Playing Without the Ball Read online

  The band is taking a break; the dancers are blundering to “Satisfaction,” which is playing in my ear from the jukebox as I wipe the gritty floor with a towel.

  The place closes at 2. Shorty limps into the kitchen about 2:15. (Shorty has told people the injury is from Vietnam; at other times he’s said it happened playing football. People who know him best say he was just born with a left leg that’s two inches shorter than his right.)

  “I’m out of here,” he says. “Don’t forget the bathroom floors.”

  “I won’t,” I say. I know how much urine a weekend crowd can spill. “Have a good night?”

  “Great night,” Shorty says. “They ain’t bad.” Spit’s group he means. “They bring people in.”

  There aren’t many local options if you want live entertainment. Shorty’s can accommodate fifty customers without too much squeezing, but there were at least seventy packed in here tonight.

  “Anyway,” Shorty says. “See you tomorrow.”

  I wipe down the stovetop and pour some ammonia in a bucket. I’ll mop the bathrooms real quick. I’ll mop the toilets, too. No way I’m getting any closer than that.

  I push the ladies’ room door open with my foot and take a step back in surprise.

  “Spit,” I say. She’s sitting on the back of the toilet, up on the tank.

  “I’m spaced,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  She stands up and wobbles.

  “You all right?” I ask.

  “Yeah. A guy gave me some acid. I haven’t done acid in ages.”

  Great. I’m alone in the bar with a hallucinating woman.

  “Shocking, huh?” she says, noting my expression. “It’s no big deal, bud. Come on, let’s go for a walk.”

  I figure I can mop up tomorrow—Shorty doesn’t open until 3 on Sundays.

  “Just till I come down,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  We step out the back door. The air is cold and still. Nothing is open; no one is out.

  “Oooh,” she says. “I can breathe again.”

  I take a deep inhale, kind of in agreement. We walk through the car dealership lot on Church Street and head for the park.

  “You don’t seem too high,” I say.

  “I’m not. It’s like an intense focus right about here,” she says, putting her palms up to her forehead. “Everything else is just sort of fuzzy.”

  I nod, as if I can relate.

  “I’ve still got a hit if you want it,” she says.

  I shake my head. No way.

  The park covers one large block in front of the courthouse. There’s a fountain in the middle and diagonal sidewalk paths going from corner to corner. There are a few benches, a few trees, and a couple of pieces of playground equipment. We sit on a bench halfway between the fountain and the street.

  “You sang good tonight,” I say.

  She raises her eyebrows. “I guess,” she says. “For a few minutes there I felt like we were clicking.” She stretches both arms out and yawns. “This town isn’t exactly hip.”

  She’s got her feet tucked up on the bench and is hugging her knees. Both legs of her jeans are ripped at the knees.

  “My moments of clarity come by once a week if I’m lucky,” she says. “When I get my mind off James. See, I’m usually terrified, like I’ll just fade away, like I’m losing my grip, and I’ll get farther and farther from that inner voice and never get it back.”

  I’m trying to keep up with her. My primary concerns are basketball and getting enough to eat, so I’m listening to her and comparing it to my own life, and she’s just rambling like it doesn’t even matter if I’m sitting there.

  She’s picking at the threads by her knee. “I get down,” she says. “I worry. And then this goofy optimism kicks in and makes me search for that next rush in spite of myself.” She draws a counterclockwise circle in the air.

  I’m freezing my ass off. “You coming down?” I ask.

  “Maybe some,” she says. “We can go.”

  She sings softly as we walk back, some Portuguese folk song she learned from her mom. A police car goes by and slows a little, then moves along.

  We reach the back steps and she puts a hand on my shoulder. “Can I crash here?” she says.

  I think about it for a second. I’ve got a sleeping bag in the closet. “There’s not much room,” I say.

  “I don’t need much.”

  When I come out of the bathroom, Spit is passed out on the mattress. I open the closet door to get the sleeping bag, but she wakes up and says, “Just get in.”

  I shrug and get under the blanket. She rolls onto her side and says good night.

  I hunch up on the side of the bed. I prefer to sleep facedown, with all four limbs spread, but I’m so tired I don’t give a shit. Spit’s asleep again already. I can smell her dried sweat; her breath is raspy and sour.

  This is the first woman I’ve ever slept with, literally or figuratively. But it’s hardly a moment to treasure.

  What’s Missing

  Ethnicity? I suppose we had some, three or four generations back, but it’s been bleached out of us pretty good. We’re as white as Twinkies and fish sticks.

  It’s a neutral, Wonder Bread sort of whiteness, a bland-talking, straight-thinking, virginal whiteness. Like Cheerios.

  When I was little, before my mother took off, she’d buy those cartons of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream. She’d dish it up and I’d let it get soft, and I’d experiment with mixtures, stirring different combinations together. And it struck me that if you added just a drop of melted chocolate to a dish full of vanilla, the mix would take on an undebatable tone of brown. But stir a drop of vanilla into a spoonful of chocolate and you’d never even know it was there.

  I play basketball. Every day. At school, at the Y, in people’s driveways. My game is sound, but it’s quiet and unremarkable. That’s attitude. Or the absence of it. I’ve got a white man’s game in a black man’s sport.

  I bet my great-great-grandfather kicked some ass on the boat over here from Glasgow. But the McLeods have gone downhill from there.

  I need to find myself some attitude.

  Sunday morning I sleep too late, waking with a start. Spit opens her eyes, wipes her nose with her fist, and burrows back under the blanket. I bolt some orange juice and a package of Yodels, brush my teeth, and jog over to the Y.

  I can hear the springy thud of a basketball as I rush up the steps, a sign that the games are under way.

  A guy named Eddie is sitting on the bottom row of the bleachers. “Jay,” he says, nodding to me. “They need one down that end.” I hustle to the other side of the gym.

  The first twenty-four guys to show up are in. Anybody who gets here after that has to wait for an opening. Today I’m the twenty-fourth to arrive.

  You put three teams of four players at both baskets and they play a continual round-robin format. Play two games, sit one. Winners out: you score, you keep the ball.

  The gym is small and cramped and it’s all old wood—wooden backboards, wooden bleachers. You go three feet out of bounds on any side of the court and you collide with a wall or the seats. It’s usually too hot in here, but on cold winter days you get a wicked breeze sneaking through.

  “Guess you’re with us,” says an older guy with wraps on both knees. The other two players waiting are on the small side, too: Mr. Mendoza, who gave me a C-minus in algebra my freshman year, and a thin, brush-cut sophomore named Jerry.

  “Looks like we got four guards,” I say.

  “We’ll run on ’em,” says the guy with the knees. “I’m Mike.” He sticks out his hand.

  “Jay.”

  There’s a lot of beef out there, and the half-court game pretty much negates any speed advantage we might have. But what the hell. I cover a six-foot-four guy about thirty in the first game and I can’t stop him for shit. I don’t care. You get your ass kicked in a game like this, but you can’t help picking up a thing or two that will
help sometime. Whatever level you get to, there’s always going to be someone better.

  We lose 7-2, but I’m warm now, ready to play.

  The other team comes on and we match up better height-wise. I cover Dr. DiPisa, a urologist who’s about my size except for his gut. He pushes and grabs a lot, sets moving picks. But he’s easy to frustrate. I make some sharp cuts, get a few backdoor layups. Mike starts hitting from outside and we win 7-5.

  It’s our turn to sit.

  “Lenny’s playing his usual clean game, I see,” says Mike.

  “Who?”

  “DiPisa. The guy thinks it’s a wrestling match.”

  “No big deal,” I say. “I’m a lot quicker than him.”

  Mr. Mendoza takes a towel out of his gym bag and wipes his face. “He does that shit to everybody,” he says. “He’s a wimp. We’ll just nail him with a couple of picks.”

  I suddenly remember that Mendoza ran against DiPisa for council last year and lost. Democrats never win in this town.

  We go to a zone next game in an effort to clog the lane and slow down the big guy. It works some, but we foul a lot. We manage to tie it at six, and you can feel the intensity pick up another notch.

  They bring the ball in and Mendoza and I double-team the big man. Somebody has to be open. A shot goes up from the baseline and grazes off the rim. Mendoza gets a hand on it, but the big guy takes it away and lays it in.

  “Son of a bitch,” Mendoza says.

  The guy raises a fist and they walk off the court. They haven’t lost yet.

  Dr. DiPisa’s team comes back on and immediately goes up 3-0 on us.

  “Settle down,” Mike says. “Play some D.”

  DiPisa’s trying to drive on me, but I hold my ground. Mendoza doubles up on him and swipes the ball away, runs it down, and makes a nice needle-threading pass to me for a layup. Mike hits a long jumper, then Jerry scores to tie it up.

  Mike inbounds the ball to me and I dribble outside with DiPisa guarding me tight. I see Mendoza drifting toward the foul line, so I feint right and drive left. DiPisa runs straight into Mendoza’s pick, and Mendoza adds a bit of elbow to his face. I hit the jumper.

  DiPisa rubs his jaw and calls Mendoza an asshole. Mendoza just smirks and calls for the ball at the top of the key.

  They never get it back. We win 7-3.

  “Let me cover DiPisser next game,” Mr. Mendoza says to me while we sit. “He’ll be so concerned about getting even with me that he’ll just drive and take bad shots.”

  We finally get a win over the big guys, so we’re on a roll. DiPisa’s team comes back on and has decided to make it physical. They’ve dropped five straight games and have nothing to lose. DiPisa stays on me even though I cover someone else.

  I try to avoid calling fouls, but he hacks me bad on two consecutive drives and I have to say I got it. Mendoza catches my eye and squints sort of hard, and I read that as an indication that he’ll take him out this time. Same play as before: a quick fake and a move toward the foul line. Mendoza gives me a screen with something extra for DiPisa. I hear the collision, make the shot. Next thing I know DiPisa’s taking a swing and Mendoza is holding his mouth.

  Mendoza swings back before they’re separated, a couple of guys holding each of them.

  It takes a few minutes for things to settle down. Eventually they shake hands and laugh about it.

  “Latin blood,” says DiPisa. “That’s all it is.”

  “We’ve been at each other since seventh grade,” says Mendoza. “One of these days we’ll grow up.”

  Restless Nights

  Sturbridge is in this valley about thirty miles east of Scranton, up in the northeasternmost county in Pennsylvania. There’s less than 5,000 people in the actual town, but the school district is huge, so we’re pulling in kids from way up by the New York border. Most guys seem to work over at Sturbridge Building Products, which is a big plant that makes things like cinder blocks and concrete septic tanks. My father put in some time there, but he’s never held any job for very long.

  Sturbridge High School is one of only four in the county, so we travel to compete in the Greater Scranton Scholastic League. We dominate in wrestling and sometimes win it all in football or baseball. Basketball never seems to cut it.

  The stores on Main Street sort of struggle by, relying on regulars and tourists. Most people do their bigger shopping out at the Kmart or in the malls over toward Scranton.

  There are five taverns on the six-block stretch of downtown Main Street, with Shorty’s smack in the middle.

  It’s early evening. Spit is sitting on a stool in the kitchen smoking a cigarette, while I put together a Reuben sandwich. Her band practices here from 5 to 7 on Mondays, when the place is empty. Then she’ll hang around the kitchen until she gets bored.

  “Thought you quit,” I say.

  “I did. Cigarettes suck.”

  She rolls up a leg of her pants and starts rubbing her shin.

  “What’d you do?” I ask.

  “It just aches sometimes after a gig or a practice,” she says. “I won a gymnastics tournament when I was eleven, and the girl who came in second kicked me in the locker room. Cracked it. Some bitch from Upper Montclair. Couldn’t stand losing to a slum girl from Newark.”

  She gives an exaggerated smile and takes a sip of her 7Up. I cut the sandwich in half and take it out to the bar. When I come back she’s standing by the window, looking out at the alley. She turns to me. “I was good, you know. My parents were even gonna send me to one of those gymnastics factories down in Houston. Then things went to hell.”

  “What happened?”

  She sighs. “I’d had enough anyway, but they started threatening to kill each other and I started looking for ways to get out. Started getting high.”

  “At eleven?”

  “Maybe not till twelve. But yeah.”

  “Jesus.” When I was twelve I was still into dinosaurs and baseball cards.

  “It wasn’t exactly a nurturing environment,” Spit says. “Daddy hit us both a lot—just with an open palm, but that was how he controlled me and my mother. What about you?”

  “What?”

  “You never say anything. About you.”

  “Oh.” I take a cloth and start wiping the steel table that I make the sandwiches on, knocking the crumbs to the floor. “I been here all my life.”

  “And you don’t plan to stay.”

  “I’ll get out next summer.”

  “To your dad’s?”

  I start drumming on the table. “Maybe. Doubt it. I think if he wanted me with him he would have waited till I could go.” I’m better off without him, just like he and I were better off when my mom left. That doesn’t mean I’m doing great, though. And I don’t have any more parents left to shed.

  I look hard at Spit, trying to get a sense of her, but she’s hard to figure. “Why are you here?”

  She gives a short, breathy laugh. “Cowardice, I guess. I don’t know why else I’d come running back to my mother.”

  I open the refrigerator and take out a hamburger for myself, tossing it on the grill. “You want anything?” I ask.

  She gives a repulsed sort of look, hanging out her tongue. “Not if it’s been walking around.” She doesn’t eat meat. I’ve never seen her eat much of anything.

  “You’re no coward,” I say.

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “You get up there on the stage and sing for four hours. That takes guts.”

  She shakes her head. “For you it would,” she says. “No, I mean it. It’s the most natural thing in the world for me. If I’m not singing, I’m lost.”

  “Like being on a basketball court for me.”

  “I guess.”

  “I wanna do what you do,” I say.

  “Self-destruct?”

  “No. Sing sometime. Rock. Reach my limit.”

  She laughs. “Join me. Anytime.”

  “I’m thinking about it.” I was dismissed from the school chorus in fift
h grade because I “needed practice.” I was dismissed during practice, which, it seems to me, would be the time to get the practice you need. What the teacher really meant was, “you are beyond help.”

  “I have no rhythm, no ability to play even the most basic chords on any instrument, and no voice whatsoever,” I say.

  Spit smiles and nods slowly. “We’ll see,” she says. “We’ll get you up there. It’s not all about playing instruments.”

  I guess I blush. Spit rubs out her cigarette on the table and gets up to leave. I flip the hamburger, turn on the radio, and watch her walk through the doorway.

  The county group home is on the corner of Twelfth and Church, a block in from Main Street and just across from the Pocono River, which splits the town in half. It used to be a juvenile prison back in like the ’50s, but now it’s a group home for the mentally disabled. There’s a paved basketball court outside—we call it the Mental Court—and they keep the lights on late, so there’s always a crowd of basketball players and other kids standing around smoking.

  Tryouts for the high school team are coming up, so the crowd has increased lately. I play there or at the Y any night I’m not working.

  Brian Kaipo, who has started at varsity point guard since we were sophomores, usually shows about 9 o’clock and sticks around for a game or two, staying sharp but keeping above the fray. He lives out in Prompton, so he drives into town, parking his parents’ car alongside the others in the Episcopal Church lot next door.

  This crowd averages younger than the players at the Y, and the game is quicker and cleaner. Guys like Gordie Rickard and Alan Murray can get above the rim, and just about everybody can hit a three-pointer if he’s open.

  Less than half of these guys will try out for the team, though. A guy like Dave Artuso would never give up his job at the Price-Right supermarket out on Route 6 to play for a guy like Buddy. The money’s too good, the coach is a dick, and he can get all the ball he needs right here.