Up at the College (5 page)

Trina believed that Yvonne was a blessing waiting to happen as far as Curtis was concerned. It was pretty clear that Curtis
thought the girl was fine. Not to mention the way he smiled and chuckled at just about everything that little negro had said
so far this evening. Every time Miss Yvonne said a little quip about something, all she heard from Coach was “Ha … ha
… hahahaha, ha … ha … hahahaha.” Yvonne was funny. But that negro wasn’t
that
funny.

Curtis Parker wasn’t the only one who was thunderstruck. Yvonne was just as taken with him as he with her. But Yvonne was
in the hole with regard to cool points, so she was working overtime to try and hide her attraction to him. Trina knew the
girl would rather die a thousand horrible deaths in consecutive order than have Curtis discover he was getting next to her.
Yet, the best thing that could happen to Yvonne was for Curtis to be an eyewitness to the beautiful ruby blush that spread
across her cocoa-colored cheeks, lighting up those sparkling chocolate-diamond-colored eyes, simply because of the sparks
bouncing back and forth between the two of them.

It was time for Yvonne to have a good, handsome, and decent man to take notice of and appreciate her. When Yvonne was married
to Darrell, she worked overtime to get along with that boy and keep the marriage intact. It was amazing. Darrell had earned
a PhD in biology from Stanford University, and yet he acted as if he were mentally challenged whenever Yvonne tried to talk
to him about the problems in their marriage. No matter what she said and how she said it, Darrell just didn’t get it.

Darrell didn’t want to understand that it was inappropriate for a woman from his department to call his house and hang up
whenever Yvonne answered the phone. He didn’t get it when Yvonne told him that Bettina was rude and nasty whenever she came
to the house, and that perhaps he needed to get her straight.

Yvonne had tried and tried to explain, petition, and help Darrell understand the problem—but always to no avail. It was as
if she had been speaking a remote foreign language. But once Yvonne rededicated her life to the Lord, went back to her home
church—Fayetteville Street Gospel United Church—and dived headfirst into the Word of God, she told Trina that the Lord blessed
her with an answer to that problem.

It had been on one of those hard nights, the ones when the reality of being divorced got to you. Yvonne was on her knees doing
a bang-up job with the divorce thing—crying uncontrollably, hollering, flinging snot, hanging all on the bedpost, calling
out, “Whyyyyyy, God, whyyyyyy” in that raspy, gravelly, annoying pity-party, crying voice. She was on a roll with that thing
and threw in some real good, desperate, and pitiful-sounding “Why me,” “What’s wrong with me, Jesus,” “Why You let this happen,
Lawwwwddd, You da’ Alpha and da Omega,” “Why come he gets to have all the fun, Lawd,” “Jesus, what is taking You so long”
and “Why, Lawd, why.”

That night Yvonne ranted and raved as if she’d lost all of her brain cells. And the good Lord let Yvonne cut the monkey fool
until she was exhausted, her eyes were swollen shut, and her voice was gone. At that point, while she was lying on the floor
too tired to move, face wet and practically plastered to the rug, a calm came over her, warming her heart and giving Yvonne
a peace that transcended her ability to understand how the Lord had calmed her completely down after all of that craziness.

When Yvonne was calmed down enough to get still enough to hear the Lord speak, she felt the words from 1 John 4:4–6 being
whispered deep in her heart.

“But you belong to God, my dear children. You have already won your fight with these false prophets, because the Spirit who
lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world. These people belong to this world, so they speak from the
world’s viewpoint, and the world listens to them. But we belong to God; that is why those who know God listen to us. If they
do not belong to God, they do not listen to us. That is how we know if someone has the Spirit of truth or the spirit of deception.”

Those words came home to Yvonne with such force that she hopped up off of that floor and starting shouting, her voice returning
with each increase of praise. God had let her know that there was no way that anybody, Darrell included, could hear and receive
a word of wisdom if they didn’t know the Lord, didn’t care if they knew the Lord, and weren’t trying to know Him, if their
very lives depended on it. The Darrells of this world couldn’t and wouldn’t hear a thing because the spirit of deception that
operated through them made it impossible for them to do anything but do their best to scheme, trick, plot, and contrive.

Trina believed that Yvonne wasn’t the only one in need of attention from somebody with some sense. Curtis, in spite of his
reputation as a playah, was long overdue to meet somebody like Yvonne—a woman who would make him laugh, be his best friend,
pray for him, pray with him, have his back, understand him, jack his tail up when he needed to tighten up on a few things,
and love him the way God called a woman to love a man. But most important, Curtis needed a woman for whom Jesus was Lord of
her life. A woman who loved the Lord like that knew how to love her man right. Because she would do what the Lord told her
to do where he was concerned.

Trina peeped through the blinds at Curtis and Maurice puffing on those expensive cigars. It always tickled her to no end to
watch Maurice lean back and take a real long puff, then ease back up while blowing the cigar smoke out of his mouth like he
was really doing something.

C
urtis liked to take short puffs of his cigar so he could taste the tobacco better. He puffed a few more times, looking up
and smiling at the twinkling stars in the velvety, midnight-blue Carolina sky. Curtis loved himself a Carolina sky—especially
on a warm fall evening like this one. It felt good to look up and see evidence of God watching him tonight. Because Curtis
desperately needed evidence that God was watching, and better yet willing to help him. If the past couple of practices were
any indication of the team’s state and readiness, he might as well go back to the office right now and clean out his desk.
And if his boss, Gilead Jackson, had had anything to do with it, Curtis would have been kicked off campus right after they
lost the first two games of the season.

He unclipped his phone from his belt and pulled up the team’s last season stats. He shook his head, shut down the Internet,
and turned the phone off. Team stats, team needs, team issues, and team problems. It seemed as if that was all he and Maurice
dealt with. He closed his eyes and felt these words from 1 John 2 being spoken directly to his heart.

“Stop loving this evil world and all that it offers you, for when you love the world, you show that you do not have the love
of the Father in you. For this world offers only the lust for physical pleasure, the lust for everything we see, and pride
in our possessions. These are not from the Father: They are from this evil world. And this world is fading away, along with
everything it craves. But if you do the will of God, you will live forever.”

Curtis didn’t know why he was remembering, word for word, this scripture his grandmother had e-mailed him a week ago. Gran
Gran was very concerned that the things of this world held way too much appeal to him over the things of God. He tried to
deny that claim. But now, sitting here consumed with wanting to beat out all of the other teams in the Southeastern Negro
Athletic Conference (SNAC), he knew that his mind and heart were completely absorbed with the things of this world. Curtis
sighed and looked up at the sky, blinking back tears that came from the double-edged sword of conviction from the Word. What
was wrong with him—a grown-tailed man sniffling up like a lil’ wimp.

“So,” Maurice said, eyeing Curtis curiously and wondering what had caused this level of sorrow to come up on him like that.
“Are the stats for the mighty Fighting Panthers so bad I should dust off the old résumé?”

“I can’t believe you, the man of God, are talking that mess, Maurice,” Curtis admonished.

Maurice, like his boy Lamont Green’s brother James, was a brother strong in the Word and strong in faith in the Lord. And
Curtis always depended on him to see the problem through those lenses that most praying, faith-filled saints viewed the world
through. Curtis’s grandmother was like that. No matter what was going on, Doreatha Parker, or Gran Gran, always took the problem
to God, left her problem at the altar, praised God for his blessings in her life, and waited in perfect peace for the answer
to that prayer to become manifest.

Now here was Maurice, standing right in his face, blowing cigar circles out of his mouth, and acting like he didn’t need to
be combing through his Bible searching for a Word from the Lord about this dilemma.

“What is your problem?” Maurice asked, now just as calm and content, despite the stats and impending doom coming from a messed-up
team and, even worse, a mean and crazy athletic director.

“My problem?” Curtis asked.

“Yeah,” Maurice answered. “Your problem. Look, Curtis, I love the Lord. I trust the Lord. But I’m faithful, not perfect. Every
now and then, I am going to have a moment, even if it’s only for a moment.”

“But you walk by faith and not by sight, man,” Curtis told him.

Maurice could not believe this boy. He said, “Of course I walk by faith and not by what I see with these things”—Maurice pointed
at his eyes—“but what about you, Curtis? What are you walking by? And why do you lean so hard on my faith instead of getting
in the Word and building up your own self in faith and trust in God? Honestly, I don’t know how you can stand to live life
without total dependence on Jesus.”

“’Cause I’m a man. I believe in working and fighting hard for what I believe in.”

“So, Jesus, the one you are called to put your trust in, wasn’t a man, a man’s man to be exact? ’Cause I don’t think a roughneck
like Peter, and a smooth thug like Matthew, would have been following and chilling with Jesus if He’d been all wimpy and punkin’
out on some brothers.

“You think those brothers whose money tables Jesus threw over were happy with Him? Don’t you think that at least one of them
got riled up and ready to throw down, but something, namely Jesus, made them think twice about doing that? I’ve seen plenty
of hard-core thugs in my day. But I’ve never seen any of them roll up on somebody who gave the clear indication that they
were not the one to mess with.”

Curtis couldn’t argue against that point. There was nothing in the Word that indicated Jesus had any problems, discussions,
or pending altercations following that bodacious confrontation. He knew from coaching all of these years that any brother
bold enough to throw down like Jesus did in the temple had better be able to back that up. There were some rough folks back
in the Bible days. But it was pretty clear that you didn’t just take a mind to roll up on Jesus. A few Pharisees tried but
they got their feelings hurt.

“Okay,” Curtis said with his hands raised in concession, “you have a point.”

“You daggone skippy I do,” Maurice said. “When did a person not have a point with the Word? It’s a—”

“I know,” Curtis replied, irritated. “It’s an infallible, double-edged sword that does not return void. So what else is new?”

Maurice wanted to kick Curtis’s butt. He was his boy and he loved him like a brother. But doggone it, if that negro didn’t
try the patience of Job. And Maurice knew he was nowhere near a Job, so his patience was shot. He said, “Why does this have
to be so hard for you, Curtis? It’s the Lord. He is a mighty, loving, gracious, and awesome God. Why do you persist in running
from Him and your blessings?

“Don’t you know that when you submit to the Lord, He is going to show you, show us, exactly what to do with this team? And
there won’t be a thing that Gilead Jackson and his flunkies Kordell Bivens and Castilleo Palmer can do about it. We just don’t
know how He is going to do it. And that’s okay because we don’t need to know all of that. Jesus ain’t never worked on a need-to-know
basis with anybody. Okay?”

Curtis knew that Maurice was right. But he wasn’t willing to give his life completely over to the Lord because there were
some things that he wanted to keep doing that he knew the Lord did not approve of. For starters, he’d have to relinquish what
Trina referred to as his “stash of booty-call boos”—the women he could call to get his needs met without explanation or commitment
of any kind. They would have to be the first thing to go. Just the thought of letting go of all of that ran his pressure up.
What was a brother supposed to do to relieve some tension? Get married?

Next he would have to kick his so-called
head boo
, Regina Young, to the curb. Curtis knew better than any of his nay-saying friends that Regina, an agnostic, was not the one.
She looked good on his arm and didn’t give him a hard time about his other women. Regina liked the prestige of being the coach’s
public girlfriend too much to complain to him about things a woman like Yvonne would have checked faster than she could blink
her eye.

But being with a woman like Regina Young got old real fast because women like Regina had little or no substance. While they
may have had the look of a treasure, they were no more than a cheap piece of cubic zirconium. And women like Regina didn’t
even know that they were not jewels. They believed the hype about themselves and thought that their looks, education, airs,
and so-called skills in the bedroom really and actually made them somebody.

Once a man got a good dose of Regina Young, he found himself longing for a simple, honest woman who didn’t backstab, harbor
secret agendas, or have unreasonable demands. It helped Curtis understand why a wealthy brother like Metro Mitchell, the owner
of Yeah Yeah, Durham’s hottest hip-hop store, was so enamored with his ghetto-fabulous baby mama, Dayeesha Hamilton, who worked
at the Kroger on Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. The girl was as ghetto as she could be sometimes. But she was good people.
Dayeesha was honest, dependable, a good cook, kept a clean and orderly home, wasn’t greedy, and was a hardworking young woman.