Middle Men (4 page)

•  •  •

At evening mass on Sunday, the celebrant, Father Meyer, read with feeling from the final canto of the
Purgatorio
, and from there he transitioned smoothly into a thoughtful and witty analysis of Aquinas and his notion of Angelic Knowledge. Or maybe he just told us that abortion was bad. Either way, my mind was elsewhere. The next morning we were driving up to Ventura.

After mass we got Del Taco and watched
The Simpsons.
I stayed up late shooting baskets, until my mom opened the front door and yelled at me to go to bed.

At some point that night, Michelle, my manicurist, sat next to me on the bleachers at St. Polycarp. Several Big Wallys were running up and down the court, and then Wally George was there too. It was a convergence of Wallys. Eventually, Michelle touched my chest and I woke up. It was three o'clock in the morning. I peeled off my boxers and snuck out the back door. Before I got to the trash cans, I heard music, and noticed a light burning in our old storage shed. I took a step toward it and kicked an empty bottle. The light went off, but not before I caught a glimpse of my dad, holding a beer and sitting on a rusty folding chair. There was a tape player at his feet. In the darkness, I could still hear music.

“Pat?”

“Dad?”

I wanted to ask what he was doing out here at three o'clock in the morning, but I also didn't want to know. I think he felt the same about me. We were both caught. The less said about our depraved nocturnal errands, the better. Now I could make out the voice of Bonnie Raitt.

“Everything okay?” he said.

“Yeah.”

Moonlight fell softly on my spunk-laden boxers. For a moment we were quiet. “I wanted to come see the tournament,” he said, “but I found some work out of town. I might be gone for a little while.”

“How long?” I said, but he changed the subject and asked about my last summer league game, and I stood there for about five minutes, giving him the play-by-play. He never mentioned the fact that I was wandering around the backyard naked, and I never mentioned the fact that he was squatting in a dark shed, listening to Bonnie Raitt.

•  •  •

The van broke down on the 101. Coach Boyd pulled onto the shoulder and walked to an emergency call box. I had never been this far north. California seemed to go on forever. The freeway was surrounded by farms and I could smell manure. When Coach Boyd got back, he opened the hood and stared idly at the engine. The Triple-A guy arrived and informed us that we were simply out of gas. “My bad, guys,” said Coach Boyd, laughing. “I forgot the gauge is busted.”

We had reserved two rooms at Motel 6. After we put our bags away, Coach Boyd led us down to the beach, only a couple blocks away. We walked through a sleepy neighborhood and then over some sand dunes. It was overcast and
the shoreline was littered with driftwood and seaweed. In the distance I could see a giant hotel right on the beach. I figured Trinity was staying there. Coach Boyd told us to sit down and relax.

“This is a big tournament,” he said. “And I know for some of you it probably feels like the most important thing in the world—”

“It's just summer league. Who gives a shit?”

“I know, Tully. But
some
guys might feel like their whole lives . . .” He squatted down and picked up a handful of sand. “Listen. What you have to understand is that in the big picture, none of this matters.” He let the sand fall through his fingers. “That probably doesn't mean anything to you guys right now, but it will. Because here's what's going to happen. Someday you'll be on a beach somewhere . . .”

“We're on a beach right now,” said Tully.

“I know, but I mean like a beach in Mexico or something.”

“What about the beach in Long Beach?”

“I guess,” said Coach Boyd, “but it's a pretty crummy beach.”

“I've always wanted to go to Hawaii,” said Pham.

“Me too!” said Coach Boyd. “And that's the point. Someday you'll be on a beach somewhere, a
beautiful
beach, in Hawaii or Mexico, and you'll be with your friends, or your girlfriend, or maybe you'll be there by yourself. Who knows? But either way, evening will come and you'll see the sun going down in the water, and you'll get it. You'll just
get
it.”

At two o'clock we drove to a local junior college. In our first game, Weaver played out of his mind. He dropped thirty, but we still lost. Afterward, we came out of the locker room in time to see Trinity warming up. We had to play them the next day. I
watched the mesmerizing spectacle of their pregame drills and felt my stomach drop. Ted Washburn stood at center circle, surrounded by a retinue of assistant coaches.

“Is that the guy who raped you?” said Tully.

“We can watch a little of this game,” said Coach Boyd, “and then we'll hit Sizzler. How's
that
sound?”

Since Weaver gave me the pamphlet we had been avoiding each other, but now he sat next to me and asked about all the Trinity players. “I can run with them,” he said, suddenly full of himself. “One of their coaches said so.”

“Which one?”

“I don't know if he was a coach, but he said he helps out the program.”

During warm-ups, all the Trinity players wore custom Nike T-shirts with a nickname printed over their number. Mark McCracken, Trinity's best long-distance shooter, was “AT&T.” Jelani Curtis, the fifteen-year-old featured in
Sports Illustrated
, was “Money.” Darren Hite, a wiry small forward, was “Skeletor.” Tully commented on how incredibly lame all the nicknames were, until he saw Andy Fague, the biggest wiseass at Trinity, whose nickname was “Nickname.”

“That's not bad,” said Tully, and it was the only time I remember him complimenting someone.

The game tipped and we watched Jelani Curtis put on a show. He handled the ball, zipped passes, buried jumpers. There was an ease and confidence to his game, a kind of regal nonchalance that I would later understand as the defining trait of all the great players who've come out of SoCal, from John Williams to Paul Pierce.

“We're fucked,” said Overton.

At Sizzler, Coach Boyd paid for three all-you-can eat buffet
dinners and everybody took turns with the plates. The waitresses looked annoyed, but they didn't say anything. I couldn't eat. I kept looking up and seeing Trinity's press in front me. Back at the motel, we played cards for a couple hours, and then Coach Boyd suggested we all go to bed. He was sleeping down in the van. A few minutes after we turned out the lights, Tully and Overton shuffled out the door. I couldn't sleep, so I spent most of the night in the bathroom, trying to finish
The Call of the Wild
, but my mind kept drifting to the game. At dawn I went out on the landing and saw Tully and Overton passed out in lounge chairs by the pool. They spent the rest of the morning smoking out in the bathroom.

On our way to the game, I had trouble breathing. When we got to the gym, a few Trinity players came down from the bleachers to say hello and wish me luck. In the locker room, I kept lacing and relacing my high-tops. The buzzer sounded and everybody went out for warm-ups. I couldn't move. Coach Boyd asked what was wrong, but the words were stuck in my throat. “I think you're hyperventilating,” he said. “I'll go find you a bag.”

He came back with the whole team. By this time I was sobbing.

“Jesus Christ, Higginbottom. You're worse than Weaver.”

“Fuck you,” said Weaver, and everybody laughed because he never cursed. He grabbed a ball and walked out of the locker room.

“I couldn't find a bag,” said Coach Boyd, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Just take it easy, okay? This is all part of . . . remember that thing I said on the beach?”

“I don't want to go out there,” I said.

“Neither do I,” said Tully. “Should I pull the fire alarm?”

“Come on, now,” said Overton. “We can do this.”

“Yeah, it'll be our one shining moment,” said Tully.

“You're right,” said Overton, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. “I'm fucking high.”

“Hey,”
said Coach Boyd, in his sternest voice. “You guys really shouldn't be getting high before games.”

I sat there for a while, with everyone waiting on me. Coach Boyd kept assuring me that he had “been there.”

“Fuck it,” said Tully. “I'm pulling the alarm.”

“Might as well,” said Pham.

“All I want is a nap,” said Overton.

Coach Boyd looked at all of us. “Are you guys serious?”

Tully disappeared. The next thing I heard was the hammering of a fire bell, and we all evacuated the gym.

The game only got postponed for an hour—I ended up with six points and twelve turnovers and Jelani Curtis dunked twice on my head—but during that hour, in the parking lot, as Coach Boyd apologized to tournament officials, I felt a miraculous sense of relief, because I knew it was all over, my future. Later that night, while everyone went to Sizzler, I sat alone in the room, watching the local news. The plan was to relax and “collect” myself, as Coach Boyd suggested, and I guess that's what happened, because instead of thinking about basketball, I focused all my attention on the local news anchor, her lips and the curve of her neck. I felt something rising in me, a sense of life maybe, this life, here, in a motel by the sea, and just like that, my Gnostic phase was over. I jerked off three times in an hour.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

I
once chased a girl to Bermuda. Her name was Karen and we met ten years ago, by accident, shortly after she moved to Los Angeles. At the time I was twenty-three and living with too many friends in Echo Park. Our apartment resembled a Moorish castle. We were on the top floor, overlooking a courtyard that sparkled with empty beer cans. Ravens nested in the lemon tree and each morning I awoke in the shadow of a minaret. Plus we had cheap cable. My room was one-half of the living room and my mattress was a single, a mighty single, floating on a sea of thin brown carpet, among neat stacks of records and magazines. My rent, including utilities, was $180 a month. None of us were overly employed. I had a great part-time job doing deliveries for Meals on Wheels, which meant I got to drive around the city, listening to the radio and knocking on strange doors. The cripples were always stoned and paranoid, but some of the more chipper octogenarians invited me in and told me stories; some even gave me gifts, bizarre gifts, sad gifts, my favorite a dulcimer, hand-carved by an Armenian man who lived in a North Hollywood motel. He whistled strange melodies and had tufts of knotty gray hair in his ears. One day I knocked on his door and he didn't answer.
I asked the clerk where he went and the clerk said he had left a few days earlier, without paying his bill. This kind of thing happened all the time. People disappeared. There was nothing I could do but cross him off my list.

My verminous roommates included the Brothers Rincon, Javier and Gilbert, who chose to paint houses a couple times a week with their uncle, even though the trustees of Cal State Los Angeles had seen fit to confer on each of them a bachelor's degree in computer science. The New Economy was still new and the brothers contributed in their own way by destroying each other nightly in marathon games of
GoldenEye
. After two a.m., when I retired to my mattress behind the living room partition, aqueous shadows flickered on the ceiling above me and I fell asleep to the clicks and taps of their heroic thumbing. Nathan worked as a bellhop at the Chateau Marmont. He was better-looking than the rest of us and made good money on tips, which he spent entirely on himself. Mark, in contrast, was short and bald and extremely generous with his money. After a brief, dishonorable stint in the Navy, he returned to Los Angeles with crabs and a deeper understanding of commerce. He scalped Dodgers tickets, hung around pawnshops, and though he didn't really sell weed, he knew enough people who did that he somehow got himself administratively involved; also, in a kind of feudal arrangement, every tenant of the castle paid him ten bucks a month for the cable he had spliced from the apartment complex next door. Other people came and went, friends, girlfriends, friends who became girlfriends and the other way around, sleeping on the couch, playing Nintendo, listening to records, leaving dishes in the sink. The dishes. For a while I always did the dishes. If I asked my roommates to do the dishes, they accused me of being a martyr. Eventually I just let their dishes pile up,
and they were happy with this arrangement. Their squalor was carefree and strategic. The water bong stains on the carpet, the broken torchères left mangled in the corner, the crumpled bags of Del Taco, all these things helped them appear frail, lovable, and human, when, in fact, they were members of a band. They owned expensive vintage gear—most of it acquired by Mark—and they called themselves the Map. I didn't think of them as artists, a distinction that belonged, in my mind, to musicians who lost themselves in the creation of sound, rather than in some gilded vision of what they might look like onstage. Nothing inspires obsession like a reclusive virtuoso—my heroes were Harry Nilsson and Arthur Lee—and nothing is more annoying than invoking such names in the face of struggling amateurs. The Map accused me of being a snob. “I know,” I said, cross-legged on my single mattress, squirting Del Scorcho sauce on my quesadilla. The Map wanted to be entertainers, which is not a sin. Nathan could actually write a decent hook. They all worked hard and I marveled at their evolution. Just three years before, they were a righteous hard-core band, playing weeknight shows at Jabberjaw and declaring in their lyrics a grim and lasting solidarity with revolutionary groups throughout the Americas. Eventually they mellowed out and learned to play their instruments. Weed and acid brought a new appreciation for melody and soon their set list consisted entirely of spacey love songs. Because I had no musical ability, or any other kind of ability, they let me load and unload their amps.