All the Right Stuff (3 page)

“No offense, sir, but are you saying I'm supposed to care about what some cavemen were doing?” I asked. “Because I don't.”

“Don't care a bit!” Elijah said, shaking his head.

“Yo, I see how you care and everything, and I respect that,” I said. “You know, different strokes for different folks. I just mean that it really doesn't get to a point where I can feel it.”

“I care about it, Mr. DuPree, because I believe that the tribes with the best rules were the ones that survived!” Elijah said. “And that seems important to me. If you play one of those video games in which there are warriors running around trying to kill each other, you understand that survival is important.”

“You play video games?” I asked.

“I've played a few,” Elijah answered. “And the few I've played had rules to help you survive. And if you're going to play those games, you have to agree to live by the rules. Or do you have a different kind of game, Mr. DuPree?”

“Okay, I see where you're coming from but—I mean this truly—we don't need agreements and contracts and whatnot today because we have laws,” I said.

“You really think that's true?” Elijah asked. “Look me right in the face and say it again, real slow.”

“I said, we don't need those rules because we have laws,” I said. “Laws replace rules.”

“Sit down right there and start slicing up some of those onions while I talk to you, son,” Elijah said. “And please don't cut your fingers up into the onions, because blood makes the soup salty.”

I sat down and started cutting the onions as he watched me. He let me cut two onions before he started talking again.

“We don't have a law that says a man needs to get out and find himself a job, do we?” Elijah asked.

He held his hand up before I could speak.

“And if he does have a job and wants to spend his money on beer and lottery tickets on the way home from work and not feed his family, that's not illegal, is it?”

The hand went up again, and I kept quiet.

“There's a law that says you have to go to school, but there's no law that says you have to learn anything. If you get on the crosstown bus and you want to stick your tongue out at everybody on the bus, you can do it and you're as legal as the day is long, am I right?”

“Can I answer?”

“You got a mouth, use it,” Elijah said.

“It's legal, but I don't want to stick my tongue out at everybody on the bus,” I said.

“Okay, but how many people you see won't shake a stick at a piece of work?” Elijah asked. “And how many you see down at the bar or wherever they go spending their money instead of taking care of their families? You see any of that around where you live?”

“Plenty,” I said.

“And how many young people—and old people, too—do you hear cursing on that bus we're talking about?”

“I guess a few,” I said.

“And how many young people you see walking out that little delicatessen on the corner—”

“The one next to the barber shop?” I asked.

“That's the one,” Elijah said. “They come out eating their fruity pops or their poppy fruits or whatever young people cram into their mouths today, and throw the wrappers on the ground. Can I get an amen on that?”

“Amen.”

“But what you want to tell me is that those things aren't that important, right?” Elijah had folded his arms across his chest. “A candy wrapper don't mean anything even if it is lying on the sidewalk, and if a man wants to spend his money down at the bar instead of bringing it on home to his family … well, that's his right. Isn't that what you want to tell Elijah?”

“It's important to you,” I said. “I can see that.”

“Would we be living better or worse if that man we talking about had a job and if the young person throwing their fruity pops wrapper on the ground put it in the trash can?”

“I wouldn't be living any different,” I said. “If the guy didn't feed his family, that's his business.”

“And that's his right under that first wake-up-in-the-morning law,” Elijah said. “But if you have to pay taxes to feed his family, then what's going on?”

“I didn't think about that,” I said.

“And if you have to pay taxes to get somebody to go around picking up fruity pops wrappers, then that's all right with you, too?”

“I didn't say that it was all right,” I said.

“And suppose I told you that there are unwritten contracts in our society that say that if you don't follow them, you're going to suffer all your life?” he went on. “Take that little business about going to school. You sitting up in school daydreaming about your career in the National Basketball League—”

“National Basketball
Association
!” I said.

“I knew you would catch me on that one,” Elijah said. “But dreaming about the National Basketball Association is your business, too, isn't it?”

“I know where this is going, Elijah,” I said.

“But our society says that most of the good jobs and nearly all of the best jobs require a college education,” Elijah said. “They got it set up so that you can get ahead in certain ways. The tribe did the same thing back in the day. That tribe said that anybody who didn't work didn't eat. Then they said that whoever was the best hunter got his pick of the meat. If you couldn't hunt good, you had to eat the leftovers. That made sense to those cavemen. Make sense to you?”

“You're sounding like a preacher now,” I said.

“And if you're strong and you can defend the tribe, then you get to eat with the good hunters,” he went on. “That make sense, too?”

“Yeah.”

“But today our tribe says that if you're the best hunter, it doesn't mean anything,” Elijah said, “because we don't need hunters. And if you're the strongest man on the block, it doesn't mean much, either. Isn't that right?”

“Yeah, that's right,” I said.

Elijah had put on a frying pan, put some olive oil in it, and was cooking the cumin seeds. Then he added some garlic, and in a minute the place was smelling good.

“So what we're talking about is society making rules for what it wants done and how it wants to live,” Elijah went on. “Some of the things it wants from us are written down like you said, in laws. Laws are the will of the people. But some of the things that aren't written down are also going to dictate how well you do in life.”

“Why don't they just write everything down and then everybody would know it and we wouldn't have a problem,” I said.

“Because the rules change, sometimes from generation to generation,” Elijah said. He was putting the sautéed seeds in a large pot. “Sometimes they change from person to person or from situation to situation. But if you can learn how to tell the differences between onions and maybe make a little soup, you can probably learn a little something about the social contract. What you think?”

“I guess I can,” I said.

“The first thing you got to know is that frying up these cumin seeds with a little garlic releases their flavor and adds some depth to our black bean soup we're having this afternoon. Now that's a good thing to know. Did you know that a good black bean soup has more character than some people?”

“I don't mean to be disrespectful, Elijah,” I said, “but I don't think I need to know all of this stuff. And what I'm going to say might sound foul, but I don't mean it to be.
Most
people don't go around worrying about ham sandwiches and contracts they don't know about, and they get along just fine.”

“Do they, Mr. DuPree?” Elijah asked. “Do they really?”

I was supposed to be mentoring
some kid on Friday mornings, and I looked forward to it. I figured it would be a boy, maybe a middle school kid having trouble reading. I hoped it wasn't one of those kids who mixed up letters because I didn't think I knew how to deal with that. I arrived at the school at nine thirty and told the guard what I was there for.

“You got ID?” he asked, looking over his glasses at me.

I showed him my ID and he told me to go to the second floor, room 203.

I found the room and there were five kids my age already there and some smaller kids, all boys.

“Mr. DuPree?” A young, thin woman with dark eyes looked up from her clipboard.

“Yes.”

“You have to report here every Friday and then go right to the fourth-floor gym,” she said. “Keisha's waiting for you there now. You know you're mentoring her in basketball, right?”

“Basketball?”

“She'll explain it,” she said. “Have fun.”

Basketball?
She'll
explain it? I imagined a nine-year-old on crutches trying to get her confidence up. Okay, I could handle it.

I got to the fourth floor, went to the end of the hall, and saw the school's logo over the entrance to the gym. I walked in and looked around and didn't see any kids. Then I noticed somebody at the water cooler. She was wearing sweats and had a ball under her arm. She saw me and came right over.

“Hey! I'm Keisha. How you doing?”

“I'm doing okay,” I said. She looked vaguely familiar, and I knew I had seen her before.

“You know how you got me?” she asked.

“How?” Lame answer, but it was all I could think of.

“I picked you because I saw you play a few times and heard that you were available,” she said. “They told you my name? Keisha Marant?”

“Yeah, I mean, no.” I was close to stammering. “They said something about basketball.”

“Okay, here's the deal,” Keisha said. “You want to sit down or something?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Now I was remembering who she was. Keisha Marant played ball for George Washington and was All World until she just dropped out of school. Now here she was, all six feet of her, striding over to the benches at the side of the court.

“Here's the deal. They're having a tournament in August down at the Cage on West Fourth Street. I got some girls together who can hoop, and we're going to enter it. I got to show strong and I need some help, so I applied to get myself mentoring when I saw you were in the community program. You don't have that much game, but you can shoot from the outside and that's what I need to work on. You reading me?”

“I thought that mentoring was about reading and math, not basketball,” I said.

“So you can't handle it?” Keisha rolled her eyes toward me.

“Yeah, I guess I can handle it,” I said. “But I thought your game was already pretty tight?”

“I can play inside, but the college coaches are telling me that they need somebody with an all-around game,” Keisha said. “What I'm thinking is that they know I got a baby—”

“You got a baby?”

“They know I got a baby and my grades aren't too tough and I dropped out for a minute, so they think they're taking a chance on recruiting me,” she said.

“But if your game is complete, then they'll take that chance,” I said, finishing Keisha's thought.

“Then I saw you play and you kept pulling up and popping from the outside,” Keisha went on. “I liked the way you looked.”

“Okay, let's see how you shoot,” I said.

Keisha hunched her shoulders, then dribbled up to the three-point line and let the ball go. The way she shot, I could tell she didn't have any confidence in it going in, and it didn't.

We watched as the ball bounced off the rim, and I retrieved it. I bounced it back to her and nodded toward the basket. She shot again, a two-handed set shot from one side that missed the rim entirely.

“You're too good an athlete to have a shot that bad,” I said. “We can make it better if you work at it.”

“I'm going to work at it because all I got is basketball,” she said. “I ain't got nothing else. I'm not even thinking about going to college unless I have a crutch.”

“Basketball?”

“You got it.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” Keisha answered. “And don't get any ideas, because I'm not looking for a boyfriend.”

Keisha Marant was good-looking. But I didn't know if I could deal with a woman an inch taller than me and maybe a better athlete.

I shot a few times from the top of the key and missed, and she was steady hawking me. The girl was dead serious and I liked that. I did have a good shot, and after a few misses I began dropping them from the three-point line. Every time I looked over at Keisha, she was staring dead at me. It was strange, but it was cool.

“What you need to work on is to shoot with one finger,” I said. “You're right-handed, so essentially you shoot with your right index finger. And when you finish the shot, your finger should be pointing at a spot right below the center of the basket. All you really need to do is to get how that feels. And oh, yeah, you need to start the shot higher. If you're strong enough, you can start it from right above your head.”