Game

Y
o, Drew, here's the story!” Jocelyn called me from the living room.

She and Mom were already sitting on the couch across from the television. Pops came out of the bathroom in his undershirt and started to say something, but Mom held her hand up.

“Wait a minute, honey,” she said. “They're talking about that stickup on 126th Street.”

Pops looked at me. There was a commercial on the television.

“It's coming up next,” Jocelyn said.

A moment later a woman's face filled the screen.

The image on the screen switched to a picture of the police stretching yellow tape across the sidewalk in front of a discount store.

Jocelyn switched channels.

“They didn't even give their names,” Mom said.

“That's because they weren't eighteen yet,” Pops said. “You can read about it in the papers tomorrow.”

“It just tears me up to see young people wasting their lives like that,” Mom said. “Every time you pick up the newspaper, every time you switch on the television, it's more of our young men either killed or going to jail. Lord have mercy! There just doesn't seem to be an end to it. Now there's a young man with all his life in front of him, and I know his parents wanted the best for him. Lying out on the sidewalk. It just…oh, Lord have mercy!”

Mom's voice was cracking, and I wondered why Jocelyn even had the story on. She knew how it upset Mom. She had always worried about me and Jocelyn, but then when my man Ruffy's brother was arrested right after Christmas, she got really messed around.

“I still think you children should finish school down south.” Mom was on her feet. She had the towel in her hand she had been using to dry the dishes. “It's just safer down there.”

Pops started in about how it wasn't any safer in Savannah, which is where my grandmother lived, than it was in Harlem. I went back to my room, and Jocelyn followed me in and plunked herself down on the end of my bed.

“Why don't you go to your own room, girl?”

“Why don't you let me borrow your cell until I get mine fixed?”

“No.”

“Drew, you ain't got nobody to call. Let me use your phone.”

“Those guys must have been on crack or something,” I said. “Pulling a stickup in the middle of the day.”

“So when do you pull your stickups?”

“Jocelyn, shut up and get off my bed.”

“How long you think Mom is going to be upset?” she asked, not budging from the bed.

I took my sneakers off and threw them near her. “Yo, even when Mom's not acting worried, she's upset,” I said. “I only got the rest of the year to go at Baldwin. You're the one she's going to send down south.”

“I was thinking that maybe I should just go to Hollywood and start my career,” Jocelyn said.

“I thought you were going to go to Harvard first.”

“I could commute back and forth.”

“And you could get off my bed so I can get some rest.”

Jocelyn got up, picked up one of my sneakers, sniffed it, and then staggered out of the room.

 

The only time our neighborhood made the news was when something bad went down, and the talk in school was about the shooting and who knew the guy who had been killed. It was a hot subject in the morning but had cooled down by lunchtime. A
helicopter had gone down in Afghanistan, and that made the front page of the newspaper. The main inside story was about some girl singer getting a divorce and accusing her husband of fooling around with her sister. That was good, because I knew Mom would be looking for news about the shooting. Everything that went down wrong in the neighborhood upset her. I could dig where she was coming from. There had been a time, a few years ago, when the shootings and all the drug stuff were just background noise. You heard about it happening, but unless some kid my age or Jocelyn's age was hit by a stray bullet, it didn't seem that real. But when I reached fifteen, it was boys my age being shot. Mom was always warning me to be careful and stay away from gangs. That's what she understood most—the gangs.

She knew I wasn't about gangs. I was about ball. Ball made me different than guys who ended up on the sidewalk framed by some yellow tape.

“Basketball is wonderful, Son,” Mom would say. “And I'm sure glad you're playing sports instead of running the streets.”

She would let it go at that, but I knew she had listened to people talking about how hard it was to make it in basketball. I knew that, too. But I also knew that even if I didn't make it all the way, I could cop some college behind my game. Everybody in the city who played any real ball knew my game was strong. James Baldwin Academy had almost made it to the regional finals in my junior year, and now, as a senior, I knew we had a good chance to make it. Last year I led the team in scoring, assists, and defense. The word was that there were a lot of scouts checking me out at the end of last year, and I knew they would be back this year. They always came after Christmas, when the deal got serious. There would be some guy recording your shoe size and how strong your wrists were and smiling when they asked you if you did any weed. They were smiling, but I knew what I had going on. All the real players told me to pick up my action during February, because that's when the scouts were sending in their reports. The thing was to make it to the tournaments in March, when the college coaches would be making their final reports.

My high school basketball career had been dope, but I knew I needed a strong finish, too. I remembered seeing documentaries on a couple of players headed for the big-time schools. Division I all the way. If I could deal big-time and get picked up by a smoking college program, I thought I could make it to the NBA. It was a dream, but it was a dream I could back up. Lots of dudes talked the talk and a few could even walk the walk, but I knew I was solid because I had big-money skills and my head was into the game. All I needed to do was to live up to my ability.

But every time something hard went down in the hood—some young brother got wasted, some kid got killed in a drive-by, or someone we knew got arrested—Mom got upset. I could dig it. She was about family all the way. When Tony got a fall, it shook Mom.

“Drew ain't Tony,” Pops said. “He got more to him. Ain't you, Drew?”

“Yeah, Mom,” I said. “I thought you knew that.”

She smiled and patted me on the hand.

Tony is the brother of my best friend. If I needed a reminder, it was Tony. Everybody had thought he
was all-world on the court, too. I knew in my heart that I was more than Tony. Maybe not on the court, but in real life. I had seen Tony hanging out on the corner and messing with the crack hos. It worried me some, because I wasn't digging anybody in the hood getting into a telephone booth and turning into Superman. But I believed in myself. When I looked around, I didn't see too many brothers believing in themselves. They were steady rapping sunshine, but you could see the weakness in their eyes when they had to stop rapping and walk away. It was like when you were on the court with a dude, and he was blowing smoke but backing off when the deal went down. I was fronting strong, but I knew that ball wasn't a done deal.

Ruffy Williams was Tony's younger brother. He was my main man and the team's center. He was usually happy, but when I met him in the hallway outside the media center, he looked pissed.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I bought an MP3 player from Ernie, and he told me he had downloaded over two hundred songs.” Ruffy was six three, two inches shorter than me, but built like a tank. “So I hook up, and the only thing
he's got downloaded is classical music.”

Ernie Alvarez was a guard. He was usually cool but a little quirky. His father ran a television repair shop, and he was always getting used tape recorders and stuff that didn't work quite right. But he sold the stuff cheap, so it was okay.

“So we got practice today, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How about we take some time out right after practice and kill Ernie?” I asked. “No big deal. We got other guys who can play guard.”

“Hey, I heard we got two new players on the team,” Ruffy said.

“Who told you that?”

“Needham. You know those two white guys we saw in the gym last week?”

“Yeah.”

“Them.”

I had seen the two guys around the school for a couple of weeks. One was small, maybe five ten, and played like he thought his game was hot. The other guy was big, my height, but broad. He played some ball during Phys. Ed. but I hadn't paid him a lot of attention. I did notice he had a slight accent.

I hate it when it's really cold outside and the windows are closed and it's stuffy in the school. Time dragged all day. I slid through the morning and made it into my afternoon English class with the clock pushing toward two. I was getting sleepy when Miss Tomita asked me to stand up and discuss the play we had been assigned to read. She didn't expect me to have my stuff together, so I sat at my desk looking all stupid while she got her steam up, and then I stood and started running it down.

“Okay, so
Othello
's a play about this brother who was a general but was married to a white chick,” I said. “The brother was uptight and worried that the chick was stepping out on him, and this guy he trusted, Iago, started whispering in his ear about what was going on behind his back. I think Iago didn't like black people.”

“Mr. Lawson, Shakespeare described Othello as a Moor, but there's no reason to believe that his actual skin color was black. That probably would not have been acceptable in Elizabethan England.” Miss Tomita was small, but when she was mad, she could make herself look bigger.

“The guy's picture on the cover showed he was a black man,” I said.

“That is what the publisher assumed,” Miss Tomita said. “We happen to be studying the author, not the publisher.”

There were some kids goofing up as if I had done something really stupid instead of just making a simple mistake. I sat down and looked at the book cover again. I wondered why, if everybody else thought Othello was black, I wasn't allowed to think the same thing. I let it slide because you can't win with a teacher.

Everybody knew that Miss Tomita was the hardest teacher in the school. She was Japanese American and taught English and acted as if she loved every book that was ever written. As far as I was concerned, she had to be reading in her sleep to know as many books as she knew. I wanted to get my grades together, and English was my shakiest subject.

 

“What I'm going to do”—Coach Hauser, or House, as he liked to be called, ran his fingers through what was left of his hair as he stood facing the
bleachers—“is to carefully explain the philosophy of our team for the rest of this year. All those who disagree with the team's philosophy can save us some time by leaving as soon as possible, because they won't be playing with us. All those who agree with the team philosophy but can't manage to play it can leave, too. If there's not enough players left to make a team, then James Baldwin Academy will just skip the rest of the season.”

He took his short, squat self over to the bench and picked up his travel bag. We watched as he took out some small bags and started tossing them out to us.

“Teams that make most of their baskets from within six feet of the hoop win most of the championships. That's a fact. And it's clear to me and to any student of the game. I am passing out tape measures to each of you so that you can understand what six feet means. Am I going too fast for anybody?”

“Yo, House, we've been kicking butt all season,” Sky said, pulling on his crotch the way he always does. “Who you thinking we're going to be playing the rest of the season?”

“You're right. We did all right in the first half of
the season,” House said. “But we still have half a season to go, and this time we want to get into the state finals.”

“In other words, you need me to carry the team again,” Sky said, smiling.

“What I need is for us to play both halves of the season,” House said. “Team ball is going to get us where we want to go. I expect our big men, the two forwards and center, to score most of the points every game. What's more, I expect them to score within six feet of the rim. That's what we're going to be working for, and that's how the team will be playing. For our big men to be doing the scoring, they're going to have to do most of the shooting. Which means that our guards are going to have to set them up, and to pick up on the number of assists. These are simple ideas, but they will win ball games. Anytime we have a game, win or lose, in which the guards score the most points, I'm going to find out what went wrong and correct it. And if I have to sit people down to keep the team philosophy in mind, I will do that. Any questions?”