by Marc Skelton
I maneuvered toward West 170th across Jerome Avenue and continued east on East 170th Street.
I hope X is okay.
A small tent city in a tunnel under the Grand Concourse has a few more residents than I remembered. The smell of urine and feces was overwhelming. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Oscar Wilde’s prison poem, came to my mind:
Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.
As I exit from the tunnel underneath the Grand Concourse, I can hear trumpets and cowbells. “Salsa Buena” by Frankie Ruiz y la Solucion. The distance from Anglo-Irish poets to Caribbean salsa is never too far in the Bronx. The poem and the music clashed in my head. I pedaled across Morris Avenue. I avoided the trucks delivering bread to the supermarket. The 11 bus softened the sound of the collisions of the claves while the rhythm of the guiros and maracas moved my legs. My shoes are clipped into my pedals. I guess that is kind of how I dance, glued to the floor. Here I was climbing up 170th Street, and I find the source: a small speaker attached to a shiny purple bike. The tires are thick with whitewall. A banana seat never looked more comfortable.
* * *
—
Two days later Luis, after eight years as my assistant, informed me he would not be able to commit to the season.
I guess my mixture of authoritarianism and humanitarianism needed to be recalibrated. Were these departures coincidental? I think it revealed that I have become the guardian of the program, and to keep it alive and functioning required setting standards. If it was simply a forum for anyone to come and go as they pleased, we wouldn’t win games. Truth is, winning matters above everything because it binds us, builds trust and friendships.
Still, I started to question my motives. Was the season over before it started? Was it time to stop coaching? I could hear the sounds of salsa echoing in this prison I had created.
Then Xavier found me in the gym.
“Coach, you know I can graduate in January, and I don’t think it is fair to the team if I stay only to leave halfway through the season.” Xavier was emotionally torn. He didn’t want to quit, but he had earned enough credits and would meet all the graduation requirements early. Plus, he wanted to find a job. He had a lot on his plate.
“I want you to play, but I understand,” I told him. “Thank you for all your hard work and dedication to the team.”
BRIAN IS MISSING
It was a bittersweet ending for Xavier. I was looking forward to his leadership and guidance. A young team had suddenly become a lot younger. I was in my classroom after school, thinking about how we could win with such a young team. Can Walfri, Bryant, and Charles control the paint? Can Mack and Frankie be our primary ball handlers? Will Shamar, Latrell, and Tyree shoot well enough from the wings to keep us competitive? I knew we could play defense. The freshmen Kaleb, Jaelen, and Brandon will be brought along slowly. My room was so quiet. Schools without children seem haunted.
I was about to go home, when my sister Jennifer sent me a text telling me to look at my brother’s Facebook posts. I have had a fear for a long time that my brother would die on the day of a game.
The next message came in before I could respond.
“Brian is missing. He said he was going to kill himself.”
I hate virtual suicide notes. I felt my madness madden. I felt my sadness sadden. Brian, my younger brother, has had a lifelong dependency on drugs. This was his latest heist, a social media hijack that would send everyone running to the comments section to rescue him. “Help…” he wrote. Then signed off. Xavier’s loss to the team was manageable. This was something else.
When I ran away from home at sixteen, it left my brother, Brian, eleven at the time, and my sister Jennifer, eight, right in the middle of the fire. Brian would start smoking marijuana at thirteen. He would drop out of school when he was fifteen. He would injure his back as a laborer when he was twenty-two. He would first take OxyContin for the pain, then a few years later he was hooked on heroin. Sound familiar?
Brian’s actions always alarmed my mom the most. Of course, this message sent her on a rescue mission in the shadows of the White Mountains. She looked in granite quarries, near lake shores and streambeds, the same way parents look for an abducted child: frantic, imagining the worst, crippled by the unknown, praying. I imagined a gorgeous September day in northern New Hampshire (the state has the second-highest overdose rate in the nation, behind West Virginia) with leaves starting to turn blood-orange, brilliant yellow, deep red, a chill in the morning, and my panicked mom short of breath, a lifelong smoker, yelling and screaming and crying for her thirty-seven-year-old son among the red maples, paper birch, and evergreen pines. Brian was somewhere, unable to take the pain of his life but brave enough to announce to the world he was done with us.
Later that day Jen, the hero in our family, drove after work, without dinner, to find our despondent mom in a hotel. The next day they would canvass the town, chauffeured by sympathetic police officers. They told my mom they do this a lot. They showed Diane all the spots where the junkies hang out, like she was on a tour of celebrity homes in California. Can a mom recover if she sees her son dead in the woods? Diane’s life has been very difficult. Her parents died when she was young. She is estranged from her sisters. Her younger brother is in prison for life. Drugs and alcohol became her extended family. Would finding her dead son be her final misfortune? The crushing grief? For nearly all my adult life, my mother has been sober. Would this push my mom to start using again? She’s fragile. She has been battling her own demons. When I finally talked to my mom, her hysteria had turned to anger.
“He needs to pull his pants up and act like a man.”
“Mom, he doesn’t need a lecture now,” Jen said. Always caught in the middle, Jen would plead with her to relent.
I was always too far away from the epicenter of their dysfunction to ever really feel the aftershock. Hours went by. Then Brian went back to his device and announced that he would now finish the job. I imagined he was trying to make threats to read the sympathetic pleas, and then his phone died. Where did he go now to charge his phone? How can he continue to torture the world with his suicidal threats? Does he realize his sons will someday read his posts?
He had told the world, at least those who follow him on Facebook, that he was molested at camp when he was seven. He said he lost his brother (me), his hero, when he was eleven. He couldn’t find his parents when he needed food. He picked his inebriated mom off the floor and put her to bed. His wife cheated on him with his best friends. He stole an inheritance from his new girlfriend.
Recently I see he got a neck tattoo of a Celtic cross. I don’t think he has ever been to church. Heroin, like any pursuit, eventually destroys the unconquerable whole. Brian was falling to pieces again.
My mother and sister found him the following morning.
Jen told me about the girl behind the counter at Dunkin’ Donuts in Littleton. She was wearing a green and gray Plymouth State sweatshirt, looking as if she knew she never should have dropped out of college. Once she quit, she knew she would be stuck for life making light and sweet coffee for all the other people in this small town. She had memorized her customers and their legal addiction to caffeine and sugar. I was told the heartbroken moms of the heroin trade frequently visited this coffee shop asking the pretty cashier with auburn hair and a splash of freckles across her cheeks if she had seen their missing scions. The pictures on their phones were of familiar faces. Not that she really knew them; they were the new daily customers. Heroin has a way of making everyone look related. The parents’ hands always shook. She developed a habit of taking the phone, especially from the dads, to save them the embarrassment of
their predicament. She held the phone close, delicately, so she could see the child before the heroin had eaten the adipose tissue from their face and destroyed them. She promised to call the police as soon as she saw them. Moms leaned awkwardly across the counter to hug her. Rheumy dads nodded with deep pride and approval.
When the Wanted or the Missing ordered a coffee, she would feign that she was out of cream, go into the back room, and call the police. She was used to genuflecting parents thanking her. The police were happy they had a set of eyes and a member of the community who was trying to help with the opioid epidemic.
Then the cops arrived and found my brother. He tilted his head, pursed his lips at the clerk, and slowly said, “Oh, that’s why you disappeared and said there was no more cream.”
Jen handed the phone to my mom.
“You feeling okay, Mom?”
“Yeah, I’m just glad I know where he is now.” A familiar phrase worried parents everywhere have said.
My mom asked, “How’s the team doing?”
PART TWO
REGULAR SEASON
NOVEMBER
Each November I reread the opening paragraph from Moby-Dick.
November is not just the time of the year when Ishmael was about to walk down the streets and knock people’s hats off. It is also high time for the season to get going. November must be the hardest month on coaches, because there’s so much to do: implement an offense, or reintroduce help-side defense like a forgotten foreign language. November is when I need to be in the gym running practices, screaming about abstract intangibles and invisible stats, or preparing my team to knock someone’s head off from a pulpit. Coaching produces this feeling: a fusion of helplessness, anticipation, and total frustration. It’s a mix of sacrificial devotion and extreme confidence, laced with an asymmetrical sarcasm heading down a one-way street toward the younger generation, who may or may not feel as passionate as you do about the game.
* * *
—
Practices officially started in November. The team was set. We finally had a quorum. We were confident the new guys Cris, Brandon, Kenneth, Jaelen, and Kaleb would contribute during their maiden basketball season. We were also counting on the returning guys: Walfri, Shamar, Jaquan, Bryant, Latrell, Charles, Frankie, and Tyree. Thirteen guys made up the squad: three freshmen, three sophomores, five juniors, and two seniors. Were we any good? I thought we might be really good, except we weren’t any good. We were too young, too turnover-prone, and lacked serious depth.
Maybe next year, I thought. The utility of canning was never more obvious. This novitiate of a basketball season, like all seasons, would be difficult: any trip or journey was a course in self-discipline. It was also a period of purposeful self-deception; over the next few months, we would have to really improve to win a championship.
It is not trivial to state we were a young team. I’ve carried just two seniors before—that was the Long Hardwood Journey season. We won fifteen games and lost in the first round of the playoffs. Yet it could be possible we had the right mixture of young and old, hardworking upperclassmen with something to prove and soon-to-be-prodigious sophomores. Were we too scarred from last season’s loss, or was that even a crowbar I could use with this team? I tried to sketch the outline of the 2016–17 team, but it was like stenciling a jellyfish. Would we float around all season harmlessly, or would we be terrifyingly aggressive and shut down beaches? I wasn’t sure.
THE 2016 ELECTION
On the subject of uncertainty, the presidential election was in two days. My father-in-law kept sending me emails that Trump was going to win and this was what Berlin was like in 1932. I already missed Obama. He deported more people than any president before him, ordered more people killed with drones, and has concealed volumes of hidden secrets. I’ll miss being misled by him.
The first day of practice had been on a Sunday. The youthfulness was palpable on the team; seniors usually cast a cloud of seriousness. The underclassmen gave off the faux impression of knowing the core values that we embrace: mental toughness, selflessness, guarded optimism, a determination to improve, and commitment to the team. Only Latrell and Brandon were absent. Sunday practices form the bedrock of the season. We usually start around ten a.m. and finish around two p.m. Frankie looked unstoppable on both sides of the ball. I wanted Charles to defend him, but I needed Charles and Walfri to challenge each other today. So I placed them against each other. Practices were going to be a little uneven until I figured out a way to balance the drills.
I woke up Wednesday morning earlier than usual. I poked my phone awake.
“How ’bout them apples?” a text from my sister read.
We woke up on that first Wednesday in November and found out Donald Trump was the president-elect. I wish it had been about apples.
At school, there was a deep malaise. Everyone showed signs of being concussed.
“Hillary Clinton won the election,” some students announced awkwardly; she was the winner of the school-wide mock election.
“Who cares?” I heard someone yell in the hallway. I stepped deeper into a certain adult sadness I have never felt. I heard a teacher compare the feeling to 9/11.
The students were shocked. There was talk of walls being built, the death of the Black Lives Matter movement, deportation. The texts I received from the guys on the team, former and current, are telling:
“I thought it was a dream until I looked it up. Damn.” (Dalen Ward, a manager)
“I was frozen with fear.” (Travis Peterson, class of 2016)
“I’m disappointed because I am under the category he is against.” (Dan Findley, class of 2014)
“I thought to myself that my family would want to move to the Dominican Republic because Trump hates immigrants.” (Kenneth Castro)
“I wondered if my parents would let me go live with my grandparents in Belize.” (Jaelen Bennett)
By Friday, a section of the hallway became a community message board. Taped to the wall was a sign on violet paper that read YOU ARE LOVED. Underneath it, printed on electric emerald, aquamarine, fuchsia, and canary yellow paper in bold font and black ink, were other mitigating posters: DEAR UNDOCUMENTED STUDENTS, AT THIS SCHOOL THERE ARE NO WALLS. And so on.
Basketball became a sanctuary from the madness of this election. The Clinton (no relation) opening game was only two days away. I tried to bury myself in basketball. Trump’s election didn’t make sense to most of the people I knew.
Game day arrives, and I have a bit of a confession: on game day I always get terrified right before I wake up. That place that we occupy right before we awake has me convinced I have forgotten how to coach: not sure how many time-outs I have, whom to sub in or out, who we are playing, will I get the team lost on our way there, do I have enough MetroCards, is it even an away game tonight or is it home, what out-of-bounds plays do we run against a 2–3 zone? I forget the names of our plays. I see myself standing clueless, paralyzed; never mind the extinct playbook and the extant players, my mind is a tabula rasa. A few years ago, to avoid slipping into this fictional paralysis, I started carrying a cheat sheet for every game the way Pushkin always carried two revolvers; it has all our man-to-man and zone plays and code words: green for pick-and-roll, yellow for pick-and-pop, gray for a dribble handoff. Once the game starts, I rarely need it; it sits quietly on a clipboard under my chair. But all day the fear sits with me. When I eat my breakfast I wonder if I was obeying the right superstition: I grew a beard, trimming underneath my jaw once a week on Sundays, along with my little bit of hair that occupies my head. How bad will the refs suck tonight, I wonder. The fear stays with me during warm-ups. The pregame handshake is when it finally disappears.
GAME ONE VERSUS DEWITT CLINTON
On a crowded 4 train I was thinking about last year’s opener against Morris High School, the oldest high school in the Bronx. Years ago, I read about it in Jonath
an Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, where he placed the school in “a landscape of hopelessness—burnt-out apartments, boarded windows, vacant lot upon garbage-strewn vacant lot” surrounding it. Now it is called the Morris Educational Complex. It has rebounded well. It is no longer a large comprehensive school, but a campus that has four separate high schools: School for Violin and Dance, Bronx International, School for Excellence, and Morris Academy for Collaborative Study. The inside looks totally different; Kozol should return. But truthfully, I was more concerned about how we were going to beat Morris without Charles, who’d been briefly suspended for some corridor horseplay, than about what Kozol would say.
* * *
—
“Hey, next stop.” Gaby broke my spell and that of some sleepy commuters and alerted us from his crow’s nest.
“There it is,” Shamar confirmed.
Shamar knew every school and basketball court in the city. It was fun to travel with him. We walk into gyms in Brooklyn or in Chelsea, and everyone says what’s up to him. It’s a double homage: they are recognizing his game and that he is such a friendly guy that he has dudes all over the city acknowledging him.
Coaching Shamar is a pleasure. He displays such docile obedience that he answers, “Yes, Coach” with an almost military acquiescence that makes me a little uncomfortable. I had expected outlawry. His first two years he would come to try out and ran around like a caffeinated squirrel. I didn’t think I could coach him. His junior year was his apprenticeship or residency. Now in his senior year, he would be the attending surgeon on the floor. His silence wasn’t resistance; it was maturity and trust. He was charming, like a postcard from an old friend.
