The arena is near Inner Harbor, a swank shopping development in downtown Baltimore, so everybody walked over there to get some pizza and kill time. Twelve tall black boys, wearing bright yellow-and-green warm-ups, the pants hanging low and almost sliding off their hips, made for a sight that was probably not usual at Inner Harbor. Shoppers were executing pick-and-rolls to avoid them. In the mall, there were dozens of stores open, but the boys seemed reluctant to go into them. We ended up in a sporting goods shop that specialized in clothes and accessories with college and professional team logos. Felipe disappeared down one of the rows. Kojo posted up in front of a rack of jackets, took two down, looked at the price tags, and then put them back. Reggie and Gerald found hats featuring their future colleges. “Yo, I like this one,” Gerald said. “It’s fly, but what I really want is a fitted Carolina hat. They only have the unfitted kind.”
Reggie glanced at him and then said, “Why don’t you wait till you get to Carolina, man? They going to have everything you want, man, just
wait.
”
“I don’t want to wait.” Gerald put on an unfitted hat—the kind with an adjustable strap across the back—and flipped the brim back. Gary Saunders came over and looked at him. Gary is a sophomore. An air of peace or woe seems to form a bumper around him. Some people think he will eventually be as good as Felipe, or even better. He pulled Gerald’s brim and then rocked back on his heels and said, sadly, “I wish I had a hat head. I can’t wear a hat. I look dumb in a hat.” Felipe walked by, wearing three hats, with each brim pointing in a different direction. He was smiling like a madman. He admired himself in the mirror and then took the hats off. “I’ve had enough,” he said to no one in particular. “Now I’m going to my room.”
SOME THINGS
at the tournament did not bode well. For instance, the program listed the team as “Rice, Bronx, N.Y.” instead of placing the school in Manhattan. Also, Jamal Livingston had decided to shave his head during the afternoon, and the razor broke after he had finished only one hemisphere. The resulting raggedy hairdo made him look like a crazy person. He was so unhappy about it that he told Coach DeMello he wouldn’t play, but Science finally persuaded him, saying, “Stretch, you look cool, man. You’re down with the heavy-metal crowd now.” The Raiders got their first look at the Southern players as they warmed up. They were big kids, and they looked meaty, heavy-footed, and mean. Damon Cason, the point guard DeMello had warned the Raiders about, had powerful shoulders and a taut body and a merciless look on his face. Beside him, Felipe looked wispy and hipless. Warming up, he was silent and unsmiling. The fans were loud and found much to amuse them. When Jamal stepped onto the court, they began chanting “
Hair
cut!
Hair
cut!
Hair
cut!” and then switched to a chant of “Rice-A-Roni!” and then back to “
Hair
cut!” every time Jamal took a shot.
The game begins, and in the opening moments I focus only on Felipe. Rice wins the tap, but Southern scores nine quick points and looks ready to score more. Three Southern players are guarding Felipe. They struggle after him on the fast breaks, but he slips by and, still skimming along, makes a driving layup from the right. Then a fast-break layup, off a snappy pass from Ziggy. Then, thirty-two seconds later, a driving layup from the left side. The guards are looking flustered and clumsy. Felipe gets a rebound, passes to Reggie, gets the ball back, and then suddenly he drifts upward, over the court, over the other boys, toward the basket, legs scissored, wrists cocked, head tilted, and in that instant he looks totally serene. Right before he dunks the ball, I have the sensation that the arena is silent, but, of course, it isn’t; it’s just that as soon as he slams the ball down there is a crack of applause and laughter, which makes the instant preceding it seem, by contrast, like a vacuum of sound, a little quiet hole in space.
The final score is Rice 64, Southern 42. Leaving the floor, Felipe is greeted by some of the white men, who have come down to Baltimore to watch his game. One of them comments on how well he played and wants to know what he did all afternoon to prepare. Felipe is mopping his face with a towel. He folds it up and then says, “Oh, my goodness, I didn’t do much of anything. I sat in my room and watched
Popeye
on television and listened to merengue music. I just felt good today.”
THE LAST TIME
I spent with the team was the night before they were to leave on a trip to two tournaments—the Iolani Classic, in Honolulu, and the Holiday Prep Classic, in Las Vegas. The flight to Hawaii was so early that Coach DeMello decided to have the boys sleep at the school. After practice, they spent a few hours doing homework and then ordered in pizzas. Reggie had brought a big radio from home and set it up under a crucifix on the second floor, tuned to a station playing corny soul ballads. Coach DeMello had set up a video player and lent the team his NBA highlight tapes. “You guys going to keep it together up here?” he said. “Let’s keep it together up here.”
One of them yelled out, “Hey, Coach, I got to ask you something. Are there any girls in Hawaii our age?”
Someone told Reggie to turn off the radio, because the music was awful.
Reggie said, “Bro, you bugging.”
“It’s stupid, man. Find something better.”
“Get your own radio, bro. Then you can be the DJ.”
“Reggie Freeman’s got a problem.”
“Hey, Gary, where’d you get that shirt?”
“Macy’s.”
“Macy’s! What, you rich or something?”
“Put on the tape. I want to see Bird and Magic play.”
“Bird’s a white guy.”
Gerald turned on the video player and put in the tape.
“Bird could be a purple guy, bro. He’s got a game.”
“Here’s Magic. This is the gospel, B, so you better listen up.”
They sat in rapt attention, replaying some of the better sections and reciting the play-by-play along with the announcer, Marv Albert. After a few minutes, I realized that Felipe wasn’t sitting with us, so I wandered down the hall, looking for him. Except for the vestibule where the boys were camping, the school was still and empty. I went upstairs to the gym. One window was broken, and a shaft of light from outside was shooting in. Someone’s jersey was looped over the back of a chair in the corner, and it flapped in the night breeze. I walked from one end of the court to the other. My footsteps sounded rubbery and loud on the hardwood. After a moment, I heard a grinding in the hallway, so I walked back across the court and out to the hall. The elevator door opened, and there was Felipe, his shirttail hanging down, his hat on backward, his hand on the controls.
“Were you looking for me?”
“I was.”
“I don’t want to hang with the guys.” He started to let the door slide shut, then pushed it open and leaned against it, grinning. “I just want to fool around. I don’t want anyone to find me. I know what I got to do when we get to Hawaii. I just want to go up and down tonight.”
Early the next morning, they left for Hawaii. They had a luau for Christmas, won three out of four games, flew to Las Vegas, ate too much casino food, again won three out of four games, and won a lot of quarters in the slot machines. The blustery, bright day they got back to New York, they celebrated Felipe Lopez’s eighteenth birthday.
THE REST OF THE SEASON
was a breeze until February, when Gil, Jamal, Kojo, and Rodney were taken off the team on account of bad grades. Still, going into the city Catholic school championship, the Raiders had a record of nineteen and four. They then played St. Francis and won, 72–54, to get to the quarterfinals, and then beat Molloy, 46–36, to advance to the next round. On a cold night last week, they played Monsignor McClancy and lost in the last few minutes, 39–36, and so their season came to a close. The white men were following Felipe in every game. He had been playing so well and so steadily for the last few months that it now was as if some mystery had lifted off him and he was already inhabiting the next part of his life, in which he gets on with the business of making the most of his talent and polishing his game. In the meantime, the white men started taking note of a few young comers, like Gary Saunders, and also some skinny wisp of a kid at Alexander Burger Junior High. He’s only an eighth grader, but he already dunks. They think he’s worth watching. What they say is that he might be another Felipe someday.
SHORT PEOPLE
B
RIEF
E
NCOUNTER
O
F ALL THE GUYS WHO ARE STANDING AROUND
bus shelters in Manhattan dressed in nothing but their underpants, Marky Mark is undeniably the most polite. For instance, even though he is very busy getting ready to go to Japan for a promotional tour, Marky took the time to call from Los Angeles the other day just to chat about his new role, as the Calvin Klein Underpants Boy. Heretofore, Marky has been known only as a young white rap star and the leader of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. Underwear has always figured in his performances, but it is only in the last few weeks that Marky has ascended to the status of lingerie luminary, and he admitted on the phone that he’s still getting used to the job.
Marky was actually a little late in calling, but he offered the perfect excuse: He had spent the morning at the gym doing some upper-body work, and it had taken longer than he expected. Who could begrudge him that? After all, if photographs of you nearly naked were plastered everywhere—this happens to be Marky’s current situation—then upper-body work is exactly the sort of thing you would be wise not to neglect. Nonetheless, Marky was apologetic. “I’m really, really sorry,” he said. “I hope I didn’t screw up your day, or anything.”
In the ads, which were photographed by Herb Ritts, Marky looks like a horny and impudent sixteen-year-old pleased with his pecs, his abs, and his underwear. In reality, he is twenty-one and slightly bashful. Now, about his thing. Since he was a little kid, Marky has favored gigantic pants riding very low on his hips. “I can’t move around in tight pants,” he said. “I’ve always been into the baggy thing.” One night, when his brother Donnie Wahlberg, who is one of the New Kids on the Block, came to watch him perform, Marky decided to pull down his pants. “I just did it as a joke,” he says. “But the crowd went crazy, and the next thing you know, it was like ‘Hey, ain’t you the kid who pulls his pants down?’ ”
Is he planning to pull his pants down in Japan?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want to cause some mad commotion.”
Just then, someone came into Marky’s hotel room, and he turned away from the phone and called out, “Yo, everybody’s in the crib today!” Then Marky got back on the phone and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt. That was my brother Donnie and my road manager, and they were crackin’ on me because I haven’t taken a bath in three days, so I’m a little greasy and I smell like a dog.”
Back to pants removal. Marky has always favored Calvin Klein briefs, and earlier this year he was asked to pose in ads for the company’s underwear line. The rest is bus shelter history. “It’s some crazy shit seeing the posters of me in my underwear all over the place,” Marky said. “But the pictures are really me, you know?” He admitted that he’d left town right before most of the posters went up, so up to now he had missed the full effect of seeing himself in briefs at large. “I think it’ll probably be cool,” he said. “It’s not that big a thing for me. After all, I’ve pulled my pants down in front of millions of people millions of times.”
B
IG
THERE ARE OTHER
big chairs making the rounds these days, but Bob Silverstein’s Big Chair is something a little different. For one thing, Bob Silverstein’s Big Chair comes apart. This was Bob’s idea. No one else has had this idea. The other big chairs are merely big, whereas Bob’s Big Chair is big-plus-transportable—meaning that it can be broken down into four separate, easily moved pieces. The other things that make it different are—well, quite frankly, Bob would rather not say. The line of work Bob Silverstein is in—novelty photo opportunities for street fairs and corporate functions—thrives on technical innovation and conceptual ingenuity, and maintaining these requires an uncommon degree of confidentiality, and it just so happens that Bob Silverstein has gotten big in the novelty photo business by being uncommonly confidential.
The exact dimensions of Mr. Silverstein’s Big Chair are really nobody’s damn beeswax, but if you go to any of the street festivals where the Big Chair is showing up this summer, you can get a good unauthorized look at it for yourself. The Big Chair is a Colonial-style wing chair with roll arms and a dust ruffle; it’s upholstered in nubbly blue-and-brown plaid fabric; and it’s extremely large. The dimensions—well, forget about getting specific, but Mr. Silverstein will allow that the chair might possibly be from three and a half to four times as big as a normal chair. The Big Chair’s purpose is to make people sitting in it look unbelievably small when Bob takes their picture. The picture goes into a cardboard frame and then goes home with the back-to-normal-size people. Let’s say, for instance, that the Big Chair could make someone sitting in it look from three and a half to four times as small as normal. Maybe even smaller. Whatever. A lot of people can fit into the Big Chair for group photos. Maximum capacity is undoubtedly quite a large number. It’s maybe a number divisible by five, maybe not. It might be around eight or so.
A certain weekend some time ago, the Big Chair was set up at the Christopher Street Fair, and Bob Silverstein was working the booth. Mr. Silverstein is a stocky man with short sandy hair, a lot of freckles, muscular forearms, and a wide-open, expressive, totally revealing face. If you frequent street festivals in New York or in various other places, such as certain other states nearby—no names, no way—you may have seen him around. He’s been doing the Big Chair for two years. Before that, he had a booth where you could be photographed with life-size cutouts—Ronald Reagan, the Pope, Hulk Hogan, and twenty-two other celebrities, all of whom he threw in the trash a few days before coming to the Christopher Street Fair, because, as far as he’s concerned, cutouts are totally over. Mr. Silverstein figures that the Big Chair has one more season and then it’s going in the trash, too. In the meantime, he’s working on something else—something big in the business sense of big rather than big in the Big Chair sense of big, which he will be introducing as soon as the Big Chair is no longer big in the business sense of big. Here’s a crazy idea: How about Mr. Silverstein’s giving a little hint about this new project? “Are you totally kidding?” Mr. Silverstein said when he heard this crazy idea. “No, thanks. I have no plans to divulge anything about it at this time. When it’s ready, you’ll know about it, believe me.”
Until this next big idea is ready for unveiling, Mr. Silverstein is keeping busy with the Big Chair. How busy? This, too, is the sort of nonpublic information that Mr. Silverstein will not be divulging at this time—or any time soon, for that matter—because indiscreet divulging is exactly how a big street fair booth thing goes from being big to being in the trash. In any case, Mr. Silverstein’s Big Chair business card says big chair photo: have the chair at your affair. These affairs could be Bar Mitzvahs, sweet sixteen parties, or other events that are strictly the private concern of the individuals involved, and absolutely no one else’s, or they could be corporate in nature. “Not to mention any names, but take a bank, for instance—a particular bank might call and say they are having some of their employees, such as, say, their head tellers and their managers, at a gathering,” Mr. Silverstein said. As he was saying this, he was assisting a couple in matching Gay Pride T-shirts into the Big Chair and surrounding them with Big Chair props—a giant pink baby bottle, a giant blue baby bottle, and a much-larger-than-life coloring book. “They will have the employees at a particular hotel, and they will contract with us to take a set number of photos,” Mr. Silverstein went on. “By the way, I also have a robot, Zoniff the Robot, who can also be hired for corporate events.” Interrupting himself, he asked the couple if they wanted the giant beer bottle in the Big Chair with them, too. “No, thanks,” the larger of them responded. “We don’t want the beer bottle. We want to look like little tiny babies.”
It occurred to us that there might be more than one Bob Silverstein Big Chair, so that one could be dispatched to a corporate event while another might be at, say, the Italian Festival at Steeplechase Park. Okay—just as a for instance, then, approximately how many Bob Silverstein Big Chairs might there be in existence in the known universe at this particular point in time?
“A few,” Mr. Silverstein answered. “A couple. There are several. Some. Hey—who, exactly, needs to know?”
Next question: Why do people like the Big Chair, really?
“I can’t say,” Mr. Silverstein said. “They just love it. Right now, it’s in. It’s a fun idea.”
A line was forming at the Big Chair booth. At the head of the line was a group of women wearing Lycra tank tops, faded blue jeans, and studded dog collars.
“Nice fabric,” one of the women said to Mr. Silverstein as she climbed up to the chair. “Did you make this chair?”
“I made the chair,” he said. “I conferred with an upholsterer on the fabric.”
“It’s a really big chair,” she said.
“That’s what everyone says,” he said.
H
ALL OF
F
AME
AT THE MOMENT
, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is about two inches high, is made of plastic, and is stored in the architectural model shop at I. M. Pei & Partners’ Madison Avenue offices. Someday soon, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will be built in Cleveland, and then it will be much bigger—it will have a two-hundred-foot tower, a huge, tent-shaped glass atrium, a music and film library, exhibits, listening rooms, performance spaces, and all sorts of tributes to its inductees. “We are far, far from finished,” Mr. Pei, who is designing the building, told us the other day. “Still, everyone seems to want to know about it. My family are more excited about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame than they are even about my work on the Louvre.”
Mr. Pei is known for making big, dignified buildings, like the east wing of the National Gallery in Washington, and he confessed that in the beginning he had had doubts about the new project. “When the committee from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation came and asked me to design the building, I was taken aback,” he said, throwing his hands in the air the way the Solid Gold Dancers sometimes do. “I told them, ‘You know, I’m not a fan. I’m really not.’ When I thought of rock and roll, all I thought of was my kids, and with me it was always ‘Kids, turn it down! Turn it
down
!’ But the people on the committee said that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t yet a fan, and I was greatly encouraged. And so I started my musical education.”
Mr. Pei, who says he prefers classical music, is seventy years old, compact, black haired, and dapper. When we met him, he was wearing a rich dark suit and a floral tie, and eyeglasses with round, thick black frames. He uses a square black lacquer table for a desk, and all the notes and papers on it, we noticed, were in perfectly squared-off piles. After a few minutes, four architects who are also working on the Hall of Fame and who took part in the rock-and-roll education of Mr. Pei came in. They were Craig Rhodes, the project manager (partial to Eurythmics, Kate Bush, and reggae, and currently nurturing an interest in blues), Sophia Gruzdys (major fan of Pink Floyd, Led Zep, Jimmy Yancey), Christopher Rand (into Bach, but sympathetic to the concept of rock and roll), and Michael Rose (seventies-power-pop casualty and ashamed of it, but he’s only twenty-two).
“I’m a rock-and-roll fan from way, way back, so when I heard that we might do the project I immediately called Mr. Pei and said, ‘Well,
I’m
available,’ ” Mr. Rhodes said as he sat down.
“Yes, this is one project I had no trouble staffing,” Mr. Pei added. “No trouble at all. But first I had to know if I was right for it. I had to know what rock and roll was. American music to me is like a tree, and I wondered if rock and roll was just a branch or part of the trunk of the tree. If rock and roll was just a branch, I wasn’t interested. So I turned to Craig, and he made tapes for me. He culled the most important music for me to hear. It was
fascinating.
”
“We also sat together and talked quite a lot,” Mr. Rhodes said. “Mr. Pei asked me a lot of questions. We spoke about who Elvis was, and the Beatles, and he asked me about the future of rock and roll. I told him that there were so many evolutionary parallel streams now that you couldn’t exactly say what rock and roll was. Actually, I couldn’t answer a lot of his questions. But I did make him these tapes, and I put on country and western, and blues, and psychedelic bands. I included some Grateful Dead, and I even put on the Sex Pistols. I put on some disco, too, although I don’t think much of it.”
Ms. Gruzdys leaned across the table and said to Mr. Rhodes, “Donna Summer? You put on
Donna Summer
?”
“No, it was Silver Convention—‘Fly, Robin, Fly,’ or something like that,” Mr. Rhodes answered. “I don’t really remember.”
Ms. Gruzdys said, “You know, I had this dream of taking Mr. Pei to some East Village place, like CBGB. The idea of him there was an amazing concept.”
Mr. Pei said, “I found all the music on Craig’s tape quite remarkable. Then the people from the foundation took me on a trip to New Orleans and Memphis, which convinced me that I should undertake the project.”
We asked Mr. Pei what he did when he was in Memphis.
He took a short, sharp breath and said, “
Elvis.
And we went into those music halls on Beale Street. Some of them had old music posters hanging up that were made of metal. I loved those metal music posters. I became quite fascinated by them.” Mr. Pei tapped Mr. Rhodes on the knee. “Craig, we must have some of those old metal posters for our building.”
Mr. Pei’s secretary came into the room and handed him a note. As he was reading it, he started to laugh, and said, “Can you imagine? This is from my symphony hall client in Dallas! Here are the two ends of a spectrum—the symphony and rock and roll!”
Mr. Rhodes produced a large white box, which he told us the team members called their sushi box of models. He turned the box over, and nine tiny Halls of Fame fell on the table. “See these forms that are sort of
exploding
off the main tower?” he said, fingering one of the little buildings. “We’re trying to depict an explosion—to show that rock and roll has a dangerous and expansive feeling.”