The Necessary Hunger

by Nina Revoyr

  Claudia poured a bag of frozen vegetables into a pot, and turned the gas on high. Ann sat right beside her, wet nose pointed up toward the broiler.

  "Somehow, none of this surprises me," Claudia said, looking over her shoulder at my father.

  "Well, I think Eric's weak," I offered as I set out the forks and knives. I'd only seen him play in one game, and he hadn't been particularly awful, but it seemed like an appropriate thing to say.

  My dad laughed now, and pressed his bottle against his knee. "He's not terrible, actually, but he's certainly not the player his father thinks he is. Or the player he thinks he is, even—you wouldn't believe all the bragging he does. I have to hear him every day in my class."

  Claudia peeked in on the meat and stirred the vegetables. "How is he as a student?"

  My father shook his head. "Bad. He's got this attitude, this self-importance, that's really obnoxious, although I don't know if his father can even see it. He sure as hell can't see it in himself. You know what Larry said when I went in there today? He said that I should never question him about a coaching decision again, that I should mind my own business, and that I didn't know what I was talking about. After ten years of coaching together, he told me I should mind my own business and that I didn't know what I was talking about."

  Claudia put down the big bowl she'd just pulled from the cupboard. She came over to the side of his chair, touched his head, and put her arms around his shoulders. "Oh, Wendell," she said, "I'm sorry."

  They stayed like that for a few seconds, and I tried not to look. Finally Claudia stood up straight again, and my father gave a dry laugh. "At least I never coached you, Nancy," he said, looking at me. "I'm sure I would've messed up any team you were on. There's obviously something about being a coaching parent that gives you the delusion that your child is the shit."

  I looked at him seriously. "Yes, but I am the shit."

  He rolled his eyes, and Claudia laughed.

  "Just eat your damn dinner," he said.

  Claudia took the steaks out of the broiler, using a fork to stab each piece of meat and put it onto a plate. I dealt out the potatoes and vegetables. My dad asked for another beer, which I brought for him, along with water for Claudia and Coke for myself. We all sat down to eat and my father continued to talk about his team; about how he wasn't sure what to do from there, or what to tell Eddie Nuñez. Claudia offered an occasional comment, but I said nothing. I chewed my steak and felt lucky that I didn't play football.

  Like Claudia, I wasn't surprised by what was happening, or by how disappointed my father seemed to be. He was—in contrast to my own coach or Larry Henderson—deeply invested in his players and their lives. They came to him with problems about family or school; he gave them advice about job interviews or college. He'd counseled a couple of players who'd gotten their girlfriends pregnant, and let kids from bad home situations spend the night on our couch. His attachment to Eddie Nuñez made sense to me. Eric Henderson already had a hundred things going for him, even without his father's giving him a spot he hadn't earned—his family, one of the few white families still living in Hawthorne, seemed to control the entire city. But Eddie Nuñez was an underdog, and my father always rooted for the underdog; he had always been an underdog himself.

  That Saturday, after Eric Henderson threw two interceptions and no touchdowns on the way to a tie with the last-place team in their league, I received a call from my friend Natalie. Natalie was one of my AAU teammates and an All-State center for Compton. I hung out with her a lot in the summertime, because she lived only two blocks away from Compton College, which was where our summer league games were held. She was calling me that night because her boyfriend, Charles, was a tackle on my father's team, and because she'd seen their poor performance the previous night.

  "What's up with that coach, girl?" she asked. "Can't he see that his son ain't shit?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I don't know what he's thinking."

  "Well, Charles say the guys don't even like that coach's boy, and they think that skinny kid Eddie should be the quarterback."

  "Yeah, he's supposed to be pretty good," I said noncommittally. I didn't want to give my father's position away, although I was glad to hear that the team agreed with him. Charles was one of its leaders, so his opinion was important. He was gruff and quiet and generally calm, a good counterpart to Natalie's high emotions. For the three years we'd played on AAU teams together, Natalie's unpredictable outbursts of anger or joy had been like a sixth player on the court. She was volatile, and fiercely loyal, and never hesitated to say what she thought. I had always liked her immensely.

  "He is," Natalie said now. "I seen him play last week, and Charles and them been talkin about him all season. They don't know what to do now, though. They don't trust Coach Henderson, and he ain't gonna pull his son just 'cos the players think he should." She paused. "I think they kinda hopin your pops'll say something. A few of the guys went and talked to him already."

  I was lying on my bedroom floor, and now I put my hand on my forehead. "I don't think my dad has any say in that, Natalie."

  "I know, I know," she said, although I wasn't sure she did. "I think the guys just wanna know that there's someone on their side."

  He was on their side, but it didn't result in anything. All through October, my father came in distracted on weeknights, and it usually took him an hour or so to snap out of his little funk. And each Friday, after a game in which Eric Henderson had made some costly error or had simply failed to be effective, he came home with his brow furrowed and a grimace on his face, and would hardly talk to me before he went to bed. I heard from Natalie that when the players realized that Eric would never be benched, they began to pull their blocks once or twice each game and let him get hit by the other team. They meant to send Eric and Larry a message, and maybe they even half-hoped that Eric would sustain some kind of injury, but Larry wasn't listening, and Eric did not get hurt. Natalie was of the opinion that they should go all out, and keep letting the defense hit Eric until he finally did get hurt, but the players didn't like that idea—they were trained to do their best, and they didn't want to end up blowing a game just to get a point across. Unless Larry Henderson underwent a miraculous change of heart, they were going to be stuck with Eric for the rest of the season.

  * * *

  In November, I had a team party at my house, parent-sanctioned, to celebrate our opening scrimmage, which—although you weren't supposed to keep score at these things—we had easily won. We'd played Mira Costa, a school we despised—it was wealthy and almost totally white. Teams like Mira Costa often had a difficult time when they played schools from the inner city. Whenever Mira Costa came to Inglewood, for example, they faced not only my teammates and me, but also an overwhelmingly hostile crowd. While we destroyed them with our play, the kids in the bleachers would cheer when they committed a turnover, laugh when they missed a free throw, yell out that maybe they should drive their Beamers back home and eat caviar in the hot tubs of their mansions. My teammates and I didn't participate in this taunting—we made our statement on the court—but on the other hand, we didn't disapprove. The scrimmage that afternoon had been at Mira Costa, and we'd been amazed, as we always were, at the beauty of their campus—there were no fences around it, the buildings looked new, the grounds were well-kept and pristine. And although most of Mira Costa's players had seemed perfectly nice, there were two girls we'd all disliked—their center, who'd hit us all in the face repeatedly with her ponytail, and their point guard, who'd asked Telisa how much money her father made. Even though it was just a scrimmage, we all felt vindicated after we won. "That kind of shit," said Telisa, referring to the point guard's talk, "is why they haven't beat us in ten years."

  Around eight o'clock that night, eleven girls showed up at my house, with sleeping bags, wine coolers, music, food, and various present and potential boyfriends. It was the first team party I'd had since the end of my sophomore year. I used to have them frequently during
the season, about every other weekend. My father had allowed us to drink because he reasoned that since we were going to do it anyway, we might as well have a place to spend the night so that at least no one would have to drive home. But then one Saturday morning he'd come back early from a conference to find empty wine cooler bottles, cheese-crusted pizza boxes, and Playgirl magazines all over the floor, not to mention the five water-filled condoms—which we'd prepared to launch at the mailman—he then discovered in his bathroom sink. I think that, given the presence of condoms in the house, he was afraid—or maybe hopeful—that I was sleeping with a boy; he didn't notice, or want to notice, that Yolanda was always the last one to leave. Anyway, that put an end to the parties for a while, at least until Claudia and Raina moved in. He finally lifted his ban after they'd been there for a couple of months—because it was my senior year, and also because he and Claudia often spent weekends with her parents in San Diego. Her parents had left LA and moved into a small house down there when her father had retired, and while they'd found a nice community of black senior citizens, they still felt a little isolated, so Claudia tried to see them as much as she could. As long as our house was back in order before she and my father returned on Sunday night, we were free to use it however we wished.

  That night, we rented A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hoosiers. The former had been selected by Pam, a junior forward, who did not consider a movie worth seeing unless about twenty-five people met their deaths in gruesome and interesting ways; and the latter by Celine, our shooting guard, who couldn't believe that people played basketball in the country, and shot at hoops that were nailed to the sides of barns. Pam insisted that we watch Nightmare first, and no one took issue with that. People rarely took issue with Pam. She was a big, stocky girl, a shot-putter in the track season, who I was always having to extract from altercations. She talked a lot of trash on the court, and had a huge, deep belly laugh off of it; she was also an outrageous flirt, and boys clamored for her attention.

  "Man," she said as the opening credits rolled, "can you imagine if Freddy Krueger played hoops? He'd give a whole new meaning to the idea of sticking a hand in someone's face."

  "I don't know why you like these gory movies," said Celine from the couch. Celine was quiet, skinny, and far too mild-mannered; we all knew she'd be hiding her face in her arms within ten or fifteen minutes. She was so shy that she covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed, and blushed when a four-letter word escaped her lips. Every once in a while during a game, though, someone would offend her so much that she'd get angry, and it was then that she proved most effective. Sometimes I'd tell her that our opponents had insulted her when they hadn't, just to get her fired up.

  "They entertainment and shit," said Pam. "They make me forget my problems. Besides, they funny as hell."

  Celine raised her eyebrows. "You think this stuff is funny?" she said. "Girl, you totally whack."

  Telisa, who was sitting on the floor, petted the dog's head thoughtfully. "I don't know about this Freddy Krueger shit, but Hoosiers is a hella good movie. I wonder what would happen if we went to Indiana. We could play on those dirt courts, against some of those big-ass country girls."

  I heard someone scoff on the couch. It was Bonita, our number-one substitute—a sophomore and a potential future star. "I don't think they'd like us out there in the country, you know what I'm sayin? It wouldn't be like Hoosiers for us—it'd be more like Children of the Corn."

  Bonita was usually sullen and she rarely talked; we were all so surprised that she'd spoken just then that we forgot to laugh at her joke.

  "Hey," she said to me, after a moment of silence, "why's your dog named after Ann Meyers and not my girl Cheryl Miller?"

  "We got her like seven years ago," I said. "Before I even heard of Cheryl." I didn't add the fact that Ann, like her namesake, was a blonde.

  In the middle of the first murder, I went into the kitchen on a food run. I came back with tortilla chips and Bartles & Jaymes, which was the drink of choice that year. Then I sat on the floor between Telisa and Shaundra. Shaundra, our center, was my other good friend on the team, a six-footer who looked even bigger because she was a little overweight. She had a Jheri curl and big owl glasses, and her cheeks were full and round. Her father was black and her mother Vietnamese, and her middle name was Kieu, pronounced Q. We called her by both names, although we normally used Q because it was shorter and sounded cooler.

  Besides being my best friends on the team, Telisa and Q were both seniors, and also the two best other players. Q, in fact, had gotten some recruiting letters in the last year. None of the places that were interested in her were particularly illustrious—they were mostly Division II and III schools, and a few lower-level schools from Division I. But still, it looked like she might end up having the chance to become the first person in her family to go to college. Her father was a postal worker who'd basically raised his kids alone; Q's mother had been killed during a robbery when Q was three. Now he was set on the idea of Q getting a scholarship, especially since his first two kids' lives hadn't turned out as he'd planned. Q's sister, Debbie, had mothered two kids by the time she was twenty, with neither of the fathers in sight. And her brother, Robert, had become a cop, which was one of the two main career opportunities—along with the military—for people without a college degree. He'd worked in Compton for three years, cracking down on the drug trade, until the big-time dealers down there convinced him that he could make more money working on their side. He'd switched over two years before and Q rarely heard from him now. Anyway, all of their father's expectations had been transferred to Q, and the problem, as Q realized, was that a scholarship was by no means assured. At barely six feet she was too short to be a college center, and those couple of inches, plus her extra twenty pounds, were going to hurt her chances. And as if that weren't enough to deal with, she hadn't passed the SAT. According to a new rule, Prop. 48, all incoming freshmen had to score at least 700 to be eligible for collegiate athletics. Q had taken the SAT twice already and had just missed getting 700; she'd try it again in December. Raina and I had both passed it the previous spring, and Telisa had gotten some disgustingly high score which was probably double what Q had received. With all of these things in question, no one could really say if Q would end up getting a scholarship. She and I tended to avoid the topic.

  Needless to say, my teammates were highly amused by the new living arrangement.

  "Nancy," Pam had said when I first told her about it. "Girl, you housin an enemy." Pam considered anyone who wasn't from our school the enemy.

  Raina was still at home when we started the movies. Stacy was there too—they were hanging out for a bit before going to meet Toni in Westwood. They emerged from Raina's room around nine, and passed through the living room on their way to the door, turning on lights and eliciting groans of protest from the rest of us. Stacy was carrying one of the Cheryl Miller dolls that had been popping up in basketball circles for the past couple of years, and she waved it at us when she walked in. She made Raina look small, although she wasn't particularly large herself—a little under 5'9", and thin. Although her mother was an earthy brown, Stacy's skin was high yellow, and she had a shoulder-length Jheri curl. Raina was two steps behind her, wearing khaki shorts and a burnt-orange sweater that I knew to be Toni's. Toni was always lending Raina clothes and encouraging her to wear them, but this seemed less an act of generosity than a method of identification, as if Raina were simply a possession she could mark as a message to prospective wooers to lay off. Still, Raina didn't wear street clothes very often, and my heart jumped when I saw her. She looked beautiful. I felt self-conscious about looking at Raina in front of my team, but also about being with my team in front of Raina.

  "Hey, ladies," she said.

  People tossed out hellos at her from various parts of the room, except for Telisa, who yelled out cheerfully, "Hey, girl, get outta here!"

  "Hey, Telisa."

  "No, I'm serious. Get out. Teammates a
nd significant others only."

  I had to smile at that one.

  Stacy stepped forward. She and Telisa were friends from having been out to some clubs together. "Yo, fuck you, bitch," she said, thrusting her chin out in mock hostility.

  Q pulled herself up, which took a long time. "Don't be talkin shit now, girl," she said, towering over Stacy and Raina both, "else I'm gonna have to smack you upside the head."

  "Ooooooohs" came up from all over the room.

  "All right, all right, we're on our way," Raina said, taking a few steps forward and pulling Stacy along.

  "Yo, hold up," called out Telisa. Raina turned. "As long as you stayin in our district now, why don't you come to our school?"

  Everybody laughed at her sudden change in tactics. Raina cocked her head and smiled. "You mean you actually want me to play with you sorry-ass losers? Who do I look like, Mother Teresa?"

  "Aw, c'mon, Raina. Think about it. With you, we'd kick the shit outta everybody."

  Stacy crossed her arms. "No way would she leave us, man." She smiled. "Besides, y'all are weak."

  Various calls of "Aw, fuck you, man" and "Bitch, get out."

  "You better watch your mouth, girl," I put in, laughing. "It's about fifteen of us here and only two of y'all."

  "All right, homes. Later," said Stacy. We gave each other the basketball players' signal of greeting and farewell, that half-handshake, half-high-five meeting of the hands, where first the thumbs interlock and then, as you pull away, the fingers.

  When they were gone, we rewound the movie back to where it had been when they'd come in.

  "Seriously, though, can you imagine?" Telisa said as the VCR whirred. "With Raina on our team we'd kick some serious ass."

  "Yeah," Q replied, nudging me with her elbow, "if we could get her and Miss Thang here to share the title of top shit."