I'm Down: A Memoir

by Wolff, Mishna

  Around 4 A.M. we finished nipping at an airline bottle of gin that Oksana had stumbled upon in a locked cabinet, and we were getting restless. Marni was giving Eileen the world’s most boring tarot card reading and I was designing a city in my mind made out of toothpicks. That’s when Lilith had an idea. She closed her spell book and said in a really creepy voice, “Hey guys, let’s try to summon the devil.”

  The air in the guesthouse changed, and suddenly the party came to life.

  “How do we do that?” Marni asked.

  “I have a spell right here,” Lilith said. “A conjuring spell.”

  Eileen asked, “Can we finish my tarot reading?”

  Violet, who had had more gin than the rest of us said, “Fuck your tarot card reading,” which surprised us all. I didn’t even know she knew the F-word.

  I was beyond skeptical about Lilith’s magic abilities, but after The Exocist, anything concerning the devil creeped me out.

  And I said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I think this is a bad idea.”

  “Mishna is pretty reasonable about this stuff,” Violet said. “And if she doesn’t think it’s a good idea, I don’t, either.”

  “Me, neither,” Eileen said.

  “So what’s the problem, Mishna?” Lilith asked.

  “I just don’t see the upside,” I said. “It’s creepy and there has to be a better way to kill time.”

  That was when Oksana explained, “The idea is for Satan to work for you. He’ll do, like, whatever you want. Like wishes and stuff.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Kirsten, in a show of forethought, asked if Lilith had any spells to put the devil back should he get unruly. But when Lilith said no, we decided to roll the dice anyway.

  We got some chalk and candles and sauntered over to the church parking lot across the street. It was cold, so we all wore our sleeping bags around our shoulders and shivered as what little gin we had all sipped wore off. Lilith drew a pentagram on the pavement, and Oksana decorated the middle of the pentagram with one of her mom’s penis statues.

  Then we lit the candles and sat down around our pentagram wrapped in blankets to chant for Satan to appear. . . . Then we waited.

  Nothing.

  “Let’s do it again,” Lilith said. “I think sometimes you just have to keep doing it.”

  So we did it again. This time Eileen interrupted in the middle, “Are we doing this right? Lilith just double-check the book!”

  “Don’t interrupt in the middle!” Violet said. “Who knows what can happen?”

  “Maybe I should do a druid harvest dance,” Kirsten said.

  “Let’s save the harvest dance for later,” I said.

  Violet, who was following over Lilith’s shoulders screamed, “We are going to do the spell exactly how it’s written!” This caused her to get winded and need a puff off her inhaler.

  Eileen deflated. “This is like my whole stupid life!”

  “Oh, well,” I said. “Satan’s busy.”

  “That’s easy for you to say!” Eileen growled. “Stupid Mrs. Heller isn’t giving you a B-plus in English and refusing to change it. Guess stupid Satan won’t be changing it, either!”

  Kirsten and Marni looked bummed, too. “You guys didn’t really think we were gonna see the devil?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Marni took too long to say.

  “I hate Mrs. Heller!” Lilith said. “She thinks she can mess with everyone’s future by passing out B’s and C’s. . . . That stuff goes on your transcript like forever!”

  “Oh, I know!” Oksana said. “Mr. Hammer tried to give me a B in math and my dad went down there and they had a fight and it took the principal to get him to just give me some extra-credit assignments.”

  “Ms. Miller won’t let me take off for elven holidays,” Kirsten said.

  “Fascist,” Marni said.

  “Do you guys want to try this again?” I asked.

  “Okay,” Lilith said. “Let’s do it one more time without the penis, and see what happens.”

  Nothing happened.

  But then someone mentioned boys again, and we wound up sitting around talking on the pentagram till 6 A.M. And I say till 6 A.M., because that’s when one of the workers from the church found us. He recognized Oksana and woke her mother up to tell her that he had found us at the church doing a satanic ritual. Of course, Oksansa’s mom thought it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

  The next day, Dad was his usual three hours late to pick me up from the slumber party. I tried to slink out the door and run to the van, but Dad was already coming up the walk to flirt with Oksana’s mom. She wasn’t his type, but Dad also wasn’t turning down female attention. And when he came into the house the first thing out of Oksana’s mom’s mouth was, “You’re never gonna believe what happened.” That was when Oksana’s stupid hippie mom, who thought witchcraft was a hoot, told Dad how we had tried to summon the devil the night before.

  He didn’t think it was a hoot.

  And when we got home, punning aside, all hell broke loose.

  He stood beside Yvonne, yelling so loudly, he was frothing. “Do you know what kind of family we are here?!”

  I knew the answer he was looking for was not “weird.”

  “We are Christians, goddamn it! Jesus fucking Christ!”

  Yvonne added, “You think we go to church every Sunday for our health?!”

  “No,” I said, and then turned to Dad. “But it’s not like the devil actually came!”

  “Are you talking back?” Dad asked.

  “No.”

  “You’re a teenager now. You need to start acting a little more responsibly,” Yvonne said.

  “Technically, you have to have the word teen in your age—”

  “Young lady!” Dad was banging his huge fist on the counter. “It is time you learned some discipline!”

  We had been going to a new all-black church called Powerhouse Baptist, and Yvonne thought that a good punishment for me would be to go to Bible study on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But Dad disagreed with her. He decided that the best way for me to learn about discipline and not summoning the devil was for me to start playing basketball. I reminded him about the four-hundred-yard dash, but I guess that had a statute of limitations. Yvonne gave him a litany of other punishments that might be more appropriate: grounding, charm school, chores, community service. But Dad brushed them all aside—a ball and a hoop would straighten me out.

  The next week Dad took me down to the Miller Community Center to sign me up for basketball as though he hadn’t been planning on it for the last twelve years. But I knew that Dad had always wanted me to play. I was tall, and after the initial disappointment of having a girl, the fact that I exited the womb at twenty-three and a half inches gave him hope that he still might someday hear, “That’s a three-pointer for Wolff!”

  Although football had been his game, basketball ran a close second. I grew up watching him play a weekly game of hoops with his crew on a league called Tuesday Night Fever. And he played. I remember once on his way to the hoop he elbowed Reggie Dee in the nose so hard that he made his nose bleed.

  And as Reggie stood in the middle of the court, holding his nose and saying, “Wolfie, what the fuck is wrong with you?” My father just held the ball on his hip impatiently and said in a low flat voice, “Hey . . . I thought we was playing some basketball.”

  On Friday nights we often found ourselves at high school games watching kids from the neighborhood, whom Dad always seemed to know better when they were winning. “That’s Jay-Jay,” he would say, pointing to the sophomore who had made a three-pointer. “He’s T’s kid. I taught him that hook at the R.B. when he was ten.” And when he did that, I always thanked God that middle school didn’t have team sports.

  So we both knew the Satan thing was just an excuse, and that if I could play hoops well, all the embarrassing things about me would become the eccentricities of a baller. Like, “Sure she wears black every day and reads Greek
plays for fun . . . but hey—whatever you gotta do to get in the zone.” But basketball was Dad’s thing. I felt like I had my own things now.

  Dad hustled me down the trophy-covered hallway of Miller rec center toward the office. “This will teach you a little discipline,” Dad said as he signed the consent form. “Now, what number do you want?”

  “Is the number one taken?” I asked. Turns out it wasn’t.

  And as we walked back down the hallway and into the parking lot, I noticed we were the only white people. Dad put his arm around me and said proudly, “Now you’re playing for the Miller Satin Dolls.”

  “What’s that? The name of the team?”

  “Puh!” Dad was indignant. “The Satin Dolls are an institution.”

  I asked Dad why I was playing for the Satin Dolls and not the whiter rec center the same distance away, and he said, “’Cause the Satin Dolls are the best. You want to learn about hoops from the seventh best?”

  “I guess not.”

  “That’s right,” Dad said. “You want to be the best, you have to surround yourself with the best.”

  ______

  On my first day of practice, Dad and I walked into the gym where my teammates were “messing around before practice.” Underneath the hoop were five six-foot-tall black girls who must have had a ball in their hands as soon as they pried the tit out, and one five-foot-three point guard who must have shared the womb with a Spaulding regulation. I couldn’t believe these girls were the same age as me. They looked like they drove themselves there and had a club to go to later. Dad laced up my shoes painfully tight and sent me over to shoot with the big girls.

  I slinked over and stopped at the top of the key thinking that any one of them could kick my ass. And I just stood there watching them make shot after perfect shot.

  “Get in there!” Dad said, motioning with his hand.

  But I ignored him, and kept watching.

  Finally Shawanda, the largest girl on the team, who actually looked like Michael Jordan, turned to me. “Hey,” she said in a shockingly low voice. “You on our team?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  She passed the ball to me to take a shot. “You play well . . . we won’t have no problems.”

  I took the shot and missed—by a lot. Dad put his hands over his eyes and left the gym. I looked at Shawanda’s hulking form looming next to me and said, “We might have a problem.”

  To which she responded, “Ha . . . ha . . . ha . . .” Her whole body moved when she laughed. Then she smiled, which reassured me that she might kick my ass one day, but today was not that day.

  Then our coach, Coach Wheeler showed up. She was this ominous figure in a flat cap and trench coat, holding a clipboard, and I could tell immediately that she was the angriest woman I had ever met. Something inside her had started yelling before she even opened her mouth. She lined us up in the middle of the court and stared us down.

  “So,” she said curtly. “You all are my team!” She scanned our faces. There were only seven of us, but she was talking to us like there were thirty. “I know a lot of you’all have been playing ball for a long time! Playing that street ball with the boys!” I gulped. “But I’m gonna teach you guys to play like professionals!” I really shouldn’t be here. “Set up plays . . . zone defense, not just this man-to-man stuff you been doing . . . We gonna have the endurance to full-court press!” She stopped and looked at me, I felt myself turning red. “You, I don’t know. You played basketball before?”

  “No,” I said, trembling. “I’ve never played on a team before.” I watched her rage bubble up in front of my eyes. And I could feel my teammates’ disappointment flanking me on either side as they let out a collective silent sigh.

  “Well,” she said angrily, “you’re gonna learn.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Then she proceeded to run me till I was nauseous.

  When I got into Dad’s van that evening, Dad was giddy. He mussed my hair as I crawled exhausted into the back.

  “How was practice?” he asked excitedly.

  “I’m in pain,” I said.

  “Well, I had a hard day at work today,” Yvonne began. “This woman came in—”

  “You met Grace Wheeler, though,” Dad said to me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Does she like you?” Dad asked.

  Nope. I had managed to drag everyone down on the very first day of practice.

  “Too soon to tell,” I said.

  “Yvonne, you know who Mishna’s coach is?” Dad asked her but didn’t wait for the response. “Grace Wheeler! She broke all the records at LSU and was on the Harlem Globetrotters.”

  Great, I thought. I’m not just out of my league. I’m way out of my league.

  “She was on the Harlem Globetrotters?” Yvonne asked. Even she was impressed.

  “Sure enough. She was one of the very first women professional basketball players!” Dad said emotionally. I thought he might tear up. “She was a woman who got paid to play ball.”

  “I don’t get it,” Yvonne said. “If I had made it like that, I wouldn’t be hanging at nasty-ass Miller. I’d be living large.”

  “Well,” Dad said. “That’s why Mishna is so lucky.”

  Coach Wheeler was merciless. She ran, drilled, and push-upped us within an inch of our lives every practice. She also had a tight system for how much water we could drink from the drinking fountain at the side of the gym. And when, one night, she worked me till I threw up, I was told it was ’cause I drank too much water.

  But Shawanda patted me on the shoulder and said in her Herman Munster voice, “She shouldn’t have given you that last set a’ lines to run.” I was really starting to like Shawanda.

  We ran drills together and learned plays and different defenses. All the plays were built around our biggest strength—Keisha Lee, our five-foot-three insanely talented point guard. She would dribble down the court to us with her two perfect braids bouncing on the side of her head, and hold a certain number of fingers over her head letting us know exactly where she was gonna throw the ball and where it would go from there. And as a team we would get into formation and wait with an animal-like readiness to spring into action. Leslee and Shawanda, our trusty forwards, got open to catch that ball and drive that lay-up in. I had been appointed the team’s center because I was big and didn’t move that well. On offense, my job was to catch the ball and get it to someone who could do something with it. On defense, my job was to stand with my big self in the center of the key and block things with my big-ass hands.

  At one practice the ball came to me couple times and I took the shots, but the second time I missed a shot, Keisha gave me a frustrated look.

  After practice I walked over to Shawanda who was putting the balls away with Leslee. I was feeling bad about pissing off Keisha, to which Shawanda responded, “That’s just Keisha.”

  “She goin’ to Duke!” Leslee said with a southern accent.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We all tryin’ to get a Scal-lar-ship!” Leslee said. “But, shoot, I don’t care where.”

  “You mean college ball?” I asked, beginning to grasp Keisha’s angst.

  “Yeah. We all want to play college ball one day. That’s why we play with Grace,” Shawanda said, “instead of a nice coach.”

  Riding home from practice that night I couldn’t even look at Dad. I was angry at him for making me a Satin Doll and screwing up an otherwise great team. “I’m glad you’re getting along with your teammates,” he said. “You know I’m so proud of you. Playing ball with the Satin Dolls. I think this could really be your thing.” This just infuriated me more. Basketball was not my scholarship. I sucked at it. And my teammates apparently had their whole futures tied to it. And what was pissing me off was that my dad had planted me right smack-dab in the way of their ambitions like a roadblock.

  Anora and friends at the rec center where I played basketball.

  “You know, if you got good and wanted to you
could do the whole college ball thing.”

  “I don’t think so, Dad,” I said. “I’m not very good.” And I knew any school that had basketball scholarships also had tailgate parties and drunken assholes that painted their faces.

  “You don’t know everything,” Dad said. “You think you’re all head, but you got my athleticism. You never know what you can do. Keep an open mind.”

  But all the open-mindedness in the world wasn’t gonna help me on the court. Within a couple weeks, Coach Wheeler had taken to asking me at every practice, “Wolff! Are you an asset or a liability?” I didn’t answer, because I was embarrassed to say I didn’t know what a liability was. If I had known, I think I would have been flattered that it was a question and not just the statement: “You are a liability.”

  And the day we got our uniforms Coach Wheeler pulled mine out of the box. “Wolff!” she called, picking up my jersey and seeing the number one on the back. “Is this some kind of a joke?”

  I was instantly embarrassed, and I said, “No, Coach Wheeler. It’s for number one at something else . . . other than basketball.”

  She looked at me with her burning-hate eyes and said, “Well, this here is basketball.”

  However, once I brought that jersey home, Dad wanted me to wear it everywhere: to parties at Lyman’s, to the grocery store, to take out the trash. He’d say, “Why don’t you just wear your jersey? You’re a Satin Doll now.” I’d tell him it was dirty, to which he’d respond, “How long does it take to do a load of wash?” Basically it was understood, if he was gonna be seen with me, it would be in a Satin Dolls’ jersey.

  Yvonne would argue, “John. No boy’s gonna be into a girl that walks around in a basketball jersey.” At which point Dad just looked at her like she was on crack. There would be no boys.

  When the season started, the idea of actual games kept me up at night. I just knew I would screw up and cost the whole team their futures. Luckily, I had an out. I had complained to Dad all through preseason about debilitating ankle pain. The type of pain that starts in the head and increases the more you think about it. Dad himself had had ankle problems and I thought, Maybe he’ll feel just practicing with the team was enough. I learned my lesson. I got my jersey. No game play necessary.