“Let’s walk,” Vega ordered the five of us.
On the dark side of the building, Ricky Santiaga sat calmly on the hood of a black Ferrari 288 GTO. Only a fool didn’t know how exclusive that joint was. It cost almost $170,000. Off the top I wondered if it was his or if he rented it just to see jaws drop open, like they were dropping right now.
His men were grouped up at the corner of the building within eyesight. I figured they were there to block off any curious heads and to make their boss feel at ease. My eyes captured the car of course, the soft white leather seats and precise piping. Every detail popped out before me. His new Tod’s, the black suede driving shoes he wore as he rested his feet against his front fender. A single lamppost casted a beam of light around them as if they were being displayed in the shoe store window of a Park Avenue shop. I checked my Datejust. It was 10:05 p.m. I had shit I had to handle and had to meet up with Ameer at 11:30. As I eased my eyes off the face of my watch, I saw his Cartier. Yet what really stood out was his gold band topped off by one clean princess-cut diamond, a modest one-and-three-quarter-carat diamond being rocked on his married finger.
“You got an appointment?” Ricky Santiaga asked me in a cool and even tone.
“I do,” I answered calmly.
“This is the appointment,” Vega intervened, giving Santiaga a pound and then introducing him to the five of us. Santiaga eased off the hood of the Ferrari and stood. He was at least as tall as me at six-one.
“My man Midnight says he has an appointment tonight and I believe him. So we’re gonna make this quick. Y’all ran a good game tonight, made me feel proud. Your teamwork was crazy and that’s what killed off your opponents. Y’all outsmarted them, made hood history. I like that. It made me want to meet you. So let’s get to know each other real fast. I’m gonna erase everything I heard about each of you from other people up until tonight.” He checked his watch. “You do the same, aight?” he asked us.
“Aight!” My four team members called out immediately.
“I’m gonna ask each of you three questions, any three questions that I choose. You get one chance to pass if you don’t want to answer one of the three questions. Then each of you gets to ask me one question. I’ll take one pass for myself, got it?” he said, looking each of us in the eye one by one to get his feeling across. He was talking slowly and seriously. He commanded everyone’s attention with his style and method, and now Vega was unusually silent.
“Machete, where are you from, originally?” Santiaga asked.
“La República Dominicana,” Machete responded without smiling, in his normal laid back, intentionally threatening style. Yet I could see clearly that he was in awe of Santiaga.
“Jaguar, where are you from originally?”
“Belize,” Jaguar answered.
“Panama, from Panama right?” Santiaga asked and answered.
“No doubt,” Panama confirmed, so excited you would think he had been MVP of the league already, his gold framed teeth all exposed.
“Braz, same question.” Santiaga pointed.
“Las favelas de Rio de Janeiro, Brasil,” Braz said proudly. It seemed everybody was suddenly rocking their accents and mother tongue.
“And you?” Santiaga asked me with a slight smile.
“I’ll pass,” I responded.
“No problem, that’s your one,” Santiaga said patiently. “So we’ll start with you this time. What’s the meaning of team?” Santiaga asked me.
I paused and then answered, “It’s a group of people who decide to work together to accomplish one or more goals. If one person falls or fails, every team member covers for him. We all keep pushing until we get it done right, the way we agreed in the beginning.”
Santiaga looked at Vega one time as though they could communicate without words. Then he refocused on the next player. “Machete, what are your plans for the future?” Santiaga questioned.
“I’m hoping to be alive in the future, that’s the first thing. Come to think of it, I want to be like you, so large I can sit on a Ferrari like it’s nothing and have a bunch of dudes who got my back standing around just waiting for me to give the word.” My teammates all laughed, not just at his answer but at Machete’s style. We were used to him, but Santiaga was just getting a taste.
And so the questions went around just like this. I said in the future I wanted the black team to win the tournament undefeated. They all cheered for that, overlooking that I never answered the question of how I see my future and what I wanted to become. For his third and final round, Santiaga got more serious, in his face and his interrogation.
“Machete, what is success?” he asked.
“Twenty-five million dollars!” Machete didn’t even pause to think about it.
“Panama, what would you do to get twenty-five million dollars?” Santiaga asked.
“Any fucking thing,” Panama said confidently. My teammates laughed, then confirmed.
“Braz, what is your definition of a traitor?” Santiaga asked.
“Anyone who gets in my way of what I’m try’na do,” Braz responded seriously.
“Jaguar, if you had to sacrifice one thing on your body, what would it be?” Santiaga asked.
“Damn, why me? Why ask me that?” he said, disappointed.
“Answer the question.” Santiaga didn’t give him a way out.
Jaguar paused. “My middle toe,” he said after a minute. Everyone laughed. “No, seriously,” Jaguar said, “’cause I got two on each side of the middle one and I could still walk or run without it, and nobody but my girl would know it was missing.” Everyone laughed.
“Midnight, my man, what is the meaning of life?” Santiaga asked me, turning everyone’s attention to my reaction.
“Family.” I said just that one word. No one said anything. For seconds, no one moved.
“Alright, let’s speed it up. You each get one question, ask me anything,” Santiaga ordered.
Braz asked, “Where are you from, originally?”
Santiaga looked at me and then answered, “I’ll pass.”
Machete asked, “Why are you putting money up for this league?”
Santiaga quickly said, “Because we can’t let no one else get a monopoly over our young.” Machete took one step back as though the answer was too deep for him.
Jaguar asked, “Why did you choose us players in the first place?”
Santiaga said swiftly, “Because I know what kind of men to surround myself with.”
Panama asked, “What do you do for a living?” Everybody got quiet. He knew it was a dangerous question and so did we.
“I’m a businessman, of course,” Santiaga said with a smile. “You know, an entrepreneur.”
“About that pendant that you wore the last three times I saw you, the gold pendant of the baby shoe. Why did you choose that piece?” I asked him, truly wanting to know.
“ ’Cause babies are innocent and men are guilty,” Santiaga said. Then he touched the pendant he was rocking tonight, a 24-carat gold chess piece. It was the queen piece, surrounded by a link made up of forty 24-carat gold king crowns. “Alright, time’s up. Now we know each other a little better. Great game, keep it up until the job is done.”
He gave each of us a pound. I was last. Strangely, he gripped my hand when I gave him a pound and pulled me into his embrace.
We all walked past the Ferrari to view it from another angle as we left. Purposely I didn’t delay. It was 10:25 p.m. now. I walked out with a few players and random youth who were still excited and involved in heated conversation, which included reenactments of small pieces of our game. I hopped on the train with a few and rode toward my Brooklyn apartment. I got off six stops later. Slowly I quieted my mind and blocked out any thoughts of basketball, money, or the game. Calmly I walked by and with anonymous passengers. I went up the stairs, crossed over, and went back down into the subway on the other side and hopped back on the train moving in the opposite direction.
There is a pathwa
y by her house that nobody should be on unless they live there, and an alley with only one window facing a solid brick wall. I only had a half hour to give. The results would be based strictly on chance. I wouldn’t want to attach this act to Allah without His permission. I crouched there, black sweats, black Nikes, my black fitted riding low. Warm weather made my face moist. I could smell the cement and the trash and traces of spilled Kool-Aid, which had attracted a bunch of busy bugs.
In only twelve minutes, he came creeping. It must have been his appointment with destiny. He was using the back entrance, because he was the type who was hardly ever welcomed willingly through her front door. This time it cost him. I leaped up from the ground, certain I was nothing but a silhouette in the dark of the night. He was startled, surprised, and unprepared, of course. My guess was that he was only used to fighting girls. Men like him think they’ll have a free hand forever.
I struck him one precise and powerful blow to his throat, so swift with my right closed fist that when his head tilted forward, he never saw my right leg at a 120-degree angle. My sharp kick made his head stand back up straight and his body fall backward against the wall. I disappeared faster than the mist, before his body could even slide down to the ground.
They say that a leopard grabs its prey by the throat, drags it, and then rips it apart with his teeth. When he’s done, he leaves nothing but blood and broken bones behind. As I moved swiftly yet calmly, taking forty-five seconds to walk through the back streets of BedStuy and down the stairs of the subway, I thought to myself, Bangs wanted me and her to have a secret. Now we have a secret.
Chapter 23
AMEER NICKERSON
“Where is everybody?” Ameer said, as he entered my Brooklyn apartment for the first time.
“Everybody like who?” I dodged, taking a few steps over to close Umma’s bedroom door.
“Your family,” he emphasized, like I should’ve already known.
“They’re away, because I’m going away tomorrow, remember?” I told him.
“Oh yeah, I knew you were going. I didn’t know they were going also,” he said, looking around my living room. I never corrected him on that matter.
“I hope you got some food up in here,” Ameer demanded.
“If the red team would’ve lost tonight, I would only let you get a bowl of hot water. I would put it right there in the corner on the floor,” I joked with him. “You’re lucky y’all won.”
“I still got your one hundred dollars though,” Ameer said, like he had one up.
“Yo, give that money to Sensei like I asked you to. Ask him to hold my spot.”
I pulled some food out of the refrigerator, which Umma had wrapped up and stored. I placed everything on the countertop. “Here, you heat it up. I’ll be right back.”
In my room I moved my duffel bag onto my bed and took some personal items that belonged to my wife and packed them inside. I ignored my new Armani suit hanging in my closet.
“Hey, how come this food is all crushed up?” Ameer yelled from my kitchen.
“It taste good. Just heat it on a low flame,” I hollered back.
“It smells good, but damn, it’s like baby food,” he complained.
I didn’t bother telling him the answers Umma would have given, that “Sudanese foods like eggplant and chickpeas and beans and lentils are often ground and merged with delicious spices. It’s great for your digestion and Americans would eat them in this manner if they knew better.”
“There should be some lemon chicken breasts in there. Try ’em. Heat mine too,” I told him.
“Do I look like your fucking housemaid?”
“Just do it. You’re doing yours anyway. I gotta make an important phone call,” I told him.
“You got any Wonder Bread?” he yelled back. “I only eat Wonder Bread!”
I picked up the telephone in my room and pressed the fifteen numbers it took to contact Iwa Ikeda, Akemi’s English-speaking friend Sensei had told me about. I calculated it was 12:40 in the afternoon in Tokyo, and although it was late Friday night in New York, it was already the next day, Saturday afternoon, for them.
Four rings and then an answering machine switched on. Her entire message was spoken in Japanese. All I understood was the beep.
“Peace, Ikeda-san, this is Mayonaka calling for Akemi. She left your phone number as a contact. Thank you for helping us with our communication. Please tell Akemi that I’ll call her back at nine p.m. Tokyo time on Sunday night. If she can be there at your place at that time, we can talk. Please tell her everything will be okay, so take it easy,” I said, and then hung up.
My plan was to arrive at Narita Airport in Japan at 8:00 p.m. Tokyo time, clear customs, give Iwa Ikeda a call at 9:00 p.m. and arrange to meet up with my wife on the spot. I already knew I couldn’t stand to hear her crying over the phone while I stood uselessly, seven thousand miles away. Face to face was my true desire and only strategy.
True, I knew that I had conflicting information. I had two addresses for her father, one in Ginza and the other in Roppongi. I had the telephone number for Iwa Ikeda, who was staying somewhere in Tokyo, which led me to believe that Akemi was somewhere in Tokyo. I had the name of Akemi’s birthplace, where she also said she had lived, which is called Kyoto, and the name of the high school she attended, Kyoto Girls’ HS, that was listed on the literature from her show at the Museum of Modern Art. The high school was also located in Kyoto.
As I flipped through the pieces of paper with her information on it, I was beginning to feel like one of the characters in the many mystery novels that I had read over the past couple of years.
“This shit is good!” Ameer said, scooping up his crushed vegetables with a spoon. “Word up, I thought it was gonna be nasty.”
“What did your coach say when he saw your face messed up like that?” I asked him.
“ ‘You’re late! Get on the court so they can fuck up your face some more!’ ” Ameer imitated his crazy coach.
“Nah, that ain’t right,” I said with disbelief.
“True,” he said matter-of-factly.
“We met our team owner tonight,” I shared.
“I bet he was filthy,” Ameer said, commenting on his riches.
I laughed. “He was Ferrari filthy!” I said calmly, but I guess with some passion to it.
“Oh my God!” Ameer said, truly amazed.
“I’ll tell you one thing, he didn’t seem like none of these hustlers from around here,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, I didn’t see no Ferraris parked down front of your building,” Ameer laughed.
“He was asking us some questions that no man in the street ever asked me before.”
“What, was he kicking the mathematics?” Ameer was talking his Five Percenter lingo.
“Nah, shit like, who are you? Where are you from originally? What’s more important than your life? Like that,” I told Ameer, as I thought back on it.
“Was he high?” Ameer asked.
“No, he was sober and clear. He was the type of cat that for some reason you might want to tell him a lie, but you end up telling him the truth.”
“Like you.” Ameer laughed once or twice and then turned quiet.
“So what do you want to do in the future?” I asked Ameer.
“Well, teacher …” Ameer switched his voice into a joke mode.
“Seriously.”
“Um, I want Sensei to offer me private weapons lesson without me having to ask him, like how he did with you. I want to have a girl that’s so bad, who makes me go so crazy, that I would do anything for her—”
“Would you marry her?” I asked him.
“That’s what I mean,” he said. “I want a girl who makes me lose my mind to the point that I would stand in front of a room full of my closest friends and family and say, ‘I do, I’ll do anything for you!’ ”
“You just fucking around,” I told Ameer.
“If you could get it, I could get it,” he said with a straight an
d serious stare. I didn’t take no offense to it. I thought if him looking at me try’na do the right thing made him want to do better in life, then all praise is due to Allah.
“And … I want my father to respect me,” Ameer said. “I want him to see me do good in life. And on his own, without my mom’s encouragement, I want him to say, “Son, you did good. You did even better than me.” Ameer looked like he was speaking to me honestly, while recalling something else. But with all jokes aside finally, it sounded like he was saying something true that he actually felt and meant.
Later that night after my bags were all packed, I threw Ameer a light blanket and a pillow. I dug my television out of my closet and set it on the table in the living room so he could watch it. I had to hear ten minutes of his jokes about my small television set, “an antique,” Ameer declared. Then he called me “Fred Sanford,” a name that I didn’t know. Next he accused me of treating him like “Grady,” another man I never heard of. Then he asked for a wire coat hanger. I handed him one. He threw it back at me and told me to stick it in the hole on top of the TV. “Move it to the left.” He laughed. I moved it and then he said, “Okay, stand there just like that. Don’t let it go.” He cracked up. I dropped the wire hanger and left the room and prepared myself for a makeup prayer. Ameer, still laughing, fell to the floor from the couch.
I made the prayer in my room on top of a clean towel, first standing—“Allahu Akbar,” which simply means “God is the greatest”—and then bending and eventually putting my head to the floor. Almost half an hour later, when I finally opened my eyes, I found Ameer standing still at my bedroom door watching me.
“What do you need?” I asked him.
“That’s how you pray?” he asked.
“Don’t you?” I asked.
“Never did,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Don’t know, just didn’t,” he said.
“You want to learn?” I offered.
“I do, but not now. Maybe when you get back home from Japan. It seems like if I do that, right now, if I start praying that way, something might change. Maybe after I finish, I won’t recognize myself.”
Midnight and the Meaning of Love Page 15