The Sidekick, page 15
“I told you,” he said again. But I think the whole thing was moderately upsetting to him. It’s like, I’m living with white people, and this is what they do to me.
Betsy maybe got the point because she stopped laughing, even if she was only laughing out of embarrassment. She did the girl thing where girls make it up to you by stroking your ego. “I’m just kidding,” she said. “It actually looks okay. I was just messing with you. It looks fine, it looks good … You look like one of those models where they blow wind in your hair, just to get that look. It just takes a little getting used to.”
Even when she was apologizing there was this little sting of teasing or flirtation. But it didn’t matter because she was about to drive to Ohio with my dad, so maybe she thought, this is just something stupid and fun, and I can say what I want because tomorrow I’m going away.
At least when she left we didn’t have to share a room. Marcus started sleeping in Betsy’s bed. I mean, we changed the sheets, but it was still like her room, with all her shit on the walls, so when you go to sleep there and wake up in the morning, you can’t help being aware of her intimate absence. The other thing he did was bike over to East Austin by his old apartment, and go to the barber he went to when he was living with his mother. This time he asked for cornrows, which is the way he always wore his hair afterward.
18
If you spend any time covering Marcus Hayes, what that really means is, you end up hanging out or communicating with Amy Freitag.
It doesn’t hurt that she’s five ten in stocking feet and sat on the bench for four years at Tennessee, under Pat Summitt—which means she can probably beat you at one-on-one … that she wears red-framed librarian-style glasses, cuts her blonde hair short, complains openly about her skin if she has a pimple, talks about gas, makes ugly faces as if she doesn’t care what she looks like, looks like Jamie Lee Curtis, like one of those fun-friendly people who nevertheless you don’t want to cross or disappoint. Most of the beat writers I know have a crush on her, but she’s also someone who remembers their wives and kids. The truth is, you never get near her, and the people she respects are the ones who understand this.
When she first met Marcus, she was a twenty-three-year-old intern at CAA, which is where Sheldon Fitch worked. Fresh out of college, living in New York, having a good time. Then Sheldon broke out on his own, and Marcus cherry-picked Amy because of all the people at CAA he had to deal with, she was the one he chose to deal with. It meant moving to Boston and spending half the year on the road. At that point her life became essentially suspended. She’s thirty-four now and nothing has really changed in the past ten years, apart from the fact, I guess, that she has salted away a substantial amount of money that she doesn’t have time to spend.
Anyway, Amy called. She said Marcus wanted to see me, and I should come by the house. The security guy would let me through, I just had to email her my license plate number. But don’t be late—there’s a window of opportunity, she said.
So that afternoon I drove out to Lake Austin. Marcus lived on Water’s Edge Drive, where every property has its own inlet. Bushes flowered against a high stone wall; there was an electric gate and a red brick circular drive behind the gate, with a palm tree in the middle and a kid sitting in the shade of the palm tree and playing with a dog.
“Kind of hot to be sitting out here,” I said to the kid, after parking. The bricks had been baking all day.
“Amy told me to play with him.”
Maybe he was eight years old, pale-dirty-faced, sweaty-haired. He had a tennis ball and was throwing it against the tree for the dog to chase.
“What’s going on in the house?”
“I don’t know.” Then he said, “Rocco was annoying everybody.”
J. P. opened the door when I rang. Her hair was wet, like shower-wet, and she wore Lycra leggings and a Sopranos T-shirt, which I guess she worked out in, because her face was red enough you could see the soft dark hairs against her skin.
“Is Marcus around? Amy said this was a good time.”
“Excuse me, do I know you?”
Her accent was low-key Southern, but with money behind it.
“I’m sorry, I should have said. I’m Brian Blum. We’ve met before. I’m writing a book about Marcus.”
“You must have mistook me for J. P. I’m her sister.” And she called out to the kid: “I want you to come inside now, you need to cool off.” But the kid didn’t come.
“He’s pissed at me because he let the dog eat my bran muffin,” she told me confidentially. “So I said, take the dog outside, if you can’t control him, and he said, it’s not my dog. But you’re looking after him, you’re responsible, so he went outside and now he won’t come back in. And I’m still hungry.”
She laughed. Her son could hear her, she had an audible voice, but it didn’t make any difference.
“Who did you think I was?” I said, when she let me in.
The entrance hall had bright marble floors and a double-height ceiling, with weird tubes hanging down over your head, like wind chimes or something, but like light sabers—they were LEDs. If you want to spend money there’s nothing to stop you, you can spend money. And, actually, the whole time we were talking there were noises of construction going on, drilling and banging, outside or inside it was hard to tell. The house was big enough even distant sounds could be internal.
“What?” she said.
“When you opened the door, you looked at me like … you expected somebody else.”
“I thought you were the lawyer.”
She’d only spoken to him over the phone. Bernadette, that’s her name, had split up with her husband and wanted to move to Austin, where her sister had just bought a big house. She was the kind of person who talks openly in front of strangers about the intimate practical details of her life. From a legal point of view, she said to Jerry de Souza, who was also hanging around, one of the things she had going for her is that Eric sometimes beat her up.
“I told him, you get your lawyers and I’ll go get Marcus’s lawyers, and we’ll see who wins. Because Marcus’s lawyers are going to be better than yours.”
But when J. P. walked in she went quiet. Bernadette was younger by a few years, which you could see when they stood next to each other. Anyway, she was sweating, and J. P. always looked very put together. Skirt and jacket, even in the house.
“Hello, Brian,” she said. You could feel the temperature change.
Jerry was making a pitcher of virgin mojitos, juicing limes, crushing mint leaves, pouring syrup. Shaking it all up with ice. He knew his way around the kitchen. Amy Freitag appeared. She asked Bernadette, “Is Rocco part of the solution or part of the problem? I don’t want Connor to feel like he’s stuck out there,” and Bernadette said, “He doesn’t listen to me anyway.”
Amy also gave me a hug. She said, “Come with me.”
Her office was a closet off the utility room, which she showed me with a certain weird pride. I’ve seen other people in her position try to emphasize their level of authority.
“What does Marcus think about living with his sister-in-law?”
“He likes having kids in the house.”
She wore a black jumpsuit, like grown-up OshKosh, and high-heeled sandals, and a necklace that sort of flung itself from side to side. Sometimes when she was thinking she put it in her mouth. She said, “Let me just … let me just,” and I waited for her to write an email. Then she looked up at me, stopped, breathed, and put her hands to her head. “There was something I wanted to tell you,” she said. “I said to myself, when you see Brian, tell him …” And she made her eyes big, like, who knows. “We’re just so excited that you’re going to write this book. It’s going to be a great book. You’re the only one who could write it.”
“I haven’t actually talked to Marcus yet.”
“Of course,” she said, but we didn’t go anywhere. Her office desk was covered in Post-it notes and printouts. Rocco had a basket in the corner of the closet, a kind of tweed cushion, so the whole room smelled of dog. “Are you comfortable with the story?” she asked. “I mean, do you have an angle on it? Do you know what you want to write?”
“Sure.”
“I fought hard for you, you know,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“There was a discussion. Everybody was there, everybody who cares about Marcus. Joe and Sheldon and Ted Myers and J. P. It was a legacy conversation and the question came up, who should write this book, and I said, everybody here in this room knows, there’s only one person who can write this book.”
“Thank you.”
“So if anything goes wrong, I said, blame me.”
She stood up and we proceeded to the next stage of business. “All right, okay. You didn’t come here to talk to me. Marcus is just working out, but I’m sure you don’t mind seeing him sweat.”
And I said, “So do you live here, too?”
“Please. I’ve got the teensiest little duplex in Travis Heights; we’re talking like six hundred square feet. But it’s got its own front door, it’s got a little porch where I can sit out and get chewed every evening. It’s got somewhere for the dog to shit. I’m happy.”
I followed her down the corridor and through a glass atrium into another part of the house, where the air-conditioning seemed less all-pervasive. The vibe was more seventies original, linoleum floor tiles, wood-paneled walls.
“We call this the Swedish sauna,” she said. “Marcus likes it hot.”
There was another kitchen, and then a gym at the back with a view of the water—the old dining room. Marcus lay resting on the bench; Brad Weldt stood over the bar. For years he worked as a trainer for the Celtics, and after Marcus retired set up a fitness consultancy and wrote a book that gets described on his website as a best-selling motivational book. But when Marcus came back, as a personal favor, Brad resumed his old role.
He lifted and lowered the bar and Marcus took the strain of the weight.
A stain of sweat had spread across his shirt. Part of what looks strange about watching Marcus lift is the length of his arms—the bar just keeps going up. He was doing two-twenty-five, with a high rep count and by the end his chest heaved like something inside was trying to get out of the cage. Through clenched teeth he said, “Don’t let me cheat,” and Brad touched a finger underneath his left elbow, just to give him a boost. Marcus said, “I got this, I got this,” but he was hard to understand. The level of effort was extreme. Brad helped him guide the bar back onto the rest and Marcus lay with his head back on the bench and his chest still sucking in air.
Amy waited, then she said, “Brian Blum is here.”
But Marcus was in non-response mode. Brad had a towel in his belt and took it out to give Marcus, who wiped his hands and then his forehead, and threw it back, with his head still flat on the bench. He looked different than he looked in Los Angeles. His retirement fat was gone. Loose skin lay on his muscles; his armpit hair had gray curls in it. When he sat up, he had to duck his head under the bar, which he did very suddenly, and took a long pull of water from the plastic bottle on the floor.
He said to Brad, “I want to get twenty-five.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“What was that? Twenty-three?”
“Twenty-three.”
“I needed help on my left side. My left side needs to get stronger.”
Amy said, “I’m just going to leave you boys …”
“Brian doesn’t mind watching,” Marcus said. “He can wait.”
Workout guys are nerds, they’re like the grammar-buffs of sports, everything has to be done a certain way. So for an hour I watched him carefully put himself through pain, and like a weird kind of pain, where he had to strain to make it happen. But he was also polishing a beautiful thing. With every rep, another set of muscles stood out distinctly.
At some point, Connor showed up. He just walked in and stood there; Marcus saw him in the wall mirror and looked at him like you look at a deer in the garden. Marcus called out, “Amy, Amy,” and I guess there was an intercom somewhere, because a minute later Amy appeared.
“I said I don’t want to have to deal with him, that was the deal.”
“Marcus, he’s just a kid, he’s not doing anything.”
She put her hand on his hair.
“Get him out. This is grown-up time,” and Brad stepped in.
“Connor,” he said. “Not now.” Then, to Marcus: “I promised to show him how to use the weights.”
“Why are we still talking about this?” Marcus said, and Amy took the kid away.
The room stank, even with the windows open. It was mostly Marcus’s stink, and it was mostly Marcus’s presence that filled the room. Eventually he finished and lay back with a towel over his face. Brad cleaned up around him. By this point in his life he must have been worth like two, three million dollars, but still he wiped down the benches and put the weights away. “How you doing?” he said to me. I never had any problem with Brad Weldt.
“Well, I moved back home. I’m living with my sister now. What about you?”
“I’ve got an apartment downtown. But it’s just somewhere to sleep. Somewhere to put my stuff. I don’t have much stuff.”
Marcus didn’t move, and eventually Brad said, “I’ll leave you guys alone.”
When he was gone, Marcus said, “Everybody acts like I don’t know what goes on in this house. I know.” He still lay on the bench, slack, post-exertion, but he pulled the towel off his face and looked at me. “I don’t always care but I know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Brad and Bernadette.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why you think she moved to Austin? J. P. is like, what’s it got to do with us. If it makes her happy. But when you step in someone’s dogshit, then it’s your dogshit, too. Now it’s like, Marcus, can I talk to your lawyer.”
“Joe Hahn.”
“Joe Hahn doesn’t … This is Pee Wee League bullshit for Joe Hahn. He doesn’t play Pee Wee League.” He took another drink of water. “What do you want to do now? I can give you half an hour.” When he stood up, long-armed, bowlegged, bone-tired, he stretched his neck, once each way, and I could hear it crack. “You want to shoot hoops?”
They were building a court next to the boathouse. That’s what the construction noise was; you could see exposed foundations, cinder blocks, a cement mixer, the usual mess, when we stepped out into the backyard. The light watery breeze hit me in the face, but the temperature was still high nineties—late September afternoon, accumulated heat. A Spalding Pro Slam portable hoop stood on the helipad, just a circle of concrete in the middle of the lawn, which stretched out on an artificial spit of land into the lake. If you threw up a brick, it might get wet. A ball lay in the grass.
I reminded him that the last time we played, I beat him at H-O-R-S-E.
“You never beat me at H-O-R-S-E,” he said.
“How about a rematch?”
But then he passed me the ball and slapped the ground with his hands. “Come on, let’s see what you can do.”
It used to be a recognizable form of human interaction when we played one-on-one. But not anymore. Basketball is one of those professions that works like Dungeons & Dragons. You start out at first level and can’t do anything but eventually become ten or twenty or thirty times more powerful. Or in my case, stick at first level. So it’s hard not to wonder if you play against Marcus Hayes: what has happened to both of you where this is now the difference. I mean, like, what have you done with your life?
If I tried to shoot, he put up a hand and blocked it. Even in slow motion, he could ease past me and dunk—like that scene in The Matrix where they operate on different frame rates, and Neo moving at ordinary speed is calmly two steps ahead of everybody else. Marcus had been lifting weights for several hours and didn’t have any energy but so what. The number of calories he needed to beat me you could get from a carrot. The whole thing lasted a minute; it was totally pointless.
“What do you think of Mmeremikwu?” I said, after we gave up.
He was shooting around now, little lazy set shots, leaving his hand out on the follow-through, working on form; and passing me the ball, too, so I could shoot. Like we used to do in high school, during zero hour, in the empty gym. It was almost seven and the sun had started to drop behind the trees across the water—casting long shadows toward the hoop.
“He’s a big piece of the puzzle. He’s one of the reasons I signed up to this team. The main reason.”
“Big piece of the puzzle” was Marcus’s set phrase—I’d read it in a piece by Fred Rotha.
“We just have to find out where to put him,” he said. That was in Fred’s piece, too. And Fred commented like, I’m not sure that’s how Mmeremikwu sees it.
“Have you been in contact?”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you like, worked out at all?”
“It’s a long season, we got time.”
But then for some reason he started talking about Isaac Brown. “Do you remember Isaac Brown?” he said.
“Sure. I ran into him a few years ago, at Shipe. He works for Terminix now. He was playing in one of those green Terminix polos and kicking everybody’s ass.”
Marcus loved that. “Terminix. I should get in touch, I need to reach out. Maybe I just show up some day. Remember how I did him, junior year. Everybody’s like, watch out for Isaac Brown, he’s D-1 material.”
And I just kept feeding him the ball, letting him talk. It all happened twenty years ago. The kid we were talking about never made the big time, dropped out of Ole Miss, came home, and started working for a pest removal company. I don’t want to make out like this is a sob story, maybe he has a great life. Those Terminix guys earn decent money, thirty, forty thousand dollars a year. It’s all good. But Marcus Hayes was Marcus Hayes; if he wanted to move to Austin, he could buy a ten-million-dollar house on Mount Bonnell Shores, he had four championship rings. So what pleasure should it give him that when he was in high school he hounded Isaac Brown off varsity. But it gave him pleasure.
