Playing Without the Ball

by Rich Wallace

  “Right.” I stop two steps below him and shrug.

  “You should make it,” he says.

  “You think?”

  “I do, yeah.” He looks around. “That doesn’t mean it’ll happen.”

  I take a seat. I like Brian, but we haven’t ever been close. He’s started varsity since our sophomore year, when I was just barely playing JV.

  He leans in close and squints. “He’s big on this kid Ricky, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “Yeah. I noticed.” I also know that I’ve been outplaying Ricky all week, even if only by a little.

  “Coach isn’t real objective,” Kaipo says. “You better kick ass today.”

  I put out a palm and he slaps it. He’s a decent man with big hands. “Thanks,” I say. I get up and go to the gym.

  Coach explains that he’s already notified ten kids that they’ll be playing JV this season, and he’s sent them home. He cut two others after yesterday’s workout, so that leaves fourteen of us warming up for today’s session, dribbling basketballs and stretching.

  I compute the problem while we go through our passing and shooting drills. Twelve of the fourteen guys left are going to stick, and two of them will be underclassmen who’ll play JV and sit varsity. There are eight seniors here. You have to figure that the six remaining underclassmen are considered better than the ten he already picked for JV, so it’s a guarantee that the two players cut will be seniors.

  I swallow hard. This doesn’t look good. It looks worse when he lines Ricky up at point guard against Kaipo at the start of the scrimmage. I take a seat on the bleachers and rest my chin on my thumbs.

  Alan Murray, who is half-black, with very short hair and big shoulders, sits next to me. I turn to him and we both give a smirk of recognition. He’s a senior, too, about six-foot-three, and he’s got good court instincts but unreliable hands. He has the same look of impending doom that I think is all over my face.

  I get in after about fifteen minutes, taking Kaipo’s spot opposite Ricky. He’s been playing with more confidence today. It’s obvious that he’ll at least be starting JV, so the pressure’s off him and it shows. He beat Kaipo a couple of times, made some good passes inside, and just seems a lot looser overall.

  Murray comes in, too, playing forward for my side. If I look for him, he’ll probably look for me.

  I make a sloppy pass right away, and Ricky takes it and runs. I catch up and edge him away from the basket, but he fires a no-look pass to Monahan coming down the lane and he lays it in cleanly.

  Okay. I’m cold, he’s warm. But one play doesn’t mean much.

  I dribble up the court and we move the ball around, looking for a pass inside. I’ll keep the tempo slow until I’ve been up and down the court a few times, until I get in a groove.

  The pass comes to me at the top of the key, and Ricky stays in his stance, daring me to shoot the three-pointer. I take the dare but the ball just grazes the rim. Our center grabs the rebound and lays it in.

  Next time up I don’t hesitate. I make a quick pass to Murray and immediately yell for the ball back. He passes it to me in the same spot and I take the jumper, hitting it.

  Ricky covers me closer next time. I drive into the lane and pop it out to Murray, who hits the fifteen-footer. We slap hands as we run back on defense.

  It’s back and forth like that for half an hour, until Coach puts Kaipo back in for me.

  I did what I can do. I watch the rest of the scrimmage, run the line drills, shoot my twenty free throws, and take a good look around the gym before heading down the stairs.

  I sit on the bench by my locker and wipe my face with a towel. I held my own today, I played even with Ricky. But I know that wasn’t enough.

  Coach is walking through the locker room. He comes to me and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Come on in a minute,” he says.

  I close my eyes. Shit. I nod and go to his office. He doesn’t follow.

  When he comes in, he’s got Alan Murray with him. Coach leans against his desk and folds his arms. “This is the toughest part of being a coach,” he says.

  Alan’s looking at the floor. I bite my lip but keep my eyes on the coach.

  “I don’t mind cutting guys who don’t deserve to be here,” he says. “Guys who don’t hustle or come in out of shape or have a crummy attitude.” He lets out a sigh. “It’s tougher with guys like you.”

  We don’t say anything. I knew this was coming, but I’m stunned anyway.

  “I’ve decided to go with a younger lineup this year,” he says. “Thanks for giving it your all.”

  I forgive the clichés because you can tell he means it. But this sucks. I can’t believe it’s over.

  “There’s a new league starting at the Y,” Coach says. “Just for high school kids. The churches are sponsoring the teams. I know it’s not the same, but you can still play ball if you want. I hope you will.”

  It’s not the same all right. Not by a long shot.

  Coach says, “What church do you go to, Alan?”

  Alan says he’s a Methodist.

  “They’ll have a team,” Coach says. “Talk to your minister.” He looks at me. “How about you?”

  “Uh, Methodist,” I say. I went to the Methodist preschool for a year, but I haven’t been near a church since. Alan gives me a puzzled look. I think he actually goes.

  Coach shakes our hands and we leave his office. I go to my locker and get changed in a hurry. Alan sits on the end of the bench, facing the wall, still in his sweaty shorts and T-shirt.

  I need to get out of here. Alan’s crying. I just want to go home and lie down.

  Early evening there’s a knock at my door. I get off the mattress and check it out. Spit’s standing there in a maroon down vest.

  “Thought you’d be working tonight,” she says.

  “Not until Friday.” I wave her in and shut the door. She sits on the radiator, so I take the chair.

  “What’s going on?” she asks.

  I just shake my head.

  “Got cut, huh?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “You just look it.” She slaps her palms on her thighs. “Wanna get drunk?”

  I look at her face for three seconds, then look down. “Nah.”

  She stands up and crosses her arms. “I do.”

  I shrug.

  “You been staring at the ceiling again, bud?”

  I smirk, just slightly. “Some.”

  “No good,” she says. “Come on. Humor me. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I guess.” I get my jacket.

  We head out and walk through the alley to Main Street. It’s getting cold and it’s windy, but the air feels good in my lungs. I realize that I’m hungry. Starving.

  “Wanna get pizza?” I ask.

  “Sure.”

  Foley’s Pizza is next to Shorty’s, and it’s a good place to kill an hour. We take the first booth so we can look out at the street, and I go up to the counter and get a couple of slices.

  Spit puts salt on hers, which seems a little excessive.

  “God, what a boring day,” she says.

  “Yeah?”

  “We had zero appointments. Zero phone calls. I actually sat there reading Stanley’s Seton Hall alumni magazine. He was out for like three hours getting supplies, which he does about twice a week. We’ve got enough toilet paper and yellow legal pads until he retires, I think.”

  She’s looking right at me, but I’m mostly looking out at the street. I make eye contact a few times to let her know I’m listening. “He’s making me work next Friday,” she says. “Day after Thanksgiving, nothing to do, and I’ve gotta sit there all day in case the phone rings. Plus I feel like shit. Clogged sinuses and all.”

  “It’s going around,” I say.

  She blows her nose in a napkin and then takes a bite of her pizza, chewing it slowly.

  “Want another one?” I say.

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  I get up and get us two more sli
ces.

  When I come back, she scrunches up her face to make me laugh. It works, to a degree.

  “So,” she says. “The dream is over?”

  I shrug. “There was no dream.”

  “But you care.”

  “I care a lot.”

  “You angry?”

  “No.”

  “Right. So what are you going to do?” she asks.

  “Nothing. What can I do?”

  “I don’t know. Something. I try to take all the shit I’ve been through and turn it into music. But there’s too much left over, so I get high.”

  “Yeah, well, where do I get my fixes now?” I say. “I mean, all the basketball I’ve played in the past few months was directed toward making the team. Sunday mornings at the Y just isn’t going to cut it.”

  “You gotta find a way to use that passion,” she says. “You gotta let it out. Otherwise some night when you’re cold and alone it’ll come banging on your door. And it won’t be smiling.”

  “You know about that, huh?”

  “All too well, bud.” She picks up a pepper shaker and starts turning it over in her hand. She’s more introspective tonight than I’ve ever seen her, which means she’s being quiet for fifteen, twenty seconds at a time. “But whatever I do to myself I keep bouncing back from.”

  I dwell on that a minute. She reaches over and taps my hand once with her fingers. “For a year I spent all my energy trying to make somebody else happy,” she says. “And there was no way. James is brilliant, but he’s burdened, and he’s too focused inward to let any light out.”

  “How the hell did you wind up with him anyway?”

  “I don’t know. But I still miss him. As destructive as that was.”

  “You miss banging your head against the wall?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Maybe that’s where I come in.”

  Her eyes get wide and she opens her mouth, laughs a little. “Maybe. Hey, I create or I destroy, you know that.” She shakes her head. “Yeah, I wanna make somebody happy. Maybe you. I guess I need that.”

  I feel a little better suddenly.

  “You’re a good guy, Jay.”

  I nod slowly. “Yeah. Whatever that means.”

  And then we’re quiet for a while, looking out the window. They’ve got the oldies station playing in here, and the Supremes come on. “My father’s favorite group,” she says.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He always listens to stuff like this, and the Temptations and the Beatles. And Springsteen’s old songs.” She really brightens all of a sudden, a broad smile and wider eyes. “Man, we’d drive to the shore sometimes, in the dead of winter even. They’d sing all the way down the Parkway, my parents, and we’d sit on the boardwalk, out of the wind, and think about summer. This is when I was little. We’d make castles out of snow and sand, freezing our asses off, then get coffee and french fries from McDonald’s.”

  “Wow,” I say, and I feel happier, too, seeing her that way suddenly. But I don’t have memories like that. Not that I can remember.

  “My father loves this stuff,” she says, and she bites her lip and grins right at me. “I know all the songs, man. Big part of my life. The good part.”

  “But it didn’t last?” I hate to ask that, because it may bring her down, but part of me likes to hear about parents crashing. That’s something I can compare to my own life.

  “Part of it lasted,” she says. “We still have that connection. But my father has too many frustrations, being the low man at work and all, and he never learned how to deal with it. So he’d get drunk and smack my mother. Not all the time. But enough.”

  She reaches across and slides her hand against mine, so some of the fingertips are touching. The warmth goes up my arms. “And you?” she says.

  “What?”

  “You know. Where the hell do your parents get off abandoning you?”

  I shake my head. “It ain’t like that.”

  “Oh, no?”

  I let out a major exhale. “Nah. I don’t know. From what I can piece together—you hear this shit from both of them, never straight, just bitching about the other one, but you gotta figure there’s some truth in it, right? They got married right out of high school and they’re both drinking all the time and taking risks. She’s doing drugs, he’s screwing around with other women, there’s lots of arguments over everything. Some days it’s great, but it’s never realistic. I come along. We move all the time; they screw the landlords out of rent; they can’t hold jobs. My father gets big ideas about the lottery and starts going to Atlantic City and betting at Shorty’s on football and basketball and anything. Sometimes he wins big, but … you know. She gets the hell out of here when she can’t take it anymore. But she’s got a kid, right? You just take off? Like my father’s going to just straighten up and take care of me?”

  “He did, though.”

  I nod and look away. “Yeah. He did an okay job. He tried, I’ll give him that much. Screw it. It’s behind me. I’m living for now, man. I’m over it.”

  TWO

  Salt

  I avoided basketball at all costs for a week, but I can’t stay away forever. So I do the 5:30 wake-up thing again and get my butt over to the Y.

  There are ten of us this time, so we go full-court. I line up opposite Dana and say hello. We nodded to each other in school the other day, and I guess that’s part of the reason I’m here at this ridiculous hour.

  “You ready to run?” she says.

  “Sure.”

  She starts kind of strolling toward the foul line as play begins, and I shadow her. Then she makes the big cut, curving under the basket as I run straight into a pick set by her father. She’s wide open as the pass comes and she swishes the shot from ten feet out.

  I take the inbounds pass and turn, and Dana’s right in my face. I dribble hard to midcourt, then pass off and drift inside.

  “Somebody’s ready to go,” I say to her.

  “I’ve been here since five-thirty,” she says. “I’m warm.”

  I’ll bet she is. The ball comes to me; I turn my back to her and push toward the basket. She sticks tight to me, gives a little bump. I could shoot, but I kick it out to the corner where one of our guys is open. He shoots an air ball and we lose possession. I chase Dana back upcourt.

  By 7 o’clock guys start leaving, and by 7:15 there are only a few of us left, so the game breaks up. I’ve still got an hour to shower and get to school, so I decide to shoot some free throws.

  After a few minutes Dana comes back on the court and rebounds for me.

  “So how come you’re not playing for the school?” I say.

  She shrugs. “Too busy. You?”

  “I got cut.”

  “Too bad.”

  “It sucks,” I say. “They could use you.” Hell, the boys’ team could use her.

  “Maybe,” she says. “I can’t. I played my first three years, but I’m concentrating on jumping this winter, so I really don’t have time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m a high jumper. My college coach wants to me focus on that.”

  “You have a college coach?”

  “I got a full ride to jump at Virginia next year. So it seemed like a good idea to quit basketball. Except for this. Plus we were moving anyway, since my dad took a job up here.”

  “You must be good.”

  She raises her eyebrows a little, shifts her shoulders. “I choke in big meets,” she says. “I jumped five-eleven last spring, then couldn’t even clear five-ten in the states. I finished third. No way that’s gonna happen again.”

  “You gonna jump for Sturbridge this spring?”

  “Sure. But my dad will coach me, unofficially. He still jumps, too. In master’s meets. He made All American at UVA, so that’s why I’m headed there.”

  “Where do you jump?”

  “My dad drives me down to Lehigh two nights a week. See, we’re from Allentown, so we know everybody down there
. So I jump twice a week and sometimes compete on the weekends. Plus lifting and running. I’ll be ready this spring.”

  Awesome. Her father comes into the gym, fully dressed now, and calls to her. “We’d better get moving, honey.”

  “Okay.” She slaps the ball to me. “See ya, Jay.”

  “Yeah.”

  I shoot a few more free throws, but I can’t concentrate. That girl is light-years ahead of me.

  Thanksgiving is the first major holiday I’ve ever spent alone. I sleep late, eat a bowl of Cheerios, listen to a couple of tapes, read Sports Illustrated, stare at the ceiling.

  Shorty won’t open until 3 today, so I go downstairs to the bar around noon and put on a football game. I look at the phone a few times; I have to call my father. Later, though.

  I go back upstairs at 2:30, eat another bowl of Cheerios, listen to another tape, read the sports section of yesterday’s newspaper, stare at the ceiling again. Spit asked me to come over, but I told her I had to work. It isn’t true, of course.

  I put on my hiking boots, a pair of cotton work gloves, a heavy sweatshirt and a windbreaker, go down the back stairs, and walk through the alley up to Main Street.

  I walk along Main, which is empty of people and traffic. I walk the four blocks to the river against a stiff wind, then cross over to Park Street and head toward the cliff. I pass the YMCA and cross the bridge over the creek, then follow a short dirt path until it starts to climb. You have to use your hands here for a few feet, pulling yourself up with roots and handholds. Then you’re on a real path that circles through the woods, up the hill, toward the cliff that overlooks the town.

  I turn off onto another path about three-quarters of the way up, following a ridge that heads into deeper woods. The maple leaves are long fallen, curled brown and frozen underfoot. There are tiny flakes of snow coming down, just on the snow side of frozen rain. The wind is icy. It feels like winter.

  “You should have gone down to New Jersey.” He sounds disappointed, but concerned. My father.

  “I had no way to get there.”

  “Oh, come on. She would have driven up. You know that.”

  “I didn’t feel like it.”