Dr. J
Page 13
Soon, I’m writing my own papers and my English tutor is barely changing any of them.
I relearn how to write. I also change my speaking style, trying to differentiate my Ds and Th’s, seeking to speak the King’s English. If speaking less colloquially and writing grammatically mean getting my degree and going into business, then that’s what I will do.
Not every black student on campus struggles with this adjustment. Sitting in front of me in sociology class is a pretty black girl who already speaks properly. There aren’t many black faces on campus, so we naturally strike up a conversation. She’s Natalie, and her father is Nat King Cole. Natalie Cole went to prep school in New England, so she already knows how to write college papers. While I find Natalie a very polished and attractive classmate, there is no sexual spark between us and, despite her charms, we never become more than friends.
But freshman year of college is where my cold streak, which has lasted five years since Theresa took my virginity back in Hempstead, finally ends. As a popular athlete, I’m a fairly prominent freshman on campus, and for the first time in my life, I am encountering females who are aggressively coming on to me. Maybe it’s the era, the late ’60s, the Age of Aquarius and all that, or maybe it’s that I’m more poised and confident, grown-up—though I still don’t really have to shave more than once every week or so. I have a telephone in my dorm room, and I begin getting calls from female voices, saying things like, “You don’t know me, but I know you. I’ve been watching you, checking you out around campus.”
“Who is this?”
The girl will tell me that she will be wearing a red blouse, jeans, and cowboy boots and standing at a certain spot in the student union in thirty minutes. If I like what I see, then we can take it back to my dorm room.
This is the first time I ever participate in the so-called sexual revolution, and while I don’t know this yet, these are my first groupies: women who want to have sex with me not for who I am but for what I am. Even exchange students. And I have to say, this is fun. It’s the first time I’m intimate with different races, different cultures. I have so many women calling me that I can’t meet all of them.
Some of my teammates plead with me, “Man, just tell them to come over. If you don’t like them, one of us will.”
5.
I’m a comical sight, so cold in the biting Massachusetts winter that I wear a leather jacket under my wool overcoat. I’ve never shivered so much as I do in the Amherst valley that first winter. While the campus tucked in beneath the white drifts is beautiful, the brick buildings beckon from the snow like cakes in a bakery display case. The trees are heavy with ice. The students are puffy in black and brown wool, trailing scarves in slashes of red and green, half-submerged as they make their way down icy paths. I find the cold to be almost unbearable. Winter is an imposition I hadn’t quite prepared for, the days even shorter than back in Long Island, the dawn’s dark persisting in the gaps between the lamplight so that my classmates become invisible as we walk to our first classes. So I bundle up, sometimes wearing every jacket and scarf I own until I resemble a frozen hobo. If there were a trash-can fire on my way to stats, I would stop and hold my hands over the flame.
The gym, of course, is warm, and the training room blessedly tropical, the usual mix of steam and sweat making a welcome refuge from the horrors of winter. I would hide out at Boyden all semester if I could, avoiding classes, hibernating in puffs of steam atop soft white towels beneath a comfortable swaddling of athletic tape and ace bandages, my feet dangling in swirling hot water. One such evening, after practice in the Cage, as I am preparing for a warming whirlpool soak, I walk in and find another black man already in the tub, sprawled out, legs fully extended, one foot elevated up and out of the bath. He has his head back, is reading a newspaper in one hand, and has an unlit cigar in his mouth.
I stop. That looks like Bill Cosby.
Damn, that is Bill Cosby!
Cosby is one of my idols. Along with Bill Russell and Dr. King, he’s one of those guys whom I’ve viewed as role models.
“What are you doing in my whirlpool?” I ask.
He laughs. He explains he’s hurt his foot and takes the water as a kind of therapy. He’s up in Amherst as part of his stand-up tour.
“You playing ball up here?” Cosby asks.
I nod.
“What’s your name?”
“Erving,” I say. “I’m Julius Erving.”
“Erving? Erving? Never heard of you.”
“Man,” I say, “I’ve heard of you.”
I ask him for his autograph. What else can I do? He signs a UMass basketball schedule. I tell him my brother Marky will never believe that I met Bill Cosby.
6.
The campus emerges from the winter, the ice retreating, giving way to mud that shoots forth from the grass and the buds that promise spring—and blessed warmth. As perhaps the best-known black student, I am again under pressure to join one of the school’s political movements. Eventually, there will be a student strike protesting the war in Vietnam that will shut down the campus. Leon, my old friend from Roosevelt, is active in the drive to establish an African-American studies program, the first in the United States. He’s a rabble-rouser, and he’s always talking to me about throwing my weight behind our causes.
It’s 1969. A decade of upheaval has almost passed, with violent riots, three world-changing assassinations, and the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and I know that Leon is right to be involved. (Leon actually changes his name to Kwaku.) But I’m not going along with his taking over college administration buildings and chaining himself to doors.
I am constantly besieged, almost every time I go to the student union, by a brother in a black suit and skinny tie named Sadiq.
“As-Salaam-Alaikum,” he says.
I nod.
“Have you given any thought to the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad?”
I tell him I have. I remind him that I’m a Christian, a Baptist.
“Have you read your Koran?” he asks.
I have a lot of patience for people, and I always take a few minutes to stop and hear Sadiq out. But it becomes an almost comical refrain. Every time I step out of my dorm, here is Sadiq.
“As-Salaam-Alaikum. It is time for you to let Allah into your life.”
I return home for spring break. This is an exalted time, where I can pick up again with old high school friends, and even date a few of my former classmates. Either I’ve changed or the world has changed, because suddenly girls who had seemed inaccessible to me are paying me plenty of attention. Sharon, a senior cheerleader at Roosevelt High whom I had previously considered out of my league, and I strike up a friendship and that spring we become intimate and she even takes me to her senior prom.
My uncle Al, one of the strong male role models in my life, fixes up a blue 1962 Chevy for me, restoring it so that it runs great, with one hiccup: every time I make a sharp left turn the horn sounds. With my new wheels, I feel a sense of freedom and Sharon and I settle into a friends-with-benefits arrangement. I’m catching up with my barnstorming guys, even playing a few games at the old courts, my mood dampened only by the fact that Marky is back in the hospital, this time because his lungs are acting up and the doctors are worried about his weak heart. He’s over at Mercy Hospital in Hempstead, and when I go to see him, to show him Bill Cosby’s autograph, he seems happy to see me but also a little delirious.
“Angels are coming, June,” he is saying. “Angels.”
He complains about how his joints ache, how his muscles feel as if they’re tearing. I’ve never seen him in this much pain.
He’s lost so much weight and his skin is drawn around his face. He’s still only sixteen, but looks much older than his years, and I want to lift him from this hospital bed and take him with me, to load him into my new blue Chevy and introduce him to women, to my friends, to the world. There is a great injustice in this, in one brother, me, getting the gifts of size, o
f height and strength and speed, of the ability to leap, of the opportunity to rise, while Marky has been shortchanged. He’s smaller, he’s got bum lungs, he’s sickly.
But Marky always comes back, I tell myself.
Mom’s scared. Freda is telling everyone not to worry. For as long as we’ve had a little brother, she says, he’s recovered.
“Marky is strong,” Freda says. “He’s got a strong soul. You’ll see.”
Marky always comes back.
I believe.
7.
I’m back on campus just a few hours when Mom calls and tells me I have to come back.
“The doctor is saying that Marky isn’t gonna make it,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
Mom is silent. I hear her fragile breathing. “Just come home, June.”
I drive back down, pushing hard on the accelerator but also believing, as Freda does, that the doctors are wrong, that Marky always comes back. He may be weak. He may need a month or two, but he’ll come back. He’ll show them.
I make the trip in just two hours, but when I pull into the driveway of the house on Pleasant and then come in through the back screen door, there’s Mom and Mr. Dan and Freda and my nephews and neighbors and everyone in the house is crying.
He didn’t make it, they’re telling me.
“Make it where?”
“Oh, June,” Mom says, hugging me. “Marky passed.”
This doesn’t make any sense. Marky is younger than I am. This is . . . this is out of order. The order should be Freda, then me, then Marky. How can Marky be the first to die? And he’s only sixteen.
“Can’t be,” I’m telling them. “He’s, he’s just—”
But I stop myself. They’re telling me that my little brother, my Marky, who followed me and played with me and who was my best friend and who was one of the four, that Marky is dead.
I start crying.
“Where is he?”
Mom tells me he’s still at the hospital.
She’s asked for an autopsy, to find out what happened, how a sixteen-year-old could have been taken from us. It turns out Marky suffered from a severe, undiagnosed case of lupus erythematosus, the autoimmune disorder that affects the skin, joints, kidneys, and brain and causes almost unbearable pain. Oh, my heart, all our hearts, break again at the thought of how much Marky must have suffered throughout his life.
I stay home until the funeral, where Marky is buried in a family plot my mother has purchased for us over in Rockville Centre.
I’m in shock the rest of that semester, thinking about the last time I saw Marky and he talked about angels coming to get him, about Marky’s wooden casket being lowered into his grave, about my mom and Freda and me crying as we said good-bye. I never stop seeing Marky in my dreams. Even when I’m walking across campus I see him, out of the corner of my eye, strolling alongside me, with his briefcase, his suit jacket, his warm smile, his reddish hair, his unique understanding of me, his forgiveness of me, his love for me. It’s like he’s always with me.
But I’m reminded, again, of our mortality, yet another sign that life is but a brief interlude between the great mysteries of where the soul begins and ends. I don’t pretend to understand or to dwell particularly much on the transformative nature of the soul, but I am convinced the souls of Marky, and of my father, and of my cousin Bobby, and so many more who will be taken before their time, are still with me.
Their souls are the winds that blow me upward. They are part of my rise.
8.
That summer, as my family staggers without Marky, I return to a home where the absence of his inimitable sound, of his wheezing, his coughing, his long stride down the hall, is a kind of dreadful silence where Marky should be.
Of course, I have to work to supplement my scholarship money, so Freda gets me a job delivering encyclopedias and educational books. She and another girl are the sales staff. They go door-to-door throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan selling these books, which is the easy part of the job because they aren’t collecting any money. They just offer these encyclopedias and educational books that help kids learn math or history for a trial period. The customer doesn’t pay anything. All he does is fill out an order form. And if the customer doesn’t like the books, they promise, they don’t have to accept them when the delivery boy arrives with the first volumes.
Freda and her partner, both young, pretty girls, secure an awful lot of orders.
Now, my job is to show up a week later with the second volume of the encyclopedia or textbook and get the customer to sign a contract and agree to a payment plan. There is a monthly payment, a weekly payment, and a daily payment, and I’m the one who actually has to close the sale, to collect the money. Plenty of folks, maybe 25 percent of the orders, don’t even let me in the door. They were happy to talk to the pretty girls, but now that this big black brother has arrived, they want nothing to do with our book business.
I spend hours negotiating and haggling over these books and the price, pointing out that the cost of the encyclopedia is just pennies a day. How can they deny their family the benefits of the wisdom and knowledge contained in these volumes? Think of the advantage their son—do you have a son? a smart, promising daughter?—think of the advantage your daughter will have in school if she has access to this kind of information at home!
My pay is based heavily on commission, and the way the business is structured, I receive a good percentage of each sale I close. Once the contract is signed, I get a few dollars every week straight into my pocket. Some weeks, I am making $400, which is more than I’ve ever earned before. I’m going to return to campus with a sharp new wardrobe.
But even after work, I don’t want to go home. The quiet, of a too-big house and just my mom and Mr. Dan now living there, and the space itself are reminders of who we are missing. Mom can’t bring herself to clean out Marky’s room, and when I go in there, I break down all over again.
I play ball every night at the park. Weekends and some evenings, I’m barnstorming again with Leon, Lenny, Tommy, Ralph, and Robert, and we’re looking for games all over, in Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Harlem, and by now plenty of the ballplayers have heard of, and want to test themselves against, me.
But there is only one guy I want to test myself against: Lew Alcindor.
The man I believe is the greatest basketball player in history has just completed his senior year at UCLA and been drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks of the NBA. One Saturday afternoon, my guys and I go looking for him at Riis Park in Queens, on the beach, where he supposedly plays ball and hangs out. We pull up in Robert’s Rambler and we see a few games in progress on the courts, but I don’t see anyone over, say, six foot five.
“Where’s the seven-footer?” I ask some guys waiting for a game. “Where’s he at?”
They point down toward the beach, and we see this long, long brother in a yellow dashiki and sandals, sitting on a beach chair, reading a book. He’s not playing basketball today.
I walk over to him. “Hey, man, I’m Julius.”
He’s reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.
He nods, lifts up his sunglasses, extends his hand.
I feel like I’m meeting the president.
He smiles. “So Julius has come.”
He’s heard of me.
“You’re not playing ball today?” I ask.
He shakes his head. He has nothing to prove—to me or anyone.
Then we both do something strange, as if even though we won’t be playing ball, we need to measure ourselves against each other somehow. We hold up our hands and press them palm to palm. Mine are larger.
9.
When I return to campus, I run into Pete Broaca, who is goose-stepping his way over to Boyden. “Julius! You must have grown three inches!”
Since the end of the freshman season, not only have I grown taller, my arms seem to have gotten longer, so that my reach resembles that of a pterodactyl. In practice, I find myself improvising in a ma
nner that I know my coaches don’t like. (Ray Wilson has come up to UMass to join Jack’s staff as an assistant.) There are numerous instances where I’ll do something on the court like, say, throw a bounce pass from one baseline over the half-court line to the far foul line to hit a teammate in stride for an easy layup, and the coaches will be shouting at me, “Julius, who the hell throws a stupid pass like that?”
But that was the angle: the picket of defenders was cutting off the outlet and I saw a way to get the ball through them by bouncing it.
In one practice, we are learning how to defeat the 2-2-1 zone defense. My shooting guard, John Betancourt, and I have worked out this move where I run the baseline behind the zone, he throws it up, and I grab it and lay it in. So we do this in practice and Coach Leaman stops it and yells, “No, no, NO, ya’ll can do that on the playground, but not in here.”
He throws me a long pass. “You have to work to defeat the zone.” Pass, pass, pick, cut, get a guy open, boom. Catch them sleeping, weak side, strong side. You gotta work! “It takes twenty seconds to defeat a zone.”
My play with Betancourt had taken about one second.
“I never wanna see you guys do that again!” And Coach blows the whistle to resume practice.
Perhaps I have known this for a while, but now I can articulate it to myself: I see the game differently than other players, than even my coaches. I am capable of doing things that they have never seen before and so don’t know how to coach. Jack Leaman wants to run most of the offense through his captain, Ray Ellerbrook. Ray has a nice shot and is a steady player, but it is clear to everyone on the team from my first varsity game against Providence in which I pull down 28 rebounds and score 27 points, that whether Coach is running plays through me or not, I’m going to handle the ball more than anyone else because I can simply go up and get the ball. My additional height has made me as dominant a rebounder as this conference has ever seen, and there are plenty of plays where I can’t resist putting the ball down and taking it coast to coast. My coaches have stopped even complaining about the shots I take, about my leaving the ground before I’ve decided to shoot or pass, because Jack and Ray have seen enough to trust that I’m operating at a different level than they are used to.