Family Over Everything (25 page)

The only game we lost all season was a blowout with Boys & Girl High in Brooklyn. They kicked our asses. I knew our team was better than that. I was real emotional 'bout that game. The reason I was not in the line-up was back spasms; it hurt to move, much less run up and down the court. Now, the guys were counting
on me, looking at me and weighing whether I was up to the task.

Coach Faulk watched as one of the magpies shot the ball at the top of the key and it rimmed out. He called time out and we ran toward the sidelines in our snazzy red and black uniforms. All eyes were on me. The coach diagramed a play calling for me to shoot a jumper at the corner.

“We got to settle down,” the coach said in a drained whisper. “Don't rush the shots. Play methodically. Focus. We got to put the ball in the hands of Melvin and he'll take care of business. Won't you, Melvin?”

I nodded. I shot the jumper but one of their players got a hard foul on me as I was going up with the ball. The ball went in on the foul shot, but the second one came out and bounced into the hands of the opposition.

The enemy called a time-out. We watched them and their coach, a loudmouth usually playing to the cameras. He gestured wildly and angrily, and slapped one of the boys on the back. They came back out and tried to do the play, which we stopped dead in its tracks. Emory picked off the pass and outran the speedy magpies to do a weak lay-up. Each team had another shot to end the game in regulation, until I put in a contested jumper as time expired.

They lifted me on their shoulders and carried me to the locker room. Spectators were pouring out of the stands, yelling and screaming my name. I felt damn good. As I was getting dressed, Coach Faulk smiled and said the sky was the limit for me. Emory walked past me and said we're going out to celebrate tonight.

I figured we had one game left to play, a brawl with St. Peter's Prep, and that would be a warm-up for the City Finals. Tonight, I'd act a total fool. I didn't want to think about how I got hurt
during the game with Westinghouse just a year ago. One of the opposing players tangled my leg in his, maybe intentionally, as we went up for a rebound and I was writhing on the wood floor, unable to get up.

“Are you hurt, son?” my coach asked me. “Can you get up? Do you think you can get off the court unassisted?”

He was giving me a way out, to bravely get back up and trot off the court like a warrior. However, I felt like a punk, a sissy. Something had given away in my leg and my ankle when I fell. I felt it pull and later it burned like hell.

“Can you get up?” Coach Faulk wanted to do the right thing.

“Dammit, I don't think I can,” I whined.

In no time, the coach waved over the trainers, who knelt beside me and manipulated my leg, then my ankle. All on the left side. I grimaced with pain and tried to hide my face with my shirt so the rest of the team wouldn't see how much I was suffering with this damn thing.

The coach whispered to the chief trainer in an urgent voice, gripping him on the arm. “Do you think he'll be able to play tonight?”

“Not in this game,” the trainer replied. The arena was hushed while they waited to see if I would leave the court under my own power. I was lifted up, between two burly players and carried to the bench. Some of the team's admirers clapped and hooted while those in the know reserved their applause to see how badly I was hurt.

After the game, which we lost by eight points, I was told that I had a bad left mid-ankle sprain but there was nothing seriously wrong with my leg. When the doctor and the chief trainer told me the good news after I was X-rayed at the hospital, I was overjoyed. Coach Faulk said I would probably be out a week or two.
They wrapped my ankle tightly, gave me some painkillers, and sent me home.

“You gave a good acting job out there,” my father hissed. He was always pushing me, pushing me. “You could have got up if you wanted to. You acted like a punk.”

“Don't call me that,” I protested. “The trainer said I hurt my ankle and that was that. The coach didn't want me to play.”

“It's because of you that the team lost the game. You know that.”

I shouted at him angrily. “That's not true!”

He smiled cruelly. “You punked out. You punked out when they needed you most. How does that feel, knowing that you didn't give your all?”

I turned from him and hobbled on my crutches to my room. My father was still yelling and ranting about how much of a coward I was, so I drowned him out with some jams from Biggie and Tupac. I knew how much he hated rap. Nigger baboon music, he called it.

“Turn that shit down,” he screamed. “Turn that fuckin' shit down. Don't let me have to come in there. I'll knock the damn hell out of you.”

I put on some headphones and listened to the music. There was something about him that reminded me about Drake Rice, whose father had high hopes for him as well. Drake's daddy was convinced he was going to play in the NBA and be a superstar. Just like Wilt or Bill Russell. My own father had those same damn dreams; one of many men living through their sons to reach goals that they could never attain.

About four years ago, Drake was leaving a party in East New York, a part of poorest Brooklyn, with a group of friends. Some dudes got out of a car and walked toward the high school basketball star. Two of them were waving guns when the cat with the hoodie yelled for the tall nigga not to move.

Everybody scattered and began running. Both of the thugs started firing wildly at the people. A girl later told the cops that you could hear the string of shots, pop-pop-pop-pop, the bullets whistling in the air past them. Drake stumbled and fell to the pavement and couldn't get up.

When they turned him over, he had two gunshots in the back. One of the parents carried him to his car and sped him to the hospital. Both of the bullets had hit his spinal cord, leaving him crippled from the waist down.

“Damn, they could've shot me in the head and my troubles would have been over,” Drake told me when I visited him. “This is totally fucked up.”

I completely agreed with him but I would never tell him to his face. God can be sometimes a trickster. Drake had everything in front of him. The good life. Everything. But now he was going to be trapped in that damn chair for life.

“Sure, we're pulling for you and living through you because if you can make the journey to the high life, then we will be a success too,” my father said to me while going to the grocery store. “A lot of folks are counting on you. You've got a responsibility to not just yourself but to everybody. Remember that?”

Damn it
, I thought. If people let me find my own way, everything would be cool. So much pressure, so much tension. I wanted to blow off steam but I didn't know how. I didn't do anything out of my character, nothing crazy, nothing to make my family ashamed of me.

Joba Duane, a dude who used to play forward on our team, was running around with a crowd of roughnecks; most of them were former jailbirds. After one of the games, Joba offered me a joint but I refused it and man, he called me all kinds of names. So he and the crew were driving around the Bronx one night, and spotted somebody who owed Joba cash money.

“Hey spook, yo' owe me some cash, two large, and you been dodging me for three weeks,” Joba shouted at the fleeing dude. “I told you I wants my money. You gon' gimme my money or I'll fuck you up.”

The runner, panicked at the threat, fled between parked cars, zigzagging to prevent from getting shot. But the Beemer whipped around, squealed to a stop, and three of Joba's crew opened fire with heavy artillery. Some of the shots raked the front of an apartment building, sending sparks and shattered glass from the rooms with people living in them.

One apartment on the first floor contained a grandfather, an eighty-six-year-old, who was getting up to shut off his TV when the volley of shots came through the window, knocking him flat on the carpet. Later, his wife was on the news at eleven, saying he was reaching for the remote when the shots came through the window. He got it in the right jaw and the center of his chest.

“Henry kept saying I'm shot, I'm shot,” his wife, tears in her
eyes, said in a shaky voice to the reporters. “I didn't know what to do. So much blood. I went over to my neighbor's place and we called 9-1-1. Henry is lucky. He could be dead.”

The news announcer gave a description of the vehicle, containing four black youths, armed and dangerous. She gave a number to the police tip line, saying all calls would be confidential.

Somebody tipped the cops off. Joba was singled out. The police staked him out for four days before they moved in, tailing him from the loading dock where he worked part-time, and surrounded him in his place. He lived there with his mother, his Dominican girlfriend and her baby. It wasn't his but he took care of it.

“They surrounded the house and moved in, trapping him like a rat,” Luz said, clutching her baby. “They kicked down the door, slapped around his mother, and searched for him. He heard them when they came in and he went up the fire escape to the roof. They went up there after him.”

“Did you see them shoot him?” the television reporter asked.

“No, they kept us inside,” Joba's girlfriend sobbed. “They shot him in his belly, in his neck and in his hand. They said he was wrestling with them for the gun. He didn't have a gun. They shot him down like a dog.”

“How is his mother taking it?” the reporter asked.

“What did you think?” Luz snapped. “She collapsed when they brought him out. She heard the sirens and the helicopters . . .and saw him when they carried him out in a body bag. She's crazy with grief, you know.”

Oh man, my Pops, a used-to-be follower of Marcus Garvey and The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, went off about that Joba business. First, he started talking about the crumbling middle class, the recession, and how people were going nuts because the country cannot pay its debts. He babbled about reducing the
deficit and how low-income families weren't ever going to move up the economic ladder.

“That's why these black boys robbin' and stealin' and killin' people, because they can't get any work,” Pops added. “Joba didn't have a chance in this country. Most black boys don't have a chance. The cards are stacked against you guys.”

•   •   •

I'd listen to him go off about the responsibility of young black men and the need to wake up to what's going on. The men and the boys are letting down the community, letting down the family, letting down the women, letting down the kids. But I couldn't see what he was doing to benefit anybody.

“Dad, somebody called you when you were out, said something about some money owed to a lawyer,” I said. “I told him that you would call him back when you got in. He sounded like it was important.”

“Everything's fuckin' important,” my father growled.

“Are you going to be at the last game?” I asked him. “It's for the championship. The trainer and the coach say I should be ready so I'll play.”

My father rubbed his chin and put his hand on my shoulder. “You've got to play your ass off. Coach Faulk said some pro and college scouts are going to be in the stands checking you out. You got to have your A game for that night.”

“I will, I will.” I grinned.

“Because it's all about the cash, the green stuff.” My father lit a cigarette. “This is a capitalist society and everything is about money. You ain't shit until you got some money. Vultures and capitalism go hand in hand. One day I'll explain capitalism to you and how it works. As much money as this country generates, there
should be no unemployment, no foreclosures, no lack, no poverty. The white man has this shit set up where poverty and capitalism go hand in hand. I'll explain it to you one day before you go out in the world.”

“Explain what?”

“Explain how the real world operates, son.” He took a deep drag of the smoke and let it out through his nostrils. The cigarette habit was something he had picked up recently. He always appeared stressed; jittery; worked up.

Our family had moved out of the projects into a fairly stable neighborhood bordering on a high crime area. For a time, we lived with our aunt in the Pink Houses in the East New York section of Brooklyn, but my father finally got some money coming in and we moved. Still, with all the money coming in the house, my parents were fussing and fighting. Pops accused her of spending money like it was growing on trees. Those were his words.

I plopped down on the couch. “Pops, what do you do? I have no idea what you do for a living. Somebody asked me and I didn't know what to tell them.”

He pulled up a chair. It was crazy how much I looked like him. Mini-me. He lit another cigarette, frowned a little and stared out the window.

“What do you do, Pops?” I repeated.

“Hustle.” He laughed roughly. “I'm a hustler. Every black man worth his salt is a hustler. If you want to be successful, then you will be a hustler.”

I pulled up my feet and stared at him. “Then you're no better than Joba.”

“Bullshit. No, Joba was a loser. He accomplished nothing with his life, except to spread misery and suffering. In fact, I'm glad he's dead. You know why I say that?”

“No.” I wanted to hear this. Pops was in love with his voice. He loved to hear himself talk.

“Listen to me, son,” my father said. “Martin Luther King was a hustler. Adam Clayton Powell was a hustler. Malcolm X was a hustler. Like I said, every black man wanting to do something is a hustler. These black men will do anything to have control in their lives. They want freedom. They want choices. And that is what I want for you. I want you to be a hustler.”

At this point, my eyes were glazing over. Yak, yak, yak. I was thinking about going down to the Vicious Juice Bar on Atlantic Avenue, getting one of those frosty fruit smoothies or a Portobello mushroom wrap with sun-dried tomatoes and low-fat Mozzarella cheese. Joyce, my honey, hipped me to this place. She liked this health drink, a shake made with soy milk, protein powder and a little juice. She was on this health kick.