Pick-Up Game

by Marc Aronson

  “They don’t always let her play,” he says. “Depends who’s there. Big white dude’s cool.”

  I get a nice Stockton-to-Malone pass between ’Nique and Waco. I start to feel good about my reel and break the rule of Spike. I ask, “How do you feel watching her get pushed around like that? They punish her, man.”

  Another shrug. I press.

  “Can’t be easy watching your girl get banged up by all those guys. You’re her man, right?”

  He says, “We tight.”

  “But you don’t like it when that happens. They jam her, man.”

  My face and the camera lens become one thing to him. He talks to us both about her. That this is all she wants. The Cage is the only place where it counts. I get a few minutes of him talking, but it all comes down to the one line I’ll use: “Dominique’s gotta ball.”

  “Thanks, man,” I say, and I mean it. “All I need is a shot of Dominique sitting next to you, waiting to get next, then rising up slowly and pulling off her Bulls jersey.” I sound like a director. A filmmaker.

  He stares at me blankly. Then he laughs with his whole body.

  It’s like Mira Mira staring me down. I don’t get it. So I ask, “What’s funny?”

  Now only his eyes laugh at me. “Dude. She won’t do that. Pose for you. I mean, you can get her running the Cage, but play-acting? Naw, man. Not ’Nique.”

  So I shoot. Wait. Watch the game. Shoot as much of Dominique as I can get.

  Finally. Game. Scotty holds out her water bottle as she slogs our way. She’s been through the war. It’s in her eyes. She doesn’t look happy about me shooting her, but she’ll want this reel.

  I shoot her grabbing the bottle.

  “You’re in my space. Move.”

  I step aside. “It’s cool, it’s cool,” I say.

  ESPN is beefing in the background, but I tune him out. Even though she hasn’t softened, I keep talking and shooting while she guzzles.

  “You’re the star of my —”

  She throws the bottle at Scotty. He misses and it hits the ground. “Zat on? Get that out my face.”

  “But you’re the subject —”

  “Get that the helloutmyface ’fore I yoke you.” Her left hand balls into knuckles and veins. Whatever I missed from far away, I have close up: rage.

  She’s no yellow cab swerving to miss me. She’s ready to “yoke me” and my camera. She frames me up tight. There’s nothing to ask her. Tell her. I’m tasting my insides, and it’s not good. I put down my Canon and back away from her.

  ESPN stays on my tail and in my ear about his highlights. I “yeah-yeah” him, but I don’t look back. I’m out the Cage, hopping over to the subway elevator, glad to get out unyoked with my Canon in one piece. My heart slams my chest floor on the ride uptown. I’m praying I got something. I’m praying hard. Actors, man. Can’t shoot a film without them.

  You remember Goat from way back?

  Do I remember Goat! Shoulda been called Eagle the way he flew. You ever see his double dunk?

  AWWWW, yeah. Where he took the ball, dunked it, and —

  Caught it before it landed and dunked it again!

  Ain’t never seen nothing like that!

  Right? What about Helicopter?

  Come on, now, who you talking to? Of course I remember Helicopter! Used to put a dollar on top of the backboard —

  Then snatch it off and —

  Leave change!

  Yoooo, that was my MAN back in the day! What about Pee Wee?

  Shoooooot! I seen Pee Wee put in work all over the city.

  Right, right? Remember that one time he put it on Nate the Skate?

  ONE time? Mannnn, he put it on Nate MANY times. Uptown, downtown, Brooklyn —

  Yeah, Pee Wee put it on a lot of cats back in the day. But not like Joe Hammond.

  Awwww now, there you go! Startin’ something. You HAD to bring up the Destroyer!

  Ay, that was my MAIN MAN.

  You remember that time he dropped fifty in a game?

  He ALWAYS dropped at LEAST fifty in a game.

  Right, right.

  I remember this one time up in Harlem, at Rucker, right, Joe’s team was playing Dr. J’s team for the championship, only Joe didn’t show up till the second half. It wasn’t no thang, though, ’cause they won after the Destroyer dropped fifty on the good doctor himself.

  How you know?

  Mannnnn, I was there, yo.

  Yeah, right!

  Ay, if I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’!

  Drop a basketball off a girder four hundred feet above the street. How high you think it’ll bounce? Bet none of them know. But I do.

  I cough, turn my head, pull out one of the tissues I have stuffed into the hard hat I’m holding in my left hand. Spit, check it. For a change, it’s just the usual New York City pollution, yellowish brown.

  I lean against the outside of the Cage. Been leaning here so long and hard against the woven steel links that when I straighten up, there’s a pattern pressed into my forehead. Shape of a diamond. Its sides the four sacred directions. An hour Billy and me been here. I was here earlier this morning, checking it all out. Plus I been here long before that. But this is Billy’s virgin visit, and his jaw is still bouncing off the pavement every time some high flyer does a semi-Jordan flying dunk.

  Me, I may be somewhat impressed, but I am remaining impassive. Wearing my stoic Indian look. Pop brought me here first time when I was ten. Three summers before the fall that killed him. Pop was one of the Mohawk ironworkers who built the WTC — whose Star Wars ruins I was in town a few years back to help take down — he brought me down here. All the way from Brooklyn, little Kahnawake, to see the sights of lower Manhattan. Pop wore his hard hat the whole time, the one with a war eagle painted on it. Letting people know who he was. First the roof of the Twin Towers, where Pop’s bonnet gained us admission and he showed me where his name was scratched into the highest piece of steel. Then the American Indian Museum, followed by the Statue of Liberty, for everybody but Indians. Then the highest point of it all for me, the Cage. And one individual in particular.

  “See that guy.” Pop nodding his head toward a lanky light-skinned man in loose clothes sporting an Afro the size of a hot-air balloon. “That’s the greatest basketball player who ever lived.” Then Pop laughed. “And don’t he know it? Son, that is Joe Hammond.”

  Present day. And I’m wondering how many of the under-thirties out there banging inside, elbows flying, even know who Joe Hammond was. Can they see his ghost standing over there by that bench watching? Or maybe it’s not his ghost. Maybe it’s the man himself. Heard a rumor he was still among the living. But if so, how come I’m the only one seems to see him? Unlike everybody else here, including the dudes out on the court.

  I wonder if any of those high-fly ballers were among the kids who saw what I saw right here a decade ago to this very day. How Joe Hammond strolled out to midcourt, almost absentmindedly. The game stopped; everybody stood aside. And when he held out his right hand, he didn’t even have to say, “Ball.” They just handed it to him. Then he stepped forward a few feet and began making two-handed shots, one after the other. Every one a swish. Fifty in a row. Other players just shagging the ball, passing it back to him. It was a red-hot day, sun beating down, but there wasn’t a drop of perspiration on his forehead. He stopped after that first fifty buckets, bounced the ball once, turned, walked a few paces toward the other basket, and did it again. Another fifty in a row. Nothing but net.

  Then he flipped the ball back to the last guy who’d fed it to him.

  “Play on,” he said, and wandered off the court in our direction. He seemed totally unaware of anyone around him. However, as he walked past us, he looked up, took in Pop’s hard hat and then his face.

  “Chief?” Hammond said.

  “Hi, Joe,” Pop replied, holding up his hand for a high five that made its way into an Indian handshake. It surprised me how Hammond was easy with that, knew the way Skins shake h
ands. Which I am not about to describe, and if you don’t know it, too bad.

  “My boy,” Pop said, indicating me with a turn of his head and a thrust of his chin. (Indians don’t point with a finger unless they are being rude or challenging someone.)

  “He got game?” Joe asked. Neither Pop nor I answered him. We just kept quiet. Answer enough. Hammond’s smile got broader, and he held out his big right hand to tap me in the middle of my forehead with his thumb.

  “It’s a head game, my man,” he said. “You remember that?”

  I still remember. Which is why I left early this morning to come back later. Why I have been watching for so long, picking up their moves, analyzing their games, and thinking how to get in — for as long as I can last. Even just one basket. But I need to do it in a way that’ll get ’em thinking, give me the little edge I need. Play with their heads.

  Meanwhile, though there are no Joe Hammonds, no Goats, not even no Anthony Masons, or Smush Parkers, I’ve been enjoying watching. It’s not tournament time here at the Cage, no orange and white jerseys. No MVPs. Just Shirts and Skins. But there’s plenty of talent here, enough to field a five that could kick the butt of any team in the Sweet Sixteen on a given day. Interesting cast of characters, too. Ranging from the stereotype street-ball nut to the downright sinister. More on that later.

  Meanwhile the one I’m liking best here is the Taino — which is how I always think of Puerto Ricans; can’t help but see the Indian first, I guess. My own weird sort of racial profiling. One of the shorter dudes on the court, but managing to bully the bigger guys by playing roadrunner to their coyote. Darting in and out like a bat shagging flies in the twilight, stealing the ball when the kid in goggles tries to dribble around him, taking it downcourt to a layup as smooth and cool as a drop of rain running down a window.

  Caesar, he’s the Taino guy. Thought at first his moniker was Mirror. Then realized that was just some name another half-ass was taunting him with. Until my island-brown brother showed him up. Caesar’s good. I like the way he looks over now and then and nods to the older man who’s watching his bag. Tío, who’s been having arguments with everybody — not mean words, though. Playing, teasing — like some of my own uncles back at the Rez do. It’s plain that T knows hoops, was a player here in his younger days. Probably the one who’s taught Caesar those moves. Only one he can’t get by with them is the dude on the other team, the sinister one.

  Yup, sinister. That one there, Waco. White as a knight of the KKK and a lefty, at that. He was here for the first game back at nine A.M. Midafternoon and he’s still here and still not breaking a sweat. Smooth, but scarily so.

  I’ve been reading those cold, empty eyes of his. He wasn’t playing for money in that first game. Which was sort of an anomaly here. Playing a money game.

  You don’t come to the Cage for the bucks, but the baskets, the adrenaline-pumping excitement of the texture of the ball in your hands, hearing it thump in rhythm with your heart against the court, then letting it and your breath go in a shot that arcs up and goes through. Seems to me that’s the real reward.

  Like it was for Joe Hammond. Pop told me how the LA Lakers heard about this legendary player, brought their whole team east to check him out, invited him to practice with them. They ended up so awed by his ability that they offered him a fifty-thousand-dollar contract. Mucho dinero, back before ten-million-dollar players.

  “Joe just laughed,” Pop said. “Said fifty bills was chump change. He had more walking-around money in his pocket any weekend. No way was he leaving the neighborhood. He was pulling down a quarter mil a year hustling pool, playing dice. But he didn’t use hoops to make money. That would have been like selling his soul. So Joe never went to LA.”

  Yeah, there are some who go on from here to college ball, even on to the pros. Some here in the hopes of getting filmed for a commercial or a documentary. There’s always more than one camera scoping the action at the Cage on any sunny summer day. Plenty of players trying to ham it up for the lens, hoping for their five minutes of Warhol.

  But for most, just stepping into the Cage is enough. If it wasn’t, there’s no way the one named Dominique would be daring it, the only girl playing today. Check that big girl ignoring the taunts, the hard fouls. Takes in a no-look layup back over her right shoulder, not even turning to see if it goes in. She’s already downcourt on D, brushing past Caesar, who’s standing there shaking his head, sorry she’s on Waco’s team and not his.

  The big white shark nods as she reaches in and strips the ball from the big guy who tries to body-block her and ends up stumbling over his own feet. She dribbles twice, then passes it out to Waco. His gaze downcourt pauses at me, leaning against the Cage. His eyes try to bore into my head. I don’t make eye contact, just hold the same blank expression. Yeah, he wants me.

  Makes me think of something I read. How a game like basketball was first played a thousand years ago in Mexico in a stone court with a rubber ball and vertical stone hoops on the walls. Serious stuff. Sometimes the members of the losing team were decapitated. Sometimes the winners. Willing sacrifices, supposedly, to the gods who loved the game so much they wanted the best players with them down in Xibalba, the underworld. Talk about cutthroat recruiting. Talk about a real head game!

  Maybe Waco thinks he’s one of those old blood-hungry deities. Eh? Hell, maybe he is one. I believe anything is possible here in New York City. And I’m already seeing ghosts. But whoever and whatever he is, Waco is as hungry as some sort of psychic vampire. Wants me like he wanted that one kid who was in the first game I watched. Boo, they called him. He was so shook by what he saw in the big white guy’s depthless gaze that he lost his game, froze up even though he seemed to be a better player. Then, after he and his buddy paid up, he split the scene entirely. Leaving part of himself behind. A little of his soul taken. Waco looking an inch taller, got some of what he was here for.

  “Game’s almost over,” Billy said, his hand on my shoulder. “You going to try to get in the next one?”

  Billy Laughing, my cuz on Mom’s side. “Come on,” he says, “dare ya!”

  Four little words. Yup. Same ones that made me consider wire-walking the high cables of the big bridge from Cornwall Island when I was twelve. But the three other words that led to me actually doing it are the next ones he speaks in the same tone as back then.

  “Bet ya won’t.”

  You ever do something that someone else wants you to do, even though you know that they’re pushing your buttons? Like the last time Billy pulled his five-word manipulation on me. I was sitting having lunch from my bucket, my feet hanging contentedly over fifty stories of empty space, our crew just done with hanging the iron except for that one long girder hanging from the giant crane in front of us. Same size crane as that one that tipped over a few seasons back and took out an entire half block in Brooklyn.

  I’d just cleared my throat for the tenth time and hawked one up that was about the same size and color as a ripe plum when Billy came up and sat next to me. He pulled a big shopping bag into his lap. Looked at me. Said nothing. Neither did I. Minutes passed. I finished the last of my ham sandwiches.

  I knew what Billy wanted me to do: ask him what’s in the bag. So I sighed inwardly and did it.

  “What’s in the bag, cuz?”

  But he didn’t answer. Instead, he looked over at that girder.

  “Is that wide enough to dribble a basketball on?”

  Crap, I thought. “Maybe,” I said.

  “Could you do it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. Then I sighed, outwardly this time, and said the words I knew he was waiting for. “But I don’t have a basketball.”

  “No problem.” He reached into the bag and pulled it out. “An authentic signed LaVonne James.”

  “It’s LeBron James, doofus,” I said, snatching the pill from his hands and then staring in disbelief at the signature.

  “Like I said”— Billy grinned —“LaVonne James. What do you expect from a ball
made in India and bought off the back of a truck for $11.95?”

  By now, as usually happens when Billy starts something, we’d attracted a crowd. The rest of our crew had drifted over.

  “BB’s gonna dribble this basketball on that girder.”

  “No way.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “It’s impossible.”

  “Suicidal.”

  And which of the previous statements did I totally agree with? And what was next said by my cuz? Yup.

  “Dare ya. Bet ya won’t.”

  Yup. It was possible to dribble a basketball on a girder. Twenty times, in fact, before my coughing fit and the sudden gust of wind, the tip of the boom, and my own decision not to follow its descent led to me grabbing the cable and watching the L. James knockoff diving like a red-tailed hawk toward the blocked-off avenue empty of pedestrians and then . . .

  Bounce high enough to clear the seven-story warehouse across the street?

  Explode into countless fragments of synthetic subcontinent rubber?

  Impale itself on a piece of rebar sticking up from the unfinished frame below?

  Use your imagination.

  Something I always do. I’ve read more books than your average Mohawk ironworker, may even make it to college someday. I know from the fatigue I felt this morning that I won’t be able to hang iron much longer. But I won’t be on any college team. They only take players with enough strength left to play at least a quarter. Not someone with the lungs of a sixty-year-old coal worker. Not a tall Skin who may look good but is guaranteed to gas out spitting blood halfway through a suicide drill.

  Courtesy of the air around the WTC — that invisible toxic cloud that all of us breathed in every day as we worked, the cops, the rescue workers, the firemen, the construction crews, including us Mohawk guys who volunteered. All of us without respirators. A whole crew of us come down from Akwesasne and Kahnawake the day after the planes hit. Thought we could save lives, but when we realized there was no one left buried to dig out alive, we still probably saved some. Our uncles and fathers had put up those towers. So we knew the safest way to take down the wreckage that might have killed less experienced workers than we were.