The Necessary Hunger

by Nina Revoyr

  I sat in the stands and looked at Raina, who was stretching alone in a corner and calmly eyeing the other team. Right then I decided that wherever I lived for the rest of my life, I'd have to go to the local basketball games. Gyms were my natural habitat—like this one, with its shiny blond wood, its stale air, its wooden bleachers so old and creaky they seemed ready to collapse. There were long red pads behind the baskets, placed there to cushion the impact of those who'd run downcourt too fast to stop for something so insignificant as a wall. Two bulbs on the scoreboard were burned out, so that the 8 became a 3. There was the sound of twenty-odd basketballs hitting the floor at short, irregular intervals, and the loud squeak of shoes on polished wood, which was like the call of some high-pitched bird. I was a creature of this place and all others like it. Everything about it—the sound of the ball swishing through the net or clanging off of the rim, the black and white lines on the court, the smell of age-old sweat—was as natural and desirable to me as the earth, trees, and fresh air might be to a creature of the woods.

  Raina, however, was oblivious to her surroundings. She was bent over a ball now, eyes shut, psyching herself up. The game that night was important, but to Raina every game was important; every game required the same level of commitment. I'd always thought that what made Raina such a wonderful player was her tremendous strength of character, but by now I knew it also was her pain. I wondered what Raina felt when she was out there on the court. I wondered what wound she had suffered, to make her need to prove so much.

  A few minutes later, the game began, and as Raina grabbed the ball after her team's center won the tip-off, my face broke into a smile. I had fallen in love with Raina on the basketball court, and every time I saw her play again I remembered why. She was so unbelievably focused—even during warmups she seemed to have forgotten that any world outside of the game at hand existed. Usually reserved off the court, she became the leader on it, yelling out directions with an urgency and authority she completely masked when she wasn't playing basketball. Raina played the game as I could only dream of playing it, with an intensity I could equal only when I was playing against her. I loved watching her during games because I could stare at her openly. I took in everything about her—the grimace she wore as she sprinted downcourt; the hair slicked back and twisted into one perfect braid; the muscles of her legs, which were long and subtle, like swells formed by something moving underwater. She missed an easy layup and then berated herself for it, using a tone of voice she'd never use with someone else. The perspiration on her body made her skin glow.

  There was something wrong that day. Her whole team was too tight, overanxious. The problem with playing on emotion is that while it can motivate you, it can also get you so wound up that it's impossible to function normally. That was what was happening to Raina's team now. They were missing easy shots, throwing passes to empty spaces, cracking under the pressure of the other team's full-court press. And they were yelling at each other, shifting blame, which only made them more angry, and so more tight. Raina was the only one who seemed unaffected. It was not that she wasn't as intense as her teammates; in truth, she was more intense, because her ability to focus had nothing to do with the anger that was defining the game for all the others. She not only managed to block out everything off the court, she also blocked out the distracting emotion on it. Firmly but calmly, she directed her teammates. She played her usual in-your-face, don't-give-up-an-inch brand of defense, made most of the shots she managed to get off, and set up a few shots for her teammates. Despite her efforts, though, she could not make up for collective mistakes, and when the buzzer sounded to mark the end of the half, her team was down by twelve. Raina and her teammates dragged themselves to their locker room, looking tired and frustrated.

  At halftime I went to chat with the parents, snuck a few looks at the scouts, and bought some horrible concession-stand nachos. These I ate with Telisa while we discussed the prospects of Raina's team making a comeback (slim). We talked about our own three remaining league games, which we were sure to win, and about the girl that Telisa was checking out on the other side of the stands. Soon both teams came back onto the floor, shot around a bit to warm up, and the second half began.

  The first three minutes of the third quarter went much like the previous half. Raina's team committed four turnovers, which led to three baskets for the other team, while scoring only once themselves. It looked like the game was over. But then, with 4:52 left in the quarter, something happened. Stacy made a steal, passed the ball to Raina, then got it back under the basket to cap off a three-on-one fast break. Score. Then Raina stole the inbounds pass and took the jump shot right there from the baseline. Score. Then their center, of all people, a lanky 6'2" girl who just a few minutes earlier had tripped over her own feet and fallen in slow motion like a giant redwood, picked off a pass at midcourt. Two passes later, Raina had the ball. She pump-faked, got her defender in the air, drove around her, stopped under the basket. Pumped again, sent another girl flying, and went up with the ball just as the girl was coming down.

  Basket and foul. The gym exploded.

  Raina sank the free throw and they were down by nine. Telisa and I stood up and high-fived each other so hard that my hand still hurt two minutes later. This thing wasn't over yet.

  To put it simply, she took over the game. After her team's initial comeback surge, things evened out again, and the teams traded baskets for a while. But suddenly Raina was at the center of everything. She controlled what was happening. She gathered the game into herself and parceled it out again as she saw fit. She didn't try to be flashy, but that only made her incredible plays—her drives between three defenders, her last-second thread-the-needle passes—seem all the more spectacular. It occurred to me for the first time that this sport was like music—that Raina was singing with her body the way that other people sang with their lungs.

  How would Raina's voice sound if she sang like she played? It would be deep, not in its tone but in its layers, with each layer suggesting another beneath it until you were aware of a profound complexity granted only to geniuses or prophets. It would be the kind of voice that didn't immediately strike you, but then, when you listened more closely, startled you with its undisguised intensity. Her singularity would be manifest not in the words that she sang, or in the style with which she delivered them, but in the timbre and intonation of her voice. Singularity is rare. Some people try to disguise their lack of it, their lack of a new story to tell or a new way to tell an old one, with their false and blown-up notion of passion. They always fail. You are as naked behind a microphone as you are on a basketball court; in both cases all the masks you've so carefully constructed are totally stripped away, and no amount of flashiness or rehearsal or even perfect execution can hide the absence of that Great Intangible which makes an unforgettable singer, or athlete, unforgettable. Raina had that Great Intangible. Listening was revelation. I heard the music that she not only sang but seemed to be writing as she went along. I heard the ebb and flow of exquisite verses, the sudden rushes up and down the scales, the glorious resolution of a chorus. I saw the way she took the other players on the court and arranged them, like notes, so that they somehow came out in perfect order. Most of all, though, I heard the longing, the need, the struggle to prove her worth, that poured endlessly out of her, that was her.

  I knew her team would win. I knew it the way you know upon waking up on certain mornings that it's going to be a wonderful day; the way you sense a letter from a long-lost friend the week before it finally arrives. It was inevitable. Halfway through the fourth quarter they were still down by five, and the other team wasn't giving an inch. But this was Raina's song now, so when she grabbed an offensive rebound, put it in, then stole the ball and scored again to cut the lead to one, nobody was less surprised than me. When she drove left off the wing to score the winning basket a few moments later, and then quickly nodded, as if to say she'd known they'd pull it off all along, I wanted to lift the ceiling with
my shouts.

  * * *

  I was seventeen years old, and always hearing from my father that everything that seemed so important to me then would someday come to mean very little. He did not mean Raina, of course—he meant basketball, and impossible math tests, and the friends I had made at school. But the basic premise applied to everything—that the things I was experiencing then were not quite real, and would only factor into my impending personhood in the form of pleasant but insignificant memories. Even Claudia, in all her wisdom, said that Raina and I were too intense, too devoted to things we'd dismiss as mere episodes of youth once we reached that distant shore of adulthood. It didn't seem to me that this was right. It didn't seem that I could ever separate my love for Raina from myself and still keep that self intact. It was too deeply intertwined, she was too deeply intertwined, with all that I was. They were wrong, our parents, and not only because they underestimated the power of my emotions—and so Raina's as well—but also because they completely misunderstood the nature of them. It wasn't simply that I loved Raina; it was that she filled my life, she flowed through my veins, she splashed out into every corner of my body. And it wasn't simply that I admired her, envied her; it was that I sometimes wanted to be her.

  CHAPTER 16

  In the week after Raina's game, two major things happened which shook several of my friends' lives to the foundation. The first was that Telisa got kicked out of her house. I, along with the rest of my household, was among the first to know—she came banging on our door at two in the morning on a weeknight. The parents must have assumed, correctly, that it was someone for one of us kids, because neither of them came down right away—and when I opened the door and saw Telisa, I was glad that they hadn't. She was carrying a big duffel bag, and she wore a grim, frightened expression I'd never seen on her before. Her eyes were dry now, but I could tell she'd been crying, and her hair, which was normally brushed and perfect, was sticking out in all directions.

  "My mom just threw me out, girl," she said, and her voice sounded raw and strained.

  "Jesus," I said, not quite knowing what to do. "What happened?"

  Telisa shook her head. "I don't wanna talk about it just yet. Can I come in and sit down for a second first?"

  "Yeah, of course," I said. "Come on in."

  We went into the kitchen and sat at the table. I got a beer for my friend, and a Milk-Bone for my dog, who'd been trailing along after me with her ears perked. Just then my father trudged in, wearing his pajamas. He was clearly annoyed at having been stirred from his sleep, and, since his mood had been so bad in recent weeks, not as accommodating as usual. He must have seen Telisa's face, though, because when he spoke, he sounded much calmer than he looked.

  "We've all got to get up early in the morning," he said to my friend. "You can't just come knocking on people's doors in the middle of the night."

  Telisa nodded seriously. "I know, Mr. T. I'm really sorry. But some crazy shit just went down at my house, and I had to get outta there right away."

  He sighed heavily, and I knew he wasn't mad. "I suppose you'll be wanting to spend the night."

  "Yeah, I would, if that's okay with you."

  He sighed again and scratched his chin. "Yes, it's okay. We'll talk about this in the morning. Nancy will get you some blankets." Then he turned to me. "Now don't you stay up half the night."

  "We won't," I promised, not looking at him.

  With that, my father dragged himself out again, the dog following on his heels. Telisa turned to me. "I'm sorry I woke y'all up," she said. "Your pops is really pissed at me, huh?"

  "Whatever," I said. I didn't want to talk about him; I didn't care what he thought about anything. He'd been spending time outside of school with Larry Henderson lately, going to bars once or twice a week, and I couldn't understand this sudden turnaround, this strange defection; it made me even angrier than I'd been about the grade. A few days earlier, right after Raina's game, I'd found a note from Larry that my father had left on his nightstand. The note, written on official Hawthorne High School stationery, had said, We're glad to have you back on our team. It had taken a great effort not to rip it into shreds. I threw this out of my mind now and turned back to my friend. "What happened?" I asked.

  Telisa took a big gulp from her beer, set it down again, turned the bottle around in her hands. "I got home around midnight," she said, "and like a fool, I brought Shavon in so I could give her this tape she wanted to borrow." She sighed. "My mom usually goes to bed early, right? So I thought it'd be okay. Me and Shavon went into the living room and got the tape, and then we just chilled there for a while. We weren't really doin nothin—just sittin there with our arms around each other—but then my mom walks into the living room and finds us." She stopped and shook her head, tapping the bottom of the bottle lightly against the table. Tears welled up in her eyes. "Man, she lost it. She went after Shavon and started punchin on her, and I just told Shavon to get outta there. Then she started yellin and cursin at me, tryin to punch on me, sayin she didn't raise me to be like this, and she wasn't gonna have no sick crazy people livin in her house. It was bad, girl. Then Earl woke up and got into it, said to leave me alone and that she was the one who was whack, and then he left, and I don't know where he went. Then she started screamin at me and sayin that I'd come between her and Earl, and that if I didn't pack up my stuff and leave she was gonna put it out in the street."

  "Shit," was all I could think of to say.

  "Yeah," Telisa said. "So I packed up as many of my clothes as I could, but I gotta go back over there and get the rest of my shit later."

  "But I thought she knew about you and Shavon," I said.

  "She did. But she didn't have to deal with it, you know what I'm sayin? Kind of like your dad is, now, with you. He probably knows, but he don't wanna know, and as long as you're single, he doesn't really have to face it."

  I felt a wave of nausea pass through me. Once, when I was with Yolanda, my father had come home unexpectedly while we were napping together on the couch. We'd jumped away from each other, just in time, and I think he'd willfully ignored our guilty looks. There'd come a day, though, when he wouldn't be able to ignore things anymore. But in order to talk about my being gay, we'd have to smash so many barriers that I wasn't sure we'd be able to face each other again.

  "And even though I've got a girlfriend," Telisa continued, "I guess my mom just pretended it wasn't happening. But when she came out into the living room and saw us like that . . ." She shook her head. "I guess she couldn't pretend anymore."

  We sat and talked for another half an hour. Then I set Telisa up with some blankets and pillows on the living room couch, and that became her bed for the next week. Although I was still too mad to convey my thanks or approval, my father was great through this time—he never asked what the fight had been about, but he knew Mrs. Coles was crazy, and so he told Telisa she was welcome to stay with us as long as she did her share of the chores. I saw him look at me every once in a while, trying to gauge my feelings; I knew that part of the reason he was being so nice to my friend was that he was trying to win me over. It wasn't going to work, though—what he'd done was not something he could just sweep under the carpet. I only talked to my father when there was no way to avoid it; it was hard for me even to look at him.

  Word quickly got around our team that Telisa could be found at my place. We'd just finished the league season and were beginning to prepare for the playoffs, but one of our starters had been put out of her house, and this was not exactly good for team morale. Meanwhile, Q was in horrible spirits—she still wasn't getting seriously recruited, and like most people who were hoping to receive an athletic scholarship, she hadn't applied to any schools. No one asked about her situation or even acknowledged it, especially me—I was probably the last person she wanted to talk to—and when she was feeling particularly crabby, which was most of the time, she tended to avoid me altogether. The playoffs would be the last chance she had to prove herself, and her future w
ould be determined by her performance. All of these factors made us very uptight, and at one practice Q and Pam started snapping at each other so viciously that Telisa and I had to get between them and calm them down. Everyone was on edge. We needed to pull ourselves back together, or the playoffs would be a disaster. Unfortunately, though, the other calming influence on the team besides me—Telisa—was wrapped up in her own set of problems.

  Although it meant that I got even less homework done, I was actually glad to have Telisa in the house. We spent a lot of time together, joking around during the day and having deep philosophical discussions late at night, and I could feel that we were getting closer. The only aspect of her presence I didn't like was that it meant I saw a lot less of Raina. She was around as much as usual, but she tended to go off by herself if Telisa and I were together; she never really wanted to join us. I only got to spend time with her when Telisa was out, which wasn't very often. It was hard for Telisa to see Shavon—her mother had called Shavon's mother, and Shavon's mother had hit the ceiling too. She was using the opposite tactic from Telisa's mother, though—instead of kicking her daughter out, Shavon's mother kept her in. Shavon had to go right home after school, and then her mother would subject her to rages and tears. She was not allowed to go out at night and her mother screened her phone calls. Finally, at the end of the week, Shavon left to go and stay with her father.