Like many of you, I've taught John Updike's "A & P," that little fiction masterpiece of Americana, in Introduction to Literature courses. Students seem to like it -- Sammy, the protagonist, is about their age, and the story is deeply textured by the detritus of the everyday; also, students are relieved to read something light on symbolism and heavy on teenage girls in bathing suits, particularly if they've just read something like, say, "A Rose for Emily," that taxes both their analytical skills and their video-game-trained patience.
Updike's poetry is often seen as secondary to his fiction, and I'm not going to mount an extensive discussion of its relative worth to the Rabbit novels. But this often-anthologized poem is a wonderful thing as Updike weaves a tapestry of meaning out of juxtaposing the quotidian and poetic, reality and dreams. It can hold its own with any of Updike's prose. It's a damn fine poem.
Ex-Basketball Player
by John Updike
Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.
Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all—more of a football type.
Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.
He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.
Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.
John Updike making apples fly.
