With thirty seconds to go it was 51–51 and they had the ball. Everybody knew they were going to hold it for one shot. Their point guard was quick but he was skinny. I went out after him and put my hand on his hip. I could stop him from going to his right just by pushing him a little. The referee was watching close and I knew he was looking for me to push too much and he would call a foul. It got down to fifteen seconds and I reached my hand up like I was going to push the guard again but instead I swiped after the ball. He braced himself for an instant and I got a fingertip on the ball.
It only went three feet away from him but it was like five feet from me. I started to dive but then something went past me like a shot.
Nick scooped the ball right into his dribble and was gone. Their guard went after him. The dude was quick. He got to Nick just as he reached our basket and fouled him as the buzzer sounded.
Our bench was on its feet and so was the St. Peter’s bench. There wasn’t any need to line up. All Nick had to do was make one of the foul shots and we had the game.
For some reason I thought Nick might blow the shot. He wiped his neck off with a towel and then went to the line. The ref gave him the ball and he looked like he was nonchalanting the shot. The ball went up, hit the front rim, rolled around twice, and then fell through. Case closed.
Nick made the second shot, too, but by then we were shaking hands with St. Peter’s. They were pissed off because they thought they had the game before I got it. Good.
After the game two things happened. The first was that Goldy called me over.
“Nice game,” he said. “You won it for us.”
“Maybe I’ll even start one day,” I answered.
“I spoke to Mr. Greene, your math teacher,” he said. “He said he had a lot of trouble giving you a thirty-four on your math test. It was all partial credit. If you don’t get your grades together you won’t even be on the team.”
“I know the coach won’t mind that,” I said.
“Yeah, well when you see me tomorrow you tell me how that’s going to help you. Okay?”
That got me down. Really down. Then the next thing happened. I got to the corner and Jimmy was there barking at Ducky. Nick was there, too. He was getting between them like he was stopping Jimmy from punching out Ducky.
Now Jimmy is an inch taller than me. I’m six four so that puts him at six five, maybe six five and a half. Ducky is like a foot shorter.
I didn’t say anything. I just went up and put my hand in Jimmy’s face and pushed him away.
“Yo, cool out!” Nick puts his books down and Ducky tackles him around the waist.
Then Jimmy, the center of our team, punks out and runs. I turned back to Nick and Ducky and they’re still wrestling around. I grabbed Nick from the back and spun him off of Ducky into a parked car. He gets to his feet and puts his hands up and I just stand there. Because I know if he throws on me I’m going to light him up.
“Here comes Mr. Tate!” somebody behind me called out.
I looked down the street and Mr. Tate was walking with another teacher. He hadn’t seen the fight yet. I looked over at Nick and he was picking up his books. Me and Ducky went on down the street.
“We got to get this straightened up,” Ducky said. “It won’t help the team. I’ll call Nick tonight.”
“Yeah. Right.”
On the way home I should have been up but I was really down. It was getting colder. I pulled my coat around my neck and tried to think about the game, but all I could think about was the fight.
Sometimes, when I thought about what I was going to do with my life I would think about being a doctor or a lawyer and having a dynamite crib and either Mtisha or some movie star by my side. In my dreams it wouldn’t all be front, either, it would be real world and real time.
But all that was big-time dreaming. Then something would happen like the fight or the math test and there would be a serious wakeup call. Then the only thing I could dream about is being on the same corner as the other brothers, looking for something to hook into. Maybe a laugh or a high. Same difference.
I knew in my heart I hadn’t done anything on the math test. I had told myself that maybe I had got enough partial credit but I knew if I did it was just luck. Now Mr. Tate could sit there behind his desk and talk about me like I wasn’t nothing and he would have it down in black and white so he could show it to me. Sometimes school was just this humongous diss you had to wear around your neck so everybody could check it out.
When I got to the hood the lights were on in the park. It was too cold to hope for a game but I got my ball and went out anyway. The park was just about empty and I moved around the key putting up jumpers that rattled against the old metal backboard. Some kids were watching me and one of them asked me if I could jam.
“Yeah, I can jam,” I said.
“Let’s see you.” The little brother was dark and long-headed.
I went out to the top of the key, moved across the line slowly, then took a big step and went up. My jacket was too tight and I lost the ball on the way up.
“He can’t even jam,” one of the other little boys said. They turned and started toward the other basket.
I don’t know why it was important to jam. But I took off my jacket and my shirt. I bounced the ball hard a couple of times and when the kids turned around I started my move to the basket. I went up and slammed with one hand. I got the ball back, went out to the foul line, and came right back and did a two-handed slam. Then I slammed with my left hand and then I slammed with my right hand and then I threw the ball against the boards and went up and slammed the bound.
“He can really jam!” one of the kids said.
“Man, he something else!”
They went onto the next court and started their own hoop dreams. I watched them through the fence until I had calmed down enough to feel the cold again. The brief high had worn off.
The phone was ringing when I got home. Derek ran to it before I could get up and tell him not to answer it. If Mr. Tate had found out already and was calling, I didn’t want to deal with the stuff until tomorrow.
“Hey, it’s Mtisha.”
The phone was in the living room and I got on the couch and picked up the receiver. Like Derek said, it was Mtisha.
“How you doing?” she asked.
“Not too good,” I said. “Messing up.”
“In school?”
“Yeah, I got a thirty-four on the math test,” I said.
“How you feel about that?”
“Bad. No other way to feel,” I said. “Hey, can I say something to you?”
“I really don’t want to get into a heavy conversation,” Mtisha said. “My moms wants to go visit your grandmother and I just wanted to know if you knew the visiting hours.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “We just went after school. It’s probably until seven or eight. Your mother knows my grandmother?”
“Yeah, they both go to Pilgrim Baptist,” Mtisha said. “What did you want to say?”
“Say?”
“You said you wanted to say something to me.”
“Oh, yeah, like I’m sorry about Kicky,” I said. “That shouldn’t have happened. I didn’t know — I knew what to do but I just didn’t do it.”
“Now you feeling sorry for yourself so you want to plea bargain your way back to me?”
“No … I mean, yeah,” I said. “Look, I tell you the truth, girl, I ain’t doing nothing right in my life these days.”
“You want to go with us to the hospital and then we can talk about it?” she asked.
“I’m feeling so bad maybe I should just wait until tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll probably just say something stupid and get you mad again.”
“Yeah, well I feel kind of bad about our argument, too,” Mtisha said. “You know it wasn’t even about Kicky. I mean I might kick her butt and all but it’s not really about her.”
“So what was it about?”
“Just trying to figure out how we a
ll fit together,” she said. “You know, me, you, Ice, Bianca, all of us. Cutting people out of your life is easy, keeping them in is hard.”
“You thinking about cutting me loose?”
Mtisha said no, that she wasn’t thinking about cutting me loose, but there was a moment of hesitation before she said it. I didn’t want to push it because I wasn’t ready, really ready, for no more hurt.
“When can I see you?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “How sweet were those kisses Kicky forced on you?”
“Told you there wasn’t anything going on between us,” I said.
“I didn’t say there was,” Mtisha said. “I just need to know how hard I got to work my show. You hear what I’m saying?”
“Look, I love you.”
There was the hesitation again.
“You getting heavy on me?”
“Something like that.”
“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.
Yeah.
Derek was sitting on my bed when I woke up in the morning.
“Get off the bed.”
“Let’s go up on the roof and shoot some videotape,” he said.
“What time is it?”
“Six-thirty,” he said. “I saw that in the movies. They shot the start of the movie from the roof. Then they went down in the street and shot the same thing. It was cool.”
“You saw that in the movies?”
“Uh-huh.”
I got dressed and we went up to the roof. It really stunk. I don’t think anybody ever cleaned it. There was a cardboard box and I knew somebody was sleeping in it. We went to the edge and looked down. The hood looked nice from the roof. I could see people starting off to work, a few guys who had been out all night collecting cans were coming back, and some people had already found them a spot on the stoop. I shot it all.
“Look over there.”
Derek was pointing at an open window. There was this real fat guy sleeping in it and he didn’t have a thing on but sneakers and a doo-rag. He could have been a real whale. Every time he breathed his stomach went up and down.
“Why he sleeping in his sneakers?” Derek asked.
“Maybe he’s a sleepwalker,” I said.
“If he walk out the house in nothing but his sneakers and a doo-rag he’s gonna scare everybody to death,” Derek said. “I bet his hair don’t look like nothing either.”
“Some guys just like wearing the doo-rag,” I said. “They keep it on all the time and don’t even care what their hair looks like.”
Derek kept running his mouth about the whale dude and I shot some more tape. A beer truck came up and I saw it was for the bodega on the corner. The guy unloaded some cases of beer and took them on into the store. If he didn’t look up I would see him and maybe even get him down on tape and I’d have him forever and he wouldn’t even know it.
Things down in the street were small so it did look like a real movie. Nice.
Got back downstairs and Moms was making eggs.
“I don’t want any eggs,” Derek said.
“Did I ask you if you wanted eggs?” Moms said.
“Who you making them for?”
“You.”
“You’re going to make my cholesterol go up,” Derek said.
“That’s the way life goes,” Moms said. “Sometimes you just can’t win.”
“When I grow up I’ll never eat eggs.”
Pops came out in his bathrobe and grunted.
“Yo, Daddy, what you think about me being a moviemaker?” Derek asked.
Pops grunted.
“Jimmy, the boy asked you a civil question,” Moms said. “You can at least give him a civil answer.”
“Be anything you want to be,” Pops said to Derek. Moms had put a cup of coffee down in front of him and he put too much sugar in it the way he always did, then he just stirred right on top like he always did.
“Dad, how come you let all the sugar stay on the bottom?” Derek asked. “You don’t never stir the bottom.”
“Who drinking this coffee?” Pops asked.
“Your father woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” Moms said.
“I just ain’t interested in nobody coming to my house and being no big brother to any of my kids,” Pops said. “If I ain’t his father he can’t be no brother to one of my kids.”
“All he wants to do is to help Greg in math,” Moms said. “You don’t know the kind of math they’re teaching these days.”
“If he wants to come to my house and see about what’s going on here he should have got my name and called me. I don’t know what he’s talking to you for. I’m the man in my house.”
“It’s not about being a man, Jimmy.” Moms voice started rising.
I didn’t want to hear no more about that guy who was supposed to be tutoring me. I went on in the room and started dressing for school. In a way I could see where Moms was coming from, that it wasn’t about manhood or nothing like that. But in the hood that manhood thing was like that card game they play on the corners downtown. Dude got three cards, two black and one red, and you got to find the red one. He mixes them up and you know you’re not going to find the right one. People telling you that this ain’t about manhood and that ain’t about manhood and you end up trying to figure out what you got that is about manhood.
When I got ready to go Moms asked me how I felt about the tutor.
“You heard what Pops said.”
“And what do you say?”
“I got to get to school.”
In school there were announcements about everything in the world. Then the same girl that lost her wallet three times already lost it again and come on with the same crying voice saying how terrible she felt ’cause it was missing.
The morning took forever but nobody ran anything down about the fight. I found Ducky and asked him if he called Nick.
“Yeah, he said he didn’t like you pushing people around,” Ducky said. “I asked him what his problem was and he started talking about how he didn’t have a problem.”
“Then what did you say?”
“I told him he wanted to be the star of the team and he was pissed because you were. He didn’t say anything about you after that. He just said he was going to forget about the fight.”
“Uh-huh. If he’s got a problem with me he’d better just get over it.”
“I didn’t think he wanted to fight yesterday,” Ducky said.
“Yeah, but what were you doing with your little narrow butt jumping into a fight?” I asked. “ ’Cause you can’t fight.”
“Beats me,” Ducky said. “I was wondering about that myself. Then I thought that maybe you and me are alike a little.”
“How you figure?”
“We’re just so good on the court everybody keeps watching us,” Ducky said, grinning. “I’m thinking about slamming if I get in the next game.”
“You better think about protecting the ball on the dribble,” I said. “You don’t work on that at all, do you?”
“You don’t work at it.”
“Yeah, I do. Whenever I play, even in the playground, I’m checking out how to protect the ball and do all the other stuff I do. You got to work on your game, man.”
In English I told Margie I had brought some tape I had shot and she found me at lunch and dragged me to the video room. Karen Ballard was there, too, and she come over. I popped the video into the VCR and pushed play.
“We’ll have to edit the tape first,” Margie was saying. “Then we’ll add music.”
The tape started with me going down the street around from the fried chicken joint and then along the stoops. My man Web was in the shot in the car wash. I swear I didn’t even see the sucker when I was shooting it because I was shooting a guy who was washing down a Jeep. Web was clowning on the side and flashing gang signals.
“This is where you live?” Margie asked.
“No, down the street,” I said.
“This is
really the ghetto!” she said.
“What are you trying to show?” Karen asked. “Is this supposed to be like a slice of life?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think it’s good,” Margie was saying. “You can put some jazz or something to it. Are these all abandoned houses?”
“People live in there,” I said.
“This is going to be so good.” Margie was shaking her head. “We might even get this on regular television.”
She was saying it was good but I could see she was looking at it like she was front-rowing a freak show or something. I just kept watching the screen and listening to her stupid comments. When the part came on with me and Derek up on the roof and she saw the whale guy she stopped the tape and played it back a couple of times. And every time she played it over she goofed on it like it was so way out. I turned the television off and took the tape out.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m not sure if this is the stuff I want in the video,” I said. Then I just walked out with her talking at me in the background.
After school I met Mtisha and we walked down to the Schomburg on 135th Street. I started running my mouth to her and I couldn’t shut up. I told her about the math test, the fight, about my pops getting uptight about the tutor, and last about Margie.
“Man, you’re letting everything mess with you,” she said. “You need to have your emotional immune system checked out.”
“I need to have something checked out.”
“So, have you seen Ice?” Mtisha waved at a girl she knew. When she waved she was smiling and she looked good as she wanted to.
“No, I was thinking about calling him tonight,” I lied.
We got to the Schomburg library and went downstairs to the reference room. I showed Mtisha the math test that Mr. Greene had given me. The 34 was in red, underlined, and circled. Maybe he thought I was going to miss it or read it like it was 43 or something.
“What did he give you partial credit for? Neatness?” Mtisha asked.
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