Jump

by Mike Lupica

  Gary Lenz, the coach, blew his whistle. He was a pushy dude from the Lower East Side, in his second year now with the Knicks. He had started out at Iona, then moved up to St. John’s, now he was in the big leagues, just thirty-two years old, looking twenty-two. He had all this curly red hair and wore snappy double-breasted suits. Richie said he looked like he’d grown up sleeping with Bugsy Siegel’s picture under his pillow. Who was another dead guy, a gangster, who Richie’d read up on in a book even before there was a movie about him Richie dragged him to see, with Warren Beatty in it.

  Richie had seen more movies than Ellis, and read more books.

  Gary Lenz was saying now, “Ellis doesn’t want to dunk, I don’t want to coach anymore today.”

  Ellis was over with Lenz now. Ellis, at six feet eight inches and change, was nearly a foot taller than the little dude coach. Ellis ran his hand through Lenz’s curls. He knew Lenz hated that.

  “Aren’t you always telling me to fill the moment with surprise, Gary? Shit, that’s what you say in your new coaching video, nineteen ninety-five plus tax, available at video stores everywhere.”

  Lenz grabbed his crotch.

  “Surprise this,” he said, and walked toward the locker room. They all knew the real reason he was cutting practice short, even on the third day of camp; he had to go shoot some BMW commercial in the city. Gary Lenz didn’t have as many endorsements as Ellis. Shit, no one did. But Gary was doing pretty good for a midget who never got off the bench at Boston College when it was his turn to fucking play.

  The gym emptied out fast. Ellis stayed. He took a ball out of the rack and motioned for one of the Fulton kids who ball-boyed during camp to come with him. Ellis shot a hundred free throws after every practice, everybody knew that. So he was always the last one out. He looked up at the windows above the court. Gary would have the windows taped up if this were the regular season, but it was the first week of training camp, so he didn’t mind if people came and watched practice. Ellis waved at the kids watching him. The reporters were already in the locker room, wanting to get out of there as soon as they could, the New York guys pissed they had to drive up to Connecticut to watch fast-break drills. The kids, though, they just wanted to see Ellis, they’d stay up there until he shot all hundred free throws. They’d watch him as long as he was out there.

  Ellis couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been watched this way.

  He made the first ten shots in a row, lost in the routine, when he noticed Frank Crittendon standing next to the ball boy.

  Crittendon said, “You got a minute?”

  He was the general manager of the Knicks. Crittendon hadn’t been around the first two days of camp, so this was the first time Ellis saw he’d gotten even fatter during the summer. He was wearing this faded pink polo shirt that rode up out of his pants, and now when he threw a little bounce pass to Ellis at the line, you could see about half his fat white belly.

  Could you get whiter as you got older? Frank Crittendon looked to Ellis sometimes like he’d been washed too many times, something like that, until he was just all washed out.

  “This can’t wait until I finish, Frank?”

  Crittendon said, almost apologizing, “It’s kind of important, Ellis.” Ellis heard him tell the ball boy to run along, he needed to have a private conversation with Mr. Adair, and motioned Ellis over to the side of the court, where there were still a couple of folding chairs set up. Crittendon sat down. Ellis stretched out on the rubber mat in front of the chairs, started doing some light stomach curls.

  “I’m not going to beat around the bush,” he said.

  Ellis smiled.

  “That’s a shame, Frank. Nobody ever beat around a bush better than you.”

  “I just got a call from a Detective Hyland. Fulton police.”

  “He the crossing guard?” Ellis came up, hands behind his head, held the curl. “Or the one who sets up for the bingo games?”

  Crittendon took off the clear glasses he’d always worn and rubbed his eyes. He’d just turned sixty years old, they’d had a birthday cake for him last spring one night before the last Knicks-Bulls game at the Garden, but Frank Crittendon looked older than sixty because of the drinking. Richie always said the only thing you wondered about with him was what time of day the boy got started.

  “A woman showed up today at the police station and has made, um, an accusation of rape.”

  Ellis said, “Rape.”

  “She’s accused you and Richie of raping her.”

  Ellis sat up, stayed up, just a little bit out of breath. There was a towel next to the mat. He wiped his face with it.

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  “That’s not what she says.”

  “What else she say, besides rape?”

  “She says that during training camp last year, at your house over there at Fulton Crest, you and Richie raped her.”

  Ellis lay back down now, staring at the ceiling, wishing Richie was there.

  Trying to act cool, like he was in charge of the general situation.

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  Frank Crittendon pulled a pipe from out of his slacks, stuck it in his mouth, unlit.

  “Her name is Hannah Carey. Do you know her?”

  Richie had always said you don’t volunteer shit to the man, whoever the man was. Richie was white, but didn’t think that way.

  “I don’t know.”

  “She sure seems to know you.”

  “Everybody knows me.”

  Frank Crittendon stood up, pipe in his teeth, looking like some little Fulton professor out of uniform.

  “I just want you to be aware of the situation, Ellis.”

  “If it’s a situation, it’s a bullshit situation.” Now Ellis stood.

  Ellis said, “You read the papers, Frank?”

  “Of course.”

  “I read ’em, too. Not that I’d ever tell a fucking sportswriter that. Know what I find out, the more I read? I find out I can’t keep count anymore of the women coming forward, saying that this athlete raped them, that athlete raped them. The beauty-contest girl from Rhode Island stepped forward and got Mike Tyson and now they’re all doing it.”

  Crittendon looked around. Ellis had noticed it before, Frank Crittendon went through life scared of his own shadow, like he was afraid somebody was listening to every single word he said, ready to hear the one bad thing that was going to cost him his job. Or his house.

  Ellis said, “Know what Richie says? He says all of a sudden rape ain’t a crime, it’s a career.”

  Crittendon said, “You’re saying it didn’t happen.”

  Ellis said, “How long have I played for you?”

  “Five years.”

  “Feel like you know me pretty well?”

  This part was bullshit. No one knew Ellis, except for Richie, and not even him half the time. Even Richie didn’t know everything.

  “I like to think so.”

  “Let me turn it around. Ask you the question: You think I have to force somebody to have sex with me?”

  Crittendon shook his head.

  Ellis said, “Shit, half the time I got to force them not to.” Which was the truth.

  He walked toward the door. He’d shoot two hundred free throws tomorrow, get back up to speed. He left Frank Crittendon standing there, like he was waiting for the whole gym to fall down on him.

  Ellis turned at the door, trying to act cool on this shit, wondering if Richie had left yet. Richie would know what to do.

  “Frank,” Ellis said, “don’t bother me with this again. You feel the urge, you know the drill.”

  “Call your agent.”

  Ellis said, “There you go.”

  3

  The little bastard from the Chronicle show, WCBS, said on the phone, “The best we can do for the time being is once a week. Which means the same deal as before, we pay you by the appearance.”

  Coño, Marty thought. Shit, damn, and fuck.

  Marty Perez, sitti
ng in his office at the Daily News, said, “We talked all summer about three. I come on full-time eventually and give up the column once and for all, if the money’s right.”

  The little bastard’s name was Randy Houghton. Marty could never remember whether he was a Houghton from Houghton Mifflin, the publishing company, or not. He was from Boston, Marty knew that. Three years out of Harvard, twenty-five years old, already producing his own tabloid show. Chronicle had caught on in New York, even started beating Wheel of Fortune in its time slot. Now they were talking about taking it national, moving it up in weight class, putting it into the next gear, primed to go up against all the others: Inside Edition, Hard Copy, A Current Affair.

  Marty Perez wanted to go national with them.

  Randy Houghton said, “I’m glad you brought up the column, babe.”

  Babe. Back home, you saw little punks like this—títeres—looking at you with their attitudes from street corners, like they knew every goddamn thing. In New York they made them television producers.

  “The column is one of the problems right now. The plan here, all along, not just with me but with the big bosses, was for you to just take your column and put it on the air. My Gahd”—Houghton still put on the rich-boy Harvard Yard accent sometimes, usually when he was bullshitting you—“nobody knows New York the way Marty Perez does.”

  Marty just waited, cigar in his free hand, playing with it. Looking at his computer terminal, which only had PEREZ COLUMN at the top, and then a paragraph mark underneath that, and then an empty screen underneath that, which felt like it went all the way down to Forty-second Street, seven floors.

  He was pretty sure what was coming.

  “Frankly, no one here minded if the TV pieces were expanded versions of the column. Just to give our show that rich New York texture we’re shooting for.”

  Madre de Dios, Marty Perez thought.

  Mother of freaking God.

  “Texture,” he said. “Yeah, I’m full of it.”

  Among other things.

  Randy Houghton wasn’t even listening to him. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already, I’ve heard you say it yourself, but the column has gotten a little tired lately, babe. My Gahd”—again—“how many times do we have to read about another high school sophomore with a fucking automatic weapon? Do you understand what I’m trying to say here?”

  Marty sighed. “I write off the news.”

  “We know. We know. But we want more than that. We want you back ahead of the news, the way you used to be. We want Marty Perez’s name back up in lights. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. You’re the king, babe. You’re Marty Perez. We want people to turn on Chronicle the way they used to pick up the News. To see what the hell you’re going to say next.”

  “I need a story is what you’re saying.”

  “It would be nice, Marty. I’m not going to lie to you, we know each other too well. I need to be able to sell the big boys here on the idea that you’re going to be able to bring in some numbers.”

  Before Marty could say anything, Houghton said, “Look, there’s a call here I’ve got to take. We’ll talk again on Friday, see what you’re thinking about for next week.”

  “I’m ready to make the move to television full-time,” Marty said. “I think if I didn’t have to work the column and the show, if I could just concentrate on Chronicle, the pieces would have the kind of juice you’re talking about.” Hating the sound of his own voice, begging this punk.

  “I hear you, I really do,” Randy Houghton said. “Talk to you Friday.”

  He put down the phone, softly, got his matches off the desk, and relit the cigar. If the little television punk knew it, if he could see what the column had turned into, then everybody knew, maybe even the spics uptown who’d always treated him like the real mayor of New York. The whole thing was getting away from him, in the last year of his contract with the News, with people getting laid off all around him in the city room. It was why he was begging for the television job. Marty Perez was still writing three columns a week, he was still a major character in town, with the column and Chronicle and the radio commentaries on WOR. But they had taken to running the Sunday column on the Op-Ed page.

  In tabloids, that was where they laid you to fucking rest.

  Hijo de puta.

  All their mothers were whores.

  It was three o’clock, he hadn’t written a word, and already he wanted a drink.

  “Hijo de la gran puta,” Marty Perez said out loud.

  He was forty-two years old, and he should have been in the clear by now, thirty years in the States, twenty years in the newspaper business, a star for half of that. His father had made his money in the tourist boom that hit San Juan right at the start of the sixties, the one that happened after Cuba closed. His father: running the casino at the El San Juan, then moving across the island to Palmas, but wanting his only son to get out, sending him up to New Rochelle to live with his aunt and uncle.

  Martin Perez, Sr., never saying it, but sending his son to New Rochelle and the Horace Mann School because he wanted him to be something more than another spic on the make in New York.

  And now, all this time later, that is what he still was. He sat there in his office, wanting to do anything but think about the empty screen, trying to figure out where it all started to get away from him.

  Marty Perez had been the boy wonder at first, covering the Yankees right out of Columbia, then moving into a sports column at the Post when he was Randy Houghton’s age. Then over to the News in sports, and finally out front. Pretty soon it was Marty Perez’s picture on the side of the News trucks, cigar in his hand. Tough guy. It was Marty Perez in the television commercials. Marty Perez as the first Latino to do the big crossover, win just about every award you could win except the Pulitzer, with everybody saying the Pulitzer was just a matter of time.

  Pretty soon it was Marty Perez making more than anybody in newspapers in New York City.

  They said he was the only one putting names and faces, giving voices, to the forgotten New York. Somebody had written that about him in the Village Voice. As if he ever cared about shit like that.

  About being King of the Spics.

  He just wanted to ride high, and if assholes like the Voice guy wrote about his style, that was just part of the deal. Style? It always made him laugh. He had stolen from everybody, from the best, Runyon and Cannon and Hamill and Breslin, especially Breslin, and somehow made it sound as if it all came out the side of his own mouth. Marty’s second wife, Madeline, told him he’d stolen everything from those other guys except their talent. That was right before Madeline sued him for divorce and skinned him clean. His first wife, Allie, daughter of one of the hotshots from Condé Nast, the one Marty had used to get into New York society, she hadn’t wanted any money, she just wanted out after she caught Marty cheating on her with Madeline.

  Madeline, the soap opera actress. She used him the way he used Allie. And ended up with the apartment and most of the big newspaper money, when that was still coming in, before they sold the paper and everybody had to take a cut to keep it alive, Marty Perez taking the biggest cut of all.

  Now Madeline was remarried, and so Marty was off the hook with alimony, looking to get out of newspapers and make some real money again.

  Looking for a story to get him out.

  The best part was when these television guys told him that one of the reasons they liked him was because he didn’t look like the other blow-dried guys you found all over the dial, that his face had character.

  Marty Perez thought, at least his face still had character, right? He put his head back and closed his eyes. Jesus, he was tired.

  His secretary, Ann-Marie, woke him up.

  “Phone call for you, Mr. Peters.”

  She always called him that when they were alone because she knew it pissed him off. Drunk one night, he had made the mistake of telling her that he had been Marty Peters on the school paper at Columbia.
He had never legally changed his name, that was a pain in the ass, and besides Marty always liked to keep his options open. But Marty Peters had been the college byline. It wasn’t until his senior year that he realized Perez could work a lot better for him, more doors could open for him by being ethnic, especially in newspapers. It was funny, when he thought about it. He had spent most of his life trying to get as far away from Palmas as he could, and now all of a sudden, the last name was like a credit card. It helped him with the ballplayers, that was for sure. It seemed that every season, baseball was importing about one hundred more guys from the Dominican or some goddamn place. It was even better when he moved up to the front of the paper, not just the Daily News realizing that New York had become like some suburb of San Juan, but all the other papers, too.

  Marty Peters was dead and buried, anyway, except with Ann-Marie, who had some Madeline in her. Pissing him off seemed like a hobby with her.

  Now he sat up and said to her, “Phone call from who, it was worth waking me up?”

  “Whom. A man. He wouldn’t tell me his name. But he said he had a quote scoop unquote.”

  Perez said, “Stop it, you’re making me hot.”

  “He sounded legitimate, the guy. You want me to tell him you’re still taking your nappie?”

  She came around the desk and nodded at the empty screen. “Or I could tell him you’re writing.”

  She walked out, shutting the door behind her. He jabbed at the blinking light on his phone.

  “Perez.”

  “I have a story for you, Mr. Perez.” Deep voice. He could have been reading radio copy. Or telling people which baggage carousel had their luggage. “A real big story.”

  “My favorite.”

  “I thought about giving it to one of the sports guys. But this is a story that will end up on the front page, anyway. So I figured, why waste time? I’ll call my old friend Marty Perez.”

  “I know you?”

  “We met in a bar one time.”

  Shit, that narrowed it down.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jimmy Carey. I’m an actor?”

  Making it sound like a question.