Game, Page 4

  By the time we had showered and dressed, I was in a good mood. Ball did that for me. It was a warm day, and Ruffy and I bought some sodas from a guy with a cart on the way home.

  “House is steady scoping you,” Ruffy said. “He’s looking for you to blow.”

  “Yeah, I’m hip,” I said. “But to tell you the truth, I don’t even care, man. If House wants to mess the team up, it’s on him.”

  “How come you’re not downtown?” Jocelyn said. “I thought you were going to help Mom with the shopping.”

  “Why didn’t you call and remind me?”

  “I’m not your secretary!”

  Mom shopped on Ninth Avenue, across from her job at the Port Authority, on paydays. She had asked me to come down and take the stuff home. The whole thing with Tomas was so heavy on my mind, I had completely blown it. But I wasn’t supposed to be there until four and it was just three thirty, so I was still cool.

  I grabbed a gypsy cab on the avenue, whizzed downtown for a big six dollars, and got to 41st and Ninth in a flash. Then I went up to the office my mom worked in and got introduced to all the people I had met a hundred thousand times before.

  “You should apply for a job with the Port Authority police,” a short, red-faced man said. “They’re looking for more African Americans to join the force.”

  “Yeah, maybe I will,” I said.

  Mom started running down this whole rap about how the Port Authority staff was now going to be involved in feeding the hungry.

  “And most of the program is due to your mother’s initiative,” Red-Face said.

  They had collected six cartons of cold cuts, chips, and soda from neighborhood merchants, and me, Mom, and this Spanish woman named Sherry were going to give them out across the street at a homeless center. A porter from the Port Authority put all the stuff on a skid, and we went across the street.

  This place was mostly a big room where people sat and played cards, ate, or got help filling out forms for different programs. I had seen it before because I always passed it when me and Mom went shopping on 41st.

  Mom and Sherry wanted me to help give out food, but I wasn’t down for it. So I just sat at one of the tables while they made the distribution.

  “So who you?” This brother sat across from me at the table. He was definitely smelling funky, and his hair looked like he hadn’t combed it in a serious while.

  “Drew,” I said, holding out my hand. “Drew Lawson. My mom is handing out the stuff we brought over.”

  “Where you live?”

  “Uptown.”

  “So you one of them uptown folks thinking you better than everybody, huh?”

  “Why you got to go there?” I said. “You don’t know me.”

  “You know what I got in me?” he asked, pointing to his chest. “I got the truth.”

  “Yo, that’s all good,” I said.

  “And the truth is that they don’t care what you do, or what happens to you,” he said. “That’s why I’m homeless.”

  “Sorry to hear that, my man.”

  “Nah, man, you ain’t sorry.” The guy turned and started sniffing, and at first I thought he was crying, but then I saw he was just sniffing. That was funny to me, but I didn’t want to bust a grin on my man.

  “So where you from?” I asked.

  “So where is Mr. Ferguson from?” he said.

  “So where you from, Mr. Ferguson?”

  “I’m from Chicago, and I came to New York because I wanted to bring truth to the people,” he said. “But you know what? When I found out the real truth, I knew the people didn’t want to hear it!”

  “What’s the real truth?” I asked.

  “That don’t nobody care if you homeless,” he said. “Ain’t nobody care if you laying dead in the street. Ain’t nobody care if you ain’t got nothing to eat.”

  “Yo, man, that’s my mom over there bringing food and stuff to you people,” I said. “She cares or she wouldn’t be bringing it.”

  “No, man, she cares because she’s homeless, too,” Mr. Ferguson said. “She knows that anything she got from the Man can be taken back by the Man. And if the Man can mess with you like that, you ain’t got nothing. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  “That’s why I ain’t putting myself out there in the Man’s game,” he said. “If you know you don’t have a win, then there’s no use for you being in the game. Ain’t that right?”

  “Not really.”

  “They got you brainwashed,” he said, turning halfway around on the bench and talking over his shoulder. “They can’t brainwash me because I been around. You ain’t been nowhere.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I guess you okay,” he said. “But I ain’t sure. You sound too white to me.”

  The guy was still smelling funky, he was talking stupid, and I was getting the feeling that I might be getting bugs on me or something. I waited with Mom while she finished handing out the food. What I saw was that most of the people didn’t care if they got food or not. One old man was complaining that diet soda caused cancer and we shouldn’t be handing them out to people. When he said that, Mr. Ferguson jumped right in about how cancer was the government’s secret way of getting rid of people it didn’t want.

  As we were leaving, Mr. Ferguson called out that he bet I was glad I was leaving. He was right.

  Me and Mom went to the meat market between 41st and 42nd and bought umpteen pounds of hamburger, some chicken, sausages, and large cans of black beans. All the time, she was thanking God about having a job and a decent place to live and how I should be thankful, too.

  “You see them poor people over there?” she said. “People should come see them and be thankful for what God has given them.”

  Mom had to go back to work for another hour, and I took the stuff uptown.

  On the way I thought about Mr. Ferguson. I figured he had pickled his brain with cheap booze years ago, and maybe even drugs. But he was right about some things. I knew I really didn’t care for the dude.

  And I started thinking that probably nobody in his family cared for him, either. Or maybe if they cared, they couldn’t deal with him being so off the wall. It amounted to about the same thing. But something he said bothered me. He said if you didn’t have a win, you might as well give up and get out of the game. That was what he was doing—getting out of the game. But with him it was straight up. Maybe with some of the guys on the corner it was the same thing, but they just weren’t dealing with it.

  “So you and Mom save the world?” Jocelyn parked herself on the end of my bed and started painting her toenails.

  “You staying on my bed all the time, people are going to be talking about incest,” I said.

  “You’re not getting in anything, so between us it’s going to be outcest and that’s just another word for friendship,” she came back. “Did you feel like Jesus feeding the multitudes?”

  “I didn’t like it,” I said. “Mom was trying to get me into one of those good-doing moods or something.”

  “Why didn’t you like it?”

  “I saw some of the food they were giving out. It was plain stuff. White bread, beans, some hot dogs. If you were hungry, then it was better than nothing, but you got to leave your pride outside when you get on the food line. Mom said some of the folks down there were crackheads and that was the only food they got. I definitely saw some winos.”

  “I feel sorry for them,” Jocelyn said.

  “So why don’t you go down there with Mom and feed them?”

  “Because I don’t like to see them,” Jocelyn said. “You know, I was thinking about what they should do with their lives and whatnot.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I didn’t come up with anything too tough,” Jocelyn said. “I’m thinking about painting my nails blue next time. What you think about blue?”

  “You wear sneakers all the time, so nobody can see your stupid toes,” I said. “What difference does the color make?”
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  “The kinds of jobs they need don’t even exist anymore. We went over that in social studies. To get a decent job, you need a decent education.”

  “Now you sound like Dr. Barker.”

  “Well, he might be a fool, but he’s still right,” Jocelyn said, standing up and looking down at her toes. “If you can’t do nothing, you got to take what they give you. You want to carry me to my room so I won’t smudge my nails?”

  “You’ve been reading about those African queens again?”

  “I do think I look like Nefertiti.” Jocelyn turned her profile toward me. “What you think?”

  “Just like her, Jocelyn,” I said. “You look just like her.”

  I watched as my sister put on her queenly walk and left the room.

  What she said made sense. I couldn’t see Mr. Ferguson holding down a regular job. None of the men and women I saw in that center looked like they were ready for prime time. I could see them all copping a plea and shuffling to the back of the bus.

  I thought of what Mr. Ferguson had said about not playing the game if you didn’t have a win. But he was living too funky to be throwing that jive down for some wisdom.

  But it wasn’t just the ones I saw downtown who weren’t playing the game. There were a whole lot of brothers I couldn’t imagine making a real getover. Some of them had been on the corner for so long, it looked like they were supposed to be there.

  I got up and went to Jocelyn’s door. It was open and she was sitting at the computer.

  “Hey, Nefertiti, why don’t you want to see those homeless people downtown?” I asked her.

  “For the same reason I don’t want to see any dead people,” Jocelyn answered. “I don’t want to see nothing that looks anything like me messed up like that.”

  “I’m hip to that.”

  Jocelyn was doing her homework, and I went back to my room and took out my books. My mind wasn’t on the books, though. It was on House and Tomas. What I thought was that House was messing with me, and I was going to back off and let it slide until the team started losing, and then House would have to come to me and my game. But if Tomas could pull the team around him, or if House just let the team lose, then I would be out of it without even being in the game. I would be doing the same sitting-out shuffle that Ferguson was. I had to come up with my B plan.

  Morning. I went out to the kitchen and my folks were having an argument about who forgot to play the lottery. My father said that my mother was supposed to put his numbers in, and she said that if he wanted to play, he should have put his own numbers in.

  “I asked you to do it, woman!” he said, standing in the doorway. “If you weren’t going to put my numbers in, you should have said something.”

  “They didn’t come out anyway,” Mom said. “So what are you worried about?”

  Mom got her handbag and kissed Jocelyn on the forehead and me on the side of the head, and they went out the door arguing. I was going to say something to Jocelyn about how stupid I thought playing the lottery was, but I didn’t want to get her started on odds and stuff.

  “How come you’re late getting up today?” she asked.

  “Who died and made you the head of the FBI?”

  “How did your practice go yesterday?”

  “Why?”

  “So do you think the United States should be more aggressive in its trade policies?” she went on. “I’ll be on the phone to the president this afternoon, so if I could get your input now…”

  “What were they arguing about?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t have any money and she won’t give him any,” she said. “You know that’s going to go on until they catch up on the bills.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” With my family it was always catching up on the bills or explaining to the electric company why we hadn’t sent the payment in. My folks didn’t mess up their money; it was just that they weren’t making that much to begin with.

  “I imagine I’ll have to start my modeling career early to support you people.” Jocelyn licked some of the jelly off a piece of toast. “But don’t worry about it. I’m big that way.”

  I got to school a minute late, and Mr. Harrison, who was on desk duty, looked the other way as I slid past the desk and into the stairwell.

  In English I sat down next to Sandy Harris, a thin, brown-skinned girl with eyes the same color as her skin and a low, kind of sexy voice. We got into another discussion about Othello and I noticed that a lot of the kids were saying it wasn’t about race. I still wasn’t going for it, and I said so.

  “Iago didn’t like the brother being a big-time general and he didn’t like him getting over with a big-time white chick, either,” I said. “And since he was white like everybody else around at the time, he had the power to mess with Othello.”

  “Is it really the woman? Or the celebrity that Othello’s achieved?” Miss Tomita asked. “We do know that Iago hoped for high office.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “And doesn’t that make the play interesting?”

  “So what’s the answer?” I asked.

  “Well, since Shakespeare isn’t around to answer our questions, it depends on our interpretations, doesn’t it?” Miss Tomita said.

  I didn’t exactly understand what she meant by that, but I could tell she was happy with it.

  I could see myself as Othello, a kick-butt general who had climbed to the top and had to deal with Iago and all the other suckies around him. Desdemona, his old lady, was like a symbol of what he had achieved in his life, and Iago was messing with it. He was saying that Desdemona wasn’t really happening for him, that his dream of her was messed up. I could see how that could turn a brother’s head inside out.

  What I figured was that as long as it was me doing my thing, a black player on a black team, then it would be about me and the team. If House could get Tomas in the spotlight instead of me, it was going to be about him and Tomas. What I had to do was outplay Tomas every time I stepped on the court. He couldn’t put Tomas in the headlines when my game was blowing up in all the stats.

  Our next league game was against Frederick Douglass Academy. House ran down this lame rap about how this game was going to show our character and whatnot. He said that we should be able to beat FDA if we played our game. FDA was one of those schools that never had a real big-time player but always had enough going on to mess with you if you showed weak. Every year some team waltzed over to 148th Street looking for an easy jam only to come slinking away with a loss.

  FDA plays a two-one-two shallow zone most of the time. Their guards play close to the three-point line, their center plays about two feet closer to the basket than most, and their forwards are in tight, too. They cut off penetration but give up a lot of three-point shots.

  House had Ernie at guard, Ruffy at center, and Sky and Tomas at forward. I thought that was lame from the get-go, because Tomas should have earned his starting position, not just had it handed to him. He hadn’t dominated anybody in the one game he had played with us and wasn’t kicking any butt at practice, either.

  FDA was up for the game, especially on defense, but their offense was weak and the game began slowly. We were up by five after a few minutes, and I thought it was going to be easy but they hung on, and then, with the slow pace, they caught up and it was back and forth. At the end of the first quarter it was 14–14. On offense we were trying to pick off their forwards and set up backdoor plays, but they were playing too tight to get that going. We were running into ourselves and just turning the ball over on the inside. Plus Ruffy had two fouls already.

  I think FDA thought they were going to lose before the game, but when they saw they were playing us even, they began to pick up the pace.

  If a team is revving up the tempo, you have to react quickly or they might get a momentum thing going on and you can’t catch them. FDA ran two fast breaks in a row at the start of the second quarter, one off a rebound and the other off a turnover when Tomas held the ball too low and their g
uard came back and slapped it loose. The next time we came down, I saw their guards edging away from their zones, looking for another fast break. Colin was in for Ernie and called for the two-swing play. That’s when both guards move to the right, the center comes out, and the right forward goes backdoor. The guard with the ball passes out to the center, who passes in to the forward, who is free because the other forward has picked his man in the low post. If the low pick doesn’t work, then the forward comes out and the right side of the zone is overloaded. Colin was going to pass out to Ruffy but got tied up and passed it to me, and I was free. The FDA forward lost his man and picked his own teammate looking for him, which left the lane open.

  I went hard, and nobody even came near to me as I scored the deuce. The same dude on FDA who had lost his man took the ball out and made a weak pass that was supposed to go over my head at the foul line. I grabbed it and went right back inside, got the deuce, and was fouled. Then I nailed the free throw.

  FDA came down again, their shooting guard threw up something that looked like half an alley-oop, and Ruffy got it and flung the sucker downcourt. Tomas was down with me on a two-against-one. Their center wasn’t that tall but he was quick. I had the ball at the foul line as Tomas slid away toward the basket. I thought their center might switch when I faked the handoff to Tomas. He didn’t and came after me as I started the shot.

  All I saw was this big palm over my head. I floated the ball over him and it went in. We were up by four and FDA called a time-out.

  “That was a prayer and you know it!” The FDA player looked like he was pissed. I liked that.

  “If you had a game, you would have stopped it,” I said.

  During the time-out House told Ricky to go in for me. I shot him a look and he was glowering.

  “What’s wrong with you, man?” I asked him.

  “You are,” he said. “Now sit down and watch the game. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

  “What you mean, learn something?” I asked.

  House turned away.

  At halftime we had managed to get up by seven, but FDA was still in the game and Ruffy had picked up another foul. We still had the win as far as I was concerned. All we needed to do was take it. But as soon as we hit the locker room at halftime, House opened up on me.