Winning the City Redux
Page 1
Honor and Praise for Winning the City:
“Fifteen-year-old basketball prodigy Dale Wheeler is cruelly confronted with life’s harsh realities that turn his world upside down, when he is unjustly denied his well earned position on the basketball team to lead them to the city championship. Overcome with the raw pain of being inexplicably cheated, his world is further complicated by his adolescent infatuation with his favorite teacher.
Theodore Weesner skillfully, and with great sensitivity lures one into an unexpected provocative world with beautifully drawn characters that cause the reader to ask curiously dangerous questions, only to provide unsuspecting answers. This unsettling yet moving drama is the kind of material that I believe, will adapt to the screen as an intriguing and compelling motion picture.”
—Joel B. Michaels of Mitzvah Enterprises, Producer of Basic Instinct 2, Terminator: Rise of the Machines, Terminator: Salvation, Lolita, Stargate, Universal Soldier and The Changeling.
“Winning the City is a fine novel, a crisply written story about a young boy’s struggle to define himself.”
—James Carroll, Ploughshares
“A courageous author . . . No one better has a handle on heart-break—he reminds me of a latter-day Dreiser who writes better, stylistically . . . What is so special about Weesner is the emotional precision.”
—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune
“. . . a knockout! . . . Dale’s struggles to win in a world whose odds are stacked against outsiders . . . leads to a heartbreaking kind of disillusionment and courageous maturity.”
—Dan Wakefield, Boston Globe
“Winning the City tells of a young athlete ‘nearly driven out of mind with all he knew,’ but Mr. Weesner’s own mind is superbly clear on every page. He is an extraordinary writer.”
—Richard Yates, New York Times Bestselling Author of Revolutionary Road
Honor and Praise for The True Detective:
“A harrowing psychological study of the effects of kidnapping and child molestation on the victim, the abductor, their families, and the investigating detective.”
—American Library Association, (ALA) 1987 Notable Book Award
“ . . . The True Detective is tough-minded, but subtly done. The language, the details, the progress of the POV sections—everything serves Weesner’s total effect brilliantly. And while it deals with a sensational, even loaded subject, ultimately I’d say the novel is that rare achievement, a wise book, and maybe the saddest book I’ve read. That it’s also a page-turner is a marvel.”
—Stewart O’Nan, acclaimed author of Emily Alone and Last Night at the Lobster
“The True Detective is a wrenching novel to read. It is a crime novel that more than any other I have read takes in the whole situation of the crime. There are no obvious villains here, or easy answers. This is not a genre novel. It belongs on the literature shelf.”
—David Guy, USA Today
“Weesner seems to have a pipeline into the minds of young people when they are confused and in trouble . . . ” (The True Detective is) “ . . . a compulsively readable thriller that is to the nuclear family what Hiroshima was to the nuclear bomb, and the best account yet of its detonation.”
—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune
“Theodore Weesner, author of the much praised The Car Thief uses his moving story of the abduction, rape, and murder of a 12-year-old boy to raise the kind of moral questions that no caring person can ignore today.”
—Marilyn Stasio, Fort Worth Morning Star Telegram
Praise for The Car Thief:
“When it first appeared in 1972, The Car Thief took its place as one of the great coming of age novels of the twentieth century. Forty-five years later, it brings back a lost moment in America’s past, the brash young auto industry on an exhilarating joyride, Michigan’s Motor Cities roaring with life. Ted Weesner’s seminal novel demands a second look for its marvelously rendered young protagonist, the unforgettable Alex Housman; for its courage and wisdom and great good heart.”
—Jennifer Haigh, New York Times Bestselling Author of: Broken Towers, Faith, Mrs. Kimble and The Condition
“A remarkable, gripping first novel.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“The Car Thief is a poignant and beautifully written novel, so true and so excruciatingly painful that one can’t read it without feeling the knife’s cruel blade in the heart.”
—Margaret Manning, The Boston Globe
“Weesner lays out a subtle and complex case study of juvenile delinquency that wrenches the heart. The novel reminds me strongly of the poignant aimlessness of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Beneath its quiet surface, The Car Thief —like its protagonist—possesses churning emotions that push up through the prose for resolution. Weesner is definitely a man to watch—and read.”
—S. K. Oberbeck, Newsweek
“What The Car Thief is really concerned with emerges between its realistic lines—slowly, delicately, with consummate art. Perhaps Mr. Weesner himself put it best: ‘In my work, I guess I wish for nothing so much as to get close enough to things to feel their heart and warmth and pain, and in that way appreciate them a little more.’ Judging from this book, his wish has been fulfilled . . . and then some.”
—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
“A simply marvelous novel. Alex emerges from it as a kind of blue-collar Holden Caulfield.”
—Kansas City Star
WINNING THE CITY REDUX
A Novel By
Theodore Weesner
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Places are named, but only to suggest reality. None of the persons who appear in these pages is intended to represent anyone, living or dead.
WINNING THE CITY REDUX—First edition
Astor + Blue Editions LLC
Copyright © 2012 by Theodore Weesner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by:
Astor + Blue Editions, LLC
New York, NY 10003
www.astorblue.com
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Weesner, Theodore. WINNING THE CITY REDUX—epub edition.
ISBN: 978-1-938231-17-0 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-938231-06-3 (epub)
ISBN: 978-1-938231-08-7 (epdf)
This novel is based on WINNING THE CITY, originally published by SUMMIT BOOKS, NEW YORK 1992 by Theodore Weesner
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1. Adolescent Basketball players—Fiction 2. High School Basketball—Fiction 3. Gritty outsider team vs. the world 4. Injustice of controlling adult—Fiction 5. Secret teacher and student love interest—Fiction 6. Flint, MI—Fiction 7. American Sports and Love story—Fiction I. Title
Book Design: Bookmasters
Jacket Cover Design: Ervin Serrano
Winning the City Redux
IN 1990 THEODORE WEESNER PUBLISHED A NOVEL GIVEN to junior high basketball called WINNING THE CITY. WINNING THE CITY REDUX embraces that same story while adding what was previously avoided: The realities of a motherless fourteen-year-old boy’s relationship with his thirty-six-year-old homeroom teacher.
A Note to the Reader
THE FOLLOWING ADOLESCENT SPORTS AND LOVE ENCOUNTER has been retrieved from a promise never to tell. What’s to say? Time slipped by, some deaths occurred, perspective was gained. The impulse went from taking a secret to the grave to getting it down before it was too late.
Storytellers have ever had it that to understand is to sympathize. Imagin
e a boy and his teacher in a relationship eclipsing (at least for the boy) the pull of school, friends, basketball, his father at home. Emotions that become magical and prepossessing for the boy. The lesson is that an occasion of intense adoration of the kind deserves any airing that might add insight to the never-ending puzzle of how we live and evolve.
Theodore Weesner
WINNING THE CITY REDUX
Foreword
1961. JFK IS PRESIDENT. JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, THE Hustler, La Dolce Vita, On the Beach are slipping into youthful hearts and minds, never to go away. A White Sport Coat, I Fall to Pieces, Rags to Riches, Who’s Sorry Now? pierce from jukeboxes in the same forever way. Charles Kuralt’s Eyewitness to History and the G.E. College Bowl are seminars-at-home for at least one fourteen-year-old whose alcoholic father works second shift at Chevrolet Plant Ten and leaves him to the streets and parks, their apartment, his homework, his lonely dreams.
Junior high basketball becomes an addiction. Shooting alone, practicing shots over and over until park lights die at eleven p.m., taking silhouette shots against a moonlit sky. Dribbling home under streetlights to shower with a length of garden hose in the landlady’s basement. Homework, sleep, big dreams, new days. Off to school at daybreak to sweep the boys’ and girls’ gyms in exchange for shooting time from a whiskey-colored floor to Plexiglas backboards with pumpkin-colored rims. Called a hillbilly here and there, now and then, while remaining but vaguely aware of class distinctions. More aware of hemp skirts and ten-footers over imaginary opponents. Perfecting a shot. Driving the lane and laying it in over one shoulder or the other going away. Hey hey whatta ya say? Walking the walk and talking the talk. Driving the lane again. Again and again. Polishing a shot. Growing up and digesting school. Unfolding like a weed from between the cracks of an old city sidewalk.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
THIS IS IT. TODAY IS THE DAY. THE FIRST PRACTICE OF THE year after school in the boys’ gym. Time to show the speed, do the deed, take the lead! All these weeks and months Dale has been able to think of little else. Since last spring.
Since forever. Now it’s his turn to be the oldest, the biggest, the best. Tryouts. But he’s a returning starter and is sure as hell not trying out. He’ll be leading the way, making them pay! His excitement is such that for days on end he has been telling himself to be cool. Time to be cool and not a fool. For playing it cool is the only tool . . . if you’re out to win the entire goddamn city.
Dale Wheeler is fourteen all the same, and whatever energy he may be bringing to his talking-the-talk temperature he doesn’t know how not to dream. He’s grown an inch and a half since the season ended last year and is growing still. In this instant he’s pushing up through five-nine. Sitting at his desk in school he can look at a forearm and see it growing larger, stronger, longer. Can pump up bicep-pears before the bathroom mirror at home. One on the left, one on the right! Pop, pop! Pow, pow! Hey, hey, get outta my way . . . my name is Dale Wheeler and I came to play! Besides confidence Dale can call up conviction in his mind and heart. Secret power leading the way, making his day! Call me cocky and I’ll make your fat ass pay!
Dale knows he’s good. There’s no doubt he’s done the work. Like a saver saving every penny, he’s given himself to little else. At times it seems it’s all he’s done, all the time, is work-work, practice-practice. And work some more. And worked on anyway. Worked into work. Sweated into sweat all over again, before taking his shower, doing his homework, dreaming his dream. For work, as every athlete knows, is the key. The more you practice the luckier you get. Acquire the moves, absorb the steps . . . and when the time comes you’ll hit the groove, no matter some hee-haw in the stands sputtering about luck and the bounce of the ball.
Dale has done it, is doing it, will do it. For an athlete is what he is. Maybe he’s only fourteen, but he knows what he knows and he knows it’s his turn to take them all downtown to win the city! “Here comes Wheeler,” cries the Sportscaster on high. “He takes the shot! No—he fakes the shot! He fakes the shot! He drives! shoots! SCORES! SCORES! SCORES!”
Even in his sleep at night Dale dreams of winning the city. Moments and moves from outdoor pickup games under the lights (amazing things happen in outdoor pickup games) blend in his dreams into games indoors rocking with all the students and teachers he has ever known or passed in the hallways of Walt Whitman Junior High. Waking from a dream with his mind full of rainbows, he reminds himself not to go off the deep end. To settle down.
Don’t be a fool, play it cool! Playing it cool is the only tool!
Everything is a game. Life, Dale knows, is a game all the way and everything that happens depends on how you play. It’s something else he knows he knows. He has no notion of himself as a thinker, or as a smart ass ninth-grader either, but he knows what he knows and he knows that everything is a game. That playing it cool is the only tool . . . when you’re out to rule.
(Okay, maybe he is a smart ass, but whoever won the city who wasn’t?)
CHAPTER 2
COMING IN LATE FROM WORKING SECOND SHIFT AT CHEVY Plant Ten—a weaving silhouette filling his bedroom doorway—Dale’s father invites his sleepy-time son into the kitchen for a Coney Island dog. Could anyone in the world more appreciate the taste of a Coney Island dog in the middle of the night than an ever-voracious fourteen-year-old playmaker, ball handler, first string guard?
As on every other night, Dale practiced at the park until the lights went out . . . before shooting a few in the dark. Dribbling home, into and out of illumination under corner streetlights, driving one telephone pole after another, pulling it back at the last minute (all but the dream), he showers with the landlady’s hose, reviews his school notebook at the kitchen table, and hits the sack dreaming his dream . . . into which swamp there appears the purveyor of tender words and unconditional love in his life. “Hey, sleepy time pal . . . come have a Coney Island dog with your old dad.”
Daylight is in Dale’s eyes and it’s time to rise and shine . . . despite a spur picking at his mind. Clomping into the bathroom to wash and brush, he detects “I Fall to Pieces” circling his father’s phonograph in the living room and sinks within, as always, to the old cry of loss haunting their handful of rooms at an off-beat hour. The message is familiar: His father is up yet and loaded, emotional and sentimental, drunk and dangerous. With no one else upon whom to visit his sad memory of Dale’s runaway mother visiting his pickled brain, his father is waiting for him to appear. In Dale’s adolescent mind another lyric begins circling the breaking day:
You get loaded . . . and I fall to pieces.
# # #
HE HAS NO choice but to make his way into the kitchen that offers the only exit from their attic apartment . . . down the backside of the landlord’s house to driveway, sidewalk, refreshing air. He enters without making a sound. His father stands there. Head hanging, he’s leaning to the wall, his chin on his chest. How long has he been on his feet? His neck looks rubbery as his head lolls to one side, a grin comes on like a dim light as he says: “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Dale opens the refrigerator, explores possibilities, ignores his father as he does at times like these. Life with an alcoholic. Life with Patsy Cline’s heartbreak lining the air they breathe: ‘You want me to forget . . . pretend we’ve never met.’
“You’re the guy stood me up!” his father tells him. “Thas who you are! Bring home a treat for the only person in the world plays tunes on my weary old heart . . . get left standing at the counter.”
You walk by . . . and I fall to pieces . . .
Dale remembers then and says: “I fell asleep! That’s what I did!”
“Musta been dreaming about something a hell of a lot better looking than a Coney Island dog,” his father tells him.
“Basketball,” Dale confesses, deciding all at once to share his high hopes with his father. “I was dreaming about basketball, winning the city . . . which is what we’re gonna do!”
“Bask
etball?” his father asks. “You say basketball? Did I hear you say basketball? Is that what I heard you say?”
“It’s my big year at school!” Dale tells him.
“First time I knew anything would keep you from your favorite middle-of-the-night snack. Surprised it wasn’t something better looking than a fat old basketball.”
“I’m the biggest at school this year!” Dale tells him. “I’ve been working like a demon while everybody else has done practically nothing. Been working all summer, all fall. Gonna lead the way, make ’em pay!” Dale did not add how proud he hoped to make his father, or how his dream included saving his father’s life, too, to a modest degree. Turning things around. Leading them to the promised land.
You tell me to find . . . someone else to love.
Someone who’ll love me, too . . . the way you used to do.
Continuing to grin, his father squints. “Son . . . gotta tell ya. Hope you dream other things, too. Don’t wanna put all your eggs in one basket.”
Dale nods, indicates that he knows, is cool, isn’t a fool . . . know all about eggs and baskets. Doesn’t he?
CHAPTER 3
WHAT DALE WHEELER DOES NOT KNOW, NOT YET, IS HOW not to dream, and anticipation remains his companion. Even as he is surrounded by school—needing to review his homework, to think about something else, anything else, Zona Kaplan sitting in front of him and smelling so good, Miss Furbish’s Word Power Challenge—basketball moments from the Sportscaster in the sky keep rising in his mind and presenting themselves as irresistibly as puppies eager to play. Get outta here, he thinks, while a puppy keeps snuggling as playful as a girlfriend he has never had, licking his face, smiling, unbuttoning her blouse and letting fall free those items his father thought not unreasonable competition for Lower Downtown’s natural casing dogs smothered in onions and secret recipe Coney Island sauce.