Slam!

by Walter Dean Myers

  Then I looked over and saw that the coach had his head to his hands. I turned and looked at the ref and he was signaling no basket.

  “Time had run out!” he said.

  I looked for Nick and then for the coach. I turned back toward the refs but they were already headed for the locker room.

  Some of the players from Trinity were coming over to shake our hands. Nick walked away without shaking anybody’s hand and the rest of us followed.

  We didn’t shower, just got on the bus smelling funky and feeling worse. Coach went around saying that we had made a strong comeback and telling everybody not to feel bad. He was feeling bad, though, and you could see that all over his face.

  They made us go all the way back to the school and then the coach told us we still had a chance to win, because Trinity had lost to Hunter and they still had to face Carver. What he didn’t say was that we had to face Hunter and Carver, too.

  The coach who had come to see Nick play was at the school and he talked with Goldy for a while before he left. I asked Goldy if he said anything about the game.

  “Said you guys looked pretty good once you got your game together,” Goldy said.

  “What did you think?” I asked.

  “I think it doesn’t matter,” Goldy said. “It’s over now. We have to go on to the next game.”

  Yeah. Me and Ducky started to the bus stop and a car pulled up. It was Ducky’s mom.

  “Can we drop you someplace?” she asked.

  “Bet.”

  Yo, Ducky’s mom was fine. If she wasn’t white and about thirty-something I might have given her a play. She got the hint real quick that we had blown the game and went on about how crowded it was downtown. Ducky didn’t want to hear that mess and neither did I so she shut up.

  “I’ll come to the next game if I can,” she said when she left me off on 145th.

  “You lucky?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said, and flashed me a pretty smile.

  I got upstairs and a little big-eyed boy named Donnie was standing on the landing.

  “Your father got shot,” he said.

  I busted down the hall and saw the door was unlocked. My heart was jumping when I ran in. Moms was making coffee at the stove and Derek was reading a comic.

  “Where’s Pops?” I asked.

  “He’s in the living room watching television,” Moms said. “You hear he broke his arm?”

  “Broke his arm?” I looked down the hallway toward the living room but I couldn’t see nothing. “Donnie said he got shot.”

  “He’s only four,” Moms said. “Anytime somebody gets hurt around here the little kids think they got shot. No, he just broke his arm.”

  “How he break it?”

  “We were shopping on Eighth Avenue and he stepped on a newspaper that somebody had put over some oil and slipped on it,” Moms said. “Cried like a baby.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “Yes he did.” Moms was smiling. “Laid right on that sidewalk and cried. Been acting like a baby ever since.”

  I went into the living room and Pops was watching a talk show. He had a cast on his arm and he was looking beat up.

  “I broke my arm,” he said.

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said. “You want me to do anything for you?”

  “No, just ask your mama to come in for a minute.”

  I went on out to the kitchen and told Moms what he said. She shook her head and went toward the living room.

  Losing the game against Trinity was whack. The thing was that Brothers got my game. We had a comeback but during the whole first part of the game I was playing weak. When a dude gets your game that strong he should be a lot better than you and Brothers wasn’t all that, and I knew it. Or maybe he was and I didn’t want to admit that a white boy had done the thing to me.

  The phone rang and I could hear Derek going for it. He only had two friends that call him but he likes answering the phone. He come to the door and said that it was Mtisha.

  Mtisha asked me what I was doing.

  “Chillin’.”

  “I heard you lost against Trinity.”

  “Dang! Who told you?”

  “Marcus. You know that guy lives over near the car wash?” Mtisha said. “Got a mountain bike?”

  “He told you?”

  “Yep. Anyway, I’m going to Sam’s for dinner because my mother is going to a church meeting,” Mtisha said. “You want to come? It’s on me.”

  “Yeah.”

  I was hoping she wasn’t going to try to cheer me up because we lost the game. People who ain’t into ball don’t even know what it means to lose.

  The whole name of Sam’s is Sam’s Fish Box which is a stupid name. Maybe if you’re a West Indian and like to eat stuff that burns your mouth out it’s okay, but I don’t dig it. They make nice chicken, which is the best thing they make, and also a pretty good curried goat. But I don’t like the goat because the bones are too small and you could be eating a dog or something. Also, Sam don’t know how to talk to people. I don’t like people cracking on me.

  It was cold out and Sam had all those big pots on and the windows were steamed up. Mtisha was sitting in the back and I went over and gave her a little kiss. She smelled good.

  “So what’s happening?” I saw she had a math book on the chair next to her.

  “Nothing much, what do you want to eat?”

  “Something light,” I said. “Maybe some chicken and some red beans.”

  Sam came over before I got my butt on the seat. He was broad and brown-skinned, and the sweat was dripping off his forehead. He asked me what I wanted.

  “Give me a minute, man,” I said.

  “You ain’t got no money,” Sam said to me. “What you need a whole minute for?”

  “How you know I ain’t got money. I could be fat.”

  “Your ears too small to have any money,” Sam said. “You see them millionaires? They got them big ears. Anytime a dollar rustle they hear it. Them small ears you got, all you can hear is pennies falling.”

  “You got chicken?”

  “I got catfish and whitings,” Sam said. “Which one you want?”

  “Get the whitings,” Mtisha said. “Catfish look nasty.”

  “Okay, give me the whitings,” I said.

  Sam went on back to his pots. Mtisha was having some kind of stew and tea with lemon. You didn’t sit in Sam’s and not spend some money. You didn’t sit there all day, either.

  “You smell like peaches or something,” I said. “Or is that just love I’m sniffing?”

  “That’s Sam’s curry you smelling,” she said. “You talk to Ice yet?”

  “No, I was planning to talk to him Monday after school,” I lied. “What you got the books for?”

  “I got this idea,” she said, pulling out a notebook. “I’m going to give you a whole lot of problems to do so I can tell just where you need help.”

  She handed me the notebook and I opened it. She had actually written out 60 problems. “You kidding, right?”

  “You see a smile on my face?”

  “It’ll take me forever to get all this done.”

  “That’s okay,” Mtisha said. “I’m young.”

  Yeah.

  Sam brought the fish and it looked terrible. Mtisha poked at it with her finger.

  “That looks like the catfish,” she said.

  “That ain’t the catfish,” Sam said. “That’s the whiting. You don’t know catfish when you see it?”

  “Taste it,” Mtisha said.

  I tasted it and it didn’t taste too bad and I said I’d eat it. But when I looked up at Sam he was smiling. It was just like him to give me the catfish and make believe it was the whiting. Jive turkey.

  On Sunday afternoon I sat with Pops a while and we had a light rap. We don’t talk all that much because he don’t have a lot to say. He can’t tell me how to play ball ’cause he don’t play ball. He can’t tell me how to deal with the streets because I already
learned that on my own. He can’t tell me much about how to get over because he ain’t got over. I like to rap with him, though, especially when he tells me stuff he did as a kid. It sounded lame, but it was interesting because I know how his program turned out. One time he said he thought buzzards was circling over his head waiting for him to get weak enough to fall. When he was first saying it I didn’t like it because I thought maybe he was seeing things but now I was seventeen I was beginning to understand what he was talking about.

  “What you going to do about the video camera?” he asked.

  “Maybe it’ll show up,” I said.

  “And if it don’t?”

  “I’ll just have to tell them at school,” I said.

  He nodded. I knew he didn’t have the money to pay for it.

  “So what you thinking about that guy coming around helping you with your math?” he asked.

  “You know Mtisha?”

  “Your girl?”

  “Sort of my girl,” I said. “She’s really good at math and she’s helping me. I think it’s going to be cool.”

  “You don’t need the guy?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Yeah, that’s good,” he said.

  He nodded to himself, and I thought he looked relieved. I was relieved, too.

  “What you mean ‘sort of’ your girl?” he asked. “I thought you had her sewn up? You don’t know how to deal with women?”

  “Hey, you can’t really tell me nothing about no women,” I said. “And don’t tell me you were some kind of nickel-and-dime Romeo, either.”

  “I got your Mama,” he said.

  “Don’t even go there, man.”

  Monday morning came and it looked like it wanted to snow but it didn’t, just got cold as anything. I met Ducky in the hallway at Latimer and I told him how fine his mama looked.

  “She’s been fixing herself up since they separated,” he said.

  “Your parents separated?”

  “I don’t think it’s permanent,” Ducky said, unwinding this enormous scarf from around his neck. “When they were arguing she was really screaming at him but after he left she was crying all over the place.”

  “Where did you get that scarf?”

  “I saw one like this in a movie and this guy was getting all the girls,” Ducky said.

  “You getting all the girls?”

  “Yeah, every time I go up and jam another girl calls me up and wants to give me her true love,” he said.

  I wanted to ask him if he thought the guys in the NBA really got as many chicks as they say in the papers but then Mr. Parrish called me over.

  “I saw your tape,” he said.

  “Yeah, I thought maybe I’d do something else,” I said.

  “Margie came on with an immature attitude when she brought me the tape,” Mr. Parrish said. “Is that why you don’t want to go on with it?”

  “No, it’s just boring,” I said.

  “Look, I think you have something good going on in your tape. I’d like to see you do about three hours more and then cut it down so that it says what you want it to say. There’s a statewide arts contest and I’d like to enter your tape. I don’t know how good it’ll do, naturally, but I think it might have a chance.”

  “You think it’s okay?”

  “You see well,” Mr. Parrish said. “And you have a feel for your neighborhood that Margie doesn’t. Think about it.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  That made me feel good for about two whole minutes while I was thinking about myself as a big-deal moviemaker. Then I remembered that I had lost the camera.

  We had practice and Trip’s father is there. He can’t see the games or the practice, but he shows up. I could dig it.

  The practice went all right. We ran some four-on-five plays to learn how to avoid traps. I had never done that before and it was all right. Then we did some wind sprints and finally had a half hour of just shooting practice. Nick said that he got a letter from the athletic department at Brown.

  “What did it say?”

  “They said they would like me to consider Brown,” he said. He had this big smile on his face.

  “Hey, congratulations,” I said.

  Definitely a raggedy situation. My game was stronger than Nick’s but the guy from Brown only had eyes for him. Nobody was talking about me. While I was in the shower I thought about it a lot. Nick had good grades and he had a nice look about him and everything. Or maybe it was just because he was white, I didn’t know. Ducky said that Brown didn’t have a good team. It didn’t make me no never mind. I was down with any school that wanted me to come and play ball.

  Most of the guys were gone when I got out of the shower, but Goldy was there.

  “Yo, Goldy, can I ask you a question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Nick said that he got a letter from the coach at Brown,” I said. “How come nobody’s interested in my game? You think it’s because I’m black?”

  “Could be,” Goldy said. “And it could be because Nick has better grades, or that he did well in the PSAT, or because Brown doesn’t think they can get anybody with your talents.”

  “Yeah. Could be,” I said. “Let me ask you another question. You think I got a chance to play college ball?”

  “You’re the one who has to figure that out,” Goldy said, tossing towels in the laundry bin. “You have to figure out how well you’re doing.”

  “But say I was your blood, right?” I straddled the bench near Goldy. “What would you say? Would you say I got a shot?”

  “If you were my blood?” Goldy leaned against the wall. “You mean, like, if you were my son or something?”

  “Yeah, what would you say?”

  “I’d tell you like my father told me,” Goldy said. “He went through a lot of hell during the Second World War. At first he was bitter, then he was mad, then he figured it all out. That’s what he told me, that he had figured it all out. What he said was that the only thing that mattered was how well you did what you loved. You know what I mean?

  “If science is your life, then you got to love science and do science with everything you have. If basketball is what you’re about then that’s what you got to do. You have to keep your eyes open and see what’s going on around you, of course. But what you do you got to do it to the max. You know what I mean?”

  “It don’t work like that, Goldy,” I said. “I see people busting their tails every day and they ain’t going no place.”

  “They’re not doing what they love, Slam,” Goldy said. “For whatever reason we don’t always have the chance to do what we love. That’s a special gift from God. But when you are doing what you love, you got to bust it. And when you do, it works. I can’t tell you how it works, but it works.”

  Ice lived on 141st Street, which used to be one of the best blocks in the hood. Then the corner of the building he lived in fell off. Square business. The whole corner just fell off. People were lying in their beds and when that corner fell off they fell out the building. The collapse killed three people. Nobody in Ice’s family got killed but they were shook up bad.

  His family moved in with an aunt that lived across the street and that’s where I went to talk to him. He wasn’t home but his mother was there. Ice’s mom used to be like my second mother. When we were small every time she bought something for Ice she bought the same thing for me. Then Ice’s father got stabbed to death on the same day that Showman’s bar had a fire. His mother got real religious after that.

  “What you doing with yourself these days, boy?” Ice’s mom was dark-skinned and slight. She was washing the floor as she talked, making patterns of soapy water on the linoleum.

  “Going to school, playing a little ball, taking care of business,” I said.

  “Hope you leaving the girls alone,” she said.

  “I’m trying to leave them alone,” I said. “But you know how that is.”

  “Don’t you go out here and make no babies,” she said, wringing ou
t the mop. “Worse thing a young boy can do for himself is go around making a lot of babies.”

  “Ice been home?”

  “He was home about four or so,” she said. “I can’t wait until we get our own place again. Ice don’t feel comfortable here. And you know he having trouble with that girlfriend of his. I don’t know what he sees in her anyway.”

  “I know what he sees in her,” I said. “She’s fine.”

  “There’s more to life than being fine,” Mrs. Reese said. “That ammonia bother you?”

  “Not that much,” I lied. “You put your hands in that stuff?”

  “No, but this woman’s floors need something,” Mrs. Reese said. “They had this old dog that couldn’t get around much before he died. These floors stink something terrible when the heat comes up.”

  “Yeah. Look, tell Ice I was by,” I said, putting my coat on.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You want anything to eat before you go?” she said when we had reached the door.

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Slam, you got a girlfriend too?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re pretty tight.”

  “Just remember you got plenty of time,” she said. “Don’t be in no hurry.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When I got downstairs Ice was on the stoop with Willie King. Willie used to have a heavy game. He could really get up. Two years ago he went to the Knicks camp and rocked with their starting five. Then he got busted and had to do a half a calendar on Rikers Island. When he got out of jail he was different. Some guys said that he had been turned out. Every time I looked at him and thought about him being turned out, being raped by other dudes, I felt bad for him.

  “What’s happening?” I said.

  “Ballplayer!” Willie put up his hand and I slapped him five.

  “What’s going on?” Ice was clean. He was wearing a black overcoat, gray suit, yellow silk shirt, and gray suede kicks.

  “You look like you going to Hollywood,” I said.

  “Same thing I told him,” Willie said. “He’s going to have to start handing out tickets to all the babes. Make them wait in line.”