by LJ Alonge
This particular time it had rained the night before. When he climbed through my window, he made my whole bed wet, and I had to sleep on damp sheets. On the way to the park the next morning, I sprinted and jumped over a big puddle on the sidewalk, knowing that overt displays of athleticism bothered the hell out of him.
“You think jumping high makes you good?” he asked with a trace of anger in his voice.
I shrugged.
“You know how many do-nothing Negroes jump high out here? Guys out here pumping gas that’ll dunk on your head. You understand that Moses Malone barely got up off the ground? And he was the greatest of all time. It’s about skill.”
I jumped over another puddle.
“These are life lessons I’m teaching you,” he said. “I’m trying to tell you about life.”
That was him all day, every day: always teaching you some kind of lesson you didn’t ask for. Always wanting you to understand what it is to be a man and expecting you to get the message through the vodka on his breath. “The world,” he’d once said, “will try to keep you a black boy your whole life. I’m not raising you to be no hat-in-your-hand Negro. You have to work to become a man.” He was one of those adults—along with all teachers, police officers, pastors, counselors, rappers, and politicians—who never practiced what he preached.
When we got to the court, he stood to the side to step out of his Windbreakers. This was his ritual, his way of showing respect to the game. He has a gnarly scar from an old work accident that runs from the top of his knee to the middle of his thigh, and he liked to wear these short shorts to accentuate it. They were Magic Johnson short, and the Warriors logo on the front had faded to just a few yellow lines. I was still a confident kid then, still a couple of years away from sinking into nerdier ambitions. I clowned his shorts, told him they belonged in a museum.
“You can start telling me how to dress for basketball when you beat me at basketball,” he said.
We never warmed up or shot around. The game was always to twenty-one. A lot of the way he played depended on whether he liked me in that particular moment. If I hadn’t messed up or gotten into trouble at school, if I could go a week without a vice principal leaving a voice mail, it was all laughter and wild hook shots. He’d let me get the score close and then pull away with a few timely jumpers. But if I was messing up, if I’d brought home anything less than a B or in some way disgraced the family name, he’d play hard and cheat. The game would become a kind of punishment.
That day I couldn’t tell what kind of mood he was in. He shot for takeout and missed, grumbling to himself. I held the ball at the top of the key, and he stood around the free-throw line. He was crouching, his arms wide, his scar dark and stretched, with a smart-ass smirk on his face. He was daring me to shoot, knowing that I was a streaky. Some days I made five or six in a row, but some days I couldn’t hit the rim. I never practiced unless he was with me. Without taking a dribble, I drained three jumpers in a row. Nine–nothing. “You won’t keep that up,” he said, creeping a little closer to me.
We’d been playing since I could walk, and I’d never beaten him. He bought me a Fisher-Price rim for my fifth birthday. He set it up in the living room and spent the entire day backing me down and dunking on me. When I started to cry, he threatened a spanking.
On my next jumper I missed left. An air ball. The ball rolled into the grass.
“See,” he said, wiping the dew off the ball, “that’s what happens when you try to do too much. That’s what I’ve been saying. You try to play like a pro, but you don’t know the first thing about fundamentals.”
Out came his bag of tricks. When we watched basketball at home, he’d try to teach me how to watch the game. Really watch it.
“You think you’re watching the game,” he’d say, “but you really ain’t.”
He’d say the game wasn’t won or lost in the highlights. “For example,” he’d say, “look at the way that guy in the post got that offensive rebound.” He’d jump off the couch and sit on the floor right in front of the TV, his finger on the screen. “That was no accident. That guy put a forearm into his defender’s chest, which threw the defender off balance for just a half a second. That’s all you need.”
As he drove to the basket, he shoved a forearm in my chest so hard that I stumbled back underneath the basket. He watched me hit the post, then scooted a bit closer and tossed a dainty floater off the backboard and in.
“Bird-chested,” he said, walking back to the three-point line. “Play bigger. You haven’t been doing your push-ups.”
On defense he gave me a solid punch in the gut when I took jumpers. The score was 17–10, him. His hands were on his knees between points, and big sweat blots ran down the front and back of his shirt. His shirt collar yawned, and I could make out some dark spots on his neck. You could see a whole lot of bad nights written on his face.
“I’m gonna win,” I said. It was my ball, and I stood at the top of the key.
“Overconfidence,” he said. “The calling card of the prima donna.”
I drove hard right, and then put the ball behind my back as I went left, something I’d seen on TV once. But I couldn’t get a good grip and fumbled the ball out of bounds.
Pop said nothing. Probably he was too disappointed to talk smack. He limped to the three-point line. Slowly he started backing me down. I could smell the sweat and deodorant and beer from the night before on him. I could hear him wheeze. Without turning around, he tossed a hook shot over both of our heads, and it went off the backboard and in. A miracle if you’ve ever seen one. Instead of celebrating, he walked quietly back to the three-point line, his hands folded over the back of his head.
It was game point. The sun was just starting to peek out through the clouds. Starting at the top of the key, he backed me down slowly, throwing all his weight against me. He put up another little hook shot. It went in again. Again, he didn’t celebrate. He picked the ball up, walked to the sideline, and put his pants on.
Maybe deep down I knew that was the last time we’d play, because I was mad as hell. On the way home I wouldn’t even talk to him. When he tried to put his arm around me, I walked ahead of him.
“Somebody die?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then what you all mad for? That’s life, and I don’t care if you want to hear it. You’ll get your ass kicked sometimes, and you’ll have to deal with that. Sometimes you’re the hammer, sometimes you’re the nail.”
CHAPTER 7
THERE ARE SURPRISES AND THEN THERE ARE SURPRISES
All things considered, it could be worse. No one was hurt, and the store didn’t burn down completely. On the news they like to pan the camera over the Q Mart, pausing on the money shots, the water-damaged roof, the blown-out windows, jagged shards of glass stuck in the frames like shark teeth.
Do I feel horrible? Of course I do. I watch Omar from the park. He’s set up a little plastic table just outside of the Q Mart, and every few minutes he organizes and reorganizes it. From the looks of things, he’s selling all the knicknacks he could salvage: waterlogged rolls of toilet paper, smudged lotto tickets, ballpoint pens, cigarillos.
But for now I put that out of my mind.
I’ve returned to Bushrod triumphantly. I’m wearing my new Js; on the way over, I walked stiffly so I wouldn’t crease them. It seems to me that summer is starting today, right now. When I get there, Similac’s at half-court picking teams. I walk up to him, ready to hear my praises sung, ready to be anointed to—
“You really thought we were gonna let you play?” he says.
“What?” I say.
“You seen what you done? You didn’t see the dude’s store?”
“But. Why did you—”
“Would you hang out with you if you were us?”
My head is spinning. “You said— I was just— You told me to.”
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“Oh.” Similac cracks his knuckles. “We had a gun to your head?”
Similac puts his hand on my back and pushes me to the side of the court so they can start the game.
“Dope kicks, though,” he says.
It’s been two weeks now, and we’re back to the same routine. The police haven’t come for me, but if they do, I’ve made peace with it. I’ll take my punishment when it comes. Frank says that because I don’t have a record, I probably won’t do any time. But if I do, he says they’ll probably send me to the cuddlier YA Camp, the kind for kids who miss school or yell at their moms. For now I sit in the grass and read Don Quixote. Omar gave it to me a while back. It’s all about how we sometimes blur the line between fantasy and reality, confusing one for the other. I won’t lie, most of it’s hella boring—too many references to fine cloths and mutton—but I’m committed to finishing it. I want to walk across the street to talk to him about it, but every time I see him yawn and look at his watch, I lose courage.
The guys have been playing extra hard recently, sometimes staying after dark. They do it on Similac’s orders. There’s some talk of the boys from Ghosttown coming down to play us in a couple of weeks. One of the guys from Ghosttown came up to Fat Jimmy at Ray’s Barbers and challenged us to a game. Fat Jimmy said everyone in the shop was looking at him, so he had to accept. But if you ask me, he just signed our death certificate. The kids from Ghosttown are killers. Big, fast, strong—they live to play outdoor ball during the summer. No AAU for them. No referees and free throws interrupting the flow of the game. They show up to your neighborhood like Vikings—ready to conquer, pillage, and plunder. If the rumors are to be believed, they’ll strip the losing team of their shoes after the game. They will invite the losing team’s girlfriends to pie at Nation’s. They will claim ownership of your park, make you pay a tax on it for playing.
Everyone knows we don’t stand a chance, but Similac has everyone practicing out here like we do. He draws up nonsense plays in the dirt like the leader of a guerrilla army. No one knows what he’s talking about. Whenever he walks to the water fountain, the other kids grumble about how he’s not even funny anymore.
It’s another hot-ass nothing day until Frank notices the two girls watching us from the other side of the fence. Frank’s got a third eye for the females, like some kind of radar for the X chromosome. It took a minute for all of us to catch on. When I turned back to Frank, he was smoothing down the five or six whiskers under his nose, a little island of hair he calls a mustache. After the smoothing came some jutting of his chin toward the street. I thought he was motioning toward Omar, so I didn’t look. Someone asked Frank what his problem was. When none of us got the hint, Frank sighed, deep and dramatic. He jutted his chin harder, more obviously, and we followed it like a compass.
The girls are all the way across the blacktop. When it’s this hot, with the heat pressing down on your neck like an iron, everything looks ten times farther away than it really is. The girls look like they might be a hundred miles away, maybe farther, like they’re out in the Mojave somewhere. I imagine myself walking to them, the soles of my shoes melting into the concrete, my thirst unquenchable.
“Water,” I will gasp as I reach them.
“So heroic,” they will say, carrying me back to their lair.
They’ve got their fingers wrapped around the chain-link like vines, and even from this far you can tell they probably smell like something amazing.
It’s rare we’re blessed with flesh-and-blood girls at the court. Every day’s a dude fest. One time Frank brought his cousin, who was from LA but starting her first year at Cal State East Bay. Her sunglasses were all Hollywood, big and dark, and she was wearing the kind of short shorts that would break a Negro’s heart. Plus she had on these fly-girl earrings that glinted wildly in the sun. The kind of girl so dope, she makes you think about every single one of your faults, every reason she’d have to reject you. I was having trouble not staring, so I focused on a spot of brown grass between my legs. She sat next to me, dug her fingers into the warm dirt, and pulled out a dandelion.
“It’s pretty,” she said, turning it around in her fingers. Yellow petals fell onto her wrist.
“You’re pretty,” I murmured, not looking up. I tried to play it cool, tried to ignore the sweat rolling down my back.
“Thanks,” she said. “I need to ask Frank something real quick.” She walked over to Frank and never came back. For the rest of the afternoon, I traced the outline her butt had made in the dirt next to me.
The girls are whispering to each other now, the bottoms of their braids fluttering behind them in the breeze. One of them’s tall and skinny-armed, her skin dark and shiny in the sun. Now she’s standing with one sneaker hooked in the fence. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she’s at least as tall as I am. You never see girls that tall.
When she talks to her friend (sister?), they cup their hands over their mouths. What are they saying? Who knows. They’re probably exchanging secrets.
Frank likes to remind me that I have technically never had a girlfriend, and he’s not wrong. There was some brief hand-holding with Tara Wiley in the fourth grade, a glorious week that she suddenly can’t remember now that we’re in high school. There was also the time Ashley Mayfield blew an eyelash off my cheek in the seventh grade. Her lips got real close to my face and almost brushed my skin. When I told Frank that story, how I thought it was a sign of things to come, he got this embarrassed look on his face like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right. But what does he know about unspoken body language? After school he takes girls into an empty science lab and comes out fifteen minutes later with a smile that would rip an average kid’s face apart.
“Would you lovely damsels enjoy a closer look?” Frank shouts to the girls.
“Of what?” the tall girl says.
Frank dribbles the ball once and gets ready to shoot. It seems only fair that he should miss. I’m not saying this out of malice, but it’s just that Frank already has a dozen girls texting him at all hours of the day. When’s the nerdboy going to get a chance? Who’s looking out for me? So I’m praying that Frank misses and maybe lands awkwardly on his ankle, and in a heroic twist, I have to carry him to safety. As Frank lies in the hospital, clinging to life, I’ll take the girls for ice cream, somewhere cozy where our bare knees touch under the table.
But no, it isn’t meant to be. The ball spins through the rim, barely grazing it. Frank lands and is fine. He does a kind of fist pump and takes a small victory lap around the court. I feel a little bit of shame, but mostly disappointment.
“And?” the tall girl says, unimpressed. She’s almost laughing as she says it, her braces flashing for a second before she closes her mouth. From my spot on the grass, I laugh a little, too. So maybe there’s hope. We are laughing together.
“If I do it again,” Frank says, “you will grace me with your number.”
Then, a hip thrust: Frank actually does a hip thrust.
“Do it again,” the tall girl says.
Despite everything that happened with Omar, I still believe that there are times in life when one must take a chance. Throughout history, great men have taken risks. I get up from the grass and wipe the dirt off my hands. I walk over to the court, my steps feeling heavy, powerful. I grab the ball and run my fingers over it. I will shoot it and I will make it; the girls and I will get ice cream. We will go to the movies at Jack London. We will sit in the back, in the darkest, most private row. Then we will sacrifice ourselves to our bodies’ hunger.
Frank grabs me by the arm and pulls me to the sideline for a conference.
“The hell are you doing?” he hisses.
“Taking charge,” I say. “Ergo, winning the hearts of these fair ladies.”
“Don’t,” he whispers hoarsely. He squints. I scored in the ninety-fifth percentile in state testing, but Frank hates it when I break ou
t the vocabulary big guns. “I’m doing this. I got it.”
I look over to the girls. I’m hoping that in my eyes they see a kind of steely resolve.
“Please,” Frank says, turning away from the fence so the girls can’t see what he’s saying. “They’re into me. I’m this close.” He holds his fingers up a half inch apart.
“They were laughing at you,” I say.
“With me, my dude. With me.”
“I got this,” I say.
He tries to grab the ball, but I hold it over my head. Frank jumps for it once and then gives up. I walk to half-court as the rest of the guys on the court back up, giving me some space. There are murmurs, chuckles, especially from Similac. Of course, great men were often chuckled at. Jesus. Buddha. Marcus Garvey. All bullied.
A breeze rattles a chain of some kind, metal-on-metal somewhere far away. I stare at the little square in the middle of the backboard. My hands are sweating; I wipe them on my shorts. There’s a little tremor in my leg, maybe a nervous muscle. I take a step forward and cock the ball near my ear, the way my dad used to teach me. As I shoot the ball I think back to the games we used to play, how he enjoyed whipping me, talking shit all the way home. Then it occurs to me that maybe this isn’t a good idea. The ball is flying to the rim on an arc that seems a little too high, it’s moving a little too fast, it is aiming for a rim that is much farther away.
I can hear Frank moan as the ball sails over the backboard and into the grass. The other guys on the court shake their heads. It is too sad a situation for laughter. I’ve ruined everyone’s fantasy. Tonight, brothers, dads, and uncles will hear this story; it will be used as a lesson for future generations. Do not let an egghead near your athletic equipment. Keep him away from your womenfolk. An empty McDonald’s cup rolls away from an overflowing garbage can and tumbles toward the fence. When I look over, the girls are gone, beamed up to wherever they came from.