Meanwhile, I’m checking out Tomas. What I saw was that he knew how to use his body, blocking out on offense and being kind of strong on defense. But he never got off the floor. It’s okay to block out, but you have to jump or guys will go over you, especially if they’re quick enough to roll to your side. On offense he had a few moves and was strong to the basket, but he wasn’t getting up. Twice his man knocked his shot away, and once, when Tomas made a weak fake and tried an easy shot from under the hoop, the defensive guy jumped up and grabbed the ball in midair. When he did that, all the girls from Wadleigh started cracking up on the sideline.
House kept calling the same two plays over and over. Me and Colin were bringing the ball upcourt slow, passing in to Ruffy or Sky at the high post, then slanting across looking for the soft pick high while Tomas set up deep and rolled away from the ball looking for the inside pass.
When we weren’t doing that, we were bringing Ruffy way out to set a high pick, crossing the off guard out near the foul line, and trying to set up a backdoor or a chippy for one of the forwards. Either way I could see that House was setting up the game so that Tomas would look good.
The guys on Wadleigh saw what was going down and were eating it up. I asked House to switch to one-on-one so I could guard Stoneface, but he wouldn’t. As we got to the end of the first quarter, it was Wadleigh 26 and us 14. Our guys were down and Wadleigh was having fun.
The second quarter went the same way. It was Wadleigh doing what they wanted to do and us playing like we were at practice or something. I tried setting a few picks for Colin, but he ignored them and went for the inside play the way House told him.
Near the end of the half Wadleigh hit a couple of threes and were nonchalanting the whole deal. I hate it when guys start acting like the game is over and they’re too good to lose. Then Stoneface got into a switch with their center, faked inside, and when Ruffy followed him out of the paint, threw up a pretty hook and made it. The guys from Wadleigh goofed big-time on that. They weren’t showing us any respect. I knew what House was doing. He was working out his game plan and, because it wasn’t a league game, didn’t care if we lost or not. I’d take the loss, but I wasn’t giving up the respect.
Colin passed me the pill on the inbound and stopped to wait for it back, but I started downcourt. Stoneface picked Colin up at half-court and came down with him. I stopped ten feet behind the key, pointed at Stoneface, and beckoned for him to come on out and get me. He wasn’t going to let that slide and came over. My man switched to Colin.
Stoneface is quick and he’s real strong. He’s got this way of holding his hands up about shoulder high to make you think he’s not going for the ball, but he’s moving his body into you and putting you off-balance so you can’t get around him. I saw that but I knew I could beat it.
“Yo!” I threw a head fake to the right, the first one that Stoneface had seen all day, and came back hard to my left, dipping under his shoulder.
I knew I had half a step, maybe less, and Stoneface was going to be coming. I went hard down the left side, planted on the line, and went up and across the lane and threw it down from the far side.
It was sweet and everybody in the gym knew it. Ruffy screamed, and Abdul, who had come in for Sky, fell down like he had fainted.
The ref blew the whistle and said something to Abdul about taunting, but he didn’t call a technical. House called a time-out. When we got to the bench, he was looking up at the clock. There was still more than a minute to go in the half.
“Drew, sit down!” he barked.
I knew House was pissed, but I just shrugged it off. As far as I was concerned, I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I didn’t play at all in the second half. The guys in the game kept looking over toward where I sat. They were feeling for me, and I knew they were confused. I had busted Stoneface and it had lifted the whole team, and then I was being punished for it. That sucked big-time.
The final score was 66–52.
“We will play this game the way I say we will play it,” House said in the locker room, “or we won’t play it at all.”
The whole team was tense as we dressed. All the old guys came over to where I was sitting and told me how foul the crap was about sitting me down. The team bus was parked just off 14th Street, and we put the gear on it. When I saw House sitting in the back, I made it a point to sit up front. Fletch came over and told me that House wanted to see me.
“I don’t want to see him,” I said.
“You mad about sitting?” Fletch asked.
“Yeah, I’m mad,” I said. “You think that was right?”
“I think he’s the coach and has the job of running the team,” Fletcher said, sitting next to me. “Long as he’s the coach and you’re not, he tells you how to play.”
“And all the Uncle Toms on the team are supposed to go along with him,” I said. “That’s the way it’s supposed to go? Or that’s just the way you glad to see it go?”
He turned and just looked at me. I knew I shouldn’t have said that bit about Uncle Toms, but I was still mad.
“I know how deep I am, boy.” Fletcher’s voice was low, his words slow. “Do you know how deep you are?”
I didn’t really know what he meant by that, but I turned away and looked out the window as the bus pulled off.
What I knew in my heart, as the bus made its way toward the West Side Highway, was that House was messing with me, with who I really was. When I was on the court, I was a different person than I was sitting in class or just walking down the street. House knew that as well as anybody. When I walked down the street I was ordinary, maybe even ordinary in a not-much kind of way. Sometimes when I hit the neighborhood and saw dudes a little older than me nodding out on the corner or standing around waiting for something to do with their lives, it made me feel terrible because something deep inside told me I was headed in the same direction they were. All those bad feelings, the not being much, the struggle with school, all of it left me when I was on the court.
The bus stopped at the school, and we took out the equipment bags and Abdul and Needham carried them inside. I started down the hill.
“Hey, Drew!”
I turned around and saw Tomas coming toward me.
The big white boy ambled over to me, walking with one shoulder a little higher than the other. I hadn’t noticed that before.
“Hey, Tommy,” I said.
“Toe-mus!” he said.
“Whatever.”
“No, Tomas.”
“Tomas.”
“So you’re mad that you didn’t play,” he said, pointing to his eyes. “I saw that.”
“Yeah, well, I was,” I said.
“Why don’t you come to my house,” he said. “I have a shirt from my team in Prague I’ll give you. Okay?”
“What?”
“You don’t have a shirt from Prague,” he said. “Come with me and I’ll give it to you.”
“No, that’s okay, man.”
“We’re friends, right?” he asked, sticking out his hand.
“Yeah.”
“So I don’t live too far,” he said.
I didn’t feel like going home with Tomas, but I didn’t feel like just walking away, either. If anybody or anything gets in my face, I don’t back off. That’s not me.
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
When you look down into the valley along 145th Street, all you see is black faces because that’s all that lives down there. Up the hill, especially past St. Nicholas, you’re liable to run into anything, especially lately with all the white people buying houses in Harlem. I wondered if Tomas was rich. He didn’t look rich, but you couldn’t tell with some people.
All the time we were walking, Tomas was talking about Stoneface. He was saying that he wasn’t that good and that Wadleigh wasn’t that hot a team.
“They were good enough to beat us,” I said.
“Well, that’s pretty good,” he said.
As we walked, I was wond
ering if House had told him to come over and talk with me. My mind was working overtime and I was sniffing the air for clues to what was going on. I didn’t trust Tomas, but I wasn’t going to back off, either.
Tomas spoke well. Just once in a while he would pronounce words differently than I expected. I asked him about it and he said he had studied English in Prague and that his family had lots of friends who spoke English.
We walked down to 142nd Street off Broadway. Tomas lived in a brownstone, and I figured his family must own it until I saw there were three bells over the mailboxes. We walked upstairs to the second floor. He knocked on the door and called his name out.
The peephole clicked. A woman opened the door and looked at Tomas, then at me, and then back to him.
“This is my friend Drew,” he said.
I followed Tomas into the apartment. It was okay, but nothing special. There were lots of books lying around and odd-looking pieces of colored glass. The woman asked us if we wanted something to eat and I said no, but we were already headed for the kitchen.
“Please sit down,” the woman said to me.
“My mother, Anna,” Tomas said.
“He didn’t think I was your girlfriend,” she said with a little crooked smile.
Tomas’s mother was all-right-looking, no makeup, real plain clothes, as if she didn’t care about her appearance. She had dark blond hair, blue-gray eyes, a thin mouth, and a large forehead that made her look a little like an old-fashioned doll. She sat at the table and folded her hands in front of her.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked after I had sat down.
“Sure,” I said, being sociable.
“Go buy some tea,” she said to Tomas.
“Hey, I don’t need the tea,” I said.
She made him go out to buy it and told me to sit down when I was going to go with him. The way she told me to sit sounded like she thought she was my mother.
“So you are a basketball player, too?” she said when Tomas had taken some money off the refrigerator and left.
“Yes.”
“My husband used to play basketball in Prague,” she said. “Mostly he played football—you call it soccer over here—but he also played the basketball. Do you know anything about the Czech Republic?”
“Not really,” I said, trying to remember where Jocelyn had said it was.
“It’s in eastern Europe,” she said. “It used to be part of Czechoslovakia, but we broke the country in two and now it’s the Czech Republic. I don’t know if that’s good or not, but that’s what it is.”
“Your husband still play ball?”
“No, he played when he was young,” she said. She nodded as if she was agreeing with herself. “But in 1977, during the struggle with the government, he was wounded and put in jail. His legs were hurt and he walked with a cane until he died.”
“I’m sorry to hear about that,” I said. “What did he do?”
“He was a teacher,” she said.
“No, I mean what did he do to go to jail?”
“David wrote a column in the university newspaper,” she said. “He wrote how we wanted to have more freedom and more choices in our schools. It was only a small paper, but everybody on that staff went to jail. Including me.”
“You were in jail?”
“Don’t smile,” she said, suddenly serious. “I was in jail for two weeks. When they took the men on the staff to jail, the women protested, too. We blocked traffic; some of us threw rocks at the state police. We had the scent of freedom and wanted it badly. It wasn’t bad, because they didn’t hit the women. They knew if they beat us up, it would just make more people mad at them.”
“You didn’t think they would put you in jail?”
“We knew, but we also knew we had to do something,” she said. “You can’t let them take away your freedom. You don’t have anything else. When they finally let my husband out of jail, he was pretty bad off.”
“I never heard of anybody going to jail for writing in a newspaper,” I said.
“Americans don’t know about things like that,” she said. “You’re a very busy people.”
Tomas came back with the tea and his mother made it. She said she had been an artist in Prague, sculpting with glass.
“One day I’ll get back to it,” she said, pouring the tea.
“I can see why you like the United States better than Prague,” I said.
“There’s nothing wrong with this country and I like it very much,” she said. “But I don’t like it better than my own country. We lost everything in the floods a few years ago. Half of Prague was under water, just like in your country where the black people live.”
“New Orleans,” I said.
“We lost our house, our books, our computer, our clothes.” She turned toward Tomas.
“We have a cousin here,” he said. “He found my mother a job in a hotel. That’s why she works at night.”
The tea was terrible. They didn’t put any sugar in it, and I didn’t know if they had any so I didn’t ask.
I liked Tomas’s mother, but I wasn’t comfortable around her. She had done things that I had never known anybody doing before, like going to jail for throwing rocks at the police, or writing for a school paper, or making stuff out of glass. I didn’t know any white people who had been in jail, period.
Tomas got the shirt and gave it to me. I hung out for a while, mostly listening to his mother talking about life in her country. I realized they didn’t have much, probably not as much as my family.
Tomas let his mother do most of the talking. Sometimes it was almost as if he were listening to her stories for the first time, too. I knew he must have known most of it, but I guess it was funny to hear your mother talking about throwing rocks at cops no matter where you came from.
What I got from the whole scene was that Tomas was scoping the tension on the team the same as I was. He was trying to cool it down, and I thought that was good, but it still didn’t explain what was going on.
I got home and showed Mom the shirt I got from Tomas and told her about having tea with them and about his mom.
“Do they look dangerous or anything?” Mom asked. “His mother sounds like a radical.”
“No, she ain’t radical,” I said.
Jocelyn took the shirt and said she was going to find out what USK PRAHA, which was written across the front, meant.
I lay down across my bed, felt around for the remote, and started flipping through channels. I wondered if House was trying to make Tomas the star of the team just because he was white. The Chargers weren’t broke—why was he trying to fix us with some guy who was going to mess up the whole team?
There was current events homework to do, and I thought about it as I lay down. I had downloaded some new jams and thought I would check them out while I went over the homework.
My mind drifted to English. I thought of Miss Tomita saying that Othello was probably not black the way we think about black people today. The way I figured it, Shakespeare wouldn’t have put him in the play if being black wasn’t an issue. And why was Iago messing with him if it didn’t have anything to do with race?
I hadn’t read the whole play yet, but I did remember Othello telling the chick about his life. Maybe that’s what made Iago mad. He didn’t have anything to run down about who he was and resented my man Othello.
I decided that no matter what Miss Tomita said, I was going to think of Othello as a stone brother.
House said he was going to add something new to each practice. The big thing in the next practice was a ballhandling drill where he had us going up and down the court around cones dribbling two balls at the same time. I didn’t think much of that at first until I saw how some of the guys couldn’t handle the ball as easily as I thought they should. I checked out Tomas, and he did all right for a big man.
I kept away from House. He was making notes on his clipboard, something he hadn’t done before. He was letting us know he was serious, but I still
didn’t know what he was trying to do.
We ran some wind sprints and then a wing drill.
“The guys on defense, bring your fists up under your arms and hold out your elbows as if you had wings,” Coach called. “Anybody who passes you and they’re outside your elbows does five laps around the gym.”
The object of the wing drill was to go at a defender as hard as you could but as close to his body as possible. If you went by him close, he would have to turn his body and shift his feet before he went after you, and he wouldn’t be able to do it fast enough to stop you. If you went around him too wide, he could turn his body as he moved and he could recover some of the time and get back into a good defensive position. I liked the wing drill, and I was good at it, too.
Coach set up a zigzag pattern of guys, and we had to dribble past them, always staying inside their elbows. We ran the drill a few times, and I saw Tomas move his elbow into guys as he drove and almost knock two of them down. They complained, but Coach just made some stupid remark about being men. I knew if Tomas did that in a game, somebody would knock his head off.
When Tomas went on defense, Sky gave him a shot and Ruffy hit him in the ribs, making him wince.
“Williams, sit down!” House again.
Okay, we all dug it. Nobody was supposed to touch Tomas. Just let him have his way.
We ran a light five-on-five, and I saw that the guys were checking out Tomas. Sky put some moves on him and he went for them. I got inside with him and called for the ball.
“Yo, Tomas, I’m going straight up,” I said.
When the ball came into me, I took one dribble and went up. Tomas had his hands up but he hardly got off the floor. I made the easy shot over him. I heard the whistle and turned to see House signaling that I had walked.
“No way!” I called to him.
House knew I hadn’t walked. Tomas knew it, too.
We finished practice with a passing drill that was a major snap because everybody wanted to show off their stuff. House kept yelling at us to get serious, but nobody was going there except Colin. Even Tomas tried a little blind pass.
Game Page 3
