Blasphemy

by Sherman Alexie

  Frank kept all of the books, three thousand novels, histories, biographies, and essays, and neatly organized them on bookshelves he built into the walls. He read one book a day. After he disconnected the telephone and permanently stopped the mail, his family and friends worried about him and came to see him, but he turned away all visitors, treating loved ones, strangers, salespeople, religious crusaders, and political activists as if they were all the same.

  Frank knew his behavior was obsessive and compulsive, and perhaps he was seriously disturbed, in need of medical care and strong prescriptions, but he didn’t want to stop. He needed to perform this ceremony, to disappear into the ritual, to methodically change into something new and better, into someone stronger.

  “Make me hurt,” he said to Russell before every training session.

  “All right,” said Russell every few weeks. “I want one thousand sit-ups and one thousand push-ups, and you’re not leaving here until I get them.”

  Sometimes Frank overtrained, ran too many miles or lifted too much weight, and injured himself. Russell would chase him out of the gym, tell him to lay off for a week or even two or three, give his body a chance to recover, to heal, but Frank kept pushing, tore muscles and dislocated joints, broke fingers and twisted vertebrae. He stopped training only when he couldn’t get out of bed, and if he found the strength to crawl into a hot shower, he’d warm his muscles enough to lift what he could. At his strongest, he bench-pressed 350 and leg-pressed a thousand pounds. At his weakest, when he was injured, he could lift only paperbacks or pencils, but he’d still do three sets of ten repetitions.

  “You can’t keep doing this to yourself,” Russell said to him again and again. “I can’t keep doing this to you. It’s malpractice, man. If you get hurt again, I’m quitting. I’m banning you from the gym forever.”

  But Russell never quit on him, and Frank never quit on Russell. Joined, they were not twins or friends; they were not lovers or brothers; they were not teachers or students; they were not mentors or apprentices; they were not monks or sinners. They remained mutable and variable, sacred and profane. Mr. Death, Frank thought, we are your contraries, your opposites and contradictions, your X factors and missing links, your self-canceling saints and self-flagellating monks, your Saint Francis and the other Saint Francis, and we have come to blaspheme your name.

  Away from Russell and the gym, Frank played basketball.

  Seven days a week, Frank drove the city and searched for games. He traveled from the manicured intramural courts at the University of Washington to the broken-asphalt courts of the Central District; from the violent and verbose games in Green Lake Park to the genial and clumsy games at the YMCA; from the gladiator battles under the I-5 freeway to the hyperorganized leagues at Sound Mind & Body Gym. He played against black men who believed it was their tribal right to dominate the court. He played against white men who wanted to be black men. He played against brown men who hated black and white men. He played against black, brown, and white men who didn’t care about any color other than the green-money bets placed on every point and game. He played against Basketball Democrats who came to the court alone and ran with anybody, and Basketball Republicans who traveled in groups of five and ran only with one another. He played against women who endured endless variations of the same dumb joke: Hey, girl, you can play, but it’s shirts and skins, and you’re running skins. He played against former football players who still wanted to play football, and former wrestlers who wanted only to wrestle. He played against undisciplined young men who couldn’t run a basic pick-and-roll, and against elderly men who never missed their two-handed set shots. He played against trash talkers and polite gentlemen. He played against sociopathic ball hogs, wild gunners, rebound hounds, and assist-happy magicians. He played games to seven, nine, eleven, and twenty-one points. He played winner-keeps-ball and alternate possessions. He played one-on-one, two-on-two, three-on-three, four-on-four, five-on-five, and mob rules, improvisational, every-baller-for-himself, anarchist, free-for-all, death-cage matches. He played against cheaters who constantly changed the score, and honest freaks who called fouls on themselves. He played against liars who bragged about how good they used to be, and dreamers who would never be as good as they wanted to be. He played against Basketball Presbyterians who refused to fast-break, and Basketball Pagans who refused to slow down. He played against the vain Allen-Iverson-wanna be punks who dribbled between their legs, around their backs, and missed 99 percent of the ridiculous, driving, triple-pump, reverse-scoop shots they hoisted up but talked endless and pornographic trash whenever they happened to make even one shot. He played against the vain Larry-Bird-wanna be court lawyers who argued every foul call and planted themselves at three-point lines and constantly called for the ball because they were open, damn it, more open than any outsider shooter in the history of the damn game, so pass the freaking rock!

  Frank played so well that he earned (and re-earned) a playground reputation and was known by a variety of nicknames: Shooter, Old Man, Chief, and Three. Frank’s favorite nickname was Oh Shit, given to him in July by a teenage Chicano kid in MLK, Jr. Park.

  “Every time the old Indio shoots and makes one of those crazy thirty-footers,” the Chicano kid had said, “his man be yelling, ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!’”

  Frank was making a comeback, though he hated that word as much as Norma Desmond had hated it, and just like her, he preferred to call it his return. After all, over the course of the year, a few older players had recognized Frank and remembered him as the supernatural Indian kid who’d disappeared from the basketball world two decades ago.

  On the basketball courts of Seattle, Frank was the love child of Sasquatch and D. B. Cooper; he was the murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby, the building of Noah’s Ark, and the flooding of Atlantis; he was the mystery and the religion and the outright lies.

  During one legendary game at the University of Washington Intramural Activities Building, Frank caught the ball in the low post and turned to face Double O, the Huskies’ power forward. He was a Division I stud slumming among the gym rats, a future second-round draft pick destined to be eleventh man for the Cleveland Cavaliers, which didn’t sound glamorous but still made him one of the thousand best basketball players in the world.

  “Oh Shit, you better give up the rock,” Double O taunted. “I ain’t letting you win this game.”

  Frank faked the jumper and dribbled right, but Double O, five inches taller and seventy-five pounds heavier, easily pushed Frank away from the key.

  “Oh Shit, you’re an old man,” taunted Double O. “Why you coming after me? I ain’t got your social security check.”

  Frank dribbled the ball between his legs, behind his back, then between his legs again. He didn’t know why he was bouncing the ball like a madman. There was no point to it, but he wanted to challenge the trash-talking black kid.

  “Oh Shit, you got yourself some skills!” shouted Double O. “Come on, come on, show me the triple-threat position. That’s it. That’s it. I am so bedazzled, I cannot tell if you’re going to shoot, pass, or drive. Oh man, you got them fun-da-men-tals. Bet you learned those with the Original Celtics!”

  Distracted by the insulting rant, by its brilliant and racist poetry, Frank laughed and almost lost the ball.

  “Better make your move, Old Milk,” taunted Double O. “Your expiration date is long past due.”

  Frank faked right, dribbled left, and scored the game-winning hoop on an archaic rolling left-handed hook shot that barely made it over Double O’s outstretched hands.

  Frank screamed in triumph and relief as Double O howled with disbelief and fell backward to the floor. All the other players in the gym—the eyewitnesses to a little miracle—shouted curses and promises, screamed in harmony with Frank, slapped one another’s hands and backs and butts, and spun in delirious circles. People laughed until they were nauseated. Nobody held anything back. Because he had no idea what else to do with his excitement, one skinn
y black kid nicknamed Skinny, a sophomore in electrical engineering, ran out of the gym and twenty-four blocks to his house to tell his father and younger brother what he had just seen. Skinny’s father and little brother never once asked why he’d run so far to tell the story of one hoop in one meaningless game. They understood why the story had to be immediately told. In basketball, there is no such thing as “too much” or “too far” or “too high.” In basketball, enough is never enough. At its best and worst, basketball is all about excess. Every day is Fat Tuesday on a basketball court.

  “Did you see that? Did you see that?” screamed Double O as he lay on the floor and flailed his arms and legs. He laughed and hooted and cursed. Losing didn’t embarrass him; he was proud of playing a game that could produce such a random, magical, and ridiculous highlight. There was no camera crew to record the event for SportsCenter, but it had happened nonetheless, and it would become a part of the basketball mythology at the University of Washington: Do you remember the time that Old Indian scored on Double O? Do I remember? I was there. Old Chief scored seven straight buckets on Double O and won the game on a poster dunk right in O’s ugly mug. O’s feelings hurt so bad, he needed stitches. Hell, O never recovered from the pain. He’s got that post-traumatic stress illness, and it’s getting worse now that he plays ball in Cleveland. Playing hoops for the Cavaliers is like fighting in Vietnam.

  In that way, over the years, the story of Frank’s game-winning bucket would change with each telling. Every teller would add his or her personal details; every biographer would turn the story into autobiography. But the original story, the aboriginal hook shot, belonged to Frank, and he danced in fast circles around the court, whooping and celebrating like a spastic idiot. I sound like some Boy Scout’s idea of an Indian warrior, Frank thought, like I’m a parody, but a happy parody.

  The other ballplayers laughed at Frank’s display. He’d always been a quiet player, rarely speaking on or off the court, and now he was emoting like a game-show host.

  “Somebody give Oh Shit a sedative!” shouted Double O from the floor. “The Old Indian has gone spastic!”

  Still whooping with joy, Frank helped Double O to his feet. The old man and the young man hugged each other and laughed.

  “I beat you,” Frank said.

  “Old man,” said Double O, “you gave me a trip on your time machine.”

  If smell is the memory sense, as Frank once read, then he was most nostalgic about the spicy aroma of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Whenever Frank smelled Kentucky Fried Chicken, and not just any fried chicken but the very particular and chemical scent of the Colonel’s secret recipe, he thought of his mother. Because he was a child who could not separate his memories of his mother and his father and sometimes confused their details, Frank thought of his mother and father together. And when he thought about his mother and father and the smell of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Frank remembered one summer day when his parents took him to the neighborhood park to picnic with a twenty-piece bucket of mixed Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a ten-piece box of legs and wings only, along with a cooler filled with Diet Pepsi and store-bought potato salad and apples and bananas and potato chips and a chocolate cake. Harrison and Frank had fought over which particular basketball to bring, but they had at last agreed on an ABA red-white-and-blue rock.

  “Can’t you ever leave that ball at home?” Helen asked Harrison. She always asked him that question. After so many years of hard-worked marriage, that question had come to mean I love you, but your obsessions irritate the hell out of me, but I love you, remember that, okay?

  On that day, Frank was eleven years old, young enough to sit on his mother’s lap and be only slightly embarrassed by their shared affection, and old enough to need his father and be completely unable to tell him about that need.

  “Let’s play ball,” Frank said to Harrison, though he meant to say, Prove your love for me.

  “Eat first,” Helen said.

  “If I eat now, I’ll throw up,” Frank said. “I’ll eat after we play.”

  “You’ll eat now, and if you throw up, you’ll just have to eat again, and then you’ll play again, and then you’ll throw up, so you’ll have to eat again. It might go on for days that way. You’ll be trapped in a vicious circle.”

  “You’re weird, Mom.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said. “And weirdness is hereditary.”

  “I’m weird, too,” Harrison said. “So you got it coming from both sides. You don’t have a chance.”

  “I can’t believe you’re my parents. Did you adopt me?”

  “Honey, we certainly did not adopt you,” Helen said. “We stole you from a pack of wolves, so eat your meat, you darling little carnivore.”

  Laughing, feeling like an adult because his parents treated him with respect and satire, Frank sat between his mother and father and almost cried with happiness. His chest tightened, and his mouth tasted bitter. He cried too easily, he knew, and sometimes had to fight school-yard bullies who teased him about his quick tears. He usually won the fights and usually cried about his victory.

  Sitting with his parents, Frank closed his eyes against his tears, blinked and blinked and thought of the utter hilarity of a dog farting in its sleep, and that made him laugh a little. Soon enough, he felt normal, like a kid made of steel and oak, and he could breathe easily, and he quickly ate his lunch of Kentucky Fried Chicken, but only wings and legs.

  “Okay, I’m done,” he said. “Let’s play ball, Dad.”

  “I’m too tired,” Harrison said. “I’m going to lie down in the grass and fall asleep in some dog poop.”

  His father was always trying to be funny. He was funny sometimes, maybe most of the time, but nobody could be funny all of the time. And being funny was sometimes a way of being dishonest.

  A few years back, Harrison had told Frank’s third-grade teacher that Indians didn’t believe in using numbers, that the science of mathematics was a colonial evil.

  “Well,” the mystified teacher had asked, “then how do Indians count?”

  “We guess,” Harrison had said with as much profundity as he could fake.

  Okay, so maybe Harrison was funny because funny was valuable. Maybe being funny was usually a way of being honest.

  “Come on, let’s play ball,” Frank pleaded with his father, who had flopped onto the grass with a chicken leg and a banana.

  “I’m going to eat and sleep and fart,” Harrison said.

  “Dad, you said you’d show me something new.”

  “Did I promise you I would show you something new?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Did I sign something that said I would show you something new?”

  “No.”

  “That means we don’t have an oral or written contract. We don’t have an implied contract, either, because you don’t even know how to spell ‘implication.’ So that means I’m going to eat chicken until I pass out from a grease overdose.”

  “Mom, he’s talking like a lawyer again.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I hate it when he does that.”

  “And I can, too, spell ‘implication,’” Frank said.

  “Okay,” Harrison said. “If you can spell ‘implication,’ your mother will play ball with you.”

  “I don’t want to play ball with Mom, I want to play with somebody good.”

  “Hey, your mom is great. Why do you think I fell in love with her?”

  “Mom, he’s lying again.”

  “I’m not lying. Our dear Helen was a cannibal on the basketball court.”

  “Is that true, Mom?”

  “I used to play,” she said.

  Frank looked at his mother. Sure, she was tall (five feet eight or so, the same height as Harrison), and she was strong (she grew up bucking hay bales), but Frank had never seen her touch a basketball except to toss it in a closet or down the stairs or into a room or out the door, or anywhere to get that dang thing out of her way.

  “Mom, are you lying?”

/>   “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “You told me I was raised by wolves.”

  “Okay, have I ever lied to you twice in one day?”

  “Mom, be serious.”

  “She is being serious,” Harrison said. “She used to play those girls’ rules. Three girls on defense, three on offense. Your mom was the shooter. Damn, I saw her score fifty-two points once. And then the coaches decided to play boys’ rules. They didn’t have to, but they wanted to see what your mom could do in a real game. And she scored seventy-three. I missed that one. If I’d seen that game, I would have proposed to her on the spot.”

  “I love you, too, sweetie,” Helen said to her husband.

  Frank couldn’t believe it. He looked at his mother in her denim skirt and frilly blue top, with her lipstick and her beaded earrings and her scarf all matching perfectly, all of her life and spirit and world color-coordinated and alphabetically organized. How could his mother, who washed her hands twelve times a day, ever have played a game so fundamentally sweaty and messy?

  “Mom, did you really play ball?”

  “It was girls’ basketball,” she said, “so it doesn’t really count.”

  She was being sarcastic, Frank knew, because she’d taught him how to be sarcastic.

  “For the rest of your academic life,” she’d told him on his first day of kindergarten, “whenever any teacher tells you that Columbus discovered America, I want you to run up to him or her, jump on his or her back, and scream, ‘I discovered you!’”

  He’d never been courageous enough to do it, but he always considered it. He always almost did it. He almost always ran home and told Helen how close he’d been to doing it, how he was sure he could do it the next time, and she hugged him and told him how smart and good and handsome he was. Helen was loving and crazy and unpredictable and gentle and voluble and bitter and funny and a thousand other good and bad and indefinable things, but she was certainly not a liar.