Up at the College

by Michele Andrea Bowen

  He didn’t know why people didn’t fear the Lord like they should, or even more than they did. The Bible held countless examples of what the Lord would do to people who were stupid enough not to fear Him. Who but an imbecile like Pharaoh would be impudent enough to follow some people in the sea who were under the protection of such a mighty God that He wiped out your entire kingdom without ever sending one super assassin, poisoned drink, chariot, knife, spear, sword, projectile rock, fire missile, javelin, or whatever they were packing back then to your house? Now that was asking—no, begging—for something to jump off.

  Folks didn’t have sense enough to revere and fear the Lord God Almighty back then, and they sho’ didn’t act like they had that kind of sense now. And Curtis didn’t know why folks were so obtuse on this matter. God didn’t bite His tongue in the Bible.

  People always try to make it seem like God wasn’t clear, or didn’t really mean what He said in His Word. But that wasn’t so. God didn’t mince words and He didn’t play—He’s always been pretty clear about where He stands because He was the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He was the same God who played Pharaoh and all of Egypt when they tried to get cute. And He hadn’t changed. He said it quite clearly in Isaiah 61:8 that He loved justice and hated wrongdoing. He also said in verse two that “He has sent me to tell those who mourn that the time of the Lord’s favor has come, and with it, the day of God’s anger against their enemies.”

  God could not be more simple and direct than that. Yet folks always found a way to convolute the obvious, so that they had a reason to justify their willful disobedience to the Word of God.

  Curtis closed his eyes tight to stop his train of thought. He was one of those justifiers, and he didn’t even know that he had that much remembered Word in him. He rubbed the spot right above the bridge of his nose. His head was throbbing, he was tired, Yvonne’s face was permanently etched on his brain’s memory card, Regina’s eyes had turned into deadly lasers, and all his crazy self could think about was the Word and why people rebelled against the Lord.

  Curtis was turning into Gran Gran. Why not his mom, who was more mellow about these matters? But Gran Gran? And on today of all days. Could it get any worse?

  He thought about that for a moment. Yeah, it could definitely get worse. Regina could figure out what was going on with him. That definitely qualified as a get-worse type of scenario. But this morning was not the morning. One of the two most important games of the season was getting closer and closer. Plus, his department was hosting the quarterly SNAC Basketball Coaches Meeting, to begin at eleven-thirty this morning.

  Curtis could not believe that he was experiencing such a dramatic shift in his heart and spirit in so short a time. And he didn’t have time for this—not today. There was entirely too much going on between the SNAC meeting and prepping for the big game with Bouclair College. Curtis had to deal with Bouclair’s head coach, Sonny Todd Kilpatrick, at the meeting. And the last thing he needed to be doing was pondering over some scriptures.

  What he needed to do today was figure out how he was going to get his star players back in the game. He didn’t care what Maurice said, what Trina said, or what Gran Gran said. Praying and supplication and finding the right sections of the Word to apply to your situation was a luxury—a luxury he would not be able to indulge in until after the problem was solved.

  Curtis reached over to grab his playbook, which was lying underneath a large Bible on his nightstand. He was too lazy to sit up and move the Bible, and snatched at the edge of the playbook. But the Bible was very heavy and the playbook wouldn’t budge. So he pushed the Bible onto the floor, grabbed his playbook, and dropped it on top of the comforter.

  Regina, who was lying on her side with her back to him, had not moved. She was so still, Curtis wanted to poke at her to make sure she had done him a solid and passed away in her sleep. It wasn’t like her to remain so still and quiet with all the noise he was making.

  The Bible was lying facedown on the floor. He wanted to lean over and pick it up but didn’t feel like going to all of that trouble for that big heavy book. Curtis pressed his head back against the headrest and got comfortable. He’d put the Bible back when he finally got up.

  Curtis opened the playbook and then leaned over the side of the bed to stare at the Bible. What was wrong with him? He needed to be studying this playbook and figuring out how they were going to kick Bouclair College’s butt. But all he wanted to do right now, was read his Bible. He had to be going through some kind of midlife crisis. Only it wasn’t about chasing other women to feel young and alive—it was about opening up to Jesus to find out what life was really all about.

  He opened the playbook and closed it. He opened it again and closed it. Again, Curtis opened that playbook, this time making an attempt to flip through the laminated pages, only to find himself closing it again, and then leaning over to stare at his Bible.

  He leaned over to reach for the Bible, and then stopped when Regina started moving around. She stopped moving and Curtis leaned over again, only to stop when Regina turned over on her back, then on her other side to face him with her eyes wide open.

  “What are you doing?” she snapped in the middle of a heavy yawn.

  Curtis blinked hard. Regina’s breath was hot and stanky. What did she eat last night—that fancy goat cheese she loved so much? He hated goat cheese—couldn’t stand the smell of it, and abhorred the taste. It had to be the nastiest cheese on earth.

  “What’s wrong with you, Curtis?”

  “Wrong? Girl, what you talkin’ ’bout?”

  Regina sat up. The strap on her gold silk nightgown fell low on her shoulder. It was a very pretty nightgown and it illuminated her pale, cappuccino-tinted skin.

  “You are sitting there blinking like something is wrong with you and there are tears in your eyes?”

  Curtis wiped at his eyes. Dang it, he thought, baby girl’s breath is kickin’.

  “I’m just tired and my eyes bothering me, baby,” he lied, hoping she’d turn over on her other side and take her stankin’-breath self back to sleep. ’Cause if she kept talking all up in his face, he was going to have to hurt her feelings to stop that goat-cheese breath from burning his eyebrows off his face.

  “I have not been able to get a decent night’s rest because you tossed and turned and moaned and groaned all night, keeping me up.”

  “Then why didn’t you go and sleep in the guest room?”

  Regina punched her pillow. She wished it were Curtis’s big head. He made her so sick sometimes. But then again, she didn’t want to rock the boat with Curtis. Even though she was not in love with him, and couldn’t begin to imagine herself with him past this academic year, she liked being Coach’s woman. There were so many women on campus who wanted this man and she had him. And even though Regina really didn’t want Curtis, what she did want was for somebody else to want what she had. She’d been that way most of her life—wasn’t happy unless she was able to make somebody else unhappy.

  Regina’s response to Curtis’s request was to act as if he had not said a thing. She snatched at the covers and rolled back over and pretended to go back to sleep.

  Curtis didn’t move and he didn’t say anything, either. If he had, he would have pushed that presumptuous, stuck-up heifer out of his bed and right onto the floor. If he had opened his mouth, he would have given that girl a few choice words that a man who was raised right didn’t say to a woman—not even a woman who deserved it. Then he would have told her to get out. He was sick of being expected to act like she was the cat’s meow when there were times she was more akin to something the cat dragged in.

  He waited for Regina’s breathing to take on a regular rhythm before opening up the playbook. What he needed was not in this book. As good a coach as he was, he had not written any plays of miracle proportion. And he definitely didn’t have anything tucked away in this book worth using against a team as formidable as Bouclair College.

  It was going to take a
miracle to win that game. Bouclair College, as much as they loved to fight and cuss and act crazy while on court, was the strongest team in the Southeastern Negro Athletic Conference. They were hard to beat and even harder to whip. The last time the Panthers played Bouclair, they scored sixteen points against Bouclair’s eighty-eight. Then Bouclair mopped up the court with the Panthers after two of Curtis’s players, DeMarcus Brown and June Bug Washington, threw the first punches over one of those trifling, whorish cheerleaders.

  What self-respecting young man threw punches during a crucial game over some piece of tail that half of the state had gotten a taste of? DeMarcus and Sonny were supposed to be two of the most eligible brothers on campus. They could have any woman they wanted—especially if she was a jacked-up and glorified skank-hoochie, or skoochie.

  But why was he even thinking along these lines? Any self- respecting playah knew better than to go sniffing around another dog’s territory. That was a guaranteed fight. He’d never seen it go down any other way. And the two starters on Bouclair’s team had messed with those little heifers just to get his players kicked out of that game and benched for enough games to roll right up to this one.

  Curtis could not stand the cheerleaders who made up the school’s varsity squad. They were the most selfish, self-serving, backstabbing, covetous, and whorish young women on campus. What team had cheerleaders who slept with members of the opposing team to help them win the game?

  Now, he’d heard of cases where the super-hos on the squad were asked to mess with the opposing team to make them lose. But to help the opposing team triumph over one’s own school was something that even the skankiest and most self-serving little cheerleader would scoff at. Unfortunately, the little girls who made up this season’s squad were so bad, they had run the best cheerleaders back to Junior Varsity. It seemed that these young women would rather be on the second-string squad if it guaranteed peace of mind and freedom from all the drama that practically exuded from the pores of the so-called elite squad members. Curtis had seen the best and sweetest cheerleaders sitting on the sidelines during a game, watching what they referred to as the “Skank Squad” with disgust all over their faces.

  It was a shame the way the team’s advisor had let a handful of scheming, conniving, and nasty-acting little girls, without an ounce of home training, make a mockery of what could have been the best cheerleading squad in the state. And the leader of the pack, Shaye- Shaye Boswell, along with her sidekick, Larqueesha Watts, was running the team into the ground.

  Although he couldn’t prove it, Curtis knew that those two were right in the thick of the mess where the bad blood between DeMarcus and June Bug and the players on Bouclair College’s team were concerned. And for some reason, he had a terrible feeling that Castilleo Palmer had set that whole thing up, right down to paying those girls off. He didn’t know why he felt that way, but he did. For some reason, Castilleo was getting some perks whenever they lost to Bouclair.

  Gran Gran always told him that the Devil was busy. And she kept telling him to get prayed up and anointed before trying to go out and coach that team. But that just seemed so churchy and over-the-top to Curtis. This was basketball business and not church business. He could understand if it had something to do with Fayetteville Street Church, or if he were a pastor instead of a head basketball coach. But he wasn’t any of that. He was a head coach at a state university, and he needed to keep church business at church so that it would not interfere with the business of what had to be done up at the college.

  NINE

  The game with Bouclair College was way too soon for comfort. In fact, Curtis felt as if he were walking around campus with a giant ax positioned over his head. He wasn’t ready. And the team? They were about as ready to fight off those angry Hornets as he was ready to be America’s Next Top Model. DeMarcus and June Bug were still benched, and the better players had yet to be cleared to start. If he couldn’t get around this mess, they didn’t have a prayer.

  After watching countless tapes and plays from previous games with Bouclair, the one thing Curtis had figured out was that you had to get in and kick butt when the game jumped off. If not, it was a losing battle, and the best a coach could hope to do was help his team avoid what amounted to a scoring massacre. The last thing any team needed was to be so outscored it gave the appearance that they weren’t even in the game. That could work on the team’s psyche and set them up for further losses during the season.

  Plus, if it was the last thing Coach Curtis Parker did, he wanted to beat the draws off of Bouclair’s head coach, Sonny Todd Kilpatrick. Curtis and Maurice could not stand that sawed-off white boy from one of those small Mecklenburg County communities not too far from Charlotte. Sonny Todd always bragged when they ran across him at their sections of the NCAA coaches’ meetings that his father, the head supervisor at one of the smaller textile mills in the area, had taught him everything he knew about handling “your boys.”

  He said in a voice that twanged like a cheap dulcimer, “My daddy taught me when I was just a little bitty thing how to handle my boys. He said, ‘Son, when your boys don’t wanna work and start getting all fancy on you, picking at those big Afro-American hairstyles, and talking junk about their rights, shut them down with either doing more work or getting so few hours they can forget having enough money to pay their bills and buy some Afro Sheen. Do that and see who will be talking about who ain’t treating them right.’

  “You know, I’ve applied that philosophy to my basketball players for the past ten years, and I win. I win and I win and I win. And those boys know better than to complain about a thing. In fact, they betta not if they know what is good for them.”

  When Sonny Todd spewed that mess at their bi-annual meeting for coaches working at historically black colleges and universities, Maurice had to drag Curtis out of the conference room to keep him off of that little white man with the wrap-around hair—a big, bald lightbulb-shaped head with the bottom half wrapped around with hair. Here they were at a meeting to talk about grades, SAT scores, retention rates, and getting these players out of undergraduate school before they reached their sixth year of college, and this clown was talking like he was having flashbacks to another time and place when he was a paddy-roller.

  There were times when Curtis simply could not stand to look at Sonny Todd’s grinning, Chester Cheetah teethy face. And whenever they encountered each other, he wanted to snatch that white boy and beat him down like he stole something. He hated the way he treated the players on Bouclair’s basketball team.

  But even worse, he detested Sonny Todd’s recruitment strategies. Every year he took along some Uncle Tom flunky who desperately wanted a job as an assistant coach, and combed the streets of some of the roughest sections of predominantly black neighborhoods looking for raw talent on the playgrounds, schoolyards, and parking lots with hoops. And he always found brothers who could ball like nobody’s business.

  But as good as these players were, there was a problem with those young men. Many of them didn’t have good foundations at home. A lot of them didn’t even have a good amount of home training under their belt. And while Bouclair potentially offered the chance of a lifetime for these players, Sonny Todd did absolutely nothing to provide them with the leadership and guidance they needed to acquire some social skills and polish, and leave Bouclair College with what they allegedly came there for—a college degree.

  Sonny Todd had his finger on some young men who had the ability to become movers and shakers in the black community. But he didn’t care about those children, and tossed them aside like two-dollar crack hos when they had run their course and he had no more use for them. Sonny Todd once confided to the only other white head coach at a SNAC school, Coach Dave Whitmore at Tyler University down near Beauford, North Carolina, his true feelings about the players at Bouclair. Sonny Todd said, “Dave, I’ve had enough of all of this criticism and scrutiny from these black guys who think they have the final say on what these boys need. I didn’t go an
d find those blacks to help them get a good education. I chose my team because I know they can get out there and get that trophy. Every time they give me some lip, I remember that the only thing those wannabe rap stars can do for me is bring that trophy home and put some extra cash in my and the school’s bank account.”

  Fortunately for the eight black coaches in the conference, this white boy was right and had a conscience. Dave Whitmore was so put out with Sonny Todd’s callous attitude toward a group of young men trying to get a shot at life using the best skills they had to offer, he made it a point of sharing that encounter with his SNAC colleagues. He liked the other coaches, had played ball with a few during his college years, and respected the healthy competition that existed between them. He said in his warm, no-nonsense western North Carolina voice, “That is one white boy who makes me wanna snatch his ‘white card’ out of his wallet and stuff it down his throat.”

  Coach Whitmore was one of the coaches in the conference who was liked and respected by all. It was ironic that the only white coaches in SNAC were polar opposites. Most of Coach Kilpatrick’s players rolled in and out of Bouclair College at the end of their second season and without a degree. Coach Whitmore, on the other hand, had such good retention and graduation rates that many coaches in SNAC and other small conferences wanted to know his secret. And every time they asked him to share how he did it, all Dave Whitmore said was, “I trust God, I stay on my knees, and I keep a blood covering over the team, and then over every single player. I also make sure that my players pray. You all just don’t understand the power of being right with the Lord, even on the court.”