The Sidekick, page 6
For some reason the pastor’s corny phrase, newness of life, kept running through my head, like sheep jumping fences as I tried to sleep. New cars, new car smells … and then I woke up, because my phone had just pinged, and rolled over in bed to check it.
The screen said, “Let’s go, Baby. I’m outside.” And I looked out the window and saw a black Lexus sedan with the lights on hovering in the road.
8
Marcus kept bugging Coach Caukwell about playing varsity. “Coach, Coach,” he’d say at the shootaround before practice. “When you gonna bring me up?”
“Bring you up?”
“Promote me.”
“Promote you?”
“You know what I mean. Make varsity.”
“Just keep on doing what you’re doing,” Caukwell told him. “But better.”
My dad still dropped me off before school to meet Marcus in the gym. I told him, in games and scrimmages, you jump two feet in the air every time you shoot, but that’s not how you practice. In practice you just kind of hop a little, it’s a totally different motion. He didn’t like to take advice, especially from me, but the other thing about Marcus was, he also listened, he thought about what you said in his own time and if he agreed with you started making corrections. So now even in warm-ups he jumped as high as he could and that meant for at least two or three months his shooting got worse. I used to beat him at H-O-R-S-E all the time, it drove him crazy.
Sometimes we played pickup on the weekends, too. Marcus lived just south of MLK Boulevard, at the edge of the Burleson district, on East 17th Street—a few blocks from Oakwood Cemetery. I’m talking about old Austin, before gentrification, when the Eastside was still the black part of town. He lived with his mom in one of those manila-brick apartment buildings, on the corner of Chestnut Avenue.
You could bike from his house to mine in about fifteen minutes. There’s a public court in Shipe Park, next to the creek, but Marcus never wanted to play there. A lot of neighborhood kids went to Shipe, along with a few old-timers, guys who wanted to swim afterward; nobody good. So he made me bike over to Eastwoods Park, near campus, another ten minutes away. Mostly because that’s where Isaac Brown and some of the varsity guys liked to play.
Waller Creek runs through Eastwoods, too, but it’s greener and shadier, more treed in. It’s close enough to student dorms that frat-boy types sometimes walk over on Saturday afternoons. Not real basketball players but big guys, who played high school football and still lift weights five times a week. On a sunny weekend, you might have ten, fifteen bodies hanging around on the sidelines, watching. It wasn’t easy to get in a game, you had to know who to talk to, you had to wait your turn. The varsity players tended to stick together. They were good enough, once they got on, to hold court for most of the afternoon. That’s the way it worked—winner stays.
So when we got there, we dumped our bikes spinning in the grass, and Marcus moved along the sideline, asking, “Who got next? Can we run with you?” Sometimes when they saw me they said no, a fat pale-faced kid wearing cargo shorts and a “Weird Al” Yankovic T-shirt … Sometimes only Marcus got to play. He didn’t look like much either, just a short skinny black dude, real young-looking, with a flattop. But anyway, you had to wait.
Live oak trees branched out over the side of the court. The grass was patchy in the shade, there were those public park garbage cans next to the benches, overflowing, attracting bees and flies. A few cars drove by but other than that the only sounds were the sounds of squeaky sneakers and hard rims, a ball banging on concrete. After lunch could turn into early evening without anybody noticing.
The first time we played the guy who had next was this skinny grad-school type in jean shorts, who had a dick-ish voice. A Quentin Tarantino type of white guy—Reservoir Dogs had just come out. Marcus said to him, “Can we run with you?” and he looked at us.
“You want to run with me?”
“They said you got next.”
“They did, did they?” That’s the kind of guy he was. I don’t know if he thought he was being funny or if this is how you should talk to kids.
“I mean, do you got next?”
“Oh I got next, I got it.”
All this time a game was going on, people calling out the score. The rule was, you played to twenty-one and then whoever lost had to get off the court, and whoever had next had to find four guys to come on with. On sunny days, on busy days, there was next and there was next-next and there was next-next-next. That’s how it worked.
“Well,” Marcus said, “can we run with you?”
“You any good?”
And Marcus checked out the action. Isaac Brown was out there, and a couple of other varsity guys, Terence Triesman-Smith, who played wing, and the starting point guard, John Linehan. Then there were a few other kids I didn’t recognize.
“I’m better than them,” Marcus said.
“What about your friend there?”
Marcus looked at me. “He’s all right.”
Anyway, Tarantino let us run. In the pause between games, some of the varsity kids wanted a water break. “I been kicking ass since two o’clock,” Terence said, and Isaac started messing around on one of the rims, just dunking, and trying different stuff. People were watching, making watching noises. Isaac had this body like one of those plastic figures, like he was made of some harder material than the rest of us. Now he was trying to palm two basketballs, one in each hand, and dunk them both. He had everybody’s attention. I mean, it was kind of amazing, he was just a fourteen-year-old kid.
But Marcus couldn’t stand around while this was going on. So he tried to dunk, too. His ball didn’t have any grips so he borrowed mine and slammed it against the bottom of the rim. There was an audible boing noise, like in the cartoons, and he fell on his butt. It didn’t matter, he got up and tried again. People were laughing at him and cheering him on at the same time, but Marcus even then could concentrate out other people. Until Terence came back from the water fountain and we started to play.
The varsity kids had winners out and scored before we knew what was going on. Then the grad-school guy insisted on bringing the ball up. He had a high dribble; he was a real ball pounder. His socks were these sports socks with the three-color stripes, and he wore them pulled up on his hairy white-guy ankles, along with Converse All-Star sneakers. The whole thing was like a style thing for him. He liked talking the talk, too.
“Get who gets you,” he said.
Linehan was guarding Marcus but Marcus wanted to guard Isaac Brown. This caused a certain amount of confusion. Also, Isaac was just too big. He was a lot stronger than Marcus, too, and kept posting him up. There’s a reason he made varsity. He pushed Marcus under the basket and Linehan threw him a lob and Isaac elevated and laid it in. I don’t like the word but that’s what he did, he just moved a little higher on the vertical plane than anyone else. And there’s nothing we could do about it.
Isaac was actually a pretty nice kid. But clumsy. Not just like, he didn’t know his own strength, but like, it didn’t really bother him if you ran into his elbow. His one basic decision in life was, I’m not going to apologize for being bigger than you. Other people had to get out of his way and Marcus wouldn’t get out of his way.
He caught an elbow in the mouth and one in the neck, where afterward he couldn’t breathe. But Marcus was too proud to call foul. He knew that kids disrespect kids who call foul, so instead he preferred to get beaten up, which is what happened. I can’t even remember the score. Tarantino could play, he had a funny little hook shot that high-school-age kids were not in a position to respond to. And he sweated a lot, I mean, really sweated, so that reasonable people would not want to touch or get near him, and picked up a lot of rebounds. But we lost anyway, it wasn’t close. And then when you lose it might be an hour before you get back on. You have to walk up and down the sideline again, and say, You got next? Can I run with you?
*
That was my first experience of the Eastwoods Park pickup scene. I don’t know why Marcus wanted me along. But still on Saturday afternoon he used to bike by my house and leave his bike in the yard and ring the doorbell and ask, Is Brian home? He never wanted to come inside, he waited on the porch. My mom sometimes brought him out a glass of water. And then when I came out, he said, “Let’s go to Eastwoods,” and for some reason I always said, “Okay.”
Playing basketball at Eastwoods involved a lot of sitting around and watching other people play. Marcus liked to shoot on the empty side of the court when he wasn’t in the game. It’s a little nerve-wracking. You’ve got to be ready to clear out, which is fine if you make the shot, but if you miss and it bounces the wrong way then suddenly ten guys are coming down on you like a herd of buffalo. So Marcus always made me get his rebounds. Sometimes I shot a little, too, but mostly I was too nervous. Marcus, I said, I mean, come on, Marcus, let’s just—I mean, let’s just, Marcus … When I was a kid I was one of those kids who used my friends’ names a lot.
The rest of the time we just hung out. One thing I learned, Marcus liked science fiction—his dad had all these old Bantam paperbacks lying around the apartment, the ones that say .45¢ on the back cover, and Marcus used to read them just to get a little space from his dad, when they were stuck with each other in Killeen. His view of the world was kind of like a science-fiction novel, where everything’s normal but at the same time not quite right, and there are some pretty basic details missing. So, for example, I remember we once had a conversation about wiping your ass. He wanted to know if I wiped my ass sitting down or if I stood up afterward to wipe it like that. Except instead of ass he probably said butt.
“What do you want to know for?”
Three in the afternoon and we’re waiting to get in a game. Even Marcus feels bored.
“I don’t want to know, I’m just curious.”
“Marcus, that’s the same thing.”
“No, I mean … I don’t know what other people do. What do you do?”
“I sit down.”
“Every time?”
“Yes, Marcus. Every time.”
“But, I mean. Can you reach everything?”
“Everything I need to reach, I can reach.”
Sometimes the stuff he said, it’s like he was setting you up to make fun of you, so I never knew how seriously to take him. But that doesn’t mean he was never serious. Maybe if you live with your mom, if you’re a teenage boy, if that’s your main experience of family life, there are certain things that don’t get discussed.
But also, he was just a weird kid. The stuff he liked to talk about was stuff like, if you’re eating a piece of pie, how big are your bites? What do you mean, Marcus, I don’t understand. I mean, and he tried to explain himself, like, should you take a lot of little bites, and have a lot of bites, or just a few big ones, where you have a whole mouthful every time?
I don’t know, Marcus. It depends on how hungry you are.
And then he thought about that for a minute. I don’t think it depends, he said.
Whole afternoons could go by like this, watching basketball, waiting to get in a game.
9
“Is that what you’re wearing?” Marcus said as I got in the car. When he texted I just picked up what was lying on the floor, the same clothes I wore to the funeral.
“Is the answer to that question ever no? I was in bed.”
“Brian, it’s ten o’clock on Saturday night.”
I looked at my watch. “More like eleven. Where are we going?”
“To a titty bar.”
“I don’t want to go to a titty bar.”
“Tough shit,” he said.
I could hear soft jazz leaking from Marcus’s ears. Somehow the saxophone gloomed me out. Our headlamps lit up arching trees and grassy front yards, quiet neighborhood streets, and then we merged onto I-35, and it was a highway world, cars coming and going at a slight elevation, where the flat city spread out vaguely below and away from the noise.
“I want to talk to you about Mel Caukwell,” I said, but with his headphones on it was easy for him to ignore me.
Ten minutes later we arrived. The Palace is a men’s club on East Ben White, just where it runs parallel to 71. I shit you not, this is one of the dark corners of the universe. Austin is not really that kind of late-night town. You can hear good music if you want to, you can get drunk, but you have to put up with women wearing clothes. The architecture was Austin hacienda-style from the seventies—beige and red bricks, and tiled roofs, and the whole thing looked less like a palace than a motel. There was a furniture discount outlet next door. Somebody had planted a row of firs outside the parking lot, to block out the highway ambience. But when we got out of the car, you could still hear trucks going past, putting in easy empty miles.
Also, I was cold. When Marcus texted, I ran out without a coat, and under a clear sky, even Austin nights feel like winter.
I said, “What’s your name?” to the driver.
“Radko.”
“What’s that, Russian?”
“My father’s from Kiev.” But his accent sounded Sunshine State.
“Come on,” Marcus said. “Enough chitchatting. Let’s see some titties.”
The bouncer at the door just nodded us through. He looked weirdly like John C. Reilly. After that we went past a security cordon and up some stairs. Most of the people sitting around in the VIP room, which overlooked the main stage, had the look of people sitting around and thinking, what the hell are we still hanging around for, until Marcus came back.
It was all the same guys from the funeral. Joe Hahn, the lawyer, sat there scrolling through his phone. Over the balcony and half a story below, on the main stage, women contorted themselves around upright poles like firemen in no particular hurry, while the PA system played “TiK ToK”, Don’t stop, make it pop. I couldn’t really hear the words. There was something almost private about the whole thing, because it was just ongoing and you couldn’t always pay them attention, but they continued anyway, though maybe the atmosphere was different on the floor.
Jerry de Souza was flirting with the waitress. He lettered in golf at Texas when Marcus and I were freshmen there, one of those tall lanky guys people instinctively like.
“After a week I almost gave up,” she told him. “I almost brought her back to the pound. It was worse than when Jenny was born, because at least with Jenny I could nurse her back to sleep.”
She wore cowboy boots and a little red uniform skirt, and that was it.
“You gotta stick with it,” Jerry said. “I have three now, a King Charles Spaniel and a Cocker, and this mutt I picked up because she was taking their food, but she didn’t have a collar. But she’s smarter than the boys, put together …”
Steve Henneman was trying to pop a Nicorette from the pill pack, next to Ted Myers, who seemed especially miserable. Ted sat with a beer between his legs, and his legs together, looking at the large flat-screen television on the wall. It was almost midnight in Austin, but only ten o’clock in California, where the Suns had a three-point lead on the Kings, midway through the third quarter. For him this was just an evening to get through.
“What took you so fucking long?” Taffy Laycock said.
“Brian had to get dressed.”
Taffy was the richest guy there, which meant he could get away with stuff other people couldn’t. He was basically a software engineer. In grad school, he figured out that you could use the Internet to broadcast local sports radio across the country. So he dropped out and started a company. Later he sold the technology to Yahoo for a billion dollars. Now he did what a forty-something nerd who everybody bullied in high school would do when he got rich: hang out with celebrities, buy sports teams, and lift weights.
Marcus looked me over and said, “You need to cut your nails.”
“Not you, too.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Betsy was on my case about that tonight as well.”
“Well, you should listen to your sister.” Then he said, “You look like a loser, you look like someone who doesn’t give a shit anymore.”
“Some things you can’t hide.”
So he called over to one of the women sitting around. Not all of them were naked. “Kyla,” he said, and people squeezed over, Kyla started moving her ass along the booth. Another girl came with her, they must have had one of those, where you go, I go, party arrangements. People got up and sat back down.
At the same time, the waitress with the dog problems said to Marcus, “What are we drinking, Mr. Hayes? How about your friend?” and Marcus said, “What kind of gin you got? I mean, like sipping gin?”
“Let me just find out for you.”
When she moved, you could see she had to keep her posture upright with muscular effort, almost like a dancer or a woman riding a horse, to look the way she wanted to look, so she didn’t look like a woman getting dressed or going to bed but like someone on show.
“Kyla,” Marcus said, “I want you to meet my friend Brian Blum, the famous sportswriter.”
She was a light-skinned black woman who turned out to be a sophomore at UT majoring in Communication and Leadership. Her hair was straightened; she wore braces on her upper teeth.
“How do you know Marcus?” I asked her, and she said, “I really don’t. I just met him this afternoon. On Saturdays I do a shift at Sam’s Bar-B-Que,” and then I realized why she looked familiar. She was standing behind one of the fold-out tables in the church parking lot, wearing a Sam’s apron and dishing out meat and beans from the hot-plate-heated metal trays.
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand what?”
“How this kind of arrangement is made.”
“What do you mean?” She stiffened a little.
