“Just a second,” I said, and I went out into the hall, to the kitchen. From among my work things I took up the Realtor’s flyer, the one I’d planted and then taken back again after he’d been hurt. The little thing had seemed so dangerous once, and it was time to be rid of it. I picked it up and unfolded it with wide, disbelieving eyes. A picture of Joseph Jones stared back at me; his dapper staff stood handsomely arrayed. It was a leaflet for Lost Boys. I’d grabbed the wrong thing. I stood there a long time, thinking what it meant.
When I came back, she looked asleep. Softly I unbound her; her limbs sank down inert. The blindfold had slipped down, but still her eyes were closed. I smoothed the spread as I moved my hands away, and then her eyes were open and she was looking at me curiously, and I felt all through my limbs the pleasure of declining, the depthlessness of my own heart, and then a prickle of excitement, for whatever was in store for him and me, and then I turned away before I could get sorry, and walked from room to room, to turn out all the yearning lights and find somewhere to sleep.
PART
TWO
5
In the fall after the estrangement, I had him all to myself, crippled and more and more in need of me. The team had a lot invested in him, of course—there was always someone lurking, watching over his regimen. He had his mother and brother for the cooking and the housework. In interviews he’d give them credit for the emotional side of his recovery, for keeping him upbeat and on the right path. But really I think I did as much as anyone. What was he going to say? This white dude I hired to drive my car is really giving me a lot of support? They always credit their mothers, you can look anywhere.
Still, I was there. I was the one heating up the soup with the sandwiches his brother made three or four at a time and left to chill. I had so much business with crutches and pill bottles I was halfway an orderly. I even made his bed for him some days. The corners were so tight he couldn’t tell it wasn’t his mother. Late some nights, when he got tired of rolling toward another championship with his alma mater on the Xbox, we’d play Chinese poker, or just sit up talking. Sometimes he’d press me for details about my past, and it was almost embarrassing to see him devour tales of my grandmother, the famous Milwaukee socialite, and our family home on the bluffs over Lake Michigan. But he was a surprising listener for someone who’d been treated like junior royalty half his life, and it was hard to deflect his interest. He’d nod sagely at the description of the wrought-iron phaeton on our driveway gate, and these impossible details seemed to give him satisfaction, as though seeing our fall materialized reassured him of his own ascent.
It was hard to take more than a little pleasure from it, though. They were difficult times for him, and there was a grim feeling to everything. The days were full of gray light and rooms with drawn curtains. Still, I was happy. I’d worked my way into the center of things. I was dug in, I could watch and watch—and I was needed.
As for Antonia, I can’t say I thought about her much. It was strange; she was gone so suddenly. I remember seeing her again for the first time a few days after I tied her to the bed, fleeting in the front doorway while I sat in the car, a fragment of a private smile hanging off her. Afterward she was always pushing her husband around in a wheelchair. But that phase didn’t last, either—Calyph soon got well enough to find her out.
He found the flyer for her house on Alberta, which I could never manage to recover, in early August. He called the number and they told him everything. Then he just sent her away, and all for cheating on him with a little real estate. I thought for sure I’d be preoccupied a little, that she’d come to me in a daydream now and then. I guess when she didn’t it seemed only respectful. He didn’t desire her, so I didn’t. She wasn’t even illicit anymore, merely passé. I knew they weren’t done with one another, not really, but he wanted to live in this illusion of complete erasure of her, and I complied. Through simple will he made a new, diminished world and walled her out of it, and then we lived there together, he and I, with his wounds.
In the middle of October, we went for a week to the Pharaoh’s estate. Savier “Pharaoh” Ramses was the last of the Jail Blazers, the gifted but misbehaving old guard who had taken the team to the Western Conference finals in ’99 and 2000 but bottomed out the franchise by the mid-aughts. Pharaoh had been a high draft pick during the team’s decline, but he was one of those talents who never became more than a sideshow collection of impressively mismatched skills. He was six-nine with guard speed and a great handle, but had no half-court game: he was too weak for the post and he couldn’t shoot. He was technically still with the team, but he’d not been on the active roster at all the previous season. The official reason was a slow-healing knee injury, but the rumor was that he and his bloated salary were getting pushed out. All summer I’d seen his classic Pontiac convertible with its “PH4R40” license plate haunting the players’ garage. Ras, his Antiguan driver, liked to dispense paternal advice to me about car wax, and Pharaoh became a sort of mentor to Calyph, gifting him with the nickname Yoshi, or Young Sheed. The team probably would’ve given Calyph a bonus just for staying away from Ramses, but with their matching knee injuries and defiant on-court attitudes, there was no keeping them apart.
I arrived at the Pharaoh’s as a guest, but soon found myself placed among the staff. I guess it was clear right away I wasn’t going to be any good at smoking spliffs and sitting by the pool. “Come,” said Ras, as I stood awkwardly in the doorway of my narrow room that first afternoon. “You’ll see more of de place if you work a little. We’ll only give you chitty-chitty stuff to do.”
The gaming tent stood in the middle of the hanging gardens, which ran almost to the cliff in the southwest corner of the estate. The Pharaoh had built on a desolate stretch of coast about two hours from Portland, and at high tide I could hear the sea in all its violence. My week there was one of the most singular of my life, but few moments there thrilled me with as much consummate oddness as following Ras down a narrow stone path beneath dangling creepers, carrying gourmet BLTs on a blinding silver tray to men who sat in the hiss and boom of the seething Pacific, playing video games.
“Don’t shoot that,” came Calyph’s voice. “That’s not your range, boy.”
“I hit that all day.”
“Not on here you don’t. They got you so you can barely make a damn layup.”
“Naw,” Belmont said, jockeying his controller around in unconscious compensation. “I show you.” He wore a bright white T-shirt and a modest gold chain, and looked hardly more than a boy.
They crowded the wide set, and the low stools they sat on leaned dangerously as they traded fast breaks. Calyph’s crutches sat against a nearby chair. Pharaoh lay behind them in a squat black chaise longue, watching indifferently. Only when we came beneath the tent did he grasp his cane to rise.
“Brick again,” Calyph chided. “Better put Deron back in.”
“Man, you musta put it to Superstar.”
“I didn’t put nothing to nothing, and you’re oh for six from deep. You’re playing this game like you twelve.”
“I’m tellin’ you, they got me rated right. Ninety-five speed.”
“Yeah? Pause it, let’s see. Let’s see what rating they got for you from three.”
“I’m like eighty,” Belmont boasted. “Seventy-five, minimum.”
“Let’s see. Oh. Oh, sixty? Yeah. So sorry.”
“What are you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Calyph said quickly. “I never play as me. What am I, a damn egoist?”
“Food, gentlemen,” Pharaoh called. “Pause that for now.”
They rose quickly, and when Calyph hopped over to collect his crutches, he still managed a suggestion of grace. His leg was heavily braced, but the thing didn’t look too medical—I’d helped him pick the color, a rich navy.
Pharaoh had three guests from the league that week, though none would be seen in any of the home openers that were by then less than two weeks away. Pharaoh and Calyph
were injured, Belmont was suspended, and Goat, who was late, was just a failure.
Among the visiting servants, I was Calyph’s only representative, while Belmont had a three-man entourage. In eighth grade, Rodrique Belmont had been a six-foot point guard from the Bronx with the best crossover since Washington did the Delaware, and now he was just a five-ten backup in Utah, a child prodigy seen through to a limited man. Hype died slow, and the league’s contracts were guaranteed, so Belmont arrived with the trappings of the star he was once thought sure to become. Goat came alone, and I think he was already in debt.
As the men came near, I eyed the bacon and the wedges of avocado on the sandwiches hungrily, and watched Ras pour a clear, sparkling drink from a glass pitcher. Pharaoh, being a man of purity, forbade the presence of alcohol until sundown.
“To living in the league,” he said, toasting in his rasping voice. “And to the player’s freedom from enslavement—from the owner, from the coach, and from the dollar.”
Calyph and Belmont glanced at each other a moment before lifting their glasses silently in the air, as if wary of the import of this stern rhetoric upon their weekend. Ras nudged me. A woman was coming down the path.
“Careful,” he muttered. “You look at her, she talks to you.”
As she was still much too far away to talk to me, this was a simple ploy. She was a short, white redhead, dressed in a gray tee cut ragged at the neck and sweatpants. She walked with her shoulders back, and I could see the sheen of sweat on her collarbones across the distance. Her body was just unfair, unfair to her I mean. I don’t think she could play badminton, eat a strawberry, or even so much as read an advertisement for milk in a magazine without seeming to engage in a luscious and obscene activity. “She a hothouse flower in the champagne room,” Calyph said later, and whatever that means, I can’t say it better. As she grew near, a communal embarrassment seemed to come over everyone but the Pharaoh. She was the first woman we’d seen there who was not a servant, and Belmont hissed between his teeth as if in displeasure. I could see there was something strange with her hands.
As she came under the tent, Pharaoh put his hand on her shoulder just formally enough that I didn’t draw any conclusions, and presented her as Odette. Her hair was up and her hands were wrapped in tape, like a fighter’s. She wiped her arm across her brow and shook hands with poise, holding her left back gingerly.
“Did you hurt yourself?” Pharaoh asked.
“It’s broken,” she said, lisping. She held her small, battered hand up for us to see, but Pharaoh did not take her seriously, and everyone else seemed to think better of leaning in to look. After a moment she began to unwrap the tape proudly.
“Who were you fighting?” Calyph asked, looking away like he was amused.
“I was sparring with Wedge,” she replied. “Do you know him?”
“He’s a big man.”
“He’s always gentle with me,” she said scornfully.
“Training for Ali, huh?” Belmont said. He too was looking away, expressionless, like something boring yet absorbing was happening over his shoulder.
“I don’t really fight,” she said. “But I need to train for my next set.”
We took this cryptic remark without comment, and the slow soft ripping of the tape filled the air. I wondered if I’d seen her somewhere before.
“I need to shower,” she said. “I only came down to steal a little food.” Pharaoh motioned to the tray and she lifted a sandwich, then, sneaking her “broken” hand in coyly, took another.
“Puma,” Pharaoh said sternly.
She put the second sandwich back sulkily and left the tent. No one watched her go.
That night Goat arrived a little before dark, and I saw him pull in from my basement window. His ride was unmistakable. It was a dark-purple Maybach with the conservative style of a European luxury line, but set so low to the ground on wheels so large that it bore a passing resemblance to the Batmobile. It was a princely car for a moody prince. The sense of uniqueness, or personality crisis, was heightened by the fact that the Maybach, not known for its efficiency, had been converted to biodiesel—its license read “BIO3.” There was a dent in the rear fender that broke through the paint and didn’t look recent.
Just three years ago, Lucas “Goat” Montaigne had been an All-American at Boise State, never much of a powerhouse. Goat didn’t look like much of a player: he was a rail-thin wing, pale as a vampire, who came to fame wearing a black goatee with its mustache twirled. He was an incredible shooter and an emotional, almost hysterical player. He wept when he led Boise within a game of the Final Four, and once hurled a CBS camera off its stand after losing a rivalry game. All this made him a folk hero: the Larry Bird of the Northwest, or, as some magazine put it, The Great Emo Hope. When he declared for the draft, the Blazers were at their lowest and there was some local pressure to pick him in the top five to turn the franchise around.
Goat could score but he couldn’t do much else. The Blazers passed on him and he played for two seasons in Milwaukee, where he was an epic bust. It’s almost impossible for a rookie who’s gone lottery to fall out of the league in less than four years, but Goat got exposed his rookie year and then he got injured. His contract was not extended, and when he was healed the Blazers brought him back to the city that had wanted him for its star on a ten-day free agent contract. He was just twenty-three.
I remember watching Goat’s first game in Portland at a bar in Marquette, and when he was sent in with four minutes to go in a twenty-point loss, the crowd roared as it hadn’t since the introduction of Oden. That roar was pure, the greeting of a savior, but the noise for Goat was louder, an outpouring of love for a neglected son whose failures were perhaps all attributable to the fact that we made him go and play in Milwaukee. We loved him guiltily and manically, even when we realized that his goatee was gone and his face looked sickly and ordinary. When he tore off his warm-ups in the fourth he looked stricken, a pariah edging back into society, and in four minutes he managed to miss three shots, turn the ball over twice, and get dunked on. In the final seconds, he caught a pass and swooped at the hoop as the defense sagged around him. As he got to the rim I had the inexplicable thought that if he blew the dunk, he would drown himself that night in the ocean. He didn’t, but the buzzer rang too soon, and the shot didn’t count.
Seeing he was alone, I stepped out and helped him with his bags. He was still clean-shaven and his hair was buzzed short for the court. After the almost Victorian poses of his popular years, this gave him the fragile look of a hospital patient newly released. He had a duffel and two sleek garment bags, both of which I managed to get from him after a little tussle of confusion. We didn’t speak, and when Maxim met us at the door to take his luggage from me, Goat scrounged hastily in his pocket for a few dollars. It was a little endearing to deny him.
Because nothing could be drunk until sundown, everybody stayed up late. On every night of the week but the last, the party retired around ten to the after-dinner room. It was designed something like a huntsman’s lodge, which I say with all the certainty of never having been in one any more than Pharaoh had. There were dark beams crossing the ceiling, a chimney made of jagged stones, and a big fire. In one corner sat an unplugged arcade hunting game complete with plastic rifles. On the second night, I asked the Pharaoh if he hunted.
“Who am I, Colin Powell?”
I was about to banish myself to silence for the rest of the week when he shook his head a little wistfully and continued.
“I’d like to shoot a elk,” he said. “Make me feel part of somethin’.”
“Make you feel part ’publican,” Belmont sang.
“Imagine that, doe,” Pharaoh said, laughing huskily. “Half a dozen brothers go up to Montana, lookin’ right, showin’ dignity, shootin’ at some elk. Why don’t that happen?”
“Only baller who hunts is Karl Malone,” Calyph declared.
“Nobody wanna be like Karl Malone,” said Belmont, shaking his hea
d with animation. “I mean, Utah infect a man. Who you know grew up in Louisiana, star baller, next thing you see he wear those tassel country vests and, like, drive an eighteen-wheeler for fun? Nobody. You play for the Jazz, things happen, man.”
“Things happen everwhere,” Pharaoh rasped. “Even Cleveland.”
“Never picked up a gun till Utah,” Belmont said sadly. “Now they want three games’ pay.”
The Pharaoh was staring into the fire. “I’m just sayin’, we shouldn’t shut ourselves out. This America. We want to try that country shit, we ought to.”
Framed jerseys hung on the walls, where the moose and elk might have been, and I took the cognac Ras had given me and went into the shadows. Over the set of bronze fire tools was a George Gervin, behind the humidor a Len Bias, and opposite the small library a Bulls-era Dennis Rodman. The shelves held at least two copies of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I wondered how Malcolm and the Worm would get on.
Ras came over, with the house’s lone female servant trailing behind. He took on the air of a host in the evenings, as though it were his house to run so long as the Pharaoh was laying his purity aside. He was the cognac steward and dispenser of cigars, responsible for our pleasures, and, it would be seen, their consequences.
“You like de cognac?”
“It does taste like money,” I said, holding it up with what felt like appropriate veneration.
He frowned. “It supposed to taste like gold.”
I took another sip and my reply rang up in my ears with an unfortunate James Bondian quality. It was getting to be a strain to calibrate to Ras. His attitude toward me was one of paternal fraternity, which I was surprised to find I didn’t resent—because he took me into his confidence, and he really did have all those polishes I hadn’t even heard about. But sometimes I felt the awkwardness of trying to wear one mask over the other. I didn’t know whether to reveal that I knew how the real masters did it, or the real servants. Any entry-level connoisseur knows your basic Hennessy is a sickly drink, but how could I get this across when what I was supposed to feel was the servant’s gratefulness for being given anything at all?
Ride Around Shining Page 8