She's Got Next

by Melissa King

  Afterwards, Heinz invited me to stay around and shoot with them, but I was ready to go. I guess I looked a little defeated, because after Heinz said good game to me, he added, “Hey, six to eleven, at least we didn’t get doubled.” He was a nice guy, that Heinz just like the ketchup.

  I ducked my head back inside the gym as I was leaving. The girls who had been doing the jump when I got there were between games, and I watched a coach-dad give one of the teams some quick tips on defense.

  “I don’t want to see nobody guarding nobody else outside this line,” he said, slow and loud, running the toe of his shoe along the three-point line. “And I don’t want to see no three people guarding one player with the ball either.”

  His post player turned a spontaneous cartwheel.

  In the small lobby area just off the court, there was a humble-looking bulletin board with the heading “Girls’ Sports Rock!” Pictures of everyone from Billie Jean King to Anna Kournikova were pinned to the board, getting across the message that it’s okay to be a dyke, but you can still enjoy sports even if you’re not one. There was an article about Chamique Holdsclaw’s bad childhood, about how her parents fought and drank and raised hell, and how she’d go play basketball to get out of the house. “All the boys would groan when she followed them out onto the blacktop,” the article said.

  Then I walked on. In the middle of an open grassy area, I saw one of those teenage girls with the fancy basketball clothes. She and a boy were off by themselves, sitting together real close in the grass, and her demurely bowed head smoothly contradicted all the different ways adults try to convince girls that sports rock.

  It’s an uncommon female who’s willing to fly alone above the junk, keep her head up, and let the boys groan, if that’s what they need to do. It’s not hard to see why. In some ways, it’s easier just to shut up and paint your toenails.

  There was a game going on at Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills, and I have to say, things didn’t look too serious. The most noticeable player was a mentally handicapped guy running up and down the court and never touching the ball unless it landed in his hands by accident. He wore a yellow Lakers baseball cap facing frontward, which marked anyone as not serious in my book. You don’t play with your hat on right if you plan to shoot. You can’t see the hoop.

  The teams were loosely divided between black and white guys. The black team had two players almost as rotund as Big Man at Poinsettia, but these two biggie-sized dudes were shut down, because the game was full-court and they stayed so winded they could hardly keep going.

  The black guys looked like they were in their midtwenties. Two of their friends were sitting on a bench on the sidelines, goofing off and watching the action. One of them had a towel draped over his head, like he’d been benched in the pros.

  The white guys were mostly teenagers. I kept noticing one of the white players in particular, a short, skinny, blond kid wearing an oh-so-urban knit cap that fit close to his head. As soon as I saw him, I thought, Well, would you look at this little 90210 punk? Like I knew anything about it.

  A white guy walked up and asked who had next. When I said I did, he scowled. He shot around for a minute on one of the empty hoops, and then he went over and started slanging it up with the two black guys on the bench. When they laughed a little at something he said, he seemed to puff up a little.

  I watched the game for a while until the score was tied at game point and one of the Biggies got an open shot under the hoop, which he somehow managed to miss. Then he got the rebound and missed again. I don’t know how he did it. There was no one even guarding him.

  The two bench guys laughed at the first miss, and when Biggie missed the second time, they started hollering and shoving each other. Then, when Biggie #2 got the rebound and he missed, too, the guys nearly fell off their bench, they were laughing so hard.

  The teenagers finally lucked into a rebound, and the Biggies lumbered after the fast break, walking. They glanced over at the bench, and when they saw their friends laughing at them, the Biggies smiled and shook their heads and waved them off. I admired their sense of humor. It’s not easy to laugh at yourself when you’re fat, exhausted, and getting beat.

  Then the white team managed to miss the open lay-up on their end, and it was like watching a bunch of really dumb people try to end a game of Trivial Pursuit. The rebound went to the Lakers cap guy. Of course it went to the Lakers cap guy, who stood flat-footed, looking down, shocked to find himself with possession of the ball. He was wide open from the corner of the free throw line, and he threw the ball up with an underhanded granny shot. As the ball sailed toward the basket, one of the guys on the black team—the only one who still cared about winning—shouted, “Goddammit!” like he knew the game was over.

  And it would’ve made perfect sense to lose the game like that, the way things were going, but the shot didn’t go in.

  The black team got the rebound. The Biggies, who had only made it to half-court by this time, turned around, looked at their own hoop, and began moving back the other direction like two forlorn barges.

  Another dude wandered up and started talking to the bench guys about what had happened with this girl he’d just been trying to get with. He was giving an elaborate and detailed play-by-play, standing directly in front of the bench so he was impossible to ignore, with his cornrows and Hawaiian print shirt and wild gestures. The two guys had to look around him to see the game, which was only just now absurd enough to be interesting. Finally, one of the bench guys asked the new guy, “Well, how’d you end the conversation then?”

  Sensing he was losing his audience, the new guy looked over at me and met my eye. I was just sitting on a bench with a ball in my hand.

  “Hey, Sheryl Swoopes,” he said, “All right.” He flashed me a big mack daddy smile and seemed to freeze, like he was posing for me to take his picture.

  “I bet you kick all their asses.”

  I laughed and told him it was doubtful.

  The game still hadn’t ended. “Man, one of y’all get in here,” Biggie #2 was begging the guys on the bench.

  Had he been a horse, someone would have shot him, but the bench guys were merciless. They waved him off and said, “Nawww, man, I ain’t playin’.”

  After another play, Biggie #1 said just forget it. He walked off the court, and Biggie #2 followed. The white teens shouted, “No way! Come on, dude, finish it up!” But it didn’t matter. The Biggies were going home.

  I walked onto the court and shot around, along with the guys who wanted to play another game. Some others approached, and it looked like things were going to get more serious. The guy wearing the Lakers cap was gone, the Biggies were long gone, even the bench guys had left, and new teams were starting to form.

  I was using a women’s ball that none of the guys really wanted to shoot with. They seemed not to want to be associated with the smaller ball, like it was a tampon or something. So I just kept shooting and shooting.

  To be frank, I wasn’t in the best mood ever. I kept seeing the scowl of that slangy guy so anxious to be in the cool club that he treated me like a tampon, and I started thinking fuck it with every shot. Or maybe it was fuck you that I was thinking, but in any event, I was making everything.

  There were fifteen people out there, so some of us weren’t going to get in. Someone asked the punk dude with the skullcap if I was their fifth. He glanced over at me and said, “Yeah, she’s with us.”

  I was impressed, because I’d watched him play earlier, watched him work hard, hollering at the Biggies to stay in and finish their preposterous game. He liked to win, and he could have easily said no, I wasn’t on their team. He could’ve gotten the best guy available instead of me. But he knew that would have been dissing me, because I’d been there the longest and I had next, even though I wasn’t asserting it very well. So he didn’t do it. I admire players like that, guys with character who take what the game gives them and make the best of it. It’s pretty Zen, when you think about it, acceptan
ce and not trying to control outcomes and all. It seemed like everything that kid was made of was right there, in four barely considered words. Yeah, she’s with us. Had I just passed him on the street, all I would’ve known was 90210 punk, a stupid prejudice based on a meaningless cap.

  I love this game.

  Walking past the tennis courts at Venice Beach, I saw a girl in a bikini playing doubles with three guys. My speculations regarding how much money someone would have to pay me to play tennis in public in a bikini were less compelling after a woman Rollerbladed past me in a thong.

  I made it to the courts, and before I could get my ball out and walk over to a hoop, a guy who was shooting around said, “Hey, sexy lady in gray, you wanna play? Come on.”

  He was black, with a shaved head. I made the usual quick judgment and decided he was probably harmless with his ridiculous “sexy,” but, fearing the specter of enthusiastic hand checking, I didn’t want to play one-on-one. So I laughed a little and said, “Well, I’d like to shoot around, if you want to.” He said okay.

  He said they called him Plato, and before ten minutes had passed I’d learned a good deal about his past, which included five kids by three different women and a variety of complicated custody arrangements. Plato was convinced that a person needed freedom. It just got old, he said, two people waking up together every day, looking at the same face all the time, fighting about money and ruining everything.

  A man walked by and hollered, “Best thing that ever happened, Plato, gettin’ married!” The guy kept going, never slowing down, and Plato gave him a quick thumbs-up without a hitch in his talking and shooting. A few minutes later, the guy walked by again. “Best thing that ever happened!” he shouted, still smiling, heading off to the other court.

  Plato was telling me about the birth of one of his children when another guy walked up and started shooting around with us. I said to the new guy, by way of including him, “We’re talking about having kids. You have any experience with that?”

  His name was Clem, and he had a sister and some nieces and nephews, so he knew a thing or two about a thing or two. He and Plato promptly fell into an opinionated debate on epidurals.

  Clem said he was thirty-seven, an actor and screenwriter working as a nighttime security guard. Plato never said what he did. Since it was the middle of a weekday and he was playing basketball in cloth high-top Chuck Taylors, shirtless and showing off an outstanding chest and flat stomach that almost no office-job-having man could maintain, I guessed he must have had lots of time and not much money, so I didn’t ask him about work.

  When Clem and Plato started up about the roots of basketball, I felt like they were putting on a show for my benefit as a guest on their court. Plato told the story I’d always heard about Naismith and the unruly YMCA kids in Connecticut. Clem said no, that’s what everybody thought, but it wasn’t true, and they argued about that for a while. But no topic other than sex could last very long with Plato around. He started in about some past exploits with one of his old girls or something he was going to do with his new girl.

  Looking embarrassed and like he wanted to change the subject, Clem mentioned he’d just seen the actor who played the Pretender on television. He said he’d seen a lot of famous people at Venice and had actually played with Woody Harrelson when he was there doing research for White Men Can’t Jump. According to Clem, Harrelson was a hack player, but the movies could make anybody look like they had skills.

  I wondered aloud about all the people who made it and didn’t make it in LA, how one person had her face on the side of a bus, and another ended up in a strip club doorway. Plato’s theory was that the difference was made by what actresses were willing to do to get parts. Then he stared off into space for a minute, like he’d forgotten Clem and I were there.

  “Psssht,” Clem snorted, before Plato could say something cruder. “The entertainment industry isn’t the only one where people sleep their way to the top. And anyway, they don’t want you to be too perfect-looking. It’s really about personality, charisma.”

  Clem said “the entertainment industry” a lot. He was in the business.

  “Yeah, look at Sandra Bullock,” I commented, expertly.

  “Exactly,” said Clem, taking a shot. He said “exactly” a lot, too.

  “And she’s got that nose,” he added, scrunching his face like he smelled something bad.

  Plato rejoined us from his casting couch reverie. “Who? Sandra Bullock? Oh, she’s cute. What they want is someone who’s pretty without any makeup, people who are just natural,” he said, cutting a quick glance at my obviously unenhanced breasts.

  “They want somebody real and wholesome, like Melissa here. Yeah.”

  Plato grinned, studying my face as if he was appreciating it because of what he’d said, or maybe just to see if I was convinced. But I was thinking about a guy from Chicago who used to say I was a “wholesome little Arkansas girl,” just like Plato did. As if we didn’t have sluts in Arkansas.

  Then they started arguing about what made Robin Williams a genius. Clem said he worked at it all the time, and Plato said it was just a gift, talent.

  I thought it was probably a combination of both, and that’s what made it so rare, but I didn’t say so. They seemed to be enjoying their argument.

  A twentyish-looking Latino guy walked up and hovered a little, just like Clem had done. Plato saw him, grinned, and said, “You got the shoes, but you left your ball at home?” The guy was wearing a sparkling new pair of the latest Kobe Bryants. He started shooting around with us, hitting everything.

  Clem and Plato and I kept talking, but Kobe Shoes wasn’t there to contemplate the nature of comic genius; he was ready to play. He gathered up a couple more guys, and we shot for three-on-three teams. Plato and Kobe Shoes were on a team, Clem and I were on a team, and each team had two big white guys wearing T-shirts with their fraternity letters on the front.

  Since Plato was such a hard-body, I was surprised to hear him grunt like an old man getting out of a chair with every long pass or rebound. He was older than he looked. I was guarding Kobe Shoes. He wasn’t that tall, but he didn’t need to be, because he could shoot from the outside, and he was super-quick. If I guarded him too close, he’d go around me, and if I backed off him at all, he’d nail a jumper.

  About all I could do was box out and try to keep him from getting rebounds, which I did, but the other two matchups were even, and the game was largely decided by the difference between Kobe and me. My team lost.

  Before a new game started, everyone stood around in a circle checking out each other’s footwear. A guy came over from another hoop, more interested in finding a conversation than a game. He looked at Plato’s cloth high-tops.

  The new guy said, “Man, I don’t know how you play in those things.”

  But then he said the best shoes he ever had were an ancient pair of leather Converse All-Stars. He talked about those old shoes like a first car or a girl he shouldn’t have broken up with.

  Everyone had a lot of questions about the Kobe Bryants. Kobe Shoes mentioned he worked at Champs and got a discount. He said “prototypes” a lot. I suspected he was good at his job, good at everything.

  After another person walked up, looked at Plato’s shoes, and said man I don’t know how you play in those things, Plato treated us to a demonstration, performing a quick shuffle but not turning his ankles too much, keeping his feet straight out. And, he said, he wore three pairs of socks for ankle support.

  Finally, two teams organized themselves for a new game. I said I’d play if they needed someone, but otherwise, I was out. I wasn’t too anxious to guard Kobe Shoes again, to tell you the truth. I didn’t really mind being outmatched a little, but Kobe Shoes was just too good. If I was on him, my team was pretty much guaranteed to lose.

  “Come on,” Kobe Shoes said. “Play, it’ll challenge you.”

  Here’s the thing. Insecure guys like Mr. Tampon at Roxbury worry about playing with a girl, like it makes
them look something less than studly. But if a guy is confident in his game and in himself, he’s more likely to welcome a girl, or an old man, or a serious young kid. That’s how Kobe Shoes was. He loved the game, and what he saw in other players was more than their shoes or their skills.

  They had enough to make their teams, and I was glad to sit down for a while and watch. A new guy wearing huge mirror sunglasses quickly sank four shots from past the three-point line. On the fourth bomb, Plato stopped everything, leaned over, put his hand on his knee, and said,“What the . . . . !”

  Of course there wasn’t an answer. The guy was just on, and he laughed it off in good form.

  Clem the actor had taken on his lane-dominating persona. “Don’t you come in here no more!” he’d yell at someone on the other team, indicating by his outspread arms that the lane was all his. Then he’d laugh at his own absurdity.

  A few plays later, Clem hurt his arm and shouted a prissy “Dammit!” He got out and came over to sit by me. After a minute or two, here came Plato to sit down, too.

  They started talking about their child-rearing theories. Childless Clem said he would kick them in the ass when they messed up, and prolific Plato said no, you can’t hit them.

  “When I was a kid and got in trouble, I had to go outside and cut my own switch, and I’d always try to get a medium one,” Plato said. “You didn’t want to get one too big, but you sure didn’t want to get one too small and have them go back out and pick one for you, huh-uh, no way.”

  Since I practically knew Plato’s entire life story by now, I was aware that his parents were from Arkansas and Oklahoma. I think maybe that switch-cutting routine is a southern thing, because it’s a story I’ve heard a lot of my relatives tell. Every time I’ve ever heard it, the person focuses on the dread he felt when he had to go cut the switch, and what strategy he used to pick it. I never heard anyone tell about the actual beating.