The garage monologue: the father's greatness-prophecy, the body-as-machine doctrine, and "a machine in the ghost"

pivotal · Winter B.S. 1960, Tucson AZ; JOI is ten

• When: Winter B.S. 1960, Tucson AZ; ten-year-old Jim's first tennis lesson, delivered as his failed-actor father's long garage monologue
• What: The father — drinking as he talks, and talking the whole scene while the boy never audibly answers — takes "young sir Jim" ("almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak," bow-tied, thick-spectacled) into the communal garage and prophesies his tennis future: "You are going to be a great tennis player. I was near-great. You will be truly great." What he teaches is a whole doctrine of body-as-machine: the garage door and the 1956 Mercury Montclair as bodies to be known and "given [their] due" — the son to become "A machine in the ghost, to quote a phrase" (the formula JOI will later invert as the documentary title The Machine in the Ghost, event 10). He retells his own junior-tennis fall — the day he overheard his own father pronounce "Yes, But He'll Never Be Great." — the paternal verdict JOI will re-transmit to his sons as the talent-as-dark-gift doctrine (event 8). He announces the family's move to California after "that celluloid siren's call" (the Man-from-Glad years of events 1 and 3), and closes on the initials pun: "That's my J.O.I. of a guy of a joy of boy." The scene is the on-page seedbed of nearly every later JOI theme — the too-large body, the optics bent (dish, spoon, "lens-grinding appliance" already in the boy's orbit), tennis-as-expectation, the father-son silence — dramatized rather than recalled. [Bears on the death and its open motive: the greatness-prophecy and the silence between Incandenza fathers and sons, staged a generation up from events 8/15.]