Hoops, page 8
I couldn’t get my head together for a while. Then I realized I wasn’t being hit. I tried shaking my head to get the cobwebs out, but that hurt. It was like in a flick. Me sitting on the floor, kind of watching things happen around me. I figured I’d better get up pretty quick before he came again, but then I heard the sound of crying. It was Paul, he was leaning against the wall, kind of holding on to it, and crying real hard. If I had been mad I stopped, and just wondered what was going on.
I went through my pockets and found some change and went out into the hall to get some sodas. There was a little kid in the hall. He looked at my face and asked me if I had been fighting.
“No,” I said, taking the second soda from the machine.
“You always look like that?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“You sure ugly,” the kid said.
I went back into the office and closed the door. Paul was still sitting on the floor, and I went over and sat next to him. He looked at me and the Coke I offered him. He took it, and we sat for a long while just drinking the Cokes. Ox knocked on the door, and I opened it and told him to split. He asked me what happened, and I told him to split again.
“You and Paul have a fight?”
“Look, I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, still standing in the doorway.
“What happened?” He was trying to look over my shoulder.
“Ain’t you got no cool, man?”
“No,” he said. He didn’t either. I finally got him to split by promising him I’d tell him what happened later.
I sat down next to Paul again, and then I asked him if he wanted to talk about it.
“You see me hanging out with Lenny and trying to get into that middle-class thing—”
“You mean that semiwhitey thing?” I said.
“Hey, it ain’t about that. It’s about getting over, like I said before. You can run it into the ground, and maybe you can deal with who you are better than I can, but that’s the way it is.”
“Yeah, but you always been my man. How you get into these changes? One day you my ace boon and the next day I don’t know you.”
“One day my pops came around and asked me if I wanted to go downtown with him.” Paul took a deep breath and let it out hard. “I said okay. We went down where he works. It was his day off, and he just wanted to pick up some stuff from his gig. He works in this office building, doing maintenance, little odd jobs. So he went in and picked some stuff up, and his boss was sitting there with two other whiteys and this sister, and he told my father to go out and get some coffee for them. My father said he wasn’t working, and this whitey laughed and said he never was. Then he told him what kind of coffee they wanted. That got next to me, you know. I started to speak on it, and he said he used to catch an attitude when he was younger, but he started getting fired from gigs.
“You know what that was like to me? Seeing my father going for coffee and everything? Because you don’t think about going for coffee for nobody. You thinking about yourself fixing something or sitting in an office, that kind of thing. You don’t think about being a grown man and fetching coffee for nobody. It was like I was looking over a mountain and seeing where I was going for the first time. You want more soda?”
“No,” I said.
“I’m sorry about the fight, man,” Paul said.
“Go on about that other stuff,” I said.
“I ain’t much different than my pops. I kept on trying to tell myself that I was, you know, but I’m not. He’s no dummy, man. But he don’t have that piece of paper. Anyway, then I met Lenny and Joni, and they were like … what? Different, I guess. Yeah, they were la-di-da niggers, just like you said they were. But you know Lenny ain’t going to be going for nobody’s coffee, man. You just know that. And Joni’s going to be the chick sitting up with them whiteys telling somebody like me what kind of coffee they want. I know that. Anyway, I started to hang with them.
“Then one day I was over to Joni’s house and I was smoking some joints that Lenny had picked up. I fell off to sleep or something, and when I woke up, Joni and this chick she hangs with sometime—”
“Skinny chick?”
“No, a gray chick,” Paul said. “They’re out on the balcony—”
“They got a balcony?”
“Yeah, they got a nice place,” he said. “Anyway, they out there talking about me and this gray chick is asking Joni if she really digs me and Joni starts going on like that’s the biggest joke in the world. She says she just hangs with me sometime because she sees it as a chance to understand ghetto people.”
“You should have busted her nose for her,” I said. “And then busted that gray chick’s nose, too. Nothing them la-di-da niggers hate worse than you putting them down in front of their ace whiteys.”
“Yeah, maybe. But that’s not how I felt. I felt like I wanted to prove something, you know. Like I was okay for her to like maybe. Hey, if a black chick who’s into something don’t dig me, and I’m trying to get away from a certain kind of thing … I don’t know. So I start taking her out more and buying her things. I didn’t have no dust, so I took some checks from the mailbox in that building over the bank.”
“Welfare people live in that building.”
“Yeah, some,” Paul said. “A friend told me. He delivers mail in that building, and he told me that some people there get welfare even though it’s supposed to be a high-rent place. I was over there one time and I saw that they hadn’t put the mailbox in right and everybody was supposed to be going to the post office for their mail. Even when they started putting the mail in the boxes, the boxes would open if you hit against them.”
“So you ripped off the checks and took them to Ugly’s,” I said.
“How you know that?”
“Because Ugly told me,” I said. “I was over there and he asked me if I had seen you and I asked why and he said ’cause he could use some more digits.”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “Only Tyrone found out about it and said that a friend of his who’s a postal inspector was on to the whole thing and they were waiting for me to cop some more checks before they picked me up. He said they knew who I was and everything because somebody had spotted me. So he got the checks from Ugly, and he burned them up so they wouldn’t have any evidence.”
“He burned them?”
“Yeah, that way the only way they can bust me is to catch me copping some more checks, and there’s no way I’m going to do that.” Paul straightened his legs in front of him and rubbed his left knee. If he hurt it when we were fighting, I hoped it hurt like hell because my face was beginning to pound like I had a toothache.
“So he did you a favor and now you beating up women for him?” I said.
“Not because he did me a favor,” Paul said. “He had to buy the checks from Ugly, and I’m doing this to pay him back. He said I’m even now.”
“And he burned all the checks?”
“Yeah.”
“Why you think he doing this for you, man?” I asked.
“I think because he likes Mary-Ann.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Say, look, don’t tell nobody nothing about this,” Paul said. “All I want to do for the rest of the summer is to play some ball and forget what happened.”
“Yeah.”
After we rapped a little more, I went back over to the Grant. It was a heavy trip, what it was. I could get next to what Paul was saying about his pops because I felt the same way. I didn’t think about it all the time, but I did think about it some of the time. In another way I had even thought about trying to be like Lenny and Joni, but every time I saw a black cat acting like that, it made me disgusted. In a way they were always out for coffee.
Paul didn’t know that Tyrone hadn’t burned the checks, and I didn’t tell him. I called Mary-Ann, listened to her mouth about why I hadn’t met her before when I said I would, and then told her not to talk to Paul about what we had done. I told her it was important that she didn’t, and she asked me why. I told her what Paul had said and that we’d better try to get all the pieces together before we did any more talking. She said cool on that. Funny that she should be Paul’s younger sister because she seemed a lot older in the head than he did.
I went down and got a pint of wine and went back up to my room and drank it. Then I fell asleep and had this dream. I was playing ball for all these scouts. They were all white, and they weren’t sitting in stands or anything, but they were sitting around the edges of the court. And each one had two la-di-da niggers sitting with them, drinking champagne out of these little plastic champagne glasses. I was playing against about ten other guys, and we were all breaking our butts. Nobody was on teams. It was every man for himself. Whatever basket you took a rebound from, you had to go shoot at the other basket, and everybody was trying to stop you. And all the while we were playing, we kept looking on the sidelines to see if the scouts were digging us, and the la-di-da niggers kept getting up in the faces of the white scouts and smiling and carrying on so they couldn’t see us.
When everybody that was playing saw that the scouts couldn’t see us, they started carrying the ball and elbowing, and it really got to be a free-for-all. Guys were punching and trying to thumb cats in the eye and stuff like that. Every time a cat would fall down, everybody would come over to where he had fallen and stomp on him and chant until he was wasted and then go on with the game. Then there was just two players left, me and Snakeskin. I didn’t even know Snakeskin had been in the game. It had just seemed that there were people without faces, just black arms and black legs and the brown ball. Now it was me and Snakeskin, and the score was tied. I brought the ball down, dribbling through the piles of bodies, and Snakeskin was on my case. I was almost trapped between Snakeskin and a pile of bodies when suddenly I remembered the move that Cal had shown me. Down the right side, around the bodies, and then up in the air off the dribble for the slam!
When I did that, Snakeskin fell to the ground, and I went over and stomped him until he was still. Then I still had to score three more baskets before the game was over. But there wasn’t anybody to stop me now, and I could show off my stuff. Only the scouts couldn’t see me for the la-di-da niggers in their faces. I went over to the sidelines.
“Here I go!” I shouted. But all you could hear was those la-di-das teheeing and those glasses hitting against each other. I scored one basket, then another.
“Look at me!” I was shouting. “Look at me!”
But they didn’t look. I took the ball and ran up to one of the la-di-das and slammed the ball into her head, and she just turned and kept laughing.
She laughed until I woke up.
Cal called us together for practice the next day. We all met at the center and went down together, all except Breeze. Cal called his house, but his mother said he had left already.
We took the A train, and all the way downtown Cal was talking to me about Aggie. How she was such a good singer. How fine she was, stuff like that. I didn’t really want to hear any of it, though. I knew all that stuff already.
“Why you leave her?” I asked.
“I guess I just wasn’t together enough for her,” he said.
I didn’t know what that meant, but he wasn’t talking anymore, so I let it lay.
When we got to the gym, Breeze was already there. He was selling cassettes to some of the kids in the summer program. He was always selling something to kids. I told him that the reason he sold to kids all the time was because he was just about on their mental level.
“What we’re going to work on today,” Cal said, “is Mr. Calvin Jones’s TIT.”
“It sounds better than Gatorade,” Roy said, and everybody cracked on that.
“I guess it does,” Cal said. “It always sounds good before practice starts. Now the TIT is simple. TIT stands for Two-Inch Theory. If you can jump two inches more than the guy you jumping against, you going to beat him. You don’t have to jump a foot more, just two inches. If you can get two inches on a man when you driving, you can score on him.
“If you can get two inches on a man when you going for a loose ball, you’re going to get the ball. And to get all these two inches, you have to try a little harder than what you think your best is right now. Do we all understand what Mr. Jones is talking about, girls?”
Everybody said they understood, and then we made some more cracks about tits and stuff, and then Cal had us all stand near the top of the key. He got a ladder and put it next to the backboard. Then he covered the hoop with a board and Scotch taped some paper to the backboard. One by one we had to come over to the backboard and jump up and touch the paper as high as we could, and then he marked where we touched and put our names next to it.
Roy got up the highest; I came in second; then Ox, Breeze, Paul, and Lenny. Jo-Jo, Walter, and the rest of the scrubs did okay, but not as good as the starters. Then Cal made each of us go to a basket and put a piece of tape on the backboard as high as we had jumped on the first board.
“Now all I want you to do is to jump two inches higher than that mark and you can sit down and have a soda on me and then we can play some four-on-four.”
It sounded easy enough. Roy started in first, but Cal stopped him and called him over to where he was standing under the board.
“Now do it!” Cal said.
Roy jumped up but missed the tape. He tried again. He missed again. Then he backed off and started to come in, but Cal stopped him.
“No good,” he said. “I want you to come in and start from here.”
We had been had. When he first told us to come and make the jump, we had been standing at the top of the key, so naturally we had started out with a run so we could really sky. Now we were trying to jump from a standstill.
“You keep jumping now,” Cal said, “until you’re ready to go show me how you can go two inches over that tape. You just yell out ‘TIT,’ and I’ll come running over.”
Everybody really tried hard at first, but none of us could make it. Then we started slipping further away from the tape as we got tired. Every time we tried to catch some rest, Cal would come over and get on our cases. We called a few things out, but none of them had anything to do with two inches.
I had come to the practice ready to show Cal that I wanted to take care of business. When he talked about his Two-Inch Theory, it was cool with me because I was ready to do it. I figured I would show him that I could work harder than anybody else. But the practice wasn’t hard, it was ridiculous. He had us jumping until I swear I could hear my heart beating louder in my ears than anything else. Then he had us scrambling around on the floor for balls. Not once or twice, but for a half hour! For the whole half hour nobody could stand on his feet. I asked him who he thought we were going to be playing, the NBA All-Stars?
When the practice was finally over, nobody said a word. That’s how tired we were. I wanted to talk to Cal about what had went down with Paul, but I didn’t want Paul to know I was rapping about his situation. I hadn’t spoken to him any more about it, and Mary-Ann said that she didn’t even talk to him about it.
We took showers and were getting dressed, still without talking, when Matt Lee came in with this old dude. He wasn’t really that old, but he was just about bald. He was from a black newspaper and wanted to take some pictures and interview some of the guys. Cal said he could interview some of the guys if he wanted to, but no flicks. That was a downer because everybody wanted to get their flick in the paper. If he had put all our pictures in the paper, they wouldn’t have to sell them on the newsstands because we would have bought them all.
Anyway, Cal didn’t go for it, and that was that. I dug him pulling Matt Lee over to the side and talking to him, and then Lee took the newspaper guy out. When everybody was leaving, I asked Cal if he wanted to see another play I had worked out, and he said okay. I did have another play, but that was really just an excuse to talk to him. We went out in the bright afternoon light carrying our bags, and some Puerto Rican kids asked us if we were basketball players. I said yeah, we were.
“Can I have your autograph?” the kid asked, pushing a comic book toward me.
“I ain’t really nobody famous,” I said.
“You going to be somebody famous?” he asked.
“He sure is,” Cal said.
“Then give me your autograph, and I’ll save it for later,” he said. I signed the edge of the comic book, and then I had to sign another autograph for another little Puerto Rican girl with eyes that were just about ready to break some dude’s heart.
“Kids are something else,” Cal said.
“How come you never had kids?” I asked.
“I had a child,” he said.
I stopped in my tracks. This guy was getting to be like a hole in the ground that you couldn’t see the bottom of. The deeper you reached, the deeper the dude went. He walked on a few steps ahead of me and then turned around.
“You coming, or you going to spend the rest of the afternoon standing there posing on the sidewalk?”
“Where’s your kid?” I asked. “I know it’s got to be a girl. That’s why you don’t want her around me, afraid I might take advantage of her, right?”
“No, a boy, Jeffrey,” Cal said. “He’d be younger than you now.”
The way he said that I knew the kid was dead. I really felt bad about it, too. Looked like wherever I reached into the man I came out with a handful of pain.
“Sorry, man,” I said. I figured I would say that and then shut up unless he wanted to talk about it.
“You know, I got a call from this guy O’Donnel who’s sponsoring the tournament,” Cal said. “He said he wants to see me about something tomorrow. The tournament’s a little bigger than some people thought it would be. They picked up some commercial sponsors, soft drink people, a tire company.”
