Playing Without the Ball

by Rich Wallace

  I go over anyway. I set down my tray and they look up. “Anybody here?” I say, mostly looking at Alan.

  “No,” he says. “Sit down.”

  I nod to Jared, who’s sitting across from me.

  “Tough break getting cut,” he says.

  “Yeah. It sucks.”

  Alan looks at me, nods.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” I say.

  “What?”

  “What do you know about this church league? I mean, can I get on your team?”

  “Maybe,” Alan says. “We got like seven guys now.”

  “Six,” says Anthony.

  Alan turns to look at him. “You bailing?”

  “I was only going to play so you’d have enough,” Anthony says. “Take this man instead.”

  “Yeah, take me. But keep him, too,” I say, pointing to Anthony.

  “Well,” Alan says, “you’re supposed to be in our youth group to play.”

  “So sign me up.”

  Alan rubs his jaw. “You start coming to meetings?”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  “I mean, I’d like you to play,” he says. “You’re a good player and all. But I do care about the youth group. I mean, some people think it’s a joke.” He takes a sip of his Sprite. “I don’t.”

  Anthony looks around at me from the other side of Alan. “He’s president,” he says.

  Okay, so there’s a condition attached to my being in the church league. I actually have to hook up with a church. Fair enough.

  “So when do you meet?” I ask.

  “We meet Sundays at six,” he says. “This week we meet at the Y. For practice.”

  I smile. “I can handle that.”

  Alan fixes his eyes on me. “Services are at eleven,” he says. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”

  We play half-court on Tuesday morning, which is more a test of skill for me than my full-court running game. But I play well; it feels good to be back. Later I ask Dana how the jumping’s going.

  “Hit a snag,” she says. “We were looking at tapes and decided that I’m not going to go much higher unless I try a new approach. A variation on what I’ve been doing. So it’s like back to square one.” She pulls up her tank top to wipe the sweat from her face, revealing her tight abdominal muscles.

  “So now I’m struggling to clear five-six,” she says, “but once I nail the new form I’ll be going higher than I ever would have before.”

  “Is that frustrating?”

  “A little,” she says. “I find myself lapsing into the old style just to get over the bar sometimes. But I fight it. I know I have to regress a little in order to get better.”

  Spit doesn’t come around until Wednesday, but she seems like her old self. She rushes into the kitchen.

  “We got another gig,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “Ground Zero. Over in Weston.” She does a comical little dance, like the twist. “I’m psyched.”

  “When?”

  “Friday. This Friday. Somebody backed out and they called us.”

  “You ain’t playing here?”

  “Not this week. No. We weren’t supposed to. Shorty’s bringing in a DJ on Friday and some other band on Saturday.”

  “So you’re moving up in the world.”

  “Nah. We’ll be back here next week. But this is cool, isn’t it? We never played anywhere else.”

  “Wow, what’s next? Scranton?”

  She laughs. “Oh, jeez, that’d be like too much to even think about. I mean Scranton.”

  I give her a high five. She’s beaming. I notice that her eyes are sort of bloodshot.

  “What’s with the eyes?” I ask.

  “Nothing. Remember last weekend when my body was rejecting my stomach? I broke some blood vessels from barfing so hard. No big deal.”

  “You kind of overdid it.”

  “It was just that medicine,” she says. “I think I was allergic to it.”

  I roll my eyes. “Maybe it was the thirty glasses of wine.”

  “Whatever. No big deal.”

  I fold my arms and squint at her. I’m not about to lecture, but I can’t believe she’s blowing this off. “Do you say this stuff just to bust my chops?” I ask.

  She sticks out her tongue. “Hey, it’s happened before,” she says. “I just don’t make a big thing out of it. I like having fun. What’s wrong with that?”

  So Friday’s looking bleak, with Spit over in Weston crawling toward the big time, and a DJ here cranking out Chuck Berry and Beach Boys songs. I hang in the kitchen all night, but it’s slow and boring.

  Around midnight I start wiping everything down, shining the counters and the refrigerator and the stovetop.

  Somebody says hi from the doorway.

  I turn and it’s Julie, the tennis player. She’s got a Red Barons baseball cap on with a ponytail hanging out the back. I say hi in return, drawing it out to almost two syllables, expressing surprise and delight and interest.

  “How’s it going?” she asks.

  “Uh, well, fine. You been out there all night?”

  “No. Just a few minutes. Thought I’d say hello.”

  She can’t mean that she came here just to say hello to me. She must mean that she was here anyway, and, since she was here, she thought she’d check in.

  I set the washrag on the table. “You, uh … who you with?”

  “Those same girls. We were at another bar most of the night.”

  “Oh. Well, I been here all night.”

  She laughs, which means she knows I was trying to be funny, even though what I said really wasn’t. “I figured.”

  “Yeah, I’m kind of chained to the stove here. I mean, you know, not all the time.”

  She looks me up and down, quickly, just a flick of her eyes. “What was your name again?” she says.

  “Jay. Same as before. How’s your elbow?”

  She points it at me. “Not bad. It comes and goes.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  She frowns a little, unflexes her arm. The same girl who interrupted last time comes into the doorway. She looks at me, then at Julie, then back at me. She shakes her head. “You coming out?” she says to Julie.

  Julie nods. “In a minute.”

  “Those guys followed us here.”

  “I figured they would.”

  Suddenly I feel cut off from the conversation. “What guys?” I ask.

  “Some guys we were dancing with at the other bar,” Julie says. “Cowboy wannabees.”

  The other girl tugs Julie’s arm. “You coming?”

  “Yeah. But I get the guy in the black hat this time.”

  “You can have him.”

  Julie gives me a point, with one finger out and the thumb up, like a pistol aimed at my heart. “So long, Jay,” she says.

  “Bye, Julie. Come see me again.”

  She turns and goes. There’s a frayed horizontal rip in her jeans, maybe three inches long, just below her right cheek. I stare at that spot in the air until long after she’s gone.

  I’m still staring when her friend reappears in the doorway.

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “Just looking,” she says.

  “At what?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Just busting you,” she says. Then she’s gone, too.

  So there’s a guy in a black hat out there who got shot down at one place, followed his prey to Shorty’s, and is dancing with Julie just because he doesn’t know how to give up. Maybe I could learn something from that.

  Maybe not.

  “L.A. Woman”

  Saturday. Spit’s in the kitchen telling me about last night’s performance at Ground Zero. She says they want her back real soon. She’s drinking ginger ale.

  Bobbi comes in to empty the bucket they dump the ashtrays into. She pours it into the trash and a puff of ashes comes up. She smiles at Spit and says, “We could use you
guys tonight.”

  “Oh, I think they’re good,” Spit says, referring to the band.

  “They’re all right. But the crowd is down.”

  The band is pretty good, even though they’re just covering popular stuff. To my ear they’re as good as most bands, even some that make it. I don’t know where you draw the line for success. I guess it’s like basketball: the difference is that little spark of creativity, that inch more of talent. You can work incredibly hard and you’ll probably get good, but then there’s the extra dose of genius that separates the truly great ones from the rest of us.

  “Take a break?” Spit asks.

  “Sure.” We sit at a table in the corner to watch the band. It’s not as if the kitchen’s busy. There’s about nineteen people in the bar, and twelve of them would be here no matter what. So the group is performing for maybe half a dozen people.

  There are four guys in the band. They’re older, probably near forty, so they tend toward classic rock and some country. Two girls are dancing, and the bass player comes out onto the floor with his guitar and jives with them. He’s a barrel-chested guy with a beard, wearing a black suit jacket over a red tank top, and he’s got frizzy hair that’s balding.

  Spit leans over to me. “Check out the buttons,” she says.

  The guy has three shiny pins on his lapel: a guitar, a saxophone, and a treble clef.

  “Merit badges,” I say. “Bass, sax, and … general musicianship.”

  Spit giggles. The song ends and the bass player goes back up to the stage, which is really just a low wooden platform in the corner. He starts talking into the microphone about their Web site. Then they go into “L.A. Woman,” which is a pretty good Doors tune.

  Spit grabs my hand. “Let’s dance.”

  I frown and push my chin out toward the bar.

  “He won’t mind,” she says. “It’s good for business.”

  I roll my eyes and shake my head.

  “People will leave if nobody’s dancing,” she says.

  I point to the two women on the floor.

  “Come on,” she says.

  I get up and we start to dance. Spit is hard to keep up with, but I try to mirror her movements. Her hair whips around. She’s skinny and quick.

  She may be right about one thing, because another couple starts dancing, too. So there’s six of us out there. I face the kitchen and try to be shielded by the others, because Shorty would get pissed if he saw me out here. If he happened to be paying attention.

  They do “Brown-Eyed Girl” next and I start to relax. When that song ends, they say they’re going to take a break, so we sit back down at the table.

  A few minutes later General Musicianship walks by and Spit calls him over. He takes a seat.

  “What’s up?” he says.

  “Hi. I’m Spit. This is Jay. Good set.” Musician camaraderie.

  “Thanks. I’m Paul.”

  “Too bad it’s slow tonight,” she says.

  “We’re used to it,” he says with a smile.

  “This place can rock,” she says. “My band plays here sometimes.”

  “Well, we haven’t been together long. Takes a while to build a following.”

  He’s sweating pretty good, so he wipes his forehead with his sleeve. “What’s your band?”

  “Elyit. Punk and rock, some original stuff. Depends on the night.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Whatever it takes.”

  “If you don’t get ’em dancing by the second set, you’re sunk,” she says. “Some nights you gotta cover the Bee Gees.”

  He laughs. The drummer has come over, a large guy in a blue T-shirt and leather cap with a short brim. Paul jerks a thumb at him. “Dave,” he says.

  We shake hands and give him our names.

  “Time to boogie,” Dave says. They go back to the stage. I catch Shorty looking my way, so I give a little wave and go back to the kitchen.

  I clean the counters and sweep the floor. Then I look out the back door for a few minutes until I hear a familiar voice. I go to the bar room and Spit’s onstage with the band, doing a heightened, punky version of “Under the Boardwalk” that fills the bar. She does have a hell of a voice. I feel it right through my chest.

  The bass guy is dancing with her and his guitar, and I count seven people on the floor. And when you hear the difference, the difference is obvious, what puts her above this band and most others. That spark of originality, even when she’s covering an old song, that voice that’s a couple of notches better than good. That thing that makes her unique.

  The room is transformed.

  Or maybe it’s only me.

  I go in the back and start making a list in my head of the positives and negatives of what I’m thinking I ought to do. The positives: she’s funny, she’s smart, she’s incredibly talented, she’s got beautiful hair. The negatives, at least the biggest ones: her reliance on drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes; her denial of all that; her history with men, at least one of them.

  I make a third column, because I’m not sure which side some things should go on: her unique appearance, her attitude toward her body.

  I add one last thing to the positive column: she likes me. I’m tired of being alone.

  I get up to find Spit. When I look out, she’s dancing slow with somebody, some guy who wasn’t here a few minutes ago.

  I recognize that wide butt. It’s the lawyer. I watch in awe until the song ends, then wave her into the kitchen.

  “Be right back, babe,” I hear her say.

  She comes in and I shut the door. “Babe?”

  She giggles. “He’s not like I thought.”

  “No?”

  “No. He’s great.”

  “You said it was nothing. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She shrugs. “This is the first time he’s come around.”

  “So how do you know how great he is?”

  “We’ve been killing a lot of afternoons together.” She reaches over and brushes some hair off my forehead. “You know, we work until about two, then I go in and take dictation the rest of the day.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Sorry, bud. You hurt?”

  I shake my head, but I am.

  “Oh,” she says soothingly. “You are.”

  I swallow hard. “No. Just a little.”

  “You’re sweet, Jay.” She hugs me. I pat her shoulder. “You okay?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t worry, bud. We’ll find you somebody.” She pulls back and touches my face. “You sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  I nod.

  “I gotta go,” she says, and she kisses my cheek. “Don’t wait up, Dad. I love ya.”

  I watch her go, then I look at the bar. One guy has his head down, dead or asleep. Another is just staring into his drink. There are four other regulars on the stools, smoking cigarettes, nursing beers. The band is playing “Brown Sugar,” and there’s a couple at the pinball machine, laughing and pounding the buttons.

  The kitchen’s closed. I’ve had enough. I go upstairs, take off my shoes, and lie down.

  Things are not going well. I want to sleep.

  But I can’t.

  Things suck.

  And tomorrow morning I have to go to church.

  Various Protestants

  I have a tie, I have a jacket, I have decent shoes. I think I can get away with jeans, black ones anyway. The Methodist Church is over on Church Street, of course, about three blocks down from the back end of Shorty’s. I walk over at quarter to 11.

  I go up the wide cement steps. A man and a woman are at the doorway, shaking hands with everybody who arrives. The woman hands me a program and gives me a big, toothy grin. “Welcome,” she says. “Glad you could come.”

  I stare at her briefly, wondering if I should know her. I don’t. So I nod and walk into the church.

  There’s low organ music playing from somewhere up near the front. I
see Alan in the center aisle with a small old lady on his arm. He’s wearing a tweedy gray jacket and black pants (not jeans). He helps the lady into one of the pew seats and walks toward the back again. He sees me and comes over.

  “Morning, Jay,” he says.

  “Hey.”

  “Follow me,” he says, kind of sweeping his arm toward the aisle.

  I walk behind him, then he stops about halfway up. He looks at me.

  “What?” I say.

  “You can sit here.”

  “Okay.” I slide in a few feet. He starts back down the aisle.

  “Where you going?” I say.

  “I’m an usher,” he whispers.

  “Oh. I’ll save you a seat.”

  He smiles. “I’ll be in the back. I’ll see you after.”

  The place starts to fill up. I find myself between a banker with silver hair and another frail old lady who keeps her coat on. I look around a lot during the service. I share a hymnal with the lady during “Holy, Holy, Holy,” holding it open in front of her as she leans into my arm. She gives me a warm smile when the song is over.

  I don’t have any experience with the church routine, but I know some of the songs and the Lord’s Prayer. When they pass the plates around I know enough to put in a dollar.

  I shake hands with the minister on the way out the door. When I reach the steps, Alan is waiting for me. He puts up a fist and opens his mouth wide in one of those silent yells.

  “You made it,” he says.

  I loosen my tie. “It was painless.”

  “Be at practice?”

  “Why do you think I was here?”

  “Fair enough. So we’ll see you tonight.”

  “Yeah, you will.” And I head back to Shorty’s.

  I show up at the Y early to shoot, but there’s another team practicing. So I take a ball, sit on the bottom row of the bleachers, and bounce the ball between my feet.

  Alan shows up at quarter to 6. The team I’ve been watching is pretty bad. Nobody can shoot, and most of them can’t run much either. The eight of them are mostly medium height and kind of fat.

  “Who are these guys?” I ask Alan.

  He squints at the floor. “Lutherans and a couple of Baptists. Neither could field a full team so they lumped them together.”