Jump

by Mike Lupica

  The other players were already out on the court. Ellis and Richie were the last two in the locker room, like always. It was a game they liked to play with Gary Lenz, who always made a big show out of being a tough guy when they got out there late, or even close to being late. Lenz knew there were different rules for Ellis, which meant different rules for Richie Collins, too.

  The Knicks coach knew what everybody knew, that fucking with Richie was the same as fucking with Ellis.

  He watched Richie take a new pair of Nike highs out of the box, smiling at them, touching them here and there like he was feeling them up. “Ooh,” he said. Ellis had seen this one before, Richie acting as if he were talking for the sneakers. “I want you inside me, Richie.”

  No matter where he was, what they were talking about, it always came back there.

  During the season, Richie would break out a new pair of Nikes for every game. Eighty-two games, eighty-two boxes of Nikes. Ellis didn’t think too much of it, he just figured it was Richie’s new-money way of making up for when they were kids and had to go to Kmart and buy the knockoff shit. Trax, the sneaks were called. They had to hear it from the boys on the corner, the dealers and the crackheads, who always had the best leather basketball shoes and leather jackets and nice designer jeans.

  “Here come the KAY-mart boys,” the corner boys would say. “Been saving up their allowance money, here they come in their fifteen-dollar discount values. Buy ’em for fifteen dollars, have ’em last fifteen days.” Then they’d chant at Ellis and Richie as they disappeared toward Booker: “KAY-mart! KAY-mart! KAY-mart!”

  Making it sound as bad as nigger nigger nigger somehow.

  Now Richie frowned at the new highs with the little burst of blue dots around the heel, lacing them, wanting to get the laces just so, all smoothed out. Richie, trying to sound innocent, said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Fresh.”

  There was something in his voice, something that bothered Ellis. He just waited.

  Richie said, “I been meaning to ask you where you went in the Jeep the other night. When Jenna came over? I thought you’d want to stay around and play.”

  Before he thought, which was always a mistake, Ellis said, “Playing all the time, whatever comes along, maybe that’s what got us into this rape shit in the first place.”

  Richie stopped lacing and put the new sneakers on the bench, pushing the box to the side, taking his time. Finally, he turned and gave Ellis the slitty-eyed look that always meant trouble.

  Shit.

  The last thing you wanted to do with Richie Collins, before a game or practice, was get his balls in an uproar by saying the wrong thing.

  “It’s me now, is it?” Richie said.

  Ellis didn’t say anything at first, he was looking past Richie, like he was trying to see all the way into practice, trying to figure out what that was going to be like. It wasn’t too hard to see it, Richie pissed off but not saying anything about it, and then fucking with him every which way he could all day long. Pass too high. Or too hard. Pass just a little bit behind.

  Didn’t see you, Fresh. Sorry.

  My fault, Fresh, catch you next time.

  Knowing him the way he did, what he liked out there, what he didn’t like, Richie could make it feel like two practices, three sometimes. Ellis remembered when they were younger, he’d be on Bobby Hurley’s team sometimes. Pickup games in the summer and whatnot. Hurley came from Jersey City, too. Nice kid, great little player, even when he was fourteen, fifteen. His father was coach at St. Anthony High, which won everything once Ellis and Richie were gone from Lincoln. They called Hurley “the nice Richie,” just because of the way he carried himself. Like a gentleman. Ellis always liked playing with him because all Hurley did was pass the ball, not try to fuck with his mind.

  Ellis, trying to downplay everything with Richie now, said, “You know what I mean.”

  “Do I?”

  “I’m not saying it was your fault or my fault. Don’t matter now whose fault it was. I just think from here on, we got to chill. We can’t be grabbing on every piece of strange that comes along.” Ellis tried to look relaxed, like this was no problem, but feeling in a rush like he always did, wanting to get through this part of the morning.

  Wanting to be back on Richie’s good side.

  Being on Richie’s good side, sometimes that seemed like the biggest part of Ellis’s day.

  “We’re in this together, Fresh,” Richie said evenly. “Let’s not forget that.”

  “I don’t.”

  “People been trying to come between us for as long as both of us can remember, starting back when the other project boys couldn’t understand why you wanted some white boy in the game.”

  Ellis said, “Nobody is gonna come between us. All I meant—”

  “Doesn’t matter what you meant, Fresh. How it came out sounding was that we did something wrong that night, when we didn’t do anything wrong.”

  He had one of the Nikes in his hands now, staring down at the business he was doing with the laces, talking into that, lecturing Ellis without even looking at him.

  “I hear you,” Ellis said, the words sounding weak, whiny. “But something’s going on out there, Rich. Sometimes I feel like they changed the rules and nobody told us.”

  “I heard this guy on the radio the other day, calling some of these hard women around femi-Nazis,” Richie said. “He meant that women nowadays have turned so mean it’s like they’re Hitler or somebody.”

  Ellis nodded, letting Richie know he understood about Hitler and Nazis.

  “But don’t let this one scare you, Fresh. She’s trying real hard, coming out the way she has. She wants to try the whole thing in the papers and on television because she knows she doesn’t have a case.” Now Richie looked up at the clock, nodded himself. Two minutes to ten. They were supposed to be out there by ten.

  Richie said, “Don’t go soft on me, Fresh. You know I hate it when you go soft.” Grinning at him.

  It always went back to jumping somebody.

  Richie said, “So, you want to tell me where you were last night?”

  “Into town is all. Went to Bradley’s, listened to some jazz. Wasn’t too crowded, was late enough so I didn’t have to deal with no ‘Hey, Fresh’ shit.”

  “Downtown, huh?” They were on the way up the steps, above ground now, so there was a window letting in the morning light, the sun seeming to brighten up the mood. The atmosphere. Richie said, “You sure you’re not holding back strange on me?”

  Maybe it was over. You could never tell with Richie, who could be the grudge kind. But maybe he was going to let the original shit pass.

  So go with that.

  “There might’ve been a little situation to check into,” Ellis said. “Not nothing for last night, but for future considerations.” He gave a sideways look at Richie, who nodded, acting happy all of a sudden. Ellis wouldn’t know for sure until the first time he got open, though. Then Richie would tell him with the first pass if he was still on the rag. For now, Richie just stuck his nose up in the air and made loud sniffing noises like a hunting dog, some pointer, whatever they were called.

  “Know what, Fresh?” he said. “Sometimes I think you’re as much a puss hound as I am, you just don’t let on, talk it up as much.”

  “That must be it.”

  “Life’s a bitch,” Richie said.

  Ellis knew what was coming next.

  “And that means we got to go through as many bitches as we can.”

  Richie always cracked himself up with that one for some reason, so he was laughing as he gave the double doors to the gym a big shove. Ellis looked up at the clock over the basket at the other end. Ten on the dot. Gary Lenz was blowing his whistle, staring at Richie and Ellis, giving them his stare. Ellis thought: Goddamn, everybody has an attitude today.

  “Bitch, bitch, bitch,” he said under his breath to Richie, which was a mistake because now Richie started laughing all over again.

&nbs
p; What’s so funny? DiMaggio wondered.

  Collins and Adair were the last two players on the court, and DiMaggio, aware that practice started at ten, had seen it nagging on Gary Lenz, who seemed to be alternating looking at his watch and at the clock, until they finally came through the doors. DiMaggio had met Lenz the day before, introduced by Frank Crittendon. Crittendon explained that DiMaggio was going to be around, on Ted Salter’s orders, and that Lenz needed to know that his normal rules for outsiders—press, fans, family—did not apply. Crittendon surprised DiMaggio with the smooth way he put the hammer to his coach, enjoying himself, even as he was laying most of it off on Salter, the big boss.

  If Crittendon couldn’t boss players around anymore, he was going to grab every chance to do it with his coach. If you can’t smack the one you want, smack the one you can reach.

  Sometimes DiMaggio forgot all the locker-room dynamics, how rare it was for things to get handled man-to-man, face-to-face.

  “I hope you’re not talking about practice, too, Frank,” Lenz said.

  Lenz made “practice” sound like “Jesus.”

  “Ted Salter said Mr. DiMaggio has the run of the place. He didn’t say, ‘Give him the run of the place except for Gary’s practices.’ ”

  He was screwing with him a little more and everybody knew it, Lenz especially, rocking back and forth on his heels, hands locked together behind his back. Not ready to back off yet.

  “You know, Frank. I don’t know what good it is for me to have these rules if anyfuckingbody”—not looking at DiMaggio, just hip-hopping in place a little faster—“can walk in here like he owns the place.”

  DiMaggio hadn’t said anything except “Nice to meet you.”

  Crittendon said, “Work it out, Gary. He’s going to be around,” and walked away. Now it was just the two of them, nobody there to impress except DiMaggio. Lenz decided to drop it. “Just so long as you don’t get in the way.”

  “I promise not to steal the play.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, the play?”

  DiMaggio, tired of Gary Lenz all of a sudden, said, “The play where somebody, Richie Collins usually, passes the ball to Adair and he scores and everybody makes a lot of money, including you. That play.”

  “Let me explain something to you,” Gary Lenz said. “You fuck with me, I’ll fuck with you. Are we clear?”

  DiMaggio said, “I look forward to us reaching that stage of our relationship.” Lenz walked away, nodding, like he was talking to himself about his asshole. DiMaggio watched him go. He had known Gary Lenz his whole life, in one form or another, managers or coaches, going all the way back to American Legion ball. They always told you what geniuses they were when you won, then put it all on the players when you lost.

  Now DiMaggio sat up in the balcony and watched Lenz go over to Adair and Collins and say something, turning and pointing to the other players, waiting in a half circle at half-court. Adair looked as bored as he had when DiMaggio met him in Frank Crittendon’s office. Collins seemed to be doing a yes-coach nod for both of them. How many days of the season would the scene be played the same way, all part of the bullshit theater of sports? Finally, Lenz walked over to where the other players and his two assistants were waiting. Collins walked behind him, briefly making little humping motions. Adair just shook his head, still bored but grinning now, shoving Collins to make him stop.

  High school with money.

  DiMaggio thought: What am I doing here?

  He could have been back in Jupiter in the cool upstairs room looking out at the water, the speakers set up, the room soundproofed so it didn’t matter if the neighbors didn’t like his music. Sitting at the old Chickering, number one prized possession of his life, practicing old Fats Waller stretches to exercise his right hand, the worse of the two. No clock in the room, no sense of time except for what the sun was doing over the water. Sitting there and imagining he was Ellis Larkins or Shearing or Oscar Peterson or even Fats himself.

  DiMaggio closed his eyes, getting himself out of Jupiter and back to Gary Lenz’s practice. Except it wasn’t his practice, no matter how much he tried to be the feisty drill sergeant as he put them through the drudge work, walking them through the plays, making them bust their asses on kick-it-out fast breaks, one after another, trying to punish them into midseason shape.

  The Knicks coach tried to make practice about him when it was all about Ellis Adair.

  DiMaggio had never seen Adair play in person. He had seen him on television, but only a few times there; he barely watched sports on television at all anymore.

  He liked watching the Dallas Cowboys play football, but the rest of that sport seemed to be three hours of field goals. Baseball, when the bastards weren’t out on strike, had become nearly four hours of beauty-parlor chitchat around maybe ten minutes of action. DiMaggio remembered turning on a game between the Knicks and the Bulls when Adair was a rookie out of Seton Hall, curious to see if all the buzz about him was true. And he had seen what everybody else saw, a skinny, fluid player who really could jump like Jordan, jumped over him a few times that night, but who had even more flair than Jordan and some old-time Elgin Baylor in him, too.

  Up close it was better.

  After a few minutes of Gary Lenz’s practice, DiMaggio realized he couldn’t take his eyes off Adair. It was like the time DiMaggio had been dragged by this dancer he was dating to see the ballet movie The Turning Point. DiMaggio sat there through the first part of it, bored, making watch checks about every ten minutes, Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft trying to outshriek each other. Then Baryshnikov danced. DiMaggio didn’t know anything more about ballet than when he’d sat down in the theater, but he sure knew this: What Baryshnikov was doing was so different from everybody else it was a laugh.

  Ellis Adair was a laugh. DiMaggio thought: This is the way it’s all supposed to look. Adair always seemed to have this loopy, lopsided grin on his face, a little crooked, always seemed to be a step faster than everybody else going down the court, a step faster and a foot higher when the ball was in the air, doing things in the air then, almost halfheartedly, offhandedly, making these dips and swoops like gulls did outside the upstairs Jupiter window.

  Lenz kept making him stop and start. Do this, do that. Go there, goddamnit. But every time he would let them play, really let them play, Adair would make another move or play or shot or drive that would blow the top off the gym. DiMaggio watched him and couldn’t help himself, he felt like a kid, the way he had when Tony DiMaggio, on one of his daddy furloughs, had taken him to Shea that first time to see Mays.

  DiMaggio sat up there until the end of practice, lost in the sounds of the gym the way he got lost in the music sometimes: the bounce of the ball and the whooshing sound of it going through the net, the slap of one hand on another, Lenz’s whistle, the curses and grunts as the big bodies, as graceful as they were, collided underneath the basket. These were the sounds you never heard in the arena or when you watched on television. This was more intimate for DiMaggio somehow. More personal, in some way he could not explain to himself. This was the inside.

  And for the first time, he had trouble putting this Ellis Adair, the basketball Ellis, the one they called Fresh, with the sulky one he’d met in Frank Crittendon’s office.

  For the first time, DiMaggio had a hard time putting Ellis Adair in a pile with Hannah Carey.

  It made no sense. There it was, anyway.

  16

  When practice was over one of the trainers went down to the other end of the gym from where Adair and Collins had come in, unlocked the double doors, and let the press in. They all went straight for Gary Lenz. The other Knick players, in a show of support for Adair and Collins, still weren’t talking to reporters. DiMaggio watched Lenz, who started talking before anybody got near him, smiling under his Harpo Marx curls, happy to have the audience all to himself.

  A. J. Fine was leaning against the basket support, waiting for a ball boy to bring him a towel. When he spotted DiM
aggio, Fine nodded in recognition. “I know who you are.”

  “Zing,” DiMaggio said, “went the strings of my heart.”

  The kid gave him the towel and Fine walked over, putting out a right hand that was surprisingly small, DiMaggio thought, for a basketball player.

  “I’m considered somewhat of an oddball with my teammates,” he said. “Not only do I keep up with the news, I actually understand it.”

  “Wow.”

  Fine said, “You’re impressed, I can tell.”

  DiMaggio knew that Fine played the role of jock intellectual the way Bill Bradley had played it once. He was six-five and slightly dumpy-looking, thick in the legs; he had red thinning hair and freckles and looked a little like Archie from the comic books. Watching him at practice, DiMaggio thought he could have played with Bradley on the teams DiMaggio remembered from the old days. Fine had one of those time-warp games, setting picks with his elbows way out there, throwing two-hand chest passes, throwing bounce passes sometimes, not jumping worth a damn, looking like a plodder thrown in with Ellis Adair and the rest of them to even up the sides, but in perfect rhythm with the game somehow, the beat, a white crooner out there with all the rappers but getting the job done with a minimum of sweat and effort.

  “Frank Crittendon said I wouldn’t have to beg you to talk to me,” DiMaggio said.

  “Heck no,” Fine said. He deliberately rubbed down both arms, then the back of his neck, then his face, then tossed the towel casually behind him.

  DiMaggio said, “You’re not worried about alienating your teammates?”

  “If I really cared what my teammates thought,” Fine said, “I’d have to be on Prozac. How much time are we talking about?”

  “Depends on you.”

  “I’m loose this afternoon. I’ll meet you at the Fulton Luncheonette. You know where that is, downtown? Almost across from the library?”

  DiMaggio told him he did.

  Fine got to the gym doors and turned around. “How many people know?” he said. “We might as well get that out of the way.”