Game, Page 5

  “Drew, you’re playing for yourself, not the team!” he said. “We’re trying to get a team effort out there, and you’re going out for showtime at the Apollo. I don’t need this crap and the team doesn’t need it.”

  I knew I wasn’t going to start the second half, but I thought I would play. FDA kept the game close all the way. Our team kept looking over at the bench, waiting for the coach to send me back in. Our guys were playing good, but they weren’t playing strong. FDA got solid and had caught up with three minutes on the clock.

  “Yo, House, put me in, man.” I was mad at myself for even asking him.

  He didn’t answer, just turned away.

  With a minute to go in the game, FDA went up by five. Ernie and Colin were at guards, and FDA, smelling a chance for a win, were all over them. Ruffy got a deuce to cut it to three. We got a turnover when the refs called a three-second violation on their big man. Sky came down the sideline and threw up a jumper from just inside the three-point line and we were down by one. FDA tried to freeze the ball, but they got too careful and lost it again on a close-guarding call with ten seconds to go. We had a time-out left and House called it.

  “We want to get the ball down in a hurry and set up something off the penetration,” he said. “Ruffy, your man is laying off. You come out and set a pick in the middle of the lane. Ricky brings the ball left to right and looks for the pass at the top of the key. Colin goes in the opposite direction through the lane. Sky sets a pick for Tomas. Ricky, it’s up to you to see who’s free. If nobody’s free, you take the shot and everybody hits the boards. On three! One! Two! Three!”

  My whole body was jumping, I wanted to be in so bad. Mad and hurt at the same time, I couldn’t believe that House was being so stupid. We had been running picks all day, so I knew they were looking for them. Colin inbounded the ball to Ricky and went to the far side. Ricky dribbled to the side of the key, and I knew it was taking too long. Tomas got in front of his man off the pick five feet from the hoop and Ricky fired the ball to him. But instead of taking it right up, he put the ball on the floor once, tried a fake, and then went up.

  The FDA forward went up with him. He got the ball on the rise and slapped it toward midcourt. Ricky went after it, catching it just before it went out-of-bounds as the buzzer sounded. The game was over.

  “Why did you pull up?” Sky was all over Tomas. “You should have gone in and jammed! If you didn’t make it, the sucker would have had to foul you. Why you throwing up some pussy shot, man?”

  Sky was right. Tomas should have taken the ball inside and attacked the rim. But it wasn’t all his fault.

  “We shouldn’t have been behind in the first place,” I said. “I should have had that ball, and everybody knows it!”

  “Watch your mouth, Drew!” House yelled at me.

  “Why I got to watch my mouth?” I asked. “We shouldn’t have lost this game and you know it.”

  I was fuming. House took a step toward me, and Fletch stepped in front of him. I wished the sucker had stepped to me. I was ready to knock him out.

  “I think House was betting on the game,” Ricky called out.

  “That had better be a joke,” House barked at him.

  “You see anybody laughing?” Ricky asked.

  “We could have won with me in there!” I said. “And everybody here knows that!”

  “I don’t know it!” House was shouting. “And I’m the coach.”

  “Well, you’re the only one who don’t know it,” Ruffy said.

  “Look, I can replace this whole team if I have to,” House said.

  “With dudes who like to lose, I guess,” Ruffy said.

  House told Ruffy to meet him in his office in the morning. Ruffy said no and he meant it.

  Outside, it was cold and there was a light rain. I watched some of the FDA players laughing and joking as they walked down the street. Just the way they were feeling good, I was feeling bad.

  Ruffy hailed a gypsy cab because he had to go see his brother’s lawyer. As he got into the cab, I told him I’d call him later.

  “Hey, Drew, which way you going?” It was Tomas.

  “Down the way,” I said, nodding downtown.

  “Can I walk with you?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  We walked down the hill without talking. I knew he wanted me to let him off the hook about losing the game, but he didn’t know how to say it.

  “I don’t like losing,” he said finally.

  “Nobody does.”

  “Why didn’t you play the second half?” he asked.

  “House has his game going and he’s the coach,” I said. “Anything I do is counterfeit, I guess.”

  “I wish you had played,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes,” I said.

  I didn’t want to deal with Tomas. I didn’t trust him. Maybe he was just coming over to see what I was thinking. I imagined him calling House and telling him what I said.

  “You think I lost the game?” he asked.

  “The team lost the game,” I said. “The coach, everybody. You did your part, too.”

  “You know I want to play basketball the same as you.” Tomas spoke softly. “In Europe a lot of boys want to come to America and play ball. We see the American players with their big cars and big houses and they’re all smiling when they look at you on television. We want to wear the same clothes and get money to wear the different brands. We want that, too. There’s no difference in what is in my heart and what is in your heart.”

  “Yeah, but you came over here and you’re starting on the team,” I said. “If I went to your school, would I be starting?”

  “Sure you would.” He grinned. “Everybody in Europe thinks that black people are like gods. They think you don’t jump—you fly.”

  “In my case it’s true,” I said.

  “Drew, I’m sorry we lost.”

  “Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

  Tomas left me at the corner with a little wave.

  Going home, I was thinking about Tomas, what he said about things not being different between his life and mine. Maybe they had a high opinion of black ballplayers in Prague, but we were in America, and what I had to deal with was where I was. Just like my man Othello had to deal with where he was.

  What I was wondering was whether or not House would let us go on losing games to make his point.

  I got all the numbers you asked for,” Jocelyn said when I got home. She was drying her nails.

  “What numbers?”

  “About who’s going to win basketball games,” she said. “The teams with the highest percentage of their baskets on layups win more times than teams with the lowest percentage of their baskets on layups.”

  “Yeah, but who’s scoring the layups?” I asked. “It could be the guards.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jocelyn said. “The percentages always work out. I checked it out with the NBA, and they agree with me.”

  “You called the NBA?”

  “I might even apply for a job with them over the summer,” she said. “Although as cute as I am, I could be a distraction to their players.”

  “What did you say, girl?” Mom had come into the kitchen in her housecoat. “As cute as you are?”

  “Mama, you know I’m fine.” Jocelyn flashed Mom a smile over her shoulder.

  “Well, nobody is going to accuse you of being too modest, that’s for sure,” Mom said.

  “Actually, I see my beauty as a handicap, a burden I have to tolerate and which threatens to cover up my great intellect,” Jocelyn said.

  “Did you tell Drew that Ruffy called?” Mom was peeling onions.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “They have some pretrial stuff going on tomorrow, and he wants you to go down there with him to the court,” Jocelyn said. “He said his mama can’t make it because she has to go to a doctor’s appointment. She’s probably stressed out. I told him you probably wouldn’t go to court s
ince your picture was put up in the post office.”

  “Yo, I think I should go,” I said. “I can tell them I’m a relative.”

  “Will you be missing anything important in school?” Mom asked.

  “Nothing I can’t make up,” I said.

  “You know, I feel so bad about Tony,” Mama said, ignoring Mouth Almighty. “I always loved that boy.”

  “Everybody loved him,” Jocelyn said. “He still messed up. I was talking to Bianca, and she said that Tony’s mother is so upset, she can’t sleep or anything. That’s why she can’t go to court to find out what’s going on. Tony’s mother said when she went to see him downtown and saw him in his prison clothes, she just broke down on the spot. She’s the one we need to feel sorry for.”

  “A lot of our young men mess up, Jocelyn,” Mom said. “But if we don’t support them, who’s going to raise the next generation of black children?”

  “I’m waiting for the UFOs to land so I can marry a Martian,” Jocelyn said. “And I hope he has some money when he gets here.”

  I thought Jocelyn could have shown a little more feeling for Tony than she did, but she was right. Tony had messed up. But for some reason, it didn’t sound like such a big deal. It was almost like—Hey, that’s the way we live in the hood, and getting caught is just part of the routine. Mom okayed me going to the pretrial, and I met Ruffy at the corner of 145th, down from the bus garage. We took the 3 train downtown. Ruffy was wearing his suit, and he had brought a pad to take notes. The train got crowded at 96th Street and stayed that way until we reached 14th.

  I had my fake ID saying I was nineteen, but we didn’t even need it. Ruffy had the name of the judge, and we found the right courtroom on the seventh floor.

  The courtroom was nearly empty except for people at the three tables in the front. Tony, in his orange jumpsuit, sat with his lawyer at one of them.

  A policewoman was talking when Ruffy and I got there. She was saying that she had checked in the guns when they were brought into the police station.

  “And are those the weapons lying on the desk in front of the clerk?” A tall, thin man in a brown suit pointed to the guns.

  Before the woman could answer, Tony’s lawyer started objecting, but the judge held up his hand and said that he would let the guns be brought in as evidence. Then the woman said she would have to see the tags, and she was shown the tags and then she said they were the same weapons that she had checked in.

  Tony looked back and saw Ruffy and me sitting there. Ruffy nodded and Tony nodded back. The judge looked over to where we sat, and so did one of the officers in the front of the room. We weren’t sitting too near the front and nobody looked nervous.

  The case went on. It wasn’t like television. Nobody seemed excited. In fact, it looked like everybody was bored. I tried to check out the other two defendants, but they mostly kept their heads down.

  Ruffy and I didn’t speak while the hearing was going on, but when there was a break, he asked me if I knew them.

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s Norman and Little G,” Ruffy said. “Remember them from Marcus Garvey Park?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Norman and Little G used to play ball with the older guys, but neither one of them really had any serious game. Norman had got a girl pregnant and tried to make her get rid of it, and the girl had been crippled. That was all I knew about him except that both he and Little G were losers nobody liked and everybody was half afraid of because they were always into something dangerous.

  At noon the hearing ended for the day. After Tony had been taken away, his lawyer came over to us and said he was glad we could make it.

  “When the actual trial starts, we want the jury to see that Tony has a family. That way they’re more likely to think of him as a human being rather than just a felon,” he said. “Is your mother coming tomorrow?”

  “I think so,” Ruffy said.

  “It’ll help if she can make it,” the lawyer said.

  We went into the hallway, and Ruffy called his mom to tell her the hearing was over for the day. I looked at everybody wandering around in the hall. Mostly young black men I figured were on trial or going to see them except for a fine-looking Latina sister in handcuffs. I gave her a smile and she looked away. It wasn’t smiling time.

  We got on the elevator, and there was an older brother already in the car. He had real wide shoulders but he kept them hunched forward. He was leaning over and trying to catch his breath. I thought he might be having a heart attack.

  “Yo, you okay?” I asked.

  “Not guilty,” he said, looking up at me. “I’m walking, man. I’m walking.”

  “Yeah, that’s all good,” I said.

  When we left the building, the guy stopped and took a deep breath. I didn’t know what had happened with him, but I could see he was glad to be free and out in the world.

  The court scene got me down. I thought about what Jocelyn had said, that Tony had messed up even though people loved him. Maybe being loved wasn’t enough; maybe there was something else you needed not to get in trouble. Then I thought about the older guy in the elevator. He was walking out of the building, but it must have been a close call because he was still shaking.

  “That guy was still trying to catch his breath,” I said to Ruffy as we started walking uptown.

  “So am I,” Ruffy said.

  I looked at him and he wasn’t smiling.

  At practice House set up backdoor plays over and over, with one of the forwards sliding off center picks for the bucket. Everybody on the team knew he was setting stuff up for Tomas, but we didn’t kick it around. All during practice I was watching the guys, seeing if they were on my side or slipping over to Tomas. I didn’t want to be suspicious of them, but that was the way I was feeling. I knew I could trust Ruffy, but I wasn’t sure about the others.

  We also practiced maintaining distances, because the guys were bunching up too much, especially when we were trying to overload a zone defense.

  After practice I walked home with Ruffy and we talked about what colleges we wanted to go to.

  “I just want to go to a school where if you’re wearing their name on your jacket, people are going to know who you’re talking about,” I said. “A guy I know went to Bethany College out in Kansas. People kept asking him where it was and if it was a real school, so he stopped wearing their jacket.”

  “I want to go to a school where all the girls have big legs,” Ruffy said. “And it’s okay if they’re not too smart, too.”

  “Yo, man, that’s wrong,” I said.

  “You know, Tony’s lawyer can still cop a plea if he wants,” Ruffy said. “If he cops, he’ll get three to five.”

  “If he doesn’t cop?”

  “They got about seven charges. The max looks like fifteen years.”

  A fifteen-year bid is too cold to even think about. We didn’t talk any more on the way home.

  It was just before lunch, and me, Ricky, and our boy Domingo were sitting in the media center trying to find his house on the website where you can locate areas from a satellite. While we looked, we were also running down our viewpoints about girls, because Ricky had some funny ideas.

  “The reason Puerto Rican girls are the best-looking is that we got the best mixture,” Ricky said. “We got African blood, Spanish blood, and just the right mixture of Taino, which is Indian. That’s what gives Puerto Rican mamas that delicate look.”

  “They look delicate, but they can’t touch girls from the Dominican Republic, because our girls are deep, and when you see a girl from the DR, all of that comes right through her eyes,” Domingo said. “You can even ask Drew, and he’s not from the DR.”

  “Ask me?” I looked at Domingo to see if he was serious and saw that he was. “I’ve never said anything about girls from the DR being so fine.”

  “Yeah, but you’re honest, man,” Domingo said. Just as he was talking, Colin came over and sat down at our table.

  “That
my neighborhood!” Ricky pointed to the computer screen.

  We tried to home in on his house, but he couldn’t recognize the streets from the top view. Then he wanted to switch to this girl’s house he was trying to get next to.

  “See if we can find her house, and then I’ll tell her I used to live over there,” Ricky said.

  “Yo, Colin, who do you think are the best-looking”—Domingo held his hands up like he was settling something serious—“Puerto Rican girls or Dominican girls?”

  “How come black girls aren’t in there?” I asked.

  “I think Irish girls are the best-looking,” Colin said.

  “Yo, he got to say that,” Ricky cracked. “My man is trying to hold up his peeps. But show me one Irish girl in this school who’s really smoking!”

  “There aren’t any Irish girls in this school,” Colin said.

  “That’s because they can’t stand the competition!” Ricky said.

  That was stupid, but I liked it anyway. We messed around some more, dissing each other’s women until the period ended. Me and Domingo started out toward the lunchroom, Ricky had to go and get another battery for his cell, and Colin was rapping with the media teacher. House saw me in the hall and came over.

  “Hey, Drew, you headed for lunch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on, I’ll treat you to some decent food,” he said. “We can go to Tacky’s.”

  Tacky’s was the name everybody gave to La Taqueria, a Mexican restaurant that had just opened in the hood. It looked kind of expensive, so I had never eaten there, but some of the teachers talked about it like it was special.

  When House asked me if I wanted to have lunch with him, I froze a little. We had been avoiding each other most of the time and I didn’t know what to expect. But I don’t back down, so I said okay.

  The restaurant was only two blocks away, and on the way over he was talking about how the neighborhood was improving.