Odd Jobs

by Ben Lieberman

  “Dad?” I asked.

  “Yeah, pal.”

  “You said the great players have vision, right?” I asked as I dribbled up the steps for my third lap in my attempt to get to l0.

  “Yup.”

  “Well, who was the best? Who had the most vision?”

  “Oscar Robertson, maybe Jerry West,” he said.

  “I never heard of them. Were they the best ever?” I asked.

  “Maybe; they sure had the vision, and it made them great.”

  I bounced the ball carefully and felt like this would be the winning lap. Still, I wanted to keep the conversation going, so I asked, “Does that mean they were the best basketball players of all time?”

  My father thought for a moment. “Michael Jordan had the vision and everything else you can imagine.”

  I finished the fourth and fifth laps and my rhythm was great; I knew I was going to do the 10 laps. “Michael Jordan?” I challenged. “He’s not better than T-Mac.”

  “Better,” my father answered.

  “Not better than Dirk Nowitzki?” I shot back.

  “Much better,” my father said, smiling.

  “Okay, okay not better than Shaq!” Because that I wouldn’t hear of. Shaquille O’Neal has always been my idol.

  Now, my father knew he was sharing idol status with Shaq, so maybe this was his opportunity to get an edge. “Please, not even close.”

  “Not even close? How could that be?”

  “Shaq might be twice the size of Michael Jordan, but he’s half the player.”

  “C’mon,” I whined. “Half the player?”

  “Keep dribbling,” my father encouraged me. “I’m telling you, Shaq is half of Michael Jordan in his prime.”

  I couldn’t help but imagine what half a player actually looked like. I started my seventh lap dribbling up the steps. “So if Michael Jordan in his prime is missing his arms, who wins? Michael Jordan or Shaq?”

  My father laughs at this imagery. “Lessee ... Michael Jordan with no arms versus Shaq. Michael Jordan wins.”

  “Dad!”

  “Kid, you’re talking about Michael Jordan.”

  “How about if Michael Jordan didn’t have his arms or his legs?”

  “He’d still win,” my father said quietly.

  “Get out of here, you’re crazy!” I said.

  “Son, I know it’s hard to believe because you’ve never seen him play, but if Michael Jordan played against Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Dirk Nowitzki and your beloved Shaq, all would lose to Michael Jordan, even if Michael Jordon was just a nose on a table. That’s how great he was.”

  The sight of a nose on a table beating all those basketball greats was too much for my 10-year-old brain to take. I laughed so hard that the ball I was dribbling hit the corner of the step and shot away. I only made it to my ninth lap and the stair torture test had to continue.

  “Ha!” my father said with a snort. “That’s why you need the vision. There are always distractions that can stop you. You’ve got to fight through and keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the ball in your mind and watch the court. See it develop. I’m going to work now. Keep working on the stairs, and maybe tomorrow will be your day.”

  It wasn’t the next day that I won the stair challenge, nor was it the day after that. Looking back now I can’t remember how long after the Michael Jordan’s nose debacle that my accomplishment came, but I do remember when it happened I kept my mouth shut and took care of business.

  There was that time in life when things fell into place. When if you worked hard you beat the stairs. It was a great theory, that is, if you worked hard you got what you needed. Then there came the time that no matter what happened and how hard you tried, the stairs beat you. Looking back, I can’t remember the day I beat the stairs, but I can point to the minute in time when all the stairs of the world started beating me, when everything changed and never went back, no matter how hard I tried.

  My mother was running some errands and my father took my little sister Katie and I into town to get a few things to start the new school year. I needed a haircut and Katie needed shin guards for her first season playing soccer. While I was getting a haircut, my sister was combing her doll’s hair. The doll, Karen, was wearing the same pink skirt and white shirt as my sister. The doll also had the same blonde curly hair that Katie and my mother shared.

  As I sat in that chair getting my haircut, in the mirror I could see Katie grooming her doll and I saw my father staring at the newspaper in his lap. I don’t think he turned one page. His eyes were on the New York Times but his mind was back in his office, working. We caught his mind there all the time.

  After my haircut, Dad bought Katie’s shin guards and she and I conned him into getting us some big sloppy ice cream cones. Then we were ready to go home. We went back across the plaza, and when we were about to cross the street to our car, my father warned Katie to be careful not to get any ice cream on her doll. But Katie had left Karen in the ice cream shop. When she realized her loss, Katie let loose a shriek that I swear could have melted our ice cream faster than this unusually hot late August day.

  I told them both, “It’s no problem. I’ll get Karen and meet you back at the car.”

  “Thanks, Kevin,” Dad said. “We’ll wait for you right here.”

  “Naw, you don’t have to do that,” I insisted. “You guys wait in the car and get the air conditioner cranking,” I suggested.

  Katie screamed. “No, I want to see Karen.” Her face was red and her eyes glistened with tears. She was past the point of no return, so there wouldn’t be any reasoning with her.

  “Okay,” I said to them both. “I’ll get the doll and wave to you from the ice cream store and then you guys get the AC going.”

  “That sounds like a plan,” my father agreed. “Hey,” he added, “make sure you’re careful crossing the street.”

  “C’mon, Dad, I’m almost 11. I know how to cross a street.”

  “Of course you do,” he said and smiled. “I’m just saying it because I care about you.”

  I sprinted over to Chico’s Ice Cream and saw Karen perched on the counter. I grabbed the doll and stepped outside. I waved it in the air back and forth and my father and Katie waved back. I couldn’t see Katie’s face but I try to remember how relieved she must have felt. She knew Karen was safe and she could enjoy her sloppy ice cream cone. I also always remember what my father said about caring about me.

  A black car zoomed around the corner faster than any I had ever seen. Oddly enough, everything happened in slow motion. The windows on the car were smoked dark, but one window wasn’t completely closed and you could see long red brittle hair in contrast to the dark car. There was screaming and hollering coming from that open window. The car swerved in all directions, and then it veered right toward my father and sister. It lifted my father clear in the air and rolled over Katie. The car never slowed down and careened out of sight. Katie’s cone was still intact on the pavement but the ice cream had been separated and was unrecognizable amid the crimson mess. How could it be? I thought, unable to process what I had just seen. Dad and Katie lay on the sidewalk like broken mannequins, but the ice cream cone was still intact.

  A hit-and-run accident. They never found the guy. Drunk driver, they hypothesized. Broad daylight and everyone could see it but no one saw it but me. The whole process was only a few freak seconds. Did the delay waiting for the doll cause a bizarre juxtaposition that couldn’t be reversed? It was just a few seconds. Yet those few seconds caused a disruption that ended two lives and sent two others spiraling in a completely different direction than they were headed before.

  I guess every minute is a defining moment somewhere in the world. Ten minutes ago, Billy Bob Buttfuck in Ohio just bought a winning lottery ticket and the next minute Igor Roganovich got hit by lightning in Croatia. Good or bad, is the new direction permanent? For me, every day since those brutal moments has been a fight to get back to where I was. Where I want t
o be.

  For the next few years, my mother was a virtual zombie. She barely had the desire to get out of bed to go to her bookkeeping job. Mom was there and I was grateful, but damn, I missed her. If I weren’t around, my mother would have offed herself long ago, I’m sure.

  Any extra money I made after the accident went to maintaining our shoebox of a house in Hempstead and buying her medication, but there was rarely enough money for both. Then, when there was some extra cash, instead of putting it away for a rainy day like I should have, I’d be too tempted to go out with my friends and see a movie or grab a burger, anything to squeeze in some “normal.” And those little things add up. The extra pressure of a stupid thing like money was killing us.

  Harris North IV changed all that, though.

  I remember the first day I saw him. I was in my last year of middle school and Harris North IV was watching me play basketball at Hempstead Park, a hotbed for street basketball. There were 30 or so shirtless basketball players wearing long shorts and high-top sneakers. Along the tall brick wall were another 20 hand-ballers wearing long pants and wife-beaters. Also lounging around in the vicinity was an assortment of old-timers with scraggly beards and dental issues. Then there was this one guy sporting khaki slacks, a pink golf shirt and Gucci loafers sans socks. Yeah, he was some chameleon. Fit right in.

  His Gucci ass showed up at my house and he started talking to my mother about giving me a great education. This guy was actually scouting parks looking for people to put his school on the map. I wasn’t any better than my buddies Loot or Carey, but Harris wanted me because I played b-ball pretty good and I was white. I found out later that the school had this whole strategy worked out. A football team had too many players and too much equipment, so a major football program wasn’t worth the trouble. With no expensive equipment and only 12 players to award scholarships, hoops was just what they needed. And what they really wanted was lily-white players.

  This guy really laid it on thick for my mother. Hempstead schools couldn’t compare with a private school like Remington. I would be a target for drugs and in a bad element if I stayed where I was. He could open up important doors for me. This grown man with a pink shirt, hanging out in shitty parks, was gonna open doors for me?

  It wasn’t like I bought into North’s visions; I had no choice. The guy had no idea what buttons he was pushing. After all, my mom had just lost two of the three people dearest to her in the whole world. She sure as hell wasn’t about to lose the third – me. And if Harris North IV had the solution, she was going to take it. While speaking with him, Mom came out of her trance and flat-out demanded that I go to the academy. If something like sending me to a private school moved her, I wasn’t going to argue. I just wanted her to be happy, not that she ever could be. Not like she was.

  Looking back, though, Remington Academy was fine. It showed me some stuff I never would have seen. On the other hand, it made me want stuff I didn’t know I wanted. Bottom line was that I was in a packed 10-cent candy store with only nine cents to spend.

  The funny thing was that this bozo Harris North IV sold Mom on getting me away from all the drugs in Hempstead. Meanwhile, you can’t believe the drugs rich kids get their hands on. While we were scoring dime bags in Hempstead Park, the guys at Remington were getting blow, X and ‘shrooms like they were renting movies from Blockbuster. Their money made all the difference.

  These guys lived in a different world, and for a while I got to live in it. I liked living in it. They showed me there was another world outside Hempstead, and I couldn’t help it, I wanted in. I got a front row seat courtesy of Constance Wendy Wellington. Everyone called her C.W. You’re not really allowed in this world without a weird name. It’s like a password at the door. No lie. We had a Bunny, Potter, Bucky, Rip, Chip, A.J. and every combination of initials possible in the alphabet, landing me right with C.W.

  I remember always trying to have an excuse to talk to her, to find any reason to see her. I can practically still feel her straight brown hair that was so silky and shiny that it drew in the light and sent it back out with a subtle glow. While the rest of us were fighting the good fight versus a tsunami of zits, C.W.’s skin was flawless. Her dark complexion managed to look tan in the winter. Beautiful green eyes and a mouth that was inviting in a plump and seductive way accented it all.

  It was hard not to be drawn into C.W.’s world. She would talk to me about basketball and the games we had coming up. When she talked to me about hoops, I was pumped. I tried to fit in. In my second year at Remington, I actually busted my ass to nail down literature class. To make things even tougher, her favorite author was Charles Dickens, so besides the regular reading, I tried to tackle Dickens. I didn’t give a flying fuck about literature, but it was C.W.’s favorite subject. Girls make you do some weird things. English Lit was hard enough to grasp, and they didn’t make it easy for a guy like me. We were reading books in class like The Catcher In the Rye, A Separate Peace and The Great Gatsby — stories about these characters with tons of money and fancy lifestyles, perfect for the Remington crowd. For them, it was like reading about their next-door neighbors. For me, it was like reading a story about aliens from the Planet Zeron.

  Later on, C.W. admitted that’s what got her really liking me. I’d like to think I charmed the fuck out of her, but that’s a reach. She knew I couldn’t care less about this stuff but I was doing it for her. I never minded doing the work to get what I want but when I looked around, everyone else was either getting things handed to them or expecting to get things handed to them.

  I spent a lot of time at C.W.’s house...if you want to call it a house. The damn place could have had its own ZIP code. I always knew people had swimming pools and tennis courts, but the Wellingtons even had a stable and horses. It was her mom’s “hobby.” This hobby could drain the economy of some small countries.

  C.W. had a great relationship with her mother. I would meet them at the Piping Rock Country Club and they would be there downing Southside cocktails, watching the tide roll in. They would spend hours together before I got there. It wasn’t that I thought it was so hip that C.W. was having drinks with her mother. It was that she was having anything with her mother. My own mother was so out of reach. Her hobby was jumping from one antidepressant to another. If that hit-and-run didn’t happen, maybe my life wouldn’t have been horses and cocktails, but it wouldn’t have been Hempstead either. I appreciated what I had and I tried not to be jealous of the Remington crowd, but it was hard to fight what I really felt. It’s not like I needed to drink Mimosas with my mother, but I didn’t need to be feeding her tranquilizers either. Shit didn’t have to turn as far left as it did. It didn’t always have to be that way, I thought. I could learn to win. Like I said, I was willing to do the work.

  Buster Wellington, C.W.’s father, was a tough read for me. As the president of the board of trustees at Remington, he was so active with the school that you could almost imagine him taking calculus with us. When he saw me around the school, he barely gave me a look, let alone had any conversations with me.

  Buster liked the basketball games, though. He was a real sports fan who had four daughters, C.W. being the oldest. While their girls were all good equestrians and field hockey players, old Buster was pretty bummed he never had a superstar lacrosse player. On that point, he treated me pretty well. He was at all the Remington hoop games and would spend some time talking basketball. I don’t have a ton of experience with fathers. Maybe I thought he could bring me into the fold a little more, but that was probably my own frustrated desire to have a father. Plus he had a natural desire to keep me out of his daughter’s pants.

  C.W. must have done a great selling job on him though, because one time he took me with them on a family vacation. We went to Nevis, an unbelievable island in the West Indies. Just to get there, we flew to Puerto Rico, then took a tiny plane to St. Kitts and then a 45-minute ferryboat ride to the resort. C.W. and her l5-year-old sister Missy had one room, while her younger twin
sisters shared another. I, the king, had my very own room. It was nice stylin’.

  However, the separate rooms thing didn’t really work out the way Mom and Pop Wellington had planned. The vacation at Nevis turned out to be where C. W. and I did it for the first time. After scouting out several romantic moonlit locales, we decided on the big laundry room where all the beach towels were washed. We broke in and turned on the dryers and lay on top of them. It was like having a vibrating bed in a seedy downtown motel but we didn’t have to pay any quarters. Pretty ingenious, I thought.

  The laundry room was C.W.’s idea; you never knew with her. She had an unbelievable appetite for fun. There were a lot of laughs and some great sex in the laundry room that night. We did pretty well a bunch of nights after that. We even managed to find a bed sometimes.

  So there I was, living large with all the beautiful people, having the hottest girlfriend in history, enjoying great sex, playing basketball and even making some connections. Obviously, you should never get comfortable on the top of the world. The landing can be a real bitch.

  After that vacation, I got a part-time job in a sandwich shop. One day my boss let me out two hours early, so I went to surprise C.W. When I got to her house, she and her father were heading toward their stable. They were pretty bundled up, but I was sure it was them. They didn’t see me come into the stable, and I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I heard my name. I stood still where I couldn’t be seen and just listened.

  “I know where it’s going and not going,” I heard C.W. say. “I know what your expectations are of me, and I know what they are of myself. There’s a certain life I want to lead and a type of person I want to share it with. There’s a place for Kevin, but it’s not long term. I’m not going to have baggage in college next year.”

  Holy shit, I thought. I’m a fuckin’ boy-toy. I thought maybe she was just telling her father a story, you know, to get him off her back. But that wasn’t the case.