She's Got Next

by Melissa King

I didn’t gloss things over for him like some well-mannered Audrey Hepburn type, and I’m afraid he and I quit playing together after that. He apologized every time he saw me, but I didn’t believe he was really sorry. He was probably just trying another angle, or maybe he was afraid I was some crazy bitch who might make trouble for him.

  A few weeks later I saw his wife, standing on the side of the court, waiting for him to finish up and go home. Or at least she looked like his wife, the way she stood and watched and waited. She was fit and athletic, Lycra- and wedding ring-clad, looking like she had just stepped out of a Spinning class, with her legs all toned and wearing jewelry and makeup, her hair perfectly styled.

  I looked down at my pale, skinny legs sticking out from a pair of gray cotton shorts and thought how quickly I would have been discarded by Randy, and how soon he would have tried to turn me into what he already had. Why don’t you wear your hair down for me?

  Pretty soon after all that, I quit going to the Y entirely. The women weren’t coming, and I wasn’t playing two-on-two anymore, so there was no point. What was I gonna do, take up Pilates?

  The bosses at my natural foods job lived in the upstairs of the house where we worked, and they often shuffled down to the offices in their house shoes or involved us in various extracurricular activities beyond dog puke watch. One weekend they were scheduled to move from our walkup to another similar house in the same neighborhood, and we were expected to help, alternately lugging boxes of office supplies and underwear.

  On Monday morning Mr. Ponytail made a spontaneous executive decision to paint the new house, and his wife spent much of the day yelling office-related but not pressing questions at him. Cheerfully, he answered back from the top of his ladder, always happiest when she was annoyed.

  I decided to go downstairs to the basement for some cases of food I needed to ship, and I happened upon Thonk, the company’s resident homeless person, laid out on the floor and snoring between the granola and the fruit leather. The bosses were proud of Thonk. They fed him sports nutrition bars and treated him much like an exotic pet.

  When I got back upstairs, Penny the dog had left some recycled Green Strength underneath my chair for me to clean up. Faced with that other-duty-as-described, I went to the bathroom. Ten minutes had passed before I realized I was looking in the mirror, tugging my cheeks and forehead into various contortions and making faces at myself.

  I looked out the window at the gray, early March sky. Winter was letting go like an impacted wisdom tooth. My mind drifted to the Wicker Park courts, covered in the sludge that would be there for at least a month.

  I needed a vacation. A long one. I started looking for a city to spend some time in, somewhere I’d never been, somewhere sunny where I could find a game. Los Angeles would do. I’d go there.

  Visitors’ Side

  A MIDDLE-AGED, bleached-blond woman stood under a palm tree. She wore gigantic sunglasses and full makeup, and she had on a powder-blue sweat suit, the shiny kind with white stripes up the sides of the legs and arms. A small black dog sat near her, panting. The woman glanced at the ball under my arm and grinned at me as I walked by.

  I slowed a little and said hi.

  “You play basketball?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I do. You play?”

  “No,” she said, chuckling a little at the thought, “but I think it’s cool that you do.”

  I walked on, cutting through a parking lot where three young guys pushed brooms around, trying to look busy. One of them glanced sleepily over my way, saw me, perked up, ran a few steps in my direction, and stopped.

  “Whatcha gonna do with that rock?!”

  He grinned and waited to see what I’d say, how cocky I was or wasn’t.

  “I’m gonna shoot it . . . I think.”

  “You think?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I recovered.

  “You think you’re gonna shoot it, huh? Well, I’m gonna come over there and see what kind of game you got. I’m gonna be over there in about five minutes, when I get off work; that’s what I think I’m gonna do.”

  “All right then, come on,” I said, letting him see me laugh a little as I walked on.

  Just past Muscle Beach, there were eight courts, nice ones, regulation size with all the lines painted on and hoops with fiberglass backboards. The courts were surrounded by bleachers, some of them for spectators, and some of them for players waiting to get in a game.

  This was it, the shit, complete with a view of the Pacific Ocean. On weekends the play would be so serious I couldn’t get in, but the situation that weekday morning was optimal for the approach. People were around, but there was an empty hoop or two. I started shooting, trying to catch a look here and there, being sure to grab any loose ball that came my way and maybe make eye contact with its owner as I passed it back, remembering to try very hard not to miss any shots, in case anyone was watching.

  A fortyish-looking guy came over and asked me what was up. We chatted a minute about nothing much, and then he said, “Come on, we’ll let you play with us, but don’t expect to be treated special now.” Of course I didn’t.

  His name was Sam, and “us” was a bunch of older men, sitting, talking, lacing up their shoes. Sam and I shot around, making it clear we wanted in the half-court game that would inevitably materialize. Others talked and laughed together the way people do when they know each other.

  Sam yelled out, “Who’s smoking that monkey shit?! Somebody’s got some!” Everyone sniffed the marijuana smoke coming from somewhere and laughed.

  We shot for teams from the free throw line, and Sam and I ended up on different sides. I was put on a young kid who wasn’t very tall or very experienced, and Sam kept telling the kid to mind his basics, complaining when the kid threw a pass away or missed the open man.

  Older guys tend to hate it when someone messes up the fundamentals. It’s okay if you can’t hit the broad side of a barn, but don’t just give it away, is how they think, maybe because that’s what they have to rely on, not speed or strength anymore, but making damn sure they do the right thing at the right time. The only advantage you can have, when you get old, is mental.

  I got by the kid and drove past Sam when he tried to pick me up. When I made the lay-up, Sam looked up to the sky, put his hands on his hips, and yelled, “Fuck!” He was mad that the kid had been out of position, and mad at himself for not being able to catch me.

  It feels good when you aggravate someone to the point of cursing, but you don’t want to make a big deal out of it.

  We won the first game and held the court for next. This time I was guarding a guy named Sandy. He had a long, gray beard and long, gray hair, and a black knee brace covered half his leg. I’d seen him earlier, shooting a basket as he whizzed by the hoop on Rollerblades.

  Sometimes I feel bad when a game is starting and one of my teammates looks around at the opponents and says to me, the only girl, “You take him.” A guy has to know he’s getting old when the other team puts the girl on him.

  Sandy got set to guard me, sizing me up and nodding a greeting. We lost, and as the game ended, a stinging sensation on the back of my neck reminded me I’d forgotten sunscreen. I sat down on the sidelines, slumped and drained from playing in the sun. Sam walked past me and said, “You tired?” He grinned a little, because I was obviously exhausted, but he waited to hear me say I didn’t want to play again before he found someone else for his next game. It was polite of him, and I left, feeling thawed out and relaxed.

  I was in my compact, bright red Mazda, stopped at a traffic light on Wilshire, heading west toward the ocean. Past the sea of sedately colored German autos to my right, there was a sudden wealth of grass, an orange basketball flying across a beautiful blue sky. My shoes were in the trunk; I was stopping at Reed Park in Santa Monica.

  It was midmorning on a Saturday, and the courts were busy with a bunch of guys trying to get teams together. As I watched from the sidelines, one of the players on the court hollered something, f
ished around in his pocket, and tossed a coin underhanded to a guy sitting on a crowded bench.

  When the guy on the bench caught the coin and sat there, the guy who threw the coin put his hands on his hips and sighed loudly. “Nigger,” he said, loud enough for all the spectators to hear him from the court, “put that shit in the meter. You already walked by there twice.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” the other guy said as he stood up and stuck the coin in his pocket. “I’ll put that shit in the right pocket meter. Shit.”

  He waited for everyone to stop laughing before he retrieved the coin from his pocket and bounced it across the court. Meter Guy eyed the quarter, but when he didn’t get picked for teams, he headed for the bench and passed the coin by. Then he sat down with the others and lit a cigarette, apparently ready to take his chances with the meter.

  As a new game got going, Meter Guy stood up and paced around the bench, holding court until he made everyone laugh and wave their hands and elbow each other.

  “You’re out of your damn mind and you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he yelled. “Come Saturday night, you’ll be wanting someone to pick your ass up!” He was hollering at the guy who threw the coin, who apparently did not own a car, or worry about one.

  The topic switched like a crossover dribble, quickly and unpredictably. “Mike Tyson is a nut case!” Meter Guy shouted. “That nigger is mentally all fucked up.”

  Insanity wasn’t, according to Meter Guy, Tyson’s only problem.

  “And his wife is ugly, too. She look like a pit bull.”

  Everyone laughed, elbowed.

  “You know what, though,” Meter Guy continued, looking intently at the man sitting closest to him, who had no choice but to listen, “Tyson’s problem is he likes them real bitches that ain’t gonna take nothin’ from him. He’s having his kids with the women he respects, women that remind him of his mama and shit. Shit, they may be mud dogs, but they don’t want nothin’ from him. Them pretty bitches, they want all the money. Tyson’s women, they real.”

  He turned down his still-audible voice, nodding his head and puffing his cigarette as he looked off into the distance. Clearly, he was thinking about some real deep shit.

  Then someone said something about what Tyson must pay in child support, and Meter Guy got excited and started yelling again.

  “Shawn Kemp, he had to pay five thousand dollars per month per kid!”

  The crowd roared over something someone else said.

  “Oh hell yeah!” Meter Guy agreed, sticking with the momentum. “Ain’t no way it takes five thousand dollars a month to take care of no kid. As a matter of fact, you really can’t spend five Gs a month on a kid. You just can’t do it.”

  His tone of authority was like blowing a whistle, and the group spontaneously divided into arguments about whether or not five Gs could in fact be spent on a kid monthly. On the court, a young guy was trying to fast-break but not getting the pass. He yelled at his teammate, “Come on, baby, please! Shit! Fuck! How long does it take to throw a pass?” He got his pass and made his lay-up.

  A big, lumbering white guy, the type who tends to play inside, carry his team on rebounds and defense, and get fouled a lot, was yelling down court, asking someone what the fuck his problem was. His defender said quietly, “Don’t take it personal, man.”

  Faced with advice he should take, Big White Guy became furious.

  “Don’t take it personal? Don’t take it personal? You wanna get personal with me?” He was just pissed off, feeling like Clint Eastwood and itching to get into it with anyone who’d have some of him. His defender looked away from the emotional mess in front of him and defused the challenge, but on the next play, he guarded the big guy hard, not giving him one inch of a break. You gotta respect that particular kind of manhood.

  From the bench, Meter Guy was yelling, “I’m takin’ care of the baby, not the baby’s mama, know what I’m sayin’?”

  He got his uproarious laughing and elbowing. Someone gave him a high-five.

  “Fuck that,” he concluded.

  Somebody’s girlfriend sat on the grass, reading a college textbook with a highlighter in her hand. She looked up for a second, shook her head, and went back to reading.

  Then someone claimed that Meter Guy had shot four air balls in their last game, and Meter Guy said he’d shot only two. Everyone argued over this matter until Meter Guy yelled out onto the court to get the attention of one of the guys who apparently had some kind of credibility.

  “Frederick! How many air balls did I shoot last time?”

  Frederick looked up from playing good defense, thought for a second, and said, “Two.” Then he went back to playing.

  “See there? Shit,” Meter Guy gloated.

  Shooting two air balls is normally not worthy of bragging rights. Generally speaking, quiet players are better than players who talk a lot.

  Meter Guy seemed to notice for the first time that there was an actual game going on. He watched for a minute before yelling, at the last moment before a guy let go of his shot, “You’re wide open and you know you’re gonna miss!” The ball went up and took a wild bounce off the rim. Meter Guy laughed while the rest of the group shook their heads.

  The thing about it was, underneath all the niggers, shits, bitches, and fucks, those guys seemed to have something like a philosophy. To me, Meter Guy, for all his crazy posturing, seemed as real as a Tyson woman. Anyway, I’d sure rather listen to him than some polite conversation where everyone’s just trying not to say anything wrong, so they don’t say anything really.

  I saw Big White Guy another time playing five-on-five with his buddies, all of them white. He was still intense, glowering all over the court as he walked around after plays, but he wasn’t out of control this time, and his team was dominating the all-black team they were playing against.

  One of the white guys was especially full of himself, yelling and hollering and doing double fist pumps when he did something good. He was feeling it, as they say, playing really well, but the way he was acting, you sort of wanted to see him fall. It’s okay to enjoy your moments, but you don’t want to take it too far, because after a while, people feel like you’re rubbing their faces in it, and besides, it’s just unseemly, like you’re not that great of a player if you’re too excited about a good game, or not that smart of a person if you let yourself believe a day’s grace is permanent.

  Double Pump and Big White were playing on the same team as a balding, vaguely prissy guy in short-short socks who looked more like a rich tennis pro than a playground basketball player. He was good, though, in a competent, by-the-book sort of way. He was in excellent shape, he rarely threw passes away or took bad shots, he worked hard for rebounds, and he tended to neutralize volatile situations because he was one of those people who is honest about making calls. He didn’t argue when he was wrong just to get the advantage, and sometimes he’d say, “He’s right, it was out on me” or “I got one” when he fouled. I started thinking of him as the Fair Guy.

  Meter Guy was back, watching the court and brooding, apparently in the mood that day to let his game do the talking. His buddies sat crammed together on their bench like a bunch of turtles on a log. Five at a time they’d jump off to take on Big White and Double Pump and Fair Guy’s team, but no one could beat the white guys.

  On one of the losing teams there was a guy with hair braided up in cornrows and beads. The shorts of his matching yellow basketball set grazed his ankles, and he might have been five feet tall with his shoes on. He and Double Pump were into it over alleged roughness, and Double Pump kept saying to the little guy, “It goes both ways, boy.” Every time he said it, the little guy answered back so quietly I could hear his hair rattling but not his words. Double Pump kept it up with his “It goes both ways, boy. It goes both ways, boy.”

  My brother and I used to get in fights like that when we were kids. I’d say, “You’re stupid,” and he’d say, “I know you are.” Then I’d come ba
ck with, “You’re stupid,” and he’d slay me with, “I know you are.”

  Double Pump and the little guy went on like that until one of the little guy’s much bigger teammates went over and said something meant for only Double Pump to hear. Whatever he said, it ended the conversation. Because of the little guy’s size, or race, or both, that “boy” stuff wasn’t cool.

  With every game Double Pump’s team won, the bench paid more attention to the play and less attention to that day’s bull session, which centered on the question of whether or not J-Lo was probably still creepin’ over to Puff Daddy’s house. Then Double Pump made this amazing lay-up at full speed, one of those shots where a guy flies past the hoop and throws it in on the way by without even seeming to look and it goes in and it’s pretty much a miracle.

  Everyone got quiet, gearing up to say the collective dayyyamm-mmm. But then Double Pump pushed things too far, trotting back inbounds to gloat over his defender just starting to think about getting up off the ground. Double Pump roared like some kind of gorilla, practically beating his chest, humiliating his competitor, and you just had to hate him a little.

  Someone from the bench shouted, “Oh fuck you, Scott. I’ve seen better.”

  It didn’t matter what anyone said, though, because Double Pump kept acting like a Little Leaguer winning the pennant on every shot he made. Unseemly. The other teams started looking for excuses, turning on each other or complaining about phantom fouls, until Fair Guy yelled to the bench guys at large, “It’s basketball, it gets a little physical, you ain’t made outta glass!”

  Fair Guy was a little squirrelly with his bravado, glancing real quick at the bench like he was either frightened he’d pissed them off or hoping he’d amused them.

  Someone said to Fair Guy, “Nigger, you been fouling me the whole game.” I wondered if Fair Guy would take that word as a compliment, like he was a member of the club, and I was a little relieved for him when he showed he had the good sense not to say it back.