace, for the hold. It’s the greatest trumpet on earth.

Helm to serve. Her first serve was good, to the backhand. A sliced return approach and Jasohn was back at the net for the deep volley first, then the touch one. Love-15. Helm’s parents had just collided as one slipped back in and the other escaped again from their box. Her next serve was unreturnable. Not so the one after that, though: Jasohn half-volleyed it for a drop shot winner. Club play! A controversy that would simmer for the next two decades burned its first ounce of carbon here. Didn’t she know it was bad form to do that? Disgruntled, discontented murmuring met Yeah whatever Lady answering tones: at 15-30, the crowd was morally divided.

Helm blew on her fingers and stared across the net. Her opponent was pacing the baseline and staring back. They both looked a little white around the nostrils; the stranger appeared to have animal eyes. Helm served an ace and at least half the stadium gave her a standing ovation. Again the girl paced while she waited, regarding her regarding her across the net; while she waited, Helm bounced on her toes, glanced at and fingered her racquet strings, tucked a lock of tawny hair behind her ear and aimed her entire being at a particular point on the opposite service line. Which when she swung for she hit: her hardest serve of the match, it zinged off the paint and made straight for a slim blue midriff. Jasohn pulled her racquet back and blocked the yellow ball into play.

Helm began immediately to run around her forehand—meaning, she would choose to skip outside the court to hit a forehand very hard and well. Helm, to the naked eye, possessed a backhand. In her view, however, no. So the tennis world had grown accustomed to seeing her dart through the margins of the court to deliver formidable forehands at opponents who were often wondering where she’d gone. The shots thundered down onto the side of the unknown qualifier. Could she pull the trigger, find the open court? Couldn’t she? Look—the whole court was open—again. Why did she hesitate, why did she prolong this awkward rally with its missing wing? Waiting for a short ball, both of them, it was apparent. And there it was: Helm, advancing on it, going crosscourt, hitting the line again. Jasohn, one knee on the floor of the doubles alley—how could this have been the shot she’d been waiting for?—unleashed a sliced and angled backhand crosscourt pass. Break point. Madness. Madness and the referee’s Hush. Break point. No one could believe it. To be silent was difficult. 30-40. Helm served. Jasohn skipped a double step to smack a forehand winner down the line to break Helm’s serve and take the lead.

And then she smiled. She smiled as she walked to her chair—she looked right at Helm, with a big smile—and sat down. She smiled as she took off her shoes and socks, bathed her feet with cool water she poured from a cup and rested them to air-dry on a towel. She smiled as she took from her bag a round silver thing with a lid and lifted out slices of peach with her fingers; she smiled as she ate them. (A tiffin tray, we’d learn to call it.) She smiled across at the glee in her box. She smiled at the scene ringing round her and sighed, once; as if, after a long bout of blindness, there it was, just as she’d pictured it, even the night sky, soft and beautiful and blue. She changed her socks, checked her shoes for wear and tear and then resumed them; she sipped some water from the cup. At Time, she was still smiling. She walked back onto the court and smiled again at Helm.

Whose own changeover, though mentally eventful—as everyone knew it had to have been by the towel she’d kept clutched to her face—had not precluded all the benefits of rest. As if she had slept on it, our three minutes her good eight or nine hours, she walked to receive with a first day of school air in her carriage; she was ready for new peers. Above all things (dogs, always, excepted) Helm loved to compete. Her home life was little more than a few hours on holidays which featured a single helping of dessert and gifts her own earnings had paid for. Practice courts, hotel rooms, limousines, airports and jets might have looked like a poor substitute for her own bedroom, a small back yard, a Frisbee, all that she’d sacrificed. But the feeling—it was sheer and it was bliss—when she hit a great shot to win an important point—it could be any point, any match—alongside the feeling of feeling those first good feelings accumulate until they’d start to shed a glow upon the court like some huge increasing pile of magic gold; and suddenly all her shots would be great and suddenly she’d win: these feelings were worth it. Helm lived for them. What could the crowd see of this? Man, woman, child: every one somewhere inside was seeing: everything. There were many big points ahead now for Helm, each one holding out an opportunity to be relieved of her hunger for happiness; the crowd was hungry for this, too. It felt happy for her. Helm smiled. She looked across at her new opponent and offered a smiling gesture with both arms: Okay, show me more now. The crowd’s voice started to batter the incandescent sky like mallets against bronze cymbals.

Like something out of the Nixon era, The Girl Who’d Made Helm Laugh wore a white cardigan sweater over her blue silk dress. Raking her curls back from her brow she squinted for silence as the press brayed excitedly: Yes—what had she said to Vivvy Helm at net?

I said—I explained to her. Look, this is what I said and this is The Story.

We could have corrected her. The familiar face, so ascetic, unaccustomedly stunned and then flushed with bemusement, suddenly cracking in the manner of a planet with an unexpected core into radiant laughter: this was the story.

Emma Jasohn held her strange eyes closed for a moment, then opened them and resumed.

Three months ago, way before I ever knew I’d be playing here—because, you know, or I should tell you, I never planned on trying to qualify for the Open which just kinda—happened. But like weeks and weeks ago. I think this is embarrassing. The girl paused as if judging her feeling, a thing unfamiliar. Was it embarrassment? She shook her head, briefly, as if there wasn’t time to tell for sure. Okay. Three months ago I made a sports bet of five hundred dollars that Helm would win this tournament. Because, frankly, I don’t have any money and I thought it would be nice to have some for textbooks and some new winter clothes and, you know, doing things—I dunno what expenses you even get in college, she finished with a look of some alarm. There was a pause, until she brightened: Yeah, this is important. See, I have this ability, ever since I can remember—I dunno what it is, it’s like this gift that I can always pick the women’s winner of the US Open. Every year with complete I swear to you accuracy I do this, long before the draws come out, anything. I’m always right. So then for the past two years or really three counting this one, I’ve put some money on it, you know, with the help of some gentlemen known to some other gentlemen affiliated with the club where I play tennis—or, one such club—and that’s been how I get money for the year to buy—I mean besides.

Another pause while she stared at what seemed to be thickets. The narrowed eyes tracked back and forth; we watched another brightening.

Well for instance, what I won last year I bought racquets with—the ones I was using tonight. And I thought—I mean they weren’t the longest odds but they were okay and I was so sure about Helm this year. She shook her head, regretful. Plus what I bet, what I wagered, I’d saved from what I won last year, I been rolling that over.

We understood the rolling gesture she was making with a forefinger.

"Because I thought, I’m gonna need money, so I made this very sizeable wager, I