I ran. I ran as hard and as fast as I could, afraid my height would make me an easy target for a nervous cop and I’d end up like the fifteen-year-old kid whose death had started this riot. I crouched as I ran, making myself as small as possible—which wasn’t small enough: I still loomed over the rest of the people. I had never been so scared in my life, or so sure a stray bullet might punch through my back at any second.
Even as I ran, adrenaline pumping my heart like a boxer’s speed bag, I also felt a shared rage with the people running beside me. As much as I admired Dr. King, I, too, wanted to pick up a brick and throw it. Not just for James Powell but also for Emmett Till. And because of Coach Donahue. And the teachers at Power who didn’t think it was important to teach us about anyone with a black face.
I didn’t throw anything. My readings at the Schomburg had taught me that looting and bricks didn’t create any real change. Some government suits would make a sympathetic speech, create a panel that would investigate the causes, dump some money on a couple of neighborhoods, plant a few trees here and there, and hope the dragon would go back to sleep for another ten years. Then it would be some other politician’s problem.
The next morning at the journal office, we couldn’t stop talking about what had happened.
“That was some bad mojo, man,” Sammy said, sitting on the edge of his desk. He wore a white, short-sleeved shirt and narrow blue tie to look more like a professional reporter. The rest of us dressed as casually as we could get away with to combat the thick summer heat.
“It’s happening all over the country,” Gary said. He stroked his upper lip every ten seconds to check on the barely visible mustache he was trying to grow. “Black folk aren’t going to put up with this crap anymore.”
“You think it’s over?” Sandy asked. Her family was black Portuguese.
“Yeah,” Sammy said. “The cops will be waiting for them if they try anything. And they won’t be playing around.”
“I don’t think it’s over,” Gary said. “Last night is just the beginning. Too much anger to get out in one night.”
He looked at me. I was the only one who hadn’t said anything. The others looked at me, too. Waiting.
“I was there,” I said quietly.
“Really?” Sandy asked with wide eyes.
I nodded. “Gunshots were popping all around me. People running every which way. Guys were smashing windows and grabbing TVs.”
“Were you scared?” Sammy asked.
I hesitated. I didn’t want to admit in front of them, especially Sandy, just how scared I’d been. I thought about putting on my game face, the stony expression I used when I took the gym floor. But we were journalists, devoted to uncovering the truth.
“I was terrified,” I admitted. “I ran like a dog with his tail on fire.”
“Can I quote you?” Sammy asked. “Big-time basketball star Lew Alcindor said, ‘I nearly peed my pants.’” He grinned. “I’m paraphrasing.”
We all laughed. Then we got down to the business of reporting what had happened. Newspapers and television news were filled with images. Many of the headlines focused on the numbers: how many rioters, how many police, how much property damage. But we decided to try to get the more human side of the story. We would go out and interview people on the streets and get their perspectives about what had happened and what it meant to them. The people we interviewed did not hesitate to tell us what they thought: They were angry about the looting and the property damage, but mostly they were angry that another black child had been shot by a police officer, knowing he would probably go free. (He did.)
That night the rioting resumed, this time spreading all the way to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The city authorities declared a state of emergency in Harlem and banned all demonstrations. A “state of emergency”? Were they kidding? Harlem had been in a state of emergency for thirty years; that’s why people were rioting! And that’s exactly what we wrote about. Meanwhile, the white press was busy condemning Harlemites as a bunch of thugs looking for an excuse to loot a new TV. Yeah, there was some of that. But that was like saying the Boston Tea Party was a bunch of looters after free tea. Did we really fight in the American Revolution so we could get cheaper tea?
In the end, everything gets reduced to numbers. The riots went on for six days, 4,000 New Yorkers were involved in the protests, 118 were injured, 465 were arrested, and one rioter was killed. An FBI report would describe the riots as an attack on “all constituted authority.” Our little band of teenage reporters told them that much in our journal. More important, we told them why. As usual, no one was listening.
Our summer program ended that week, and the following week I was back at Coach Donahue’s Friendship Farm. After everything I had just been through—being exposed to the Schomburg collection, discovering the rich cultural history of the Harlem Renaissance, meeting Dr. King, being caught in the middle of a riot, writing about the anger and frustrations of people in Harlem—even looking at the name Friendship Farm made me want to break something. But for the sake of my parents and whatever I owed Coach Donahue, I endured my three-week sentence in silence.
At camp, I was a celebrity, with kids fawning over me, joking with me, trying hard to be my friend. They did nothing wrong, but after my experiences in Harlem, I was still in too much of a state of shock to be very friendly. To be honest, I didn’t try very hard. To me, being friendly would be an endorsement of Coach Donahue, and I didn’t want to send that message. Not after everything I’d been through. People like Coach Donahue, who wanted us to wait our turn, who felt entitled to use the N-word whenever it suited them, were part of the reason for the riots. And they would never admit or understand why they were.
So I acted my part. I played basketball, kept to myself, and, three weeks later, returned to Harlem. As I walked along the streets, I realized that this summer had been a rite of passage for me, a leap from being a child of the projects to being a citizen of Harlem. I had met new coaches, like Al Calloway, Dr. Clarke, and Dr. King, who had held up a mirror so I could see myself clearly for the first time. Now I knew what my history was, who my people were, and where my future pointed.
17.
Making Friends with Wilt Chamberlain
The last couple of weeks until the start of my senior year, I tried to get back to a normal life of hanging with friends and playing intense streetball. I returned to Harlem frequently, now that I felt so much at home there. Harlem was busily repairing the physical damage caused by the riots, but everything was not business as usual. White politicians and news commentators expected Harlemites to be repentant and act ashamed, like naughty children who had broken their parents’ favorite vase. Instead, they walked around a little taller, with a little more pride. They had a “you know why” look in their eyes and an expectant “what are you going to do to fix it” expression on their faces. Most residents had not wanted the burning, the destruction, the looting, but sometimes those were the unfortunate by-products of legitimate peaceful protests. And doing nothing would have been worse. How many unarmed black children could they allow to be killed without saying something?
I missed my involvement with HARYOU and the opportunity to put into words all the thoughts and emotions I had experienced during the turmoil. I discovered I had a passion for writing that ran much deeper than I’d realized. Not just a passion but a need to somehow get it all out of me. Without that creative outlet, I had to express myself on the basketball court. I played every chance I could, any place I could find a game. Then, when the summer Rucker Tournament started, I made sure I was there to watch the best players in the world teach me how to become better.
Wilt was there with his own team from Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise, the Harlem nightclub he owned. I gave him a wave, he nodded back, and I settled in to watch him play. The battle against Wilt’s team looked to be pretty even at first, but then the other team started to pull ahead. Wilt was fuming. For three quarters, Wilt endured the pounding, until h
e decided he just wouldn’t take any more.
I could see the determination not just in his face, but in his whole body. Wilt refused to lose. He went after every rebound and grabbed it no matter how many other players also went after it. His teammates fed him the ball under the basket and he dunked it. If Wilt got his hands on the ball, he dunked it. And there was nothing they could do to stop him. He dunked ten times in a row, with the crowd screaming in delight at the show he was putting on. Sometimes he’d go up with three players hanging on to him. But they might as well have been fluffy scarves for all the trouble they caused. Watching him, I learned the advantage of sheer willpower in winning a game. It was a lesson that stayed with me my entire basketball career.
“That was amazing,” I said to him afterward.
“We got it done,” he said. No boasting. No grinning.
I mangled a few more appreciative compliments while he toweled the sweat from his face and neck.
“Tell you what, young Lewis,” he said. “Why don’t you drop by Smalls sometime. We’ll talk.”
Then he was gone, he and his team shaking hands in the crowd.
I did drop by Smalls a couple of days later, not wanting to seem too eager. It wasn’t just that Wilt Chamberlain was one of the best players in the world, or that there was a cool, edgy allure to being seventeen and hanging out in a nightclub. The real appeal for me was that Wilt was the living embodiment of my possible future. Whatever he was doing right now was probably what I could be doing in five years. I needed to learn what that life would be like.
I learned that his life was good. I’d had a small taste of celebrity from the press swarming me during my All-City games, but nothing like the relentless recognition that Wilt got. No matter where he went, fans would yell and wave and run up to him as if he were their old high school pal. Inside Smalls, he could control that public adulation somewhat by carving out a space and surrounding himself with close friends. Wilt’s entourage at Smalls warmly welcomed me to the group, even going so far as concocting a special nonalcoholic drink just for me. They called it the Orange Sling, which consisted of orange juice with an egg beaten into it. I couldn’t believe I was sitting in one of the hippest joints in Harlem, sipping a signature drink with Wilt Chamberlain. Life had certainly taken a turn for the better.
One day, we were in Smalls when Wilt decided we should go to his apartment to play cards. We all piled into his limo and drove to his home in the ritzy Park West Village complex on Central Park West.
Wilt’s apartment was the ultimate bachelor pad, with antique gold finish on everything in sight. The walls were decorated with real paintings, not just cheap copies from Woolworth’s as most people I knew had. His stereo system was the latest in high-tech, surrounded by a large record collection with some of the same jazz albums I owned. Only more. Much, much more. Wilt had a reputation for extravagance, but this was all beyond even my imagination. This was where Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin might live in one of their rollicking movies about chasing girls.
For the first time, I had a coach who was teaching me the possibilities of a successful black man’s lifestyle. If this was the lifestyle I had in store for me, then bring it on!
Wilt made a point of taking me to swanky places, giving me a taste of what my life would be like one day. Having been brought up in a working-class family and neighborhood, my imagination for spending was limited to slick photographs in upscale magazines. I couldn’t really think of what I would do with money beyond a fancy suit and hot car. One evening, he took Carl Green, me, and my date, Sandy from HARYOU—whom I finally got up the nerve to ask out—to the Latin Quarter, a popular and swanky nightclub. Sandy wore her hair like Diana Ross, up in the back with straight bangs over her forehead, and a simple summer dress with straps. I wore my best—and only—suit, with a skinny black tie. We looked just like what we were: a couple of high schoolers playing dress-up. Carl and Wilt wore tailored suits and shiny ties that made them look as if they owned the place. And that’s how they were treated. The waitstaff hovered around us like fawning grandparents, making sure we had everything we wanted. The singer from the stage announced, “We have a celebrity in the audience,” and a bright spotlight swept over the room until it lit up our table. I shrank back into my seat, looking for a shadow to hide in. Wilt seemed to puff up under the light, like a sponge expanding in water. The diners cheered and Wilt waved back, the wattage from his smile rivaling that of the spotlight.
For the rest of that summer, Wilt was my guru into this fascinating world that whetted my appetite to be a professional basketball player. He took me to the horse races to watch his own horse. He let me go over to his home any time to borrow records from his enormous jazz collection. He included me with his entourage whenever they went to a jazz club in Harlem.
This was a world where no one dared call you a nigger. Not to your face.
My mother warned me to be careful not to intrude. “Lewis, Wilt is a grown man with plenty of things to do and people he will want to be seeing alone. He might not want you to come over to his house all the time. He might not want to spend all his time with a boy still in high school.” I was the only kid in my high school hanging out with a celebrity, which brought me a little proximity celebrity of my own. Even in summer, word got around. But Mom got me worried that maybe I was nothing more than a kid pestering a kindhearted celebrity. So I told Wilt what my mom said.
“Nah, it’s cool, Lewis. Your mother’s all right. Make sure you always listen to her. But, no, don’t worry about it.”
When summer ended, I returned to the demands of school and basketball while Wilt returned to his NBA commitments. But the taste of the sweet life that could be mine stayed with me.
18.
Girls and Me and Basketball Make Three
Wilt and I didn’t have any of those heart-to-heart talks about the ways of the world or the mysteries of life or the agonies of adolescence. That wasn’t his style. He showed me the way life could be, and that was my lesson. Take it or leave it. One of his lessons that never quite took hold was how to deal with girls.
Every time I visited Wilt, there was another beautiful woman. Not only were they gorgeous, but they were friendly, funny, and kind. It would have been easy to dismiss Wilt’s success with women as merely the result of his wealth and celebrity, but the women I met seemed to genuinely enjoy his company. He was outgoing and generous, loved to laugh, always knew what to say.… Basically, he was the exact opposite of me.
I tried to copy Wilt’s style, to be suave and sophisticated, but I didn’t have it in me. I was shy and quiet, and I avoided the spotlight. I was respectful with girls, polite, nonaggressive to the point of never making any move.
One complication to my having a serious dating life was that my fantasy woman was the Italian actress Sophia Loren, famous for her sultry, sensuous looks and curvaceous body. I unfairly compared girls I met against this impossible paragon and was disappointed that none measured up. Of course, it’s natural for teenage boys and girls to look for their romantic ideals in media idols like singers or movie stars, but what I began to realize was that my model was a woman with Caucasian features. Why was that? Part of the problem was not having many famous black movie stars whom young black teens could admire. The American ideal of beauty was white, and I had been brainwashed into it. When I came to that realization, I felt both ashamed I hadn’t realized it earlier and free to appreciate the beauty beyond the glossy covers of popular magazines.
That realization led to another. Whenever I watched my beloved Westerns growing up, I had always rooted for the cavalry to defeat the savage Indians (even though my mother was part Cherokee). But why was that? African Americans had much more in common with the Indians than with the soldiers. I remember watching Distant Drums with Gary Cooper and rooting for him to wipe out those nasty Seminole Indians. But my summer at HARYOU learning about black history led me to discover that the Seminoles also had a significant population of free black people and runaway s
laves they called Black Seminoles. I had been rooting against my own people.
I dated Sandy from HARYOU a few more times after that evening at the Latin Quarter with Wilt. Sandy’s uncle was Babs Gonzales, a well-known jazz vocalist. She told me that he had been born Lee Brown but changed his name to Ricardo Gonzales so he could pass for Mexican and get hotel rooms that were denied to black people. It was strange to me that here was yet another person who had changed his name to reinvent himself. Although Sandy and I shared a love for jazz, I just didn’t have enough time left over after studies and basketball to keep dating her.
Based on the tales they told, all my friends were wildly successful with girls. According to them, they were doing things I’d only seen James Bond do in the movies. They happily shared their romance wisdom with me: Treat them badly, let them know who’s boss, keep them guessing whether you care or not. It was hard to argue with their success, but I knew that I didn’t want to be that kind of person. It wasn’t how my dad treated my mom. I knew what it felt like to be treated as less, to be belittled. I would have to plug along playing at romance the way I played at hearts: with a losing hand.
Then I met Cheri Benoit.
She was a year younger, very pretty, very outspoken. I liked her immediately, and for some reason I couldn’t fathom, she liked me, too.
Cheri and I saw each other as regularly as we could, given my busy schedule, but we told no one. I didn’t want to get caught up in the usual high school gossip about who was seeing whom. Anything you cared about could be used against you. The downside was that since no one knew we were seeing each other, my friend Kelly one day started telling me how he was putting the romantic moves on Cheri. I didn’t let on, but as he gave me the juicy details, I felt my anger rise. After that, I stopped talking to Cheri for six months. I missed her, but I was so disappointed that she preferred Kelly to me that I couldn’t face her.
Becoming Kareem Page 9