by Melissa King
Years later, an athletic shoe ad airing on WNBA commercial breaks showed a bunch of guy cheerleaders doing the exact same stripper moves their female counterparts do, but instead of looking sexy, they looked ridiculous. The camera showed the guys shaking their butts with scared, desperate-to-please looks on their faces, and then we saw a group of WNBA players huddled in a timeout, casually slouched and grinning, having an authentic time, ignoring the cheerleaders like athletes always do. The commercial seemed like an improvement, an evolution, from the credit card’s pledge of allegiance to the shopping mall. The players didn’t have to vow their dedication to manicures in order to be acceptable. They just had to play their game.
At the open gym or anywhere else, I wanted to win, but going for rebounds, screaming like a karate master, wringing wet with sweat, making faces I probably wouldn’t want to see, it felt kind of weird. Sometimes it would occur to me, Damn, I’m intense. I’m aggressive. Not assertive—aggressive.
Tori said to me once, after one of my high, loud rebounds, “Girl, you’re like a Reebok commercial. This is your world . . . you go.” She could say stuff like that and manage not to sound like some advertisement. Maybe it was because she was black. Maybe it was because she meant it.
I didn’t feel pretty and I didn’t feel nice and I didn’t feel prissy. I wasn’t being distracted by candy or shiny trinkets or the perfection on my toenails. I did feel like myself, and it felt good.
The Wicker Park neighborhood was well into its urban pioneering days, but the park itself still reminded you of the area’s relatively recent transformation. Hipsters threw Frisbees with their dogs a few hundred feet away from dozens of old-timers who had been killing time there since the days when Wicker Park really was a gritty urban neighborhood. In general, the old faction stuck to the Damen Street side, and the new people threw their Frisbees on the back end. There were savvy little independent kids running around all over.
Unlike the women’s open gym, there were no guarantees at outdoor courts, no Jack guarding the door. Wicker Park was my Chicago, a place where I felt at home but didn’t particularly belong.
Once, I saw a young couple with a large parrot. They were sitting on a blanket with a picnic basket, and a group of kids had gathered around them. I was bouncing a ball around on the court way across the park. From time to time the bird would raise its clipped wings and squawk and try to fly, and the kids would shriek and fall back, and then surge in to get a closer look. I was pretty amazed, thinking about the life of a city kid, seeing so much every day, and about how free-spirited or kind the couple might think they were for treating a crippled bird to a visit to the park.
A sign said WARNING YOU ARE IN A SAFETY ZONE. PENALTIES FOR SELLING DRUGS OR OTHER CRIMINAL ACTIVITY IN THIS PARK ARE SEVERELY INCREASED. I saw guys walk past each other making subtle handoffs, or drive up in separate cars, walk off together, then come back a few minutes later and take off again, going their separate ways. It was just what was happening, part of the bustle.
One day it was raining, and I got stuck sitting on my bike under an awning. When the weather cleared, I started shooting around. Three guys came over, and we played two-on-two. It was casual, no egos.
As it should’ve been, because they really sucked. They were fouling the hell out of each other, running around on the wet concrete, laughing and having a good time. One of them was wearing sandals, another was barefoot, and I think they were all three a little drunk. I was teamed with a guy named Vince, who had been the first to come over and shoot around with me.
There were four hoops crammed onto a small slab of concrete at Wicker Park. Most places, you play half-court unless you have at least eight, but here, games went to full-court at three-on-three because the courts were so short.
A dirt field beside the basketball courts was used for sixteen-inch softball, which I’d never seen until I moved to Chicago. I guess it’s popular in the city because you don’t need much room to play it. You can’t hit that big-ass ball very far.
The three sucky-player guys and I played goofy full-court two-on-two, and on one particularly good play Vince stuck both hands behind his back, palms up, while he ran backwards down the court, for me to slap him ten. It was stupid, but he knew it was stupid. I like that in a person.
Vince wrote his phone number on my arm with a felt-tip pen after we finished playing. I wrote the number down somewhere when I got home, but later on I couldn’t find what I did with it.
One day, I was sitting on my bike at Wicker Park, scanning the court, when I heard someone talking to me from the general direction of the Damen Street side.
“What’s up, kittycat?”
This old park dude was looking at me, grinning.
“What’s up, kittycat, you gonna shoot some hoops you gonna play me some one-on-one can you dunk it?”
I almost turned around and rode off, because I knew this guy was gonna stick to me the whole time I was there, but there was an empty hoop and I felt irritated about having to leave a court because of this old park dude, especially after I’d ridden all the way over there on my bike.
The guy I mentioned earlier, the one with the “Skins and Shirts” poster, always said I should stay away from unsavory elements. He thought I was reckless. He wouldn’t ride the El, and he never gave money to homeless people on the street. But he volunteered at shelters around the holidays and was on the boards of several charitable organizations.
Park Dude went walking off somewhere, so I shot for a while, and then he came back and started shooting around with me.
There’s a certain etiquette when people shoot around. Sometimes someone just comes up and starts getting your rebounds, sort of deferring until you pass the ball to him and trot to the hoop to get his rebounds. Or sometimes people come up to you if you’re shooting and just say, “Can I shoot around?” and you say sure.
Usually, when two people shoot around, one person shoots from the outside and the other stands under the hoop and rebounds until the shooter misses. Then the shooter comes in for a lay-up and starts rebounding for the other person. That’s pretty customary.
Park Dude wasn’t so great to shoot around with. He kept throwing the ball back to me too hard, or slinging it clear over my head or off to the side so that I had to jump or make a quick move to catch it or else it would get past me. Every once in a while the ball did get past me, and I would have to run after it, practically doing back flips to catch it before it flew onto another court or rolled into the middle of a softball game.
If I were male, younger, urban, I would have said something like, “Man, would you watch that shit? What’s the matter with you? Damn.” But I’m not.
I have to admit, though, Park Dude could really shoot a hook shot. He barely even looked at the goal but just threw it in the general direction and made it, nothing but net. It was a “patented shot,” something a lot of older guys develop to compensate for their diminished games.
After a while, I found myself in a game with Park Dude and some kids. A little girl asked me how old I was. She nearly fell over when I told her I was thirty.
“How old are you?” I asked her.
“Ten,” she told me.
Park Dude ran after his own rebound after missing wildly. The little girl looked after him, crinkling her face.
“He’s weird,” the girl said. “He smells like beer.”
He was, and he did, but as far as I could tell, there was nothing wrong with his hearing. Park Dude laughed at something. He said it was getting hot, and he took his shirt off. There was a long, vertical scar running down his rib cage and stomach.
That’s when I began to worry. I started to think about what happens to a harmless park dude’s brain when he’s treated like dirt by arrogant little white girls. And then I actually did begin to feel like I was reckless, understanding for real that I was the one who had brought Park Dude and the little girl together. She would have never come over had she not seen me there, and I didn’t know how safe it w
as for me, much less for her.
We played for a while longer, and the little girl relentlessly dissed everyone, including the two boys she’d come with. I couldn’t tell whether her caustic attitude was genuine bad-ass or plain old fear, and I didn’t know if it would get her in trouble or help her by making her seem tough. Park Dude laughed and seemed to approve. He kept turning his attention on her, as if he wanted her energy directed at him, no matter how disdainful she was. He seemed to be thinking, You go, girl, but I couldn’t really tell for sure. I just felt sort of uneasy and responsible.
After the game, I said I had to go. But I hung around a minute or two on my bike, watching the court to make sure everyone had scattered before I rode home.
Some days, my natural foods job was beyond tiresome. My boss was a balding man who was shorter than I was and kept his ring of hair styled into a scrawny ponytail. It was my responsibility to help him get contracts together, which wouldn’t have been too difficult except that it was near impossible to keep him focused. I always had to ha-ha it up for about a half hour while I waited for the moment when I could bring up the work we had to do in a way that wouldn’t be a big downer for him. He ran the company with his wife, who was no picnic either, the way she came up behind her employees and gave us shoulder massages as we tried to keep typing at our keyboards. Personally, I didn’t find that relaxing.
The structure of most weekdays was to hit the snooze alarm fifty times, muddle through eight hours, leave the office at 5:01, go home and change into some basketball clothes, and go looking for a game. It was on such a day that I ended up at Wicker Park, shooting around with a little kid, another little kid, and his toddler brother, killing time before a game developed.
I kept grinning at the toddler, because he was cute, but his brother didn’t grin; he included him. He expected the child to play, but he wasn’t too rough on him. The toddler just ran all over the court with his arms wrapped around the ball, grinning.
A commotion broke out on the other court, and everyone got still, stopping what they were doing to watch.
“Why you testin’ me, nigga? . . . Why don’t you test summa these other niggas!?” one of the kids was saying to a shorter kid, pushing him, in his face, itching to fight.
Two middle-aged guys were standing off to the side of the court. They were Park District employees. I could tell because they were wearing those plastic ID holders on their shirts, standing around with their arms crossed and surveying everything, talking to each other.
Everyone watched the escalating problem. After a boy got in the middle of the two fighters, one of the Park District guys walked over and said something.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” the Park District employee kept saying. “Let’s just play ball. Gentlemen.” But those two kids didn’t care about some middle-aged white guy with a potbelly and an ID tag. They just kept on.
“Man, if you ever touch my shit again, I’ll kill you! Come on, nigga, swing! Do it!”
The tall kid stalked off, daring the other kid to follow and fight him. The older brother on my court looked over at the toddler and said gently, “Boo, wanna go see a fight?” Boo just laughed, running around in his stiff-legged toddler way, holding on to the ball.
After a while, an older guy asked me would I like to play with him and some other people. I said sure. The guy who’d asked me to play was the only adult among teens, and he played like it mattered. The kids were kind of laughing at him until we started kicking their butts. The older guy refused to scale down his intensity, saying to the scoffing teens, “You know I play hard.” The teens got into it in spite of themselves, and we could never remember the score. That’s how it is when the game is really good, like when you’re having fun on your vacation and you don’t remember to get out your camera and take a picture.
The morning’s snooze-alarm abuse seemed like it was from someone else’s life. I was on, lost in what I was doing, only erring a few times when I misjudged how fast those teens were and how high they could jump now that they were breaking a sweat. I’m not that great of a shooter, but that evening, as we began to feel the urgency of making one more trip down the court before it got too dark to play, I was hitting everything. The guys kept yelling at each other, looking for someone to blame every time I made a shot, yelling “Who’s guarding that girl!” and calling me Little Larry Bird.
We all have our moments.
I’d get up on Saturday mornings knowing my apartment needed to be cleaned or something, but then I’d find myself in my car, cruising for a game. I’d start shooting around, tell myself I was only going to stay for a few games, but more often than not it was close to dinner time before I went home.
One morning I was at Wicker Park, bouncing a ball around casually and taking a few shots while I waited for people to wander up. A boy burst out of a nearby building and came running towards me.
“Hey! You wanna play me one-on-one?!”
We’d played on the same court a few times. I said, “Yeah, let’s go,” but before we could get started, the boy had to make time for some Wicker Park child care.
“Rolando!” a woman shouted from an ancient Cadillac idling in the street, causing him to stop everything and sprint to the car for instructions about when to come home. Then he raced back over as fast as he’d left, apparently cleared for some more time at the park. The Cadillac roared off.
“Come on! Let’s go!”
He was practically yelling, he was so excited.
We shot around for a minute on the empty court.
“Where is everybody?” I asked him.
“My homeys just went to the store,” he told me.
So I played him a game of one-on-one. He was only about ten years old, and I was two feet taller than he was, so of course I didn’t guard him very hard.
His three homeys rode up on two bicycles. The Gap could only wish to get at the urban slouch of these kids’ baggy T-shirts and shorts as they sat on two-thirds enough bicycle, watching Rolando and me play. One kid stayed balanced on the handlebars, confident as a cat.
They kept saying, “Yeah, she goin’ to the WNBA next week. She got a right, she got a left, she got a shot, she got some D . . .”
They were just messing with me, being friendly because Rolando was.
Rolando kept teasing me, too, pretending he was shoving me around and laughing and shouting and showing off, saying stuff like “All right, it’s on now,” and “You know I’m mad now.” I was kidding him back, saying, “Thanks for the warning, Rolando.”
I liked that kid. I told him he was playing well, and he said, just a little more quiet and serious now, “Some people say I got game.”
I tried to tell Rolando something my dad used to tell me about how, when you’re playing defense, you need to look at someone’s belly. How you don’t look at their face, because they can fake you out with their face and eyes, but they can’t fake you out with their belly. He looked like he knew about the belly already, but he seemed to like it that I was telling him something.
He said his coach always told him to keep his eyes on their bootie.
“That’ll work,” I said.
After a while, a group of teenage guys started playing a game of twenty-one on the other court. I hate that game sometimes because it’s so heavily rebound-oriented. I love to get rebounds, but when it’s all guys who are bigger than me, I do better passing and playing defense and shooting from the outside than I do driving the basket and getting rebounds.
“Rolando,” I said, “do you think those guys would let me play with them?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re kind of rough.”
More and more of Rolando’s friends started arriving, getting their own vibe going. The courts were filling up, and I couldn’t find a place on either side. I shot around a little longer, but those older guys never asked me to play or even made eye contact with me, even though I knew they saw me wanting to get in the game.
I went back home to face my d
irty dishes, thinking how those sonsofbitches made me sick. They didn’t know if I could play or not.
The next time I played with Rolando, he was being guarded by a girl about his age and size. Between plays, the girl busted the standard “this sister’s seen it all and ain’t takin’ no shit off yo’ punk ass” move, that combination hand-head motion that, joined with some colorful profanity and threats of hitting someone with a chair or a shoe, never fails to thrill a Jerry Springer audience. On a ten-year-old, the attitude was a little ill-fitting, like she was wearing her mother’s high heels.
Rolando was being his usual gregarious self. I started playing with him and the girl and some other kids, hoping a ragtag group of adults looking for exercise would begin to form.
Some people play with quiet intensity. Not Rolando. He never quit talking, and he was always having an elaborate fit over a good play somebody made, or yelling for everyone to throw him the ball all the time. He was often offended if he was left out on a fast break. Once, as his teammates trotted back down court after making a lay-up, he stood on the defensive end yelling, “Oh yeah, now, see, ya’ll just forgot all about poor Rolando, didn’t you?”
His teammates looked at him like he was crazy, which he was, a little. He’d been nowhere near the play.
Our game ended, and Miss Seen It All, she homed right in on good-humored Rolando, using him to make an impression on the group, telling us exactly how things were gonna be.
“I can play,” she said, looking at Rolando, “and I play to win, so don’t you even be tellin’ me I can’t get in this game, cause I’m tellin’ you right now, I’m the best.”
Rolando looked at her like he didn’t know quite what to say. No one was trying to keep her out.
Then, with one quick move, the girl threw the ball on the ground behind her and started chasing Rolando around, and he was laughing, but he didn’t look exactly unafraid, and I noticed he managed to stay out of arm’s reach of her. I could see the whites of his eyes as he looked back over his shoulder, trying to determine if he was playing or fighting.