by Otto Penzler
“Yeah?” I said, not too friendly but not, like, impolite.
“You live around here?” He knew I did.
I said, “Uh-huh.”
“Get on home.”
I turned around and walked. Slow but not too slow. I heard the white cop talkin’ to Wallace and the others, and the crackle of his radio comin’ from the car. Red and blue was strobin’ across the bricks of the complex. Under my breath I was sayin’, Thanks, God.
In my apartment everyone was asleep. I turned off the TV set and covered my sister, who was lyin’ on the couch. Then I went back to my room and turned the box on so I could listen to my music low. I sat on the edge of the bed. My hand was shaking. I put it together with my other hand and laced my fingers tight.
SERGEANT PETERS
After the Park Morton incident, I answered a domestic call over on First and Kennedy. A young gentleman, built like a fullback, had beat his girl up pretty bad. Her face was already swelling when I arrived and there was blood and spittle bubbling on the side of her mouth. The first cops on the scene had cuffed the perp and had him bent over the hood of their cruiser. At this point the girlfriend, she was screaming at the cops. Some of the neighborhood types, hanging outside of a windowless bar on Kennedy, had begun screaming at the cops, too. I figured they were drunk and high on who knew what, so I radioed in for a few more cars.
We made a couple of additional arrests. Like they say in the TV news, the situation had escalated. Not a full-blown riot, but trouble nonetheless. Someone yelled out at me, called me a “cracker-ass motherfucker.” I didn’t even blink. The county cops don’t take an ounce of that kinda shit, but we take it every night. Sticks and stones, like that. Then someone started whistling the theme from the old Andy Griffith Show, you know, the one where he played a small-town sheriff, and everyone started to laugh. Least they didn’t call me Barney Fife. The thing was, when the residents start with the comedy, you know it’s over, that things have gotten under control. So I didn’t mind. Actually, the guy who was whistling, he was pretty good.
When that was over with, I pulled a car over on 5th and Princeton, back by the Old Soldier’s Home, that matched a description of a shooter’s car from earlier in the night. I waited for backup, standing behind the left rear quarter panel of the car, my holster unsnapped, the light from my Mag pointed at the rear window.
When my backup came, we searched the car and frisked the four YBMs. They had those little-tree deodorizers hangin’ from the rearview, and one of those plastic, king-crown deodorizers sitting on the back panel, too. A crown. Like they’re royalty, right? God, sometimes these people make me laugh. Anyhow, they were clean with no live warrants, and we let them go.
I drove around, and it was quiet. Between three a.m. and dawn, the city gets real still. Beautiful in a way, even for down here.
The last thing I did, I helped some Spanish guy try to get back into his place in Petworth. Said his key didn’t work, and it didn’t. Someone, his landlord or his woman, had changed the locks on him, I figured. Liquor stench was pouring out of him. Also, he smelled like he hadn’t taken a shower for days. When I left him he was standing on the sidewalk, sort of rocking back and forth, staring at the front of the row house, like if he looked at it long enough the door was gonna open on its own.
So now I’m parked here near the station, sipping coffee. It’s my ritual, like. The sky is beginning to lighten. This here is my favorite time of night.
I’m thinking that on my next shift, or the one after, I’ll swing by and see Tonio Harris’s mother. I haven’t talked to her in years, anyway. See how she’s been doing. Suggest to her, without acting like I’m telling her what to do, that maybe she ought to have her son lie low some. Stay in the next few weekend nights. Let that beef he’s got with those others, whatever it is, die down. Course, I know those kinds of beefs don’t go away. I’ll make her aware of it, just the same.
The Harris kid, he’s lucky he’s got someone like his mother, lookin’ after him. I drive back in there at the housing complex, and I see those young kids sitting on that wall at two in the morning, looking at me with hate in their eyes, and all I can think of is, where are the parents? Yeah, I know, there’s a new curfew in effect for minors. Some joke. Like we’ve got the manpower and facilities to enforce it. Like we’re supposed to raise these kids, too.
Anyway, it’s not my job to think too hard about that. I’m just lettin’ these people know that we’re out here, watching them. I mean, what else can you do?
My back hurts. I got to get me one of those things you sit on, with the wood balls. Like those African cabdrivers do.
TONIO HARRIS
This morning I studied some in my room until my eyes got sleepy. It was hard to keep my mind on the book ’cause I was playin’ some Method Man on the box, and it was fuckin’ with my concentration. That cut he does with Redman, called “Tear It Off”? That joint is tight.
I figured I was done for the day, and there wasn’t no one around to tell me different. My mother was at work at the Dollar Store, and my sister was over at a friend’s. I put my sneaks on and grabbed my ball and headed up to Roosevelt.
I walked up Georgia, dribblin’ the sidewalk when I could, usin’ my left and keeping my right behind my back, like my coach told me to do. I cut down Upshur and walked up 13th, past my school, to the court. The court is on the small side and its backboards are square, with bumper stickers and shit stuck on the boards. It’s beside a tennis court and all of it is fenced in. There’s a baseball field behind it; birds always be sittin’ on that field.
There was a four-on-four full-court thing happenin’ when I got there. I called next with another guy, Dimitrius Johnson, who I knew could play. I could see who was gonna win this game, ’cause the one team had this boy named Peter Hawk who could do it all. We’d pick up two off the losers’ squad. I watched the game and after a minute I’d already had those two picked out.
The game started kind of slow. I was feelin’ out my players and those on the other side. Someone had set up a box court-side and they had that live Roots thing playin’. It was one of those pretty days with the sun out and high clouds, the kind look like pillows, and the weather and that upbeat music comin’ from the box set the tone. I felt loose and good.
Me and Hawk was coverin’ each other. He was one of those who could go left or right, dribble or shoot with either hand. He took me to the hole once or twice. Then I noticed he always eye-faked in the opposite direction he was gonna go before he made his move. So it gave me the advantage, knowin’ which side he was gonna jump to, and I gained position on him like that.
I couldn’t shut Hawk down, not all the way, but I forced him to change his game. I made a couple of nice assists on offense and drained one my own self from way downtown. One of Hawk’s players tried to claim a charge, doin’ that Reggie Miller punk shit, his arms windmillin’ as he went back. That shit don’t go in pickup, and even his own people didn’t back him. My team went up by one.
We stopped the game for a minute or so, so one of mines could tie up his sneaks. I was lookin’ across the ball field at the seagulls and crows, catchin’ my wind. That’s when I saw James Wallace’s black Maxima, cruisin’ slow down Allison, that street that runs alongside the court.
We put the ball back into play. Hawk drove right by me, hit a runner. I fumbled a pass goin’ back upcourt, and on the turnover they scored again. The Maxima was going south on 13th, just barely moving along. I saw Wallace in the driver’s seat, his window down, lookin’ my way with that smile of his and his dead-ass eyes.
“You playin’, Tone?” asked Dimitrius, the kid on my team.
I guess I had lost my concentration and it showed. “I’m playin’,” I said. “Let’s ball.”
Dimitrius bricked his next shot. Hawk got the ‘bound and brought the ball up. I watched him do that eye-fake thing again and I stole the ball off him in the lane before he could make his move. I went bucket-to-bucket with it and leaped. I jammed t
he motherfucker and swung on the rim, comin’ down and doin’ one of those Patrick Ewing silent growls at Hawk and the rest of them before shootin’ downcourt to get back on D. I was all fired up. I felt like we could turn the shit around.
Hawk hit his next shot, a jumper from the top of the key. Dimitrius brought it down, and I motioned for him to dish me the pill. He led me just right. In my side sight I saw a black car rollin’ down Allison, but I didn’t stop to check it out. I drove off a pick, pulled up in front of Hawk, made a head move and watched him bite. Then I went up. I was way out there but I could tell from how the ball rolled off my fingers that it was gonna go. Ain’t no chains on those rims, but I could see the links dance as that rock dropped through. I’m sayin’ that I could see them dance in my mind.
We was runnin’ now The game was full-on and it was fierce. I grabbed one off the rim and made an outlet pass, then beat the defenders myself on the break. I saw black movin’ slow on 13th but I didn’t even think about it. I was higher than a motherfucker then, my feet and the court and the ball were all one thing. I felt like I could drain it from anywhere, and Hawk, I could see it in his eyes, he knew it, too.
I took the ball and dribbled it up. I knew what I was gonna do, knew exactly where I was gonna go with it, knew wasn’t nobody out there could stop me. I wasn’t thinkin’ about Wallace or the stoop of my moms’s shoulders or which nigga was gonna be lookin’ to fuck my baby sister, and I wasn’t thinkin’ on no job or college test or my future or nothin’ like that.
I was concentratin’ on droppin’ that pill through the hole. Watching myself doin’ it before I did. Out here in the sunshine, every dark thing far away. Runnin’ ball like I do. Thinkin’ that if I kept runnin’, that black Maxima and everything else, it would just go away.
MAMZER
R. D. Rosen
My grandfather was Sidney Fogelman.
To basketball fans of a certain age, his name will still evoke memories of a time when they played the game in a cage through which the other team’s less inhibited fans might stab your leg with a lit cigar or a hatpin. When professional basketball was the college sport’s ugly little sister. A time before it occurred to anyone that you could shoot with one hand from the outside, when you played for fifteen or twenty-five bucks a game on your way to a career coaching or running a bar or selling real estate.
Grandpa Sidney was there in the early days of professional basketball and he was there thirty-five years later, after World War II, when, having nurtured basketball through decades of rough, raw regional play, he helped conceive the National Basketball Association. By then, of course, the number of Jewish players, who had been a dominant force on the court, had begun to dwindle. After the war, Jews began clambering out of the ghettoes that have always spawned most of our hungriest and best athletes. But Sidney had always been a short, dumpy coach and front office guy—ironically, he’d never been that good at the game—and in the late 1940s he had a visionary businessman’s belief in the game that would someday give Wilt Chamberlain, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan a forum for their special skills.
When I was a little boy, he started at last to make some real money from the game. Since he was not a materialistic man, he decided to invest some of it for my sister and me, his only grandchildren. Twenty years later, that decision put Beth through law school and me through the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Back in the 1970s, when Grandpa Sidney was in his seventies, the National Basketball Association employed him to provide a variety of services of which he was uniquely capable. Among these jobs was the annual making of the league schedule, which, in the days before computers, required Sidney to hole up in a New York City hotel room with fistfuls of airline schedules and arena calendars. Miraculously, he would emerge a week or two later, like Moses with the tablets, clutching a handwritten plan. When the first computers came along, the league took the job away from Sidney and gave it to a machine. However, the computers of the day were unable to accomplish in any amount of time what Sidney Fogelman was able to do in a week or two on a legal pad, and so they gave the job back to him until they made better computers.
Grandpa Sidney thought his only grandson—me—would make a crafty point guard, quick off the dribble and able, as they say, to see the floor. (Sidney’s only son, my father, had disappointed him in this area by proving to be no more gifted on the court than he had been.) After Grandma died, Sidney came to live with our family and he taught me the game in endless conversations, as well as on our suburban playground, where he would stand on the sidelines in a brown double-breasted suit and stained fedora, barking intructions at my friends and me as he had once screamed himself blue in the face coaching his most famous team in the 1920s and ’30s, a team composed entirely of Philadelphia and New York Jews.
Because Sidney had the gift of making others want to please him, I devoted far more time to the game than my talent warranted, and only gave it up in high school when even my own loving parents had to admit I was no good, and Sidney himself, now in his eighties, was beginning to retire from the affairs of the world and lose the aura of biblical authority that made me practice my jump shot long after I’d given up any hope it would go in the basket with any frequency.
Grandpa Sidney held on for several more years, body slowly failing but mind terrifyingly intact. In his last years, I’m quite certain he still would have been able, if called upon, to make up the NBA schedule. Although Sidney Fogelman himself was a barely observant Jew, he was so proud a product of first-generation American Jewish culture that the formal aspects of Judaism seemed almost beside the point. He may not have attended shul with any regularity, but he understood Hebrew and spoke Yiddish and he could effortlessly drop a quote from the Bal-shem Tov into a sentence about the pick-and-roll off the high post. His spiritual gene found its way to me, and around the time I went off to college, I decided I wanted to become a rabbi.
This pleased him enormously because his own father had been a poor but religious man in Poland. He was the shammes—the caretaker—of a small synagogue, whose job it was to sweep the sanctuary after service, dust the Torah, fold the yarmulkes and the tallises. In his last two or three years, when I was at the seminary in the city, Sidney would sit with me at my parents’ kitchen table, and after a few perfunctory comments about the triangle offense or the approaching NCAA basketball tournament, we would settle into a discussion about Israel, moral relativism, destiny, or a number of other topics that I, as a future rabbi, was ravenous to explore.
It was during one of these visits toward the very end of his life that Grandpa Sidney told me the story that only now, years later, do I feel safe in relating. I can see him now across the speckled Formica expanse of kitchen table, his face deeply furrowed, his nostrils dense with thick black hairs my mother would trim for him every few weeks.
“Did I ever tell you the story about the ’37—’38 season with the Planets?” he said, referring to the Philadelphia Planets, the all-Jewish professional basketball team that he owned and coached, which won numerous Eastern League championships in that faded, sepia-toned era.
“Which story?” I asked.
“The one I’m about to tell you.”
“I have no idea whether you’ve already told me the story you’re about to tell me.”
He waved a liver-spotted hand in my direction. “What do you know?” he said. This was his favorite rebuke—“What do you know?”—as if the listener were an idiot who couldn’t be trusted to understand what Sidney was telling him. Often the phrase would be accompanied, for emphasis, by a light backhanded slap against my chest.
“It’s impossible that I told you this story before, because never before have I told it to a single soul. You, Ronnie, my favorite grandson, are the first.”
“I’m your only grandson. Why am I so lucky?”
“Because you I like,” he replied.
This was a high compliment. Sidney often said about others, including people he might have led you to believe he l
iked: “Him I wouldn’t give you a nickel for!” or “I wouldn’t give you a penny for the whole lot of them!” To be liked by Sidney Fogelman was a particular honor, especially in his own mind. It was really hard to say what gave him this power, the power to make you infinitely glad that he approved of you, but you accepted it because people like Sidney, as I’ve learned over the years, are what give life its shape and its deeper meanings.
“Let me hear it,” I said, plucking a Marlboro from the pack in my pocket.
“No smoking,” Sidney said with coachlike command. I put the cigarette away.
“Now, in 1937, Ronnie, I had perhaps my best group of boys ever. Every one a Jew. Which wasn’t so unusual in those clays because I’d had many Planets teams that were every one a Jew. Just like the other teams were all micks or dagos or”—he seemed to pause here in deference to some particular racial sensitivity—“Negroes. We had Gordy Metzger, Vic Fine, Ted Morris, Leon Skolnik, Bakey Gumbiner. You name it.”
On his fat fingers he counted off some of the great Jewish ballplayers of that era, not one of them taller than six foot three, names familiar to me from the Philadelphia Planets’ memorabilia he kept in a box under his bed in the spare room: programs, newspaper accounts, autographed team photos. The team jerseys were emblazoned with Stars of David. They were proud to be Jews, these immigrants’ meaty kids, and tough enough to stand up to anyone who objected.
“And Al Newberger,” Sidney went on. “God, that young man could shoot the ball. Two-handed set shots. High-arcing sons-of-bitches. They used to hit the rafters in that Union City dump the Arrows played in. But he hardly ever said a word. Even on the court he used to take his licks with a quiet smile. Then he’d give it back to the guy two quarters later when his back was turned. And, Ronnie, I’m not talking about a time when your eight-million-dollar-a-year putz whines to the ref about a tap on the chin under the basket. Back then, you’d get clocked and the ref wouldn’t even blink. No blood, no foul. Sometimes it was like a prison yard riot.
