Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  When the next summer came, I went back to summer school again. Miss Patterson was there too.

  She watched me play basketball, and one afternoon, she said to me, “My boyfriend is the basketball coach for the eighth-grade team. I’d love for you to meet him sometime.” I said sure. Brad Simpson was a tall, handsome guy. He watched me dribble and shoot not once, but again and again in the afternoons. When I paused, my too-small shirt damp with sweat, he would say that he couldn’t wait to get me up in the eighth grade. But, he added, “I don’t know if you’re good enough, Scott. I don’t know if you can handle it.” He’d shake his head slightly and tell me that I needed more skills, and then he’d say, “I want you to do this,” and he’d show me a shot or a fake or a drill, or “I want you to do that.” And he’d show me ways to dribble. I know now exactly what he was doing, but back then I took it like a challenge, a doubt that I would measure up. I felt I had something to prove. One day, Brad gave me a ball of my own, a regulation-size basketball, and I dribbled it everywhere.

  I dribbled the ball during lunch. If I was walking downtown, I would dribble the ball the whole way. Wherever I went, so did the basketball, vibrating up and down beneath the palm of my hand. I could switch between my left and right hands; I could dribble it around my entire body, passing it from palm to palm in one seamless motion. I dribbled the ball so much that the pebble skin wore away until it was smooth and Brad gave me another one.

  When I couldn’t bear the sounds around me, I’d drown out the noise with my basketball.

  Most nights, I would take my basketball to bed with me. I would lie in the dark, sometimes crying, sometimes thinking, but most of the time just talking to my basketball, and I would fall asleep with it in the crook of my arm. It was nothing more than a nylon carcass and a butyl rubber bladder pumped full of air, but it seemed to be nodding or occasionally whispering back to me, a sage sphere listening in the darkness, absorbing my secrets and my despair. I locked myself away under my covers, thinking, “What’s the point? Is this it?” and pleading to the silence, “There has got to be more.”

  I was a tight-lipped kid, and I told no one anything, not the truth about my father, not about the swallowed-up emptiness I felt, not about my mother, whom I battled like a boxer in the ring, not about the stray images that crept in like leaden New England clouds, the tile in the camp bathroom in Cape Cod, the dense Malden woods and the rock in my hand. From daylight to dusk, I ran the bases, broke away on the court; I filled my days with motion because when I was moving, when I was diving for the ball, cocking my wrist to shoot, swinging a heavy wooden bat, there was no time to think. Like a reflex deep inside, my muscles took over, my mind focused only on guiding them, on the elements of breathing, on leaning, shifting, and dodging. But at night, under my covers, there was only quiet solitude. I couldn’t escape my thoughts; I couldn’t escape anything. I was trapped on the second floor.

  I don’t remember when my mother and I started fighting. In the beginning, it was over whether I had cleaned my room or where I was, or how I had failed to come home on time. The starting point was irrelevant; it was the end that mattered. She would yell, and I would yell back. The slightest disagreement could easily escalate into a full pitched battle, with our faces inches away from each other and then with her smacking me, with a towel, a belt, or the dreaded two-by-four. Finally, when I got physically big enough, I shouted, “Don’t ever hit me again because I am sick and frickin’ tired of it.” After that, it became a battle of words, although she might give me a shove or a push. It all blends in like so much loud noise rattling around in my ears.

  She was tired, my mother. She was working at dead-end jobs and coming home to an apartment that she had to clean, to laundry in piles, bedsheets, towels, dirt and baseball grit tracked across the floor. Even though we lived upstairs, not all of the dirt came off before we made it in. She had rent payments, car payments, car shop payments because used cars were all she could afford and they were always troublesome. She had grocery bills and she had to buy me new clothes because I couldn’t stay small long enough to fit into anything. Her friends were all married, and they ran errands and did the food shopping when their husbands were at the office. My mother had to do it after work or on the weekends. If something broke, she had to fix it. There was no backup, no other shoulder. She never made plans, never talked about the future—hers, Leeann’s, or mine. Even something as simple as going to the beach for an afternoon was a spur-of-the-moment thing on a Saturday morning. She never looked back or looked forward. She was a get-through-one-hour, get-through-the-next-hour type of person. She worked hard for us, and any little bit of money that she spent on herself went to pay for exactly two things: her cigarettes—Marlboro 100s that she bought by the carton—and alcohol.

  Sometimes I hid her cigarettes and she would be furious, tearing the house apart looking for them. And sometimes I went after her booze. A few times, I emptied the bottles down the sink, hearing the steady glug, glug as the liquid was swallowed up by the drain. More than once, I diluted the contents of a bottle with water. She liked vodka best—her drink of choice was a vodka tonic. She bought it in economy gallon jugs with Russian-sounding names like Popov, and when she had worked her way through the first third of the alcohol, I could add the water without her knowing. Just a cupful or two at a time into the clear liquid of the big gallon jug, and she could only wonder why her drink seemed to lack its usual kick. Of course, probably all she did was pour more.

  Most things were worse when she drank, especially the fighting.

  She didn’t drink all the time, but she was constantly around alcohol in her waitress and banquet-serving jobs. When she went out with her old high school girlfriends, it was invariably to a bar or a cocktail lounge. And everyone drank back then. The men who rode the train to and from Boston each weekday came home and poured themselves two fingers of scotch or kept jars of pearl onions or olives to drop into their gin and vermouth. A few years later, when I got a job in a liquor store down the road, I spent my late afternoons and Saturdays wearing a path from the stockroom to the parking lot, carting out cases of beer. Teenage kids drank beer in the cemetery; it was hardly rare to see half-crushed cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon or Budweiser glinting next to sedate carved headstones.

  My mother kept her bottles under the sink or in the cabinets. Sometimes she would hide her alcohol, but I could almost always find it. My nose grew so attuned that I could smell it before I even walked into the room. And I didn’t have to hear the soft click of the cabinet or see the empty glass in the sink to know when she had been drinking. From almost the first sip, her entire personality changed. The moment that initial jolt of alcohol was absorbed into her veins, her transformation would begin. When she drank, everything about her sharpened, especially the knifelike barbs of her tongue; she was someone I did not want to be around.

  She did not often get sloppy, falling-down drunk. But at times I did come home to find her passed out on the couch, her body splayed like a fighter on the losing end. I’ve seen her stumbling and vomiting—into the toilet or the sink, whichever was closer—and smelled the sickly stench long after it had been washed down the drain. It was probably why when she went out to bars with her girlfriends she left her car at home.

  My mother and I battled the way she battled with her husbands, especially with my father. We shared that undercurrent of tension, smoldering below the surface, which at any minute could be kicked into high flame. She didn’t like my choice of friends, especially the older kids. She didn’t like the girls who had started to hang around, especially the sixteen-year-old who would show up under my window at 1 a.m. and call my name, asking me to come out with her. She didn’t like how I disappeared or was late or didn’t show up when I was supposed to. Mostly, she probably didn’t like that somewhere between age ten and age twelve, I had slipped beyond her control. I was bigger than she was now; I towered over her, and my voice was rumbling. I could and did
pass for a high school junior or senior, not a preteen, and that made it easier for me to take off on my own. Sometimes, I would just up and disappear, and it was like throwing in her face all those other vanishing men. So we fought our pitched battles, screaming, prepared to come to blows, and we did it right in front of Leeann.

  Sometime after I entered junior high, we moved again. Off Broadway Street and the perpetual mold of its too many trees, away from the peeling paint and shutters hanging lopsided by one hinge. Away from my third-floor bedroom where one night, sweaty and quick, I lost my virginity to an eighteen-year-old girl from up the street whom my mother periodically hired to babysit for Leeann. I had real girlfriends later on, but after that night, it was years before I had a serious one. We moved to another top floor, the second floor of a house that had been chopped into quarters: two apartments on the top, two on the bottom, my room under the eaves. The street was named Salem, like the town of the witch trials and the courthouse with Judge Zoll. It was, ironically, only a few blocks down from Eastern Avenue, where my grandparents lived, but it might as well have been a world away. When Gramps retired at sixty-three or sixty-five, he and my grandmother retreated back to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, full-time. They bought a nice Federal-style house that had probably once belonged to a ship’s captain. Gramps could oversee his rentals, be near the water, and inhabit the flinty world where he was most at home. There was no train whistle to remind him of his clock-managed life commuting into and out of Boston. But their absence meant that I couldn’t ride over to see them. I couldn’t run away, not even to the red vinyl chair in Gram’s kitchen. We still drove up to Portsmouth—it was only about an hour’s ride—but it had to be a planned excursion. The spontaneity was gone.

  The Salem Street apartment was smaller. But there was a basketball hoop in the driveway, and I hammered a nail and put another hoop up on the utility pole along the dead-end road across the way. I moved my mother’s car to shoot, when I was not driving it on small excursions. One night she went out, leaving me with Leeann. I had a friend over and we decided to go get some beers at the liquor store with our girlfriends. We hopped into the Impala and left Leeann in the living room with the television, watching Sonny and Cher. I came back with the car and parked it perfectly. Or so I thought. It was actually too perfect, too close to the curb. Mom recognized that the car wasn’t where she left it and busted me for getting into it. I told her that I was just moving it so that we could play hoop in the driveway, which might have been a good enough lie, but the car was too far away and too perfectly placed and she didn’t believe me. She was mad, furious. “Do you know what you’ve done? You took the car and left Leeann.” I tried to act contrite, to show that I knew when I’d crossed the line. The thing was, she never found the beer or any sign of the girls. As with most parts of my life, she didn’t know the half of those other things.

  I wanted to go out now, almost every weekend. At the local YMCA and the town hoop courts, I had met Bobby and Jay Moore, two basketball-playing brothers. Bobby towered at six foot five and was a budding high school star, and Jay, six foot one, was coming up fast behind him. Bobby and Jay played every sport, including street hockey and ice hockey when the lake froze and boys rushed down and strapped on their skates to glide over the pebbly, bumpy ice. And they played basketball. Bobby’s nickname was “Ace,” and I became “Deuce,” because I could hold my own on the court with him, and I sought both brothers out, all the time. I wanted to be just like Bobby; I think he kind of tolerated me. There was always a game at the Moores’ house, a fierce contest waged in their tiny driveway. Bobby would play from early morning until past dark, and when they put out lights on the side, he kept shooting long after the sun went down.

  Wakefield in 1971 was a place where the parks were crowded with kids, where there was always a pickup game or someone with a mitt and a bat. Mrs. Moore turned her boys out in the morning and told them not to come back until supper, which she served when the sun was almost down. “Out of the house,” she said, and the rule was ironclad. If you came to play at the Moores’ and you were thirsty, you turned on the outdoor faucet at the side and sucked down the stream of clear, fast-flowing water. Kids came and went from that driveway at all hours, and when one crop grew exhausted, another appeared. There were games of one-on-one, two-on-two, and three-on-three, or Bobby might just play one-on-two against two younger kids. There were no age limits, and the rules were clear: winners stayed on the court until they lost; losers sat down, and only then could new players rotate in. The space itself was so small it wouldn’t even be a regulation quarter-court, but the narrowness just made the game more competitive and physical. Rather than spread out for a pass, we converged on the net and on the ball. It was a game of elbows, fakes, side steps, and dunking.

  Balls landed in the net or bounced against the neighbor’s house, which pressed up against the edge of the driveway, barely big enough for a full-size Oldsmobile to park in. I could hear the games from down the block as I ran to go play, eager to take Bobby on. I heard the slap of sneakered feet on the blacktop, the rhythmic pop of the balls, and the cries to pass, the shouts at a score, or the wail of despair when a ball rolled around the rim and then tilted sideways back to earth, failing to drop in. I started showing up at the driveway on most days, sometimes waking Bobby up and badgering him to get out of bed so that we could go shoot. But no one turned me away.

  I was almost as tall as Jay, and although the brothers were nearly three and five years older than me—a veritable lifetime in the world of teenage boys—I could keep up with them, not just breaking away on the court, but faking, passing, rising up on my toes to shoot, and letting the ball sail through the air, released at the perfect moment, with the perfect wrist extension. Bobby was always teaching me to play better, always challenging me to be better. I was usually the first one picked for teams when we played. One by one, other players tired and dropped out, but not me. I was determined to outrun all of them. I earned their respect on the court, and they found it funny to have me tagging along after them. They were my surrogate big brothers, my role models and mentors, a point to set my compass by as I tried to figure out how to stop being a boy and start becoming a man. But to them, almost forty years ago, I was just the scrappy kid who was always hanging around and who never sat still.

  Later, we played together in summer leagues, traveling to Andover and Newburyport and Boston, lacing up our sneakers and trying to whip other teams. But mostly, in the beginning, I was a fixture at their house. I was embarrassed to have people, especially older kids, come to mine. It was small and spartan, and there often seemed to be some type of conflict. I remember a number of times when Mrs. Moore sent me home with a bag of clothes that she said Bobby had outgrown. I ended up wearing long coats that hung down past my knees because that was the style Jay wore.

  On weekend nights when their parents had gone up to Maine, Bobby and Jay had parties: they grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, played hoop, and drank beer. The drinking age was still eighteen, and someone always brought beer. In addition to the games in the driveway, some of the older kids would hang out on the tiny porch of their brown-shingle home. As a great joke, Jay and Ace invariably introduced me as a sophomore friend of theirs who went to Melrose High, over in the next town. I hung out with their friends, and occasionally drove them home when they had too much to drink, even though I was only thirteen. And I tried to kiss the high school girls, who thought I was cute until their younger sisters told them how they sat across from me in the same classroom in junior high. I took sips from a beer can and worked at acting cool, until it got close to my curfew time, 10 p.m. At five to ten, I would take off running, a fast sprint up and down the rolling hills of Wakefield, to be home on time, or two or three minutes late. I trained myself to run a five-minute mile to make my curfew on those evenings.

  Hanging out with a pack of older kids was also partly how I ended up in a car at the Liberty Tree Mall on that hot July afternoon, an
d from there, in Judge Samuel Zoll’s courtroom.

  Chapter Seven

  Judy, Brad, and the Judge

  About the time we moved to Salem Street, my dad was getting divorced again. He moved out of his big house in downtown Newburyport and into an apartment nearby, and now Robyn and Bruce were a bit more like me, vying for his time on alternate weekends. The difference was that he saw them more consistently. I was still, for the most part, a child in absentia. But that made it possible for me to imagine a very different life with him. I had taken a few brief tastes, and I thought that I wanted more.

  I was aware that in Newburyport, my father was a man of some consequence. He was an elected member of the city council and I think he served as president of the council at one point. He was also one of a few residents who was trying to rescue this once prosperous town. In its glory days, Newburyport had been a small but wealthy port. Elegant captains’ houses rose on the hill aptly named High Street, and African and Native American slaves labored behind older mansion doors until after the end of the American Revolution. Closer down toward the docks the houses crowded on top of each other, but they still retained a kind of faded elegance. Newburyport was, in its prime, a place of shipbuilders, merchants, and traders, wedged on a thin strip above the marshlands at the tip of the Massachusetts coastline. New Hampshire was a ten-minute ride away. On the town docks, built out into a channel of the Merrimack River, barrels of thick West Indian molasses were unloaded and then turned into heady rum in the distilleries that lined the Market Square. Its small band of citizens held the first Tea Party rebellion in protest against the British tea tax, and it was later a hotbed of abolitionism and a vital link in the Underground Railroad.