The Sidekick, page 20
“Come on,” he said. “These are my clean jeans.”
“You asked for it.”
This kind of conversation was going on all around me, and Shelley kept laughing and trying to join in, and not quite getting the timing right. I felt bad for her. I felt like, you don’t have to make these people like you.
At one point, a couple of guys came up to talk to us because they knew Briana. Or they knew her brother, who worked at the bar. They looked like typical UT students, a little overweight, but also like they worked out. The bigger guy was maybe six three. He wore jeans and a black leather belt and a T-shirt that said, “ASK ME ABOUT MY WOLF.” The other guy was shorter and had a goatee. He said, “Hello ladies, you having a good night?” even though half the people at the table were guys.
Briana said, “Fuck off, Mason.”
And the guy in the wolf shirt said, “You boys don’t look twenty-one to me.”
What I remember is, Breon and Marcus didn’t say anything, or even look at anybody, and it was like something was going on at a different tone or frequency than I could hear.
“Somebody gonna answer me?”
“Don’t be a dick, Josh.”
Marcus said, “I’m just having a Coke and something to eat.”
And Josh said, “I’m just playing with you. Oh my god, you should see your faces.” And then, in a kind of TV voice, like, For all you kids out there, he said, “Have fun, kids,” and they left us alone.
“They’re such assholes,” Briana said.
“How do you know those guys?”
“I don’t really. They’re my brother’s … I don’t even know if he would call them friends. It seems like if you’re a guy there are just these guys you know. Mason keeps asking me out. It’s kind of gross.”
“Oh my god, you like him.” This is the kind of dumb conversation I was listening to.
Shelley kept trying to talk to Marcus about Duke. She said, we should totally go there together. Marcus didn’t say much. I don’t really know why he was there. He kept his jacket on, even inside. He used to chew the collar a little, which is one of the things my mother tried to get him to stop. She didn’t always know what to do with Marcus, or say to him, they were kind of awkward together in the house, in a polite way, but when he chewed his collar, she knew what to say. She said, “Don’t chew.” So when I looked at his jacket I saw this little damp patch on the collar.
At one point, when he got up to go to the bathroom, and everybody had to get out to let him out, I said to Shelley, “Can I talk to you?”
“What about?”
“I just want to talk.”
“Okay,” and she looked at me.
“It’s too loud in here. Let’s go outside.”
She made a face, like, whatever, but she went. I felt like, okay, just keep your nerve, it’s going to be okay, as we walked outside. It had been raining softly while we were in the bar, and the wet roads made the traffic sound like, shush, but it wasn’t raining now.
“What did you want to say?”
I felt like, this is the way I can talk to you, when you sound like this. Not that she sounded happy or anything to be standing outside in the parking lot with me, but just, her tone of voice was the tone of somebody who was actually saying what was on her mind, which was, why am I out here. Her face with the makeup on made me feel sorry for her, because it didn’t look good under the streetlight, it looked like … just, actual chemicals that you put on your face, but in a way that also made me really like her, because she was trying to be something she didn’t have to be … Maybe that’s what you always feel about somebody you have a crush on, who isn’t responding the way you want her to respond. But I was seventeen years old. I didn’t know any of this. I hadn’t tried any of this before, so I didn’t know how it worked.
“What did you want to say?” she said again. “I’m getting cold.”
“It’s not very cold out.”
“Well, I’m cold, I mean …” She had left her coat in the bar and was standing outside in just her cheerleading uniform.
“I can put my arm around you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“If you’re cold.”
“I’m fine. Just tell me why I’m standing out here in the parking lot …”
“Don’t talk to Marcus about Duke, it stresses him out.”
It’s the only thing I could think of to say.
“Why does it stress him out?”
“Because they’re not recruiting him. He can’t just … go wherever he wants to go. He needs a scholarship.”
“Okay. I mean, whatever.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, why are you telling me this?”
“Because I don’t want you to … I mean, get your hopes up or …”
“I mean, like, why’d you care?”
And I tried to kiss her.
“Please,” she said, and turned her face away.
We stood like that for, I don’t know, I didn’t check my watch. Eventually she said, “Can we talk about this later?”
“What?”
“What just happened.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Okay, but can we talk about it later?”
“Why?”
“Because right now … I just want to have a good time tonight. Is that okay? Just tonight. You won a big game, and we’re out … and I just want to have a good time.”
“I don’t think you’re having a good time.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean, it just feels like you’re pretending.”
“All right, Brian. I’m trying to be nice about this … but right now. Forget about it. You’re right. Let’s all go in and pretend to have a good time.”
“I don’t want to go back in there.”
And she said, more gently, “It’s fine. I won’t say anything.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re a normal boy, and I’m a normal girl, and everybody’s normal. Now let’s go inside. I’m getting cold.”
“Just leave me alone for a minute.”
But she didn’t leave me. “Well, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Go home.”
“You don’t have a car.”
“There are taxis, there are buses.”
“Come on, Brian. Just come inside. Then we can all go home together.”
“When?”
“I don’t know when. When people want to go home.”
“I don’t really want to be around you right now. With all those people.”
“Why not?”
“When you’re like that.”
“Fuck you, too,” she said, and went inside. And I actually started walking home by the side of the wet road, with the cars going past. I wanted to feel all the things you feel when you’re seventeen years old and some girl just turned you down. Or even if I didn’t want to, that’s what I spent the whole time thinking about, which just increased those feelings. The sidewalk is intermittent, you have to cross a lot of parking lots, and then actually a bus came by, which I got on, and which took me into campus. From there I could walk home. I figured, probably by the time I get back, Marcus will be back. It was eleven o’clock at night when I reached the front door. The lights were out, except for the light in the kitchen that Mom always left on. For a second, I thought, maybe I should check his room, but I was tired and miserable and just went to bed.
24
Betsy asked me for Marcus’s cell phone number or email address, because she wanted to thank him for the car. I said, I don’t have those things. She said, How do you get in touch with him? And I told her, I don’t really get in touch. There are media events, to which I’m sometimes invited. This shouldn’t surprise you, I said, when she looked at me funny … I’m not surprised. You don’t have to be angry with me. I feel like, for some reason it annoys you that he bought me a car … Even after I moved out of the house, we still got in these arguments. Eventually I said, If you want to reach out you can contact Amy Freitag, who is professional and nice.
After a while I realized they were emailing several times a week, and sometimes even speaking on the phone. Amy had this ability, which isn’t always standard in pretty women, to make women like her. She was especially good at showing interest in their kids, and at some point, Betsy must have said, my son is just starting third grade at a new school and having a hard time. She said the same thing to me.
School isn’t supposed to be fun, I told her. It’s something you put up with.
According to Betsy, he was being bullied. I don’t know what counts as bullying these days, almost any kind of meanness. In which case, my whole childhood was one long bully-session. Look at the man it made me. She said, he cries when he goes to school, which he never used to do—he was her smiling happy life-is-good little man. Anyway, Betsy started driving him in the convertible, letting him sit in front, so when they pulled up the other kids could see him in this beautiful red sports car. And if anyone asks where we got it, she told him, just say Marcus Hayes is an old friend of your mom’s, and he gave it to us.
But the kids didn’t believe him. They thought it was one of those lies a weird kid tells, to make himself look less weird, even though it’s actually one of the reasons he’s weird.
So Amy arranged for Marcus to visit his class. Then she let me know about it, which is how I found out. Because she thought I might want to put it in the book.
*
Betsy asked me to meet them at the school. There wasn’t room in the Mazda. So I walked instead, the same way I walked when I was ten—cutting through Hancock Park past the public golf course.
The school itself is one of those beautiful brick buildings, pale midcentury pink, with columns of tall windows, which you never notice or think about when you’re a kid, because you’re just a dumb kid. It’s just a school. Mr. Rincon, the principal, decided there should be an assembly first, so the whole student body got to see Marcus Hayes, and then he would make an appearance in Al’s third-grade class. His teacher was a woman named Mrs. Wallace. Betsy was very pro this teacher. Among other things, she once said, “I’m not sure his friendship with Noah is actually helping him settle in.” Noah was becoming a kid toward whom Betsy harbored irrational feelings.
I showed up early and waited around for the red convertible. Betsy had work, so she handed over Albert without leaving the car. I had to get a pass from the office, so said goodbye to him in the hall, where he disappeared in the sea of other kids. Then the bell rang (those bells! still ringing) and I made my way to the auditorium.
The last time I walked in that room was twenty-five years ago, but still it had this strong charge for me. Every day I used to sit on a plastic folding chair, which afterward we had to stack against the wall. When we first moved to Austin I was eight, just a fat unhappy kid, and going to school was like entering an indoor swimming pool, where everything echoes and drips, the tiles are slippery underfoot, and because of all the sound-distortions, your head feels like … where am I. And to some extent these feelings returned. The auditorium was really just the school gym, with dark leathery wooden floors and brick walls, and those pull-out baskets attached to the walls, which most of the time lie flat against the brickwork.
On one end, a temporary podium had been set up. The windows behind it must have faced west, because at nine in the morning all they let in was secondhand light … a little greenish from the live oak trees outside. For PE class we played dodgeball in that gym. I was one of those kids who if kids are mean pretends like he hurt himself, or somebody pushed him, and sits down and bawls until the teacher comes over. And I knew they didn’t have much sympathy. But I also knew they have to come over if you cry and ask what’s wrong, are you okay. It was a deal I was willing to make. It’s hard to believe, sometimes, that these things actually happened, and you were stuck in that time and that self the same way you are right now … even though you eventually escape.
But I misremembered about the folding chairs, because the kids when they filed into the auditorium, by grade and class, actually sat on the wooden floor, cross-legged, and the chairs were for parents and teachers and other grown-ups, like me.
Radko, Marcus’s bodyguard, grabbed one of them and carried it to the stage. Marcus sat down; that’s when I realized he was there. Even in the dim light he kept his Oakleys on. I saw him say something quietly to one of the teachers, who walked away.
Then Mr. Rincon stepped onto the podium and tested the mic. He wore a bow tie and a denim shirt, like your friendly neighborhood authority figure, but also looked like someone who had gone through recent health issues—pale and stubble-headed. “This is a very special day for the Roadrunners” (that was the school mascot), “because we’ve got a very special guest …”
Meanwhile, I looked for Albert’s head. He had brown normal hair, he was kind of normal height. Sometimes I thought I found him, and then the kid would turn around and say something, and it wasn’t him. For some reason I had a feeling of panic growing inside me. Like a dumbo, I hadn’t taken off my coat before sitting down, because it was cold outside. But now with all the heat of childish bodies the auditorium started to warm up. You have to get out of here, that was the feeling.
After the principal finished, Marcus took off his jacket. He said, “Let me get out of all this fancy Dan … attire. Make me feel old.”
He stepped off the stage, with the jacket in hand, and then dropped it on one of the kids in the front row. Everybody laughed. Marcus said, “Where’s he gone?” and picked up the jacket and handed it to Amy Freitag, who waited in the wings. “I’m sorry,” he said to the kid. He had done all these things many times before.
Someone passed him a basketball, and then Radko stood up and reached one of the baskets stanchioned against the brick wall—he pulled at the net, and the hoop swung around.
Marcus said, “I just need a volunteer.”
A hundred hands shot in the air, and Marcus looked blankly at the crowd through his dark sunglasses. Amy came over and whispered in his ear, and Marcus called out, “Where’s my old friend … Albert Blum. Come on, Al,” and a kid rose out of the line (there he was) and picked his way through the other kids to the front.
“Just stand under the basket and pass me the ball.”
Albert didn’t look happy or nervous, he looked like a kid who was doing what somebody told him to do.
“Y’all think I’m gonna miss?” Marcus asked, and took off his sunglasses (which he gave to Amy, too) and pulled out the hems of his shirt. “You know what the magic word is, to get what you want?”
A few kids said, “Please.”
“Work. Hard work. Everybody here can do this if they put the work in.”
And he turned to shoot. For a second I thought he might miss. My hands were actually sweating at the thought of … making a fool of yourself in front of all those kids, but the ball dropped in and the rim made a kind of clank, from the tug of the net, as it shifted against the wall. Al caught the ball and passed it back to Marcus, who shot again. Another swish. Then another. And another—I started counting and then stopped. He missed one in the middle, which Al had to chase down, but it didn’t matter. Everybody in the room was completely silent, three hundred kids watching him shoot.
Afterward, a few of the kids stayed behind to fold up the stacking chairs, including Al. I wanted to say something to him, but he was in school mode. It was like looking at somebody with his face two inches under the water. He just wanted to stack the chairs. You forget, at that age, life is a series of small dumb tasks. But his head also seemed to me like some kind of crucible, inside of which chemical reactions were taking place at great heat. I waited for him to finish, then we walked together to Mrs. Wallace’s room, where I sat at the back at one of those tiny desk-chair combinations. We could hear Marcus talking to somebody in the hall, probably Mr. Rincon, and then there was a knock on the glass window of the door, and Marcus and Amy came in.
He had to stoop in the doorway, and his presence in the third-grade classroom was … like one of those pictures where everything is normal except for one thing, like a floating hat or an upside-down moon, which makes the rest ridiculous. There were kids’ hand-paintings on the wall, and a map of the United States, and a potted palm tree, and for some reason a big piñata hanging from the ceiling, shaped like a dinosaur, and Marcus Hayes leaning against the edge of the teacher’s desk.
Albert sat next to Noah, in the front row.
Marcus said the stuff he always says, about hard work, and having fun, and listening to people who got something to teach you. It’s not all about winning, it’s about getting better. I missed a lot of shots, I lost a lot of games. Find something you’re good at, it doesn’t have to be basketball. Find something you love to do. It keeps you out of trouble. It kept me out of trouble.
“Can you still dunk?” a kid called out.
“I can still dunk. How high is this ceiling, Mrs. Wallace? Do you think I can hit my head on it?”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Come on, come on …” But he reached up and lightly touched the paneling.
“How many kids do you have?”
“I don’t have any kids,” he said.
“Are you married?”
“I have a beautiful wife.”
“Is that lady your wife?” They meant Amy Freitag, who stood by the window next to the potted palm, and suddenly laughed.
“She’s my assistant,” Marcus said.
“Don’t you want kids?”
“Maybe when my career is over. Right now my focus is, just playing basketball again.”
“Couldn’t your wife look after them?”
“All right,” Mrs. Wallace said. “That’s enough of that.”
“How come you always wear sunglasses? Something wrong with your eyes?”
“All right,” Mrs. Wallace said again.
“It’s fine, I don’t mind.” And he unleaned himself from the desk and bent down to one of the kids in the first row, who asked the question.
