Game (7 page)

I stopped the ball five feet from the three-point line. The moment I stepped up, 14 turned his back to me, faked left, hooked me hard with his right elbow, and took a step around me.

It was like the whole thing was in slow motion. As I turned, I felt how low he was and how close and felt myself stopping so I wouldn't trip over him. As soon as I stopped, going up on the balls of my feet, I knew the rest of the program. He spun around me, and I turned to see his elbow go up past my eyes.
The only thing I could hope for was that he'd miss the trey. He didn't. They were up by a point.

Number 14 had pulled the same move on me twice, and I felt like crap as I glanced up at the clock. Eleven seconds.

Ricky brought the ball down quickly. I didn't want to look at the clock, but my eyes went up anyway. Six seconds. Not enough time to set anything up. Ricky made a move toward the basket, had a chance for a short jumper, then passed the ball out to me. Number 14 went for a head fake and I was past him. I took a quick step across the lane, saw Sky pick his forward, and went up as hard as I could.

All I saw was the big black shadow going up in the air between me and the hoop. I looked up to see if I could dunk, but I would have had to slam the ball through Scott's chest. His hands were a foot over the rim and the dude was still rising. I brought the ball back down and turned as I pulled it around my back, hoping that Tomas would be somewhere in the area.

I landed on my heels and fell hard on my back. As I bounced on one of the mats they had around the edge of the floor, I heard the buzzer. Time was out.

I looked up and saw our guys jumping up and down. Something good must have happened.

The guys helped me up and I looked at the scoreboard. Our score was flashing. We had won by a point.

“I was hoping you were sliding over!” I shouted to Tomas over the noise.

“I wasn't,” Tomas said. “Their guy just pushed me away from him and the ball came to me!”

In the locker room we were all shouting and giving each other high fives. House was talking about how the backdoor play had worked at the end and how he was glad we remembered it.

 

The whole team felt good after the win, and it showed. We were slapping each other on the back and making stupid jokes and laughing even though they weren't that funny. House joined in, and so did Fletch.

“You know, we are a good team,” Tomas said to me and Ruffy as we walked down the street. “I thought we could be—now I know it's true.”

Ruffy laughed and said if it hadn't been for his nine points, we would have lost. Then he had to
grab a cab and get home in a hurry. Me and Tomas kept talking as we walked, going over the game, enjoying ourselves.

Harlem is good when the temperature drops. The lazy rhythms of summer perk up and the street life seems to take on a sense of purpose. The cold-weather hustle is meaner, too. You can't be sleeping in the park with the hawk nipping at your butt, and the same Mr. Hungry who was kidding with you in July grows teeth when the weather turns cold.

Tomas said, “I'm going to make myself some soup and then I'm going to watch television, but the whole time I'm watching, I'm going to be thinking about the game.”

“Why don't you come to my house for supper?” I said.

“Sure, why not?” Tomas nodded as he spoke. “What time should I come?”

“Six thirty,” I said, trying to remember what time we usually had supper.

I hadn't thought about inviting Tomas to dinner, but I didn't think my mom would mind. Ruffy was always dropping by, and she always put out a plate for him.

When Tomas turned to go to his crib, I stopped him and asked if his mother was going to come by, too, just so I could let my mother know.

“No, she's working downtown tonight,” he said.

 

I was thinking about the game when I reached the block. Some girls were jumping rope in front of the barbershop, and I watched while a fat chick did double Dutch. She was good.

I peeked into the barbershop to see who was there and saw Duke, who used to own the shop, and the other regulars.

“Drew, what's happening on the youth front these days?” Duke asked.

“Nothing much,” I said. “Just came from playing ball.”

“You win?” a tall, light-skinned guy asked.

“He said he just came from playing ball,” Duke said. “If he had lost, he wouldn't be mentioning it.”

“Yo, that's not true, sir,” I said.

“You win?”

“Yeah, but…”

“The last time you lost—did you run in here and tell everybody?”

“You too hard, Duke.”

I left the barbershop and went on upstairs.

The guys at the barbershop were right. I was happy because we had won. And just the way I could see where some people didn't think much about it, I knew I did think it was the bomb. No matter what House had said, ball made my heart beat faster, made me want to jump up and down and be Superman. That's what life was about anyway, being Superman and living like life itself was important. Basketball made my life important.

“Yo, Mom, I invited a friend to dinner tonight. He'll be here at six thirty.”

“Who?” Jocelyn asked.

“You did what?”
Mom asked.

“Tomas,” I said. “The new guy I told you about on the team.”

“The white boy?” Jocelyn asked.

Mom went into hyperdrive getting supper ready. She liked having people over, but she liked having time to get supper ready. Even Jocelyn lent a hand.

Mom made the pork tenderloin she had bought for Sunday and cooked that with green beans, carrots, mashed potatoes, and sauerkraut. Jocelyn
was just heating up the gravy when Tomas knocked on the door.

Mom made a lot of noise about how tall Tomas was, and he smiled a lot and checked out the crib.

Our apartment was okay. Mom kept it spotless, and it usually looked good unless Jocelyn got a decorating idea and Mom let her mess with something. She let Jocelyn do just about anything she wanted to do, so sometimes we'd have pillows lying around that we weren't supposed to move, sit on, or put anything on.

“They're designer pillows,” Jocelyn said.

When she first started putting her “designer” stuff around, I used to kid with her by sitting on them or throwing them at her, but she would always get even by taking the laces out of my shoes, which really pissed me off.

“So what kind of food did you eat in Prague?” Jocelyn asked Tomas when Mom had finished blessing the table.

“We had this same kind of food,” Tomas said. “Pork with sauerkraut and knedliky.”

“Sauerkraut and
what
?”

“Knedliky.” Tomas repeated the word. “It's kind
of like dumplings in your country.”

“So which is better, dumplings or ca-nade-li-key?” Jocelyn asked.

“Jocelyn, Tomas doesn't want to compare different kinds of food for you,” Mom said.

“Yes, he does,” Jocelyn said. “That's why he came over. Isn't that right, Tomas?”

“I think they're about the same,” Tomas said.

“So why did you come to the United States, anyway?” Jocelyn asked.

“Jocelyn!” Mom's eyes grew wide.

“Well, in 2000 we had a big flood in Prague,” Tomas said. “All the houses in my neighborhood were flooded. We didn't have a lot to begin with, but then we lost most of what we had left when the floods came. My father had died two years before, so my mother and I thought we would start all over again in a different place.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, Tomas,” Mom said.

“So tell me, Tomas.” Jocelyn was on a roll. “What's it like being white?”

“Jocelyn, that's enough!” Mom was getting annoyed.

“You are a little sister,” Tomas said, pointing a
finger at Jocelyn. “Nothing is worse than a little sister. In Prague if you have a little sister, you don't have to pay taxes, because having a little sister is bad enough.”

“Jocelyn, Tomas is our guest,” Mom said.

“All I need to know now, Mama, is does he have a girlfriend?” Jocelyn said.

“I have seven girlfriends,” Tomas said. “One for each day of the week.”

“Which means you don't have any girlfriend, because if you had one, you'd be bragging about it.” Jocelyn was pleased with herself. “Drew almost had a girlfriend, but then she came to her senses. What's your favorite subject in school?”

“I thought all you wanted to know was if he had a girlfriend,” Mom said.

“And she doesn't care what your favorite subject is if it's not math,” I said.

“It's not math,” Tomas said.

“Then I guess I'll just have to keep looking,” Jocelyn said.

I didn't know why Jocelyn liked Tomas, but she did. He was easy to get along with and pleased Mom when he asked for more food. After dinner
we hung in my room for a while, and he looked over my CDs.

“The coach told me he thought we could make it all the way to the state championship if we played together as a team,” he said.

“We have five more games before we reach the regionals,” I said. “Only one team makes the regionals from each division. If we win the regionals, we play in the state finals. We've already lost one game. We lose two and we could be gone. Bryant hasn't lost yet.”

“You think this is a good team?” Tomas asked.

“Yeah. What do you think?”

“It's a good team,” he said. “Faster than my team in Prague.”

What I was thinking was that he wasn't sure. He knew what the guys on his team in Prague were like, but he didn't know what a black team from Harlem was all about. He said that our team was faster than the team in Europe, but I wondered what other things he had seen that were different. I also wondered what House had said to him.

W
hen Tomas left, Mom got on Jocelyn, but I could tell she wasn't serious. Both of them had liked him. I was surprised at Jocelyn, because she doesn't take to people that quickly. I looked over my homework assignments, did some of the reading in history, and started to do the math. But I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, Mom was waking me up, asking me if I was going to have breakfast. “And why you sleeping in your clothes?” she asked.

“In case I had to go somewhere in my dreams,” I said.

“You know, you and your sister don't act like anybody in my family,” Mom said, standing in the doorway. “My side of the family thinks slower and talks slower, too. You're both fast thinkers, but you're not slick or nothing. I like that.”

I wasn't fast enough to figure out what that meant, so I let it go.

 

After school Ruffy called me and asked if I wanted to go downtown with him and Tony. I was surprised that Tony was back on the street.

“They set a trial date for three months from now,” Ruffy said. “And Tony's out on bail.”

I felt good about that and said I would go downtown with them. We met in front of the bank on 145th and Tony flagged down a cab. We went down to the Old Navy store on 125th Street, and Tony bought some dynamite shirts. Then we walked down to the African restaurant on Lenox Ave. Tony said we should order what we wanted.

“I got you covered,” he said, flashing some twenties.

I wondered where he got the money, but I didn't say anything. Ruffy was talking about how Mr. Brunson,
Tony's lawyer, wanted Tony to dress for the trial.

“He wants him clean, but not too flashy,” he said. “Kind of conservative, like me.”

“It's all a game, man,” Tony said. “What I got to figure out is if I really want to deal with a trial or not.”

“What are the other two guys going to do?” I asked.

“Depends on me,” Tony said. He was leaning back in his chair. “If I take the deal they want to hand down, I can burn both of them. You know what I mean? What they got is a whole bunch of things—my lawyer calls it a laundry list—we're being charged with. There's three ways this deal can go. I can cop the deal and do a three-to-five bid, and probably get back into the world in twenty-nine months. Or I can take my chance on the trial and maybe walk away clean. But if they throw a curve and I get a guilty verdict, then I'm facing a whole stack of calendars. So I got to check it all out and weigh the pros and cons and make my decision.”

Tony was acting like he was making a real-estate deal or something instead of talking about going to jail.

“Brunson wants him to take the deal,” Ruffy said.

“You know, that's all good for him,” Tony came back. “He can say he won something because I got a light bid. But I ain't buying no time just to make him look good. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Tony kept on talking about his big decision and how he had figured out his chances for this and that, as if he were in control of everything. It sounded foul to me.

“Norman and Little G got records, so they're facing heavy time all around,” Tony said. “They scared of me copping, because if I cop, I can send them away forever.”

Yeah, right. I was glad when we finished eating and left the restaurant. Tony said he was going to grab a cab and go over to the projects to see his girlfriend. Ruffy was supposed to go with him and then take the cab home. I said I was going to drop by the Studio Museum to pick up a book for Jocelyn and would see Ruffy in the morning.

Tony and Ruffy got into a cab and headed east. I watched them go for a bit and then started walking uptown.

Tony's attitude had bothered me a lot. He was spending money I knew he must have got from his mother and talking about his decision to take the plea deal as if he were on top of things, when he was really just running his mouth about how much time he was going to be locked up.

Me and Ruffy were sitting in the restaurant with him, and both of us knew what the deal was. But we hadn't spoken on it because there really wasn't that much to say. The time when Tony could have made a good decision was gone. Now all he could pull together was the least pain. He was acting tough because that's all he could pull off, but it wasn't even his game anymore. It was the prosecutor's game and the judge's game. They had all the rules and all the moves, and all Tony had was his front, and that was raggedy.

It was turning colder, and a few snow flurries were coming down along Frederick Douglass Boulevard. I tried to remember the last time there had been a heavy snow in Harlem. It had to have been at least a year or so. The cold wasn't that bad, and the walk uptown felt good. My head was clear and I wanted to push my mind on what I had to get
done for school, but I kept thinking about Tony and how he had let his life slip away. I wondered if there was a time, just one second, that he could have made one move, one step to the right or left, or said one word different and found himself in a whole other place. I wondered, if I got to that moment, whether I would see it clear. I felt sad for Tony, but I felt nervous for me, too.

 

The next game was with Wheatley. Wheatley wasn't a good team. All they could do was run up and down the court and heave the ball. They had five lames on their starting team and ten more lames on the bench.

“You know how these guys play?” Ernie asked. “They play like black popcorn, man. They're just popping around the court and running all over the place and hoping that the ball comes to them. They don't have any talent.”

We started off great and jumped to a 15–6 lead. We hung on to those nine points for the first half with House congratulating us because nobody was in foul trouble. I passed as much as I could, trying to get everybody into the game. At halftime their
cheerleaders came out. The trip was that their boosters were all fat. Ernie and Sky were cracking on them when two big greasy dudes came out of the stands and said they were going to pop a cap in Sky someplace nice so he wouldn't have to worry about using Preparation H anymore. Ernie started mouthing off to the guy, but I cooled him down.

“Look around you, Ernie,” I said, leaning over him. “We're in their gym, in their school, and there's a hundred and fifty ugly-butt guys up there who haven't got anything better to do tonight than stomp us to death!”

“I'll let you slide this time, fool!” Ernie said to the guy, who looked like Busta Rhymes on a bad hair day.

“Man, shut up before we pull a drive-by on y'alls bench!” the guy said.

I believed him. Anyway, we went out and finished strong to win by fourteen points. In my mind the win wasn't good because Wheatley didn't have much of a team.

House heard something was going to go down, so we didn't shower, just grabbed our clothes and jumped on the bus. The driver, seeing we were
getting on his bus funky, didn't waste any time getting out of there, either.

We had four games to go and we were coming together real strong. House had us practicing hard whenever we weren't playing. He had Ruffy in the weight room, and my man was looking good. He wasn't really cut, but he was beefy and had lost enough weight to get down the court faster. He had always been strong inside, with his boxing out making up for his not being able to really sky too tough.

 

We had killed Tech before. Everybody killed Tech, because they didn't have no team. What they did have was Cleo Hill.

“If that boy had a coach, he could be all-world,” Fletch said. “He's got the size, the heart, and a few moves, but his coach won't let him do what he does best, hang under the boards.”

What they had Cleo doing was trying to score from all over the court. He had a little outside jumper that was nice, like Brandon Walters, who played down on West 4th Street. What he didn't have was a consistent touch around the hoop. Sometimes, when
you got him real mad, he would just go crazy and score a bunch of points in a hurry. The games they won went that way. It was close down to the end, and then somebody got Cleo mad.

We played Tech and ate them up. No contest. Cleo brought the ball down the court near the end of the game and went around Tomas with a crossover dribble. I anticipated the whole thing and went up and knocked his shot away and everybody goofed on that. Then, when I had the ball, I came down, put a move on Cleo that left him standing in his tracks, and went up for the slam. Cleo recovered, came back, and got my stuff from the back. I tried to force the ball through the hoop, but he just pulled me down to the floor with one huge hand.

“How you like that, pretty boy?” he said.

After the game Sky got on my case, asking me why I changed my mind when I went for the slam.

“That must be a new kind of move, man,” he said. “Bring the ball up, get a mean look on your face, and then come down to the floor and grin!”

“Anytime you're up against some real players, somebody is going to throw your stuff away,” I said. “He just got mine.”

 

Wednesday practice. Of all the practice sessions we went through, the one everybody hated most is the OK Corral drill. Everybody except Fletch. He was the one who dreamed the sucker up, and we had to hear his lecture every time we ran it.

“Every game you play, there are six times when you're supposed to get an easy basket under the bucket and somebody throws it away,” he said. “If you throw the ball too soft, you let everybody make a grab for it. If you throw it too hard, you're going to throw it out-of-bounds or somebody is going to miss it so's it goes out-of-bounds. You have to learn to catch the ball and throw it short distances to recover those six easy shots.”

We stood in threes in the paint a few feet from the boards, six feet apart, making two passes as fast as we could before going for the layup without putting the ball on the floor. I was with Needham and Tomas. Needham couldn't catch a cool breeze in an igloo, but Tomas had good hands. We worked on short passes for twenty minutes before House let us go.

Most of the team started toward the shower,
but I saw House stop Tomas and Abdul and point them back onto the court. Fletch was waiting with a basketball under the basket. I sat down to see what they were going to do.

What was happening was that Fletch was working with Tomas. He was using Abdul as the defensive player. I watched as he pulled out the tape and made an X on the floor with it. Position play. For the next twenty minutes Fletch worked with Tomas, passing the ball in to him from the top of the key or from the sideline to either side of the X, making him move to the X in one dribble and then go for the shot.

He did it over and over, with Fletch yelling at him, telling him when he was doing it wrong, telling him when his feet were too slow or he was bringing the ball too low.

“Make them stop your strongest move!”

I watched as Tomas moved his wide body through the lane, pivoting on the tape and going for the basket. Tomas did it over and over again. Pulling the ball closer to his chest when Fletch told him to chin it, extending his arms when Fletch told him to get bigger, shaking his head when Fletch asked him if he was getting tired.

I felt sick. I felt angry. Not just anger, but a rage coming up in me. I wanted to stand up and walk away, but as tight as my arms felt, as huge as my chest felt, my legs were weak.

I thought Fletch was supposed to be on my side. Why was he talking to me softly and then building up Tomas?

I looked around, sure that I would find House gloating somewhere, leaning against the tiled walls, but he wasn't anywhere in the gym. It was just Tomas and Abdul and Fletch, and me standing on the side feeling my guts ache.

As they walked off the court, I saw that Abdul was dripping in sweat. Tomas's legs, heavy and white and hairy, moved like tree stumps toward the locker room. Fletch stopped a few feet from me. I looked up at him. I didn't have enough saliva in my mouth to spit.

“How you feeling, Drew?” he asked.

“I see you're working with the white boy,” I said.

“What do you want, Drew?” Fletch looked at me. “You want to get over by having him fall down? That what you want?”

“Get out my face!” I said.

Fletch stepped closer to me. “What you going to do, Drew? You going to hit me? Is that what you want to do?” he asked. “Because if you want to give up your game altogether, that's the way to do it. Raise your hands and see how far your anger gets you.”

We glared at each other for a long time; then he pivoted on one foot and walked away

 

Game day. When Powell came to our gym, I was feeling down. What I wished was that I could jump up and hit somebody, just do a real beat down on the world and get it out of my system. I knew what Fletch had said was real, but I was feeling so frustrated, I didn't know what to do with myself. Maybe for the first time in my life I didn't want to play ball.

Powell had Donald Hand and this tough-shooting Italian guy, Frankie Corsetto. If Donald brought his mind to the game, he'd be real good. What he does bring his mind to is being a thug. The word on the street is that he took money from shorties and did some boosting down on 1-2-5. You can stop Frankie if you foul him a lot because he doesn't like to get hit
and will throw up only treys if you bang him.

I felt sluggish, and everything I did was wrong. The first time I got the ball, I traveled. The next time I got it, I threw up an air ball. Meanwhile, Frankie is going around me and I'm trying to hit him but he's making me look bad and House sits me.

At the end of the first quarter they're up by six, but we come back, with me sitting on the bench, and at the half it's all tied. I was mad and feeling bad at the same time. It was like my whole life was going down the drain.

We came out with four minutes left in the intermission and ran a few layups before the start of the second half. The whole team was down, and Sky's Hollywood pep talk wasn't doing anything to help. By the end of the third quarter we were losing by seven. I had started the second half, but House had me on the bench again.