The Sidekick, page 32
We walked across the park together, under the trees and past the swimming pool. School was out and the pool was full. Even the basketball court next door was occupied by a bunch of kids, messing around. They looked about twelve.
“You could do some stuff would make them tell their parents about it,” I said to Marcus.
“Let’s just shoot in your driveway.” So that’s what we did.
Marcus wanted to play one-on-one, so for a couple of minutes I let him beat up on me. He wore gray jeans and an Abercrombie & Fitch maroon T-shirt, and I tried to grab his shirt, which pissed him off, so I stopped. Anyway, it was ridiculous but not in a fun way, just dumb.
“Don’t dunk on the rim like that,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It’s old, it’s already a little messed up.”
“I’m not hanging on it.”
“Just leave it alone. My dad gave it to me. You’re really not supposed to dunk on it. He gave it to me for my ninth birthday, and there were these instructions, and that was one of the instructions.”
In the end I suggested we play H-O-R-S-E. “A dollar says I win,” which he couldn’t resist. I think we both felt, like, a slight uptick of intensity. His first two shots were jump shots from the grass. I made one out of two. Then he hit a three-pointer from the road, where you have to compensate for the dip in the driveway. I missed that, too, and he got a little cocky. He tried a hook from the free-throw line, from the same strip of Celtics green that my dad painted in ten years before. Over the years the front rim had bent a couple of inches, mostly from Marcus dunking on it. Anyway, his shot hit the backboard and rolled off the lip.
After that, I just lined up free throws, calling “underhand, Rick Barry style.” He didn’t complain the first time, which set the precedent. I made the first one and he made the first one and started talking shit. Then I made eleven straight, and he missed five of them. Game over.
He didn’t want to pay up but eventually took a dollar bill out of the front pocket of his jeans, where he kept a small wad. “I should really get you to sign this,” I said. “Sign and date it—To Brian Blum, who beat me at H-O-R-S-E on this day, Sunday, June 9, 1996. So I can take it out and show people when you’re rich and famous.”
But of course I spent it a few weeks later, I just forgot. Before he got on his bike, I said, “Some of the guys are coming back this summer. Andy and Mike and Frank and Jim.” We could all get together, if he wanted to join us. Frank was talking about setting up a D&D campaign.
“Maybe, let me know.”
It was about ninety-five degrees outside and five o’clock in the afternoon, the mosquito hour. My shirt had stuck to my back, which was covered in sweat. Leaf dust or something had gotten in my eyes, which already stung with the salt and itched from hay fever. We stood in the driveway and didn’t know what to do; I think Marcus patted my shoulder. Then he rode off down the street with those live oak branches arching overhead, moving in and out of shade and carrying the black garbage bag over his shoulder like a sack.
*
The next couple of years we drifted apart. I heard about him the way everybody else did, by reading his box scores in the paper and watching him on SportsCenter. I still covered the Longhorns for the Daily Texan and even stopped by Gregory Gym from time to time. But our relationship was basically a professional relationship, and other reporters stepped in to take my place, guys from ESPN and USA Today. They knew his name, and he knew their names back. Even around campus he attracted a crowd. To get to him you had to push through hangers-on.
Almost every year there’s a Cinderella team that makes it to the Final Four. The schedule bounces their way, somebody gets hot. All you have to do is win four games. This year it was Texas, and Marcus was the guy.
He scored twenty-nine against Wisconsin in the first round, against a slow-it-down, pack-it-in Big Ten bully. You couldn’t score inside against them, so Marcus went outside and finished with five threes, including a twenty-four-footer with a minute left that put the Horns up six. Afterward, he kissed his hand and blew the kiss toward somebody on the Wisconsin bench. A reporter asked him about it in the press conference, and he said, “We just been having a little back-and-forth. All game long. I wanted to show him my appreciation.”
Against Coppin State, another Cinderella team, with the Horns down one and three seconds left, he hit a leaner from the left block with two guys hanging on him to win the game.
Billy Packer from CBS Sports asked him in the postgame show, “Can you talk me through that last play? Is that how Coach Menzes drew it up?”
Marcus leaned into the microphone and said, “Not exactly.”
He was figuring out that it isn’t hard, if you’re in control of a situation, to make people laugh. What matters isn’t being funny, it’s being in control.
Texas faced Louisville in the Sweet Sixteen, which had a week to prepare for him. Denny Crum, the Louisville head coach, started with a full-court press. Menzes let Marcus bring up the ball, because you couldn’t trap him in a corner, he was too quick. But that cut his scoring in the first half, and the rest of the Horns struggled, too. In the second half, he stopped passing. Sometimes it’s easier to attack a defense when you come from the backcourt with a head of steam. Even if they throw another defender at you, it’s a guy running toward you while you’re going the other way. He finished with thirty-six.
When the horn sounded, you could see Marcus pushing through the crowd toward the Louisville bench. Denny Crum put an arm around him and Marcus said something in his ear.
A reporter asked him about that, too. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him I always wanted to play for Louisville. They had the Final Four in Dallas when I was in fourth grade, so I got to stay up and watch. That was the year they won it. Milt Wagner, Billy Thompson, Pervis Ellison. Never nervous Pervis. They had some great players, I loved Milt. They beat Duke.”
“So how did you end up at Texas?”
“I guess Coach Crum didn’t want me.”
More laughter. You could see him becoming a public person, without giving anything personal away. Maybe that’s what it means.
By the time they faced North Carolina, Texas was Marcus’s team; they’d live or die by his sword. Even in the press conference afterward, in the layup lines beforehand, in the locker room, in the cafeteria, in the hotel, on the team bus, they deferred to him. This is the role he was comfortable in, with other people—it’s the role he played with me. In December, in Honolulu, when they met on New Year’s Eve, the Tar Heels beat Texas by six points. But Texas got their revenge and it wasn’t close.
The Final Four that year was in Indianapolis, but I didn’t have the money to fly out. Plus, I had class. So my dad and I watched the game at home—sitting on the couch where Marcus used to watch games, too. Texas faced Kentucky, the defending champs. Marcus played fine. He finished with twenty-two points, nine below his tournament average, and they lost.
One minute you’re on national TV in front of a hundred cameras, and the next day you’re back at school with all the other kids. There are five weeks left in the semester and you have homework and final exams.
Coach Menzes gave me an interview for the Daily Texan. He said the things you’d expect him to say. Marcus Hayes is a very mature young man, he really stepped up and accepted the responsibility. To be honest, he said, we’re a little ahead of schedule, I didn’t expect to make that kind of run. Next year there’s gonna be a target on our back.
38
Quinn had borrowed her housemate’s Impala; she pulled into the driveway a little after seven o’clock. They like to get these minor surgeries out of the way early. I went out to meet her in a soft rain.
“I can’t believe I’m making you do this.”
“Of course, Brian.”
“I can’t believe I’m asking you to see me like this.”
“Like what? It’s just nice to see you.”
At that hour, college students don’t have a lot of conversation in them. I don’t either. She took MoPac and we sat in commuter traffic; you forget, if you have a job like mine, that this is people’s lives.
“Did you bring some work? You may have to wait a while.”
“I’ve got my phone, it’s fine.”
“You’re not missing any classes, are you?”
“I don’t have anything until this afternoon. Don’t worry, Uncle Brian.”
We stared at the rain coming down over the highway, and on top of the cars, moving at half-speed. By the side of the road, beyond and below us, the tree canopy spread out. Sunrise was half an hour ago but the cloud cover kept lightening and you had the feeling, day breaks, everything starts again.
The clinic was a low-rise building, peach-colored, with parking directly outside. Nobody in Texas wants to walk up stairs anymore.
We went in and sat down. Most of the other people waiting were middle-aged men, alone or with a wife or girlfriend. Forty, fifty years old, otherwise healthy-looking, but their presence itself was like an admission of guilt.
When the receptionist called my name, Quinn said, “Do you want me to go with you?”
“That’s all right.”
“Sometimes it helps to have somebody else to remember what they said.”
“I think this is just prep … I’m sorry to have dragged you into this.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not usually somebody who asks people for help, at least …”
“Go, just go.”
I saw Dr. Kleinman for a couple of minutes, who explained the procedure. His manner was always the manner of somebody having a good day. You didn’t want to disappoint him by having a bad one. First we apply a numbing gel, he said. What does that mean? We put it into your penis, so you don’t feel anything. Does that hurt? What we say is, that it’s uncomfortable … that’s the official line. Afterward, if you want to disagree, you can disagree. And he laughed, not meanly, but just to show—none of this is really a big deal. Then we stick a camera in and have a look around. Sometimes it pinches a little, but I’ve done a lot of these. I’ve got a pretty steady hand.
Afterward, for a few weeks, you may notice a little blood in your urine. That’s normal. We also have to watch out for infection. If it starts to burn, if you get a fever, anything like that, we’ll put you on antibiotics.
The whole time I’m sitting there, I have a full bladder, because they tell you to tank up before the procedure. That way the camera can scuba dive through a sea of urine and not pinch against the edges of a dry sack. So everything he says goes right to the groin.
“Can I have sex?”
Dr. Kleinman looks at me. You expose yourself to these people, but whatever you say is something they’ve heard before.
“See how you feel. Maybe give it a day.”
He has other patients, my time is up. A nurse leads me into a room where I can get changed. I take off my shoes, my jeans and underpants, my shirt and undershirt, and put them in a plastic bag, which they give you. They also give you one of those light blue wraps or dressing gowns that you tie at the back. It’s like stepping into a bed sheet. Everything is loose, everything hangs free. What you feel is, totally unprotected.
There’s another waiting room outside, where the guys in gowns are already lining up. You can sit down, but it feels weird sitting down, you feel the weight of your scrotum on the vinyl chair. A TV bolted to one of the walls shows a breakfast talk-show: a man and a woman, both heavily made up, drinking coffee and making public-facing conversation. Intimate but also social. It’s like the good mood you have to be in with friends of friends.
Part of what stresses me out is the thought of leaving my wallet and phone in a plastic bag. So I tell the nurse, I’m just going to give this to someone, and walk down the end of the hall, where a door leads on to the reception area. Then I open the door and lean out. Quinn is sitting there, looking at her phone. She’s wearing a pleated skirt and green tights and lace-up leather boots with a modest heel. She got dressed up for this, she wanted to look nice. Her face is one of those pale Irish faces where a little red lipstick really stands out. Whenever she sits down she has to adjust for her hair. When I was in high school, I always thought the girls with superlong hair had some kind of damage; it’s like they needed a security blanket. But I don’t really know what girls are like.
“Quinn,” I say. “Can you take this for me?”
I don’t want to come in the room because the only thing keeping my butt from hanging out is a loose knot, which I tied blindly. So she has to stand up and come to me.
“Everything okay?”
“Fine. Nothing’s happened yet. My wallet’s in here, I don’t want to leave it lying around.”
“Should I take the whole bag or just …”
So for a minute I dig through the tangle of clothes and find wallet and phone and give them to her, while propping the door open with my shoulder. She takes them from my hand, and I say, “I haven’t even asked you yet, how you’re doing. I mean, how’s it going with …”
“Maybe now is not the time,” she says.
*
A lot of guys have had this procedure. It’s like a whole world opens up, of middle-aged manhood, and you enter the club. They don’t need to read about it and I don’t expect anyone else wants to either. So I’ll keep this short. Dr. Kleinman did to me what he said he was going to do—he shoved a handful of numbing gel up my dick and waited a minute for it to take effect. Then snaked a camera down the opening; don’t ask me how, I wasn’t looking. I lay on my back on the blue roll of paper and watched somebody who was good at his job controlling the controls.
But this is what I thought about. When I was a kid, the first home computer we owned was an Apple IIe, which Betsy got when she started junior high. It came with a monitor and you could attach a joystick to it and play a few limited games. One of those games was Tharolian Tunnels. The premise was, you had to steer a kind of underground spaceship as it descended through various interconnected caverns into the heart of the world. Sometimes the caverns fed into each other and you could maneuver the ship so it didn’t touch any of the walls; but occasionally the opening was too narrow and you had to blast your way through, using Space Invader-style bombs. If the ship hit the walls or got too near to one of the explosions, you lost a life but kept going until all your lives ran out.
Anyway, this is the game that Dr. Kleinman was playing in my urinary tract. He dived into the urethra and passed through the prostate into the bladder, trying as much as possible not to touch the sides, while at the same time looking around to see what he could see. There were a few explosions, nudges and bumps against those delicate internal skins not designed for contact, but mostly he did fine. Afterward he said, “It all looks good. Your prostate is impressively large, but I didn’t see anything to worry me.”
The whole conversation lasted about five minutes.
“So why did I piss blood?”
“Who knows. Maybe a kidney stone, maybe a UTI that cleared up before we tested it.”
“Does that mean I’m in the clear?”
But he wanted to have another look at my balls before signing off. Come back in a couple of months, he said. We’ll see if that tumor is doing anything it shouldn’t be doing.
The nurse wouldn’t let me leave until I passed water. So I stood in the bathroom and held this thing in my hands and tried to ease the pressure hanging between my legs. Counting out the seconds, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three, etc. like I was waiting to rush the quarterback in some pickup game of flag football. A trickle came out and turned into a stream. It was like pissing through someone else’s dick, I couldn’t feel a thing. Except a thin wire of pain, like a memory of something that used to be there.
When I came out, the nurse asked me, “Any blood?”
“I don’t think so.”
Then I could go. The plastic bag was in the changing room and I put on my clothes and went to see Quinn.
“Well?” she said, standing up.
“They didn’t find anything.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means good news. They were looking for cancer.”
“That’s great, Brian …” She had a backpack over one shoulder but tried to put her arm around me.
“I’m sorry I dragged you out here for nothing.”
“What are you talking about. I had fun.”
Her hair was in my face and one of us had to release first. I didn’t want to make her feel like I was clinging on. Keep it light. We stepped outside and I said, “Do you want to get breakfast somewhere?”
“Sure, okay.”
It was ten o’clock in the morning, the rain had stopped, and which happens in Austin in the winter, when you tear the cloud away, underneath it like a layer of old wallpaper is a bright spring sky. By the afternoon it would be seventy degrees; already I could smell the sweat in my armpits as I sat in the car, and opened the window, and let the air from Westlake Hills wash over me.
“You had me worried there for a while,” she said.
“Well, I have to come back for a follow-up. But so far so good.”
There’s an IHOP just on the other side of MoPac and that’s where we went. In my NBA beat-reporter days I used to eat at places like this all the time. You sit in one of the booths and watch the cars come into the parking lot and the traffic on the highway beyond.
“I shouldn’t have made you do this,” I said, when the waitress took our orders. “It was selfish of me. I could have driven, I just had a bad experience the last time, when they took my blood. For some reason I had this dumb idea that if you saw me like this it might make you feel closer to me.”
“I feel close to you.”
“But as soon as we got there I realized, this is not how I want you to see me.”
“Like what? Women are used to this stuff, we deal with it all the time.”
“You’re a good kid,” I said.
