Call Me by My Name (9 page)

With the Jamboree scratched from the schedule, Coach Cadet filled the open date with an intrasquad scrimmage at school. We'd been banging on one another at practice for almost two weeks, and now we had a chance to bang on one another in a game setting. He and the other coaches divided the squad into two teams, the Orange and the Black, our school colors. They wanted a full-blown dress rehearsal under the lights, and they found a crew of referees to work it. The game was supposed to be a reward for the sacrifices we'd been making, and the coaches thought it would be good for morale to have our parents see us in uniform, so they had wooden bleachers installed along one side of the practice field with enough seating to accommodate a few hundred people. Coach gave us permission to invite immediate family only.

“Keep it to a minimum,” he said. “Make sure it's people you know who aren't going to cause trouble.”

All the black guys looked at one another. “Not to be racial about it,” Coach Cadet said, “but I just don't feel like getting hauled in by the school board, you understand?”

Tater and I were both on the Orange squad, and that Friday after classes the equipment manager issued game uniforms, which seemed little better than the ones we'd been wearing at practice. They dated back a few years, judging from the patches that covered holes and tears in the fabric and the tattered condition of the numbers and striping. We had three hours to burn before kickoff, and most of us whiled away the time in the gym watching the cheerleaders and pep squad rehearse their routines.

“She's something, huh?” Tater said.

I looked at where he was looking, and that was the cheerleaders. Angie had made the squad, and so had Patrice Jolivette, a junior with curves galore. One day I'd caught Tater staring at Patrice in the lunchroom, but everybody stared at her, including white boys like me. “Yeah, man, she does that to me too,” I said.

The school had selected an equal number of black and white cheerleaders, and Patrice had been named cocaptain of the squad, an honor she shared with Beverly Charleville, the white senior chosen to assure racial parity. Today, Patrice was wearing a maroon sweatshirt over her uniform with the face of a snarling, floppy-eared bulldog on the front. She'd been a cheerleader last year for the town's black school, J. S. Clark High, and the shirt was a faded souvenir of her time there.

“Just think,” I said to Tater. “If we hadn't been forced to desegregate, you'd be a Bulldog now instead of a Tiger. Whatever happened to that old school, anyway?”

“What do you mean what happened to it? It's gone. They closed it. And they turned the building into a crummy junior high.” The outrage in his voice surprised me, and he wasn't finished. “Clark was a great school,” he said. “And it had great sports teams. There were some cabinets when you walked in that were full of trophies won by all the championship teams.”

I'd spent some time looking at the trophies in the cabinets at our own school, but I hadn't seen any won by Clark's athletes. “Where is all that stuff—you know, the trophies from those years before integration?”

“Left behind,” he said. “Just left behind like none of it mattered. What's that tell you, Rodney?”

At home Pops had been using the word “militant” to describe angry blacks who made the news roaring for civil rights, and I might've tried the word out on Tater now had I not wanted to hear his answer.

“All those seasons at Clark?” he went on. “The pictures of former players? Their medals and ribbons? It's like it never happened. I like seeing progress, Rodney. I like this school a lot, and I'm proud to be a Tiger. But if you ask me, Clark deserved better.”

We were out on the field an hour later. Everybody wore the same white helmets with orange-and-black stripes, but our side wore orange jerseys and white pants, while the other squad had on black jerseys and black pants. The Black looked more intimidating than we did, and one of the coaches acknowledged as much when he stood laughing at us during stretches and yelled out, “Dang if you don't look like a pumpkin patch, the way you're lined up in rows just now.”

Coach Cadet had also arranged for the school band to perform, but it was proficient with only “Hold That Tiger,” an old ragtime tune that was our fight song. The band played it over and over, and we were already sick of it by the time we were done with warm-ups and waiting for the game to start.

I'd dominated every defensive lineman on the team except for Rubin Lazarus, who was every bit as strong as I was, even though I outweighed him by thirty pounds. Rubin added to an appearance of menace with eye black that ran down his face in streaks. The eye black seemed an odd addition, considering we were playing at night, but the overall effect was undeniable: Here was a very intense and likely deranged person you didn't want to trifle with.

Rubin was so good that I quickly forgot there were other players sharing the field. We became the center of the universe, with a spotlight shining down on us from a hole in the heavens. As the game went on, I despised every large and small piece of him, and I despised his mother and father for siring such an animal, and the mothers and fathers who sired them. There were yet more generations to despise, especially after he knocked me to my knees and stepped on my tender vegetation en route to sacking the quarterback.

We went at it hard, and it occurred to me, even as we were pounding on each other, that the intimacy involved in blocking a guy is a personal act that brings you closer to another human being than any other activity but one. Your skin rubs against his skin. You smell his breath and feel his weight when the play is done and he's lying on top of you in the pile. You stare into his eyes from inches away and search for signs of surrender.

By the end of the first quarter I'd already sweated enough to fill bathtubs, and my uniform had absorbed much of what he'd lost. And what I'd lost had gone into his. Everybody else was playing a game. I was playing for my life.

“You got me that time, Rodney,” Rubin told me late in the fourth quarter, after I'd driven him ten yards off the line and dumped him on his back.

“I got lucky,” I said.

“Yeah? Heck, man, you get lucky a lot.”

We had scored in the last minute to beat them, 27–23, on a Hail Mary pass from Curly to wideout Louie Boudreaux. Louie ran a go route up the sideline and caught the ball in the end zone when the cornerback assigned to cover him, Joey Pierre, lost his footing and fell to the ground. Louie held the ball up to show that he'd made the catch, and the referees blew their whistles to signal it was over.

As I was removing my pads on the sideline I heard a ruckus in the stands. Several men were fighting. I automatically assumed it was between blacks and whites and the race-based brawl we'd all been dreading. But I looked more closely and saw only black men involved. Because it was the first extracurricular event bringing blacks and whites together, the school had hired a police detail to handle just such a scenario, and now cops climbed into the stands and broke up the scrum. I'd seen enough to understand what had happened. Somebody had said something to Joey Pierre's father, who'd said something in reply. And then the brawl had started. Joey's dad had blood running down his face. The other guy's shirt had been ripped off his body. Five or six other men also were tending to injuries or torn clothes.

“You ain't nothing but a beast, Rodney Boulet,” I heard somebody say behind me. I spun around and there stood Rubin, his eye black so badly smudged that it covered his whole face. “I'm just glad we can go back to being on the same team again.”

“Me too,” I told him. “Thanks for the competition, brother.”

We started walking toward the locker room, and I spotted my parents in the parking lot between the practice field and the school. They'd left the stands before the fight started, I was glad to see. Pops was standing off to the side smoking a cigarette, and Mama had joined other parents and the cheerleaders to form a gauntlet for us to walk through on our way to the showers. We strode the gauntlet in single file, lugging our helmets and shoulder pads and exchanging hugs and high fives with anyone who wanted them. Tater was walking right in front of me, and when he approached Angie, she came up on her toes and kissed the side of his face. I gave her a look that immediately put her on the defensive. “He's like my other twin brother,” she said, and then she went to kiss me on the cheek too.

I pushed past her.

“Come on, Rodney. It's nothing.”

I turned back once I reached the door to the locker room, and she was still standing there, her mouth fixed in a pout. Was what passed between her and Tater really that big a deal? I decided it wasn't, and I also decided I'd have felt the same had she kissed one of my white teammates. In fact, had she kissed Curly Trussell, I probably would've put my helmet and shoulder pads back on and gone after him. To further calibrate my feelings, I reminded myself that I'd just spent three hours in ferocious physical contact with Rubin Lazarus, the two of us swapping bodily fluids as my big warm bulk pressed up against his. I was wrong and I knew it, so I puckered my lips and blew her a kiss with the flat of my hand held up to my face. Just like Angie, she leaped up as if to catch it, then she brought the kiss down to her chest and held it with both hands against the place over her heart.

Tater had started at cornerback and on special teams, and from what I could tell he'd played well, shutting down the receivers he was assigned to cover and forcing a fumble on a kickoff that we turned into six points. But he was quiet in the locker room and slow to dress. He seemed lost in the throes of trying to sort out some small torment. I knew something was wrong, and I worried that he'd witnessed my scene with Angie and taken exception. When I finished dressing I walked over to his locker.

“What's wrong now?” I asked.

“It's about what happened after the game.”

I couldn't blame him for being unhappy with me, and I was about to apologize when he said, “If you're black, you can't even be human and make a mistake. Your daddy gets beat up for it afterward.” He sprayed some deodorant under his arms and I stepped back to escape the cloud. “I don't like Joey Pierre, you understand? He's got a motor mouth, and he plays dirty. But that touchdown at the end? Louie beat him because Joey lost his footing and fell down. That could happen to anybody. But the fight after the game? Come on, man. What does that tell you?”