Walking down a Homewood street or more likely riding through in a car, I had the habit of looking for people I knew. Faces I’d think I recognized usually turned out to be somebody else. Faces just seemed familiar. On closer inspection, after the obligatory wave and the mutual checking out, I’d have to admit it wasn’t Reggie or Punkin Mallory or Brother Allen or Bobbi Jackson. Took me years to figure out what I was doing wrong. When I’d take my wife and kids to Freed’s, I was looking for the Homewood I’d left twenty years before. Vaguely familiar faces I’d glimpse in the streets probably belonged to the sons and daughters of my old crowd. All along I’d been skipping a generation, acting as if time stood still in Homewood.
My grandmother’s been dead ten years but when we exit the parkway and turn onto Braddock Avenue, and Braddock intersects Finance just after the low train bridge, I think: Freed’s, and she’s sitting in her rocker beside the mantelpiece, her glasses slipped down to the wings of her nose, her long, bony fingers worrying an edge of the sweater draping her thin shoulders. Loose wisps of gray escape the neat thickness of her hair, parted in the middle and piled atop her head. She’ll sound as if she’s beginning to cry when she says Spanky, the old nickname she’s never stopped calling me. The first time she sighs Spanky is when the journey of three hundred miles from Philadelphia or seven hundred miles from Iowa City or three thousand miles across an ocean really ends, when I’m really home again. I can’t wait to see her, to see the smile break across her features and hear what first sounded like crying become crinkly laughter. She’ll seem frighteningly old and distant behind the blank moons of her glasses, till I find her eyes. I anticipate the cold bump of the metal rims against my cheek when I bend down to kiss her. Memories of time collapsing, of being a kid at the window, of running away to play college ball, of losing Homewood and finding it again race through my mind in the instant it takes to locate the bent Finance Street sign out the car window. I tell myself: Don’t turn here. Keep straight on Braddock to the traffic lights on Bennett. Freed’s not here anymore.
The prison lounge is like returning to Homewood because you never know who you’ll see, who will pop up and in what disguise. Like Homewood because you must teach yourself to read faces, decipher them, keep in mind how long you’ve been away. You must remember that the present moment is a tightrope you’re negotiating and an unexpected face can terminate your act abruptly. You lose the illusion that now is anything more than the thinnest strand stretched over the immensity of what you were and always must be.
In the visiting lounge two or three years ago I’d asked Robby who that guy was. The old white guy over there with the priest.
That’s Murphy, man.
Does he have a nickname? Does anybody call him Reds?
Don’t nobody like him or talk that much to him. Might be Reds for all I know. He’s Murphy to me. Used to be a cop. Lucky ain’t nobody killed him. Cops ain’t too popular in the joint. You know what I mean. Lotta guys in here love to get they hands on a cop. Wouldn’t think no more of offing a cop than stepping on a roach. Once a cop, always a cop. All of em snitches. But old Murphy been here a long time. Don’t nobody bother him much no more. He’s just another con now.
It had to be Reds. The elongated, pale face. Big hands. His thick body softer now, going to fat, but that aggressive forward hunch still in his shoulders. Tyrannosaurus rex. Arms short for his body, hanging limp but bent at the elbows, coiled, ready to receive a pass or snap into position for a two-hand set shot.
Reds was nearly bald except for a few strands of thin, reddish hair combed back over the steep crown of his skull. Like my grandmother, Reds had called me Spanky, my Homewood name. He had played high-school ball against Maurice Stokes and Ed Fleming, legendary Homewood heroes who’d gone on from Westinghouse High to college, then the NBA. To hear Reds tell it, he was better than both of them. They were good, strong kids, but raw. He could shoot and pass rings around them. His team won every match against Westinghouse when Reds was big gun at Central Catholic.
Real shootouts when the public school champs played the Catholic league winners for the city tide. Stokes and Fleming were tough, real tough, but Reds didn’t mind admitting he was the best. If he’d gotten a chance at college ball like they did, no telling how far he’d have gone. But it wasn’t in the cards.
Reds was one of the kings of the playground, an aging king but still on top when at thirteen or so I first had ventured away from my home court—a single wooden backboard on a pole in Liberty Elementary School’s dirt left field—to Mellon Park, where good players from all over the city congregated. For some reason Reds liked me. Maybe he remembered me, even younger, watching the games in Westinghouse Park. I remembered him. He was one of the few white players there, and maybe I reminded him of those summer days in Homewood, of the wide-eyed peanut gallery that always gathered to watch the big guys play. Whatever, he took me under his wing. Made sure I got a chance to play every now and then in less high-powered Mellon games. He also guaranteed my safe passage through the white neighborhoods I had to cross walking to and from Mellon Park. Spanky’s okay. He’s a good kid. That was all Reds had to say.
Reds wasn’t a cop then. He drove a bread truck for National Biscuit Company. Coincidentally, Nabisco sponsored my favorite radio show: “Straight Arrow.” I’d always identified with Indians more than cowboys, and the song that began each “Straight Arrow” episode—
. . . N - A - B - I - S - C - O
Nabisco is the name to know
For a breakfast you can’t beat
Eat Nabisco shredded wheat. . . .
—was a magic formula that transmogrified me into one of my Indian heroes.
Not that the white kids in the neighborhoods bordering Mellon Park posed any actual danger to life or limb. More a matter of harassment. Nigger this and nigger that and maybe a stone or two at your feet kicking dust off the asphalt, or a gang of six or seven kids with nothing better to do than block the sidewalk so I’d have to go around them and worry for the next fifty yards or so whether they’d decide to chase me or not.
Reds looked out for me. Then, over the years, as I grew bigger and stronger, Reds gradually became less of a fixture at Mellon. His skills declined. The deadly two-hand, over-the-head set shot that began when he slid one foot behind the other, stopped being automatic. His leaning jumper, which had always looked awkward because it was propelled with two hands like his set shot, dated Reds. Young skywalkers grinned and swatted it back in his face.
When Reds sprinted or touched down after the jumper, you could hear coins crashing in the deep front pockets of his chinos. The jingle-jangle was out of place; Reds sounded as if he didn’t belong on the court, as if he were just passing through on his way to work. I remember wondering why he always carried pocketfuls of change, remember the shock of seeing his pale white thighs when he turned up one scorching Sunday afternoon in Bermuda shorts.
As a new generation of ballplayers—blacks from Homewood, East Liberty, and the Hill, whites from Point Breeze, Momingside, and the suburbs—rose up, I battled them on even terms. My rep was established and I didn’t need Reds or anybody else. Reds would show up occasionally, a faded star in the background still spinning stories about the time he outscored Stokes and Fleming combined. He took his turn with everybody else rehearsing his glory days and drinking sweet wine in the weeds behind the cyclone fence that surrounded the court. Reds wasn’t a wino; but winos, hangers-on, and players sitting in the shade waiting for winners—when you could find shade at Mellon— were his audience.
I always greeted Reds, but as I became a king in my own right, we had less and less to say to each other. I began avoiding him when I could. He’d embarrass me, the way he’d holler Spanky. I didn’t like it, but let it slide. Reds was Reds and always would be. To him I’d always be Spanky, always be a kid who needed his running commentary on passes I should have made and shots I shouldn’t have taken.
Playing Big Five and Ivy League ball in Perm’s Palestra k
ept me busy and sometimes happy. But college basketball lacked the spontaneity, the free-form improvisation and electricity of the playground game. Remember the early sixties before Texas Western’s all-black five defeated Adolph Rupp’s lily-white Kentuckians. Most coaches designed offenses more suitable for corn-fed, Big Ten linemen than for the high-flying whippets and greyhounds the city game was beginning to breed. “Playground move” was synonymous with bad move. Not bad move, but something undisciplined, selfish, possibly immoral. Twenty years later, coaches are attempting to systematize and teach the essence of the game invented on the playgrounds.
At Penn I became a better player, but I paid a steep price for that and other cultural improvements. Teachers, coaches, nearly everyone important in the white university environment, urged me to bury my past. I learned to stake too much of who I was on what I would become, lived for the day I could look back, look down on Reds and everybody else in Mellon Park, in Homewood.
If Reds was around Mellon when I returned home from college to play during summer vacations, I can’t recall. On the court I wouldn’t have answered to Spanky. That I do know. I resented any reference to my punkhood when I had to be protected from punks. The past was incriminating. The past was skinny legs, a silly nickname, a pickaninny potbelly that wouldn’t go away till I was fifteen.
Yet Mellon Park continued to be a special place in my imagination. When I balked at the regimen, the monotony, the blue-collar ethic of practice, practice, practice, the prospect of beating Princeton or Yale was seldom incentive enough to inspire more effort. To keep hustling in practice and school, I’d imagine how lame I’d sound trying to explain to the older guys from the playground—men like Delton and Smitty, Reds and Rudy and George Brown—why I blew the chance they never had. I’d anticipate the golden summers at Mellon, the chance to show off my new skills and prove I hadn’t forgotten the old ones, the only ones that mattered in my heart of hearts.
Mellon remains a magnet on summer weekends for Pittsburgh’s high school, college, pro and playground royalty. The court’s run down now. Scarred backboards, rims bent and loose, two cracks in the asphalt just beyond one foul line so driving down the lane is like walking up steps. Neglected, going to seed, the buckling, gray rectangle is a microcosm of the potholed city. Tradition and location conspire to preserve Mellon’s uniqueness. Over the years Pittsburgh’s best have always played at Mellon. And since the park’s not really in anybody’s neighborhood it’s a no-man’s land, the perfect place for a battlefield, one of the only inner-city basketball courts where white and black players confront one another.
At Mellon a few summers ago I learned what it felt like to be a ghost. A bunch of older guys (I had ten or fifteen years on most of them) were waiting for winners and reminiscing about Mellon’s good ole days. I listened to them talk about this dude went to Peabody High. He was bad, yeah. Played in college. Won some kind of scholarship or something. Had a nice game. What was his name? I said my name, and one or two nodded. Yeah . . . yeah. That’s the dude. He could shoot the ball.
When Robby had said Reds was a cop, a memory had been tripped, but I couldn’t contextualize it. Maybe I was creating it after the fact, but I saw Reds in his city cop uniform, two-tone blue like the prisoners wear. He sports shiny boots, a Sam Brown belt across his chest, a holster and cartridge belt slung gunflghter-low on his hip. The leather squeaks. It’s Reds’s face under the polished black visor of the cap but somehow different, ominous, even though he’s smiling and basking in all the attention his uniform gets, out of place in Mellon Park.
I was trying to explain Reds to my brother. The problem was, I wasn’t sure myself. Years and years since I’d thought of Reds in any connection, then suddenly there he was across the visitors’ lounge, his long torso and big head, the bow of his belly, his hands still poised and ready for a pass.
What’s he in for?
Chopped his wife up in little pieces.
He used to look out for me at Mellon.
Say he caught her with another dude. Went crazy and wasted his old lady.
Reds passed by later. He shook my hand. Spanky. Nodded at my brother. An incredulous look, a few mumbled words; but he was remembering everything, and everything was too much. Neither of us wanted to linger, or to deal with it, so off he went again with the priest and an older woman, his sister, mother, cousin, whoever.
Robby told me during a subsequent visit that Reds had bragged about how tight he was with the Widemans. And Widemans included my brother, so Reds figured he had gained an in with the black guys among whom Robby was a leader. Reds traded on that association, boasting, carrying himself a little taller, straighter, bumming cigarettes till he carried it a bit too far, got too familiar, and Robby had to tell him cool it. A strange sort of payback, a false neatness rounding off my relationship to Reds. For a month or two, I had been Reds’s safe passage through one black corner of Western Penitentiary.
So you never know who will pop up. Where a name, a face will take you. How much of your unguarded, unexposed, unused past you’ll suddenly have to make sense of.
When I lay in my cell hurting, swept with a grief that after years of this tormented existence has turned to melancholy, I look at the wall and the shadow from the light coming in between the bars on my door, and it wiggles and ripples along with the flow of the river that passes outside the walls of my tomb. It hurts most on spring and summer nights after seeing Leslie and still having the warmth and smell of her body on my mind. At times like these the life rhythm of the river’s ripple in the wall’s shadow brings a burning in my eyes and the taste of salt on my cheeks.
I’d asked Robby to write out a schedule of a typical day, an hour-by-hour log that would familiarize me with the prison routine. At what hour did the prisoners’ day begin? When were mealtimes, work times, free periods in the yard? Was it like high school? Did bells or P.A. announcements punctuate the prison day? Were all lights in the range extinguished at a certain hour or were prisoners allowed reading privileges in their cells? I needed that kind of concrete, mundane information so I could walk through a day with Robby on paper. He hadn’t forgotten about my request, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet either.
* * *
I started it, man. Won’t be hard to do. But what with school and work and everything, I just can’t seem to get nothing done. I got the time, in a way. That’s all I do got in here is time. But it’s funny. You know. Like you’d think you could get a whole lot done in the joint. Time’s what you got, like I say. Tons of time. Time on top of time. You wake up in the morning and you think about the fact the day’s just starting and you got to get through the whole thing, you got all them hours and hours till you drop off to sleep. Damn. It makes mornings miserable. People’s evil in the morning. Like you open your eyes and boom. The whole bag of shit slams down on your shoulders. You in the joint. It’s another day just like the last miserable day and you still in the joint and ain’t nothing you can do about it. Not today. Not tomorrow.
But you ain’t really got no time be worrying bout tomorrow when you wake up in the morning. See cause you got today staring you in the face and today’s a bitch. Like what the fuck am I doing in here? Why me? How the hell Ima make it through all them hours till I’m sleep again?
Don’t nobody say nothing in the mornings. Everybody stone evil. Look at a dude cross-ways he’s liable to flip out. Try and kill you wit a spoon. During breakfast cats be staring down in they bowls. Like if they could get down in there with the shit that’s where they’d be. Even the guards don’t fuck wit nobody in the morning. Half the time I don’t know what I be eating. I’d skip breakfast if I was allowed. Food’s nasty. Niggers be evil and funky. A new day’s starting and nobody don’t like it. Nobody don’t want to be here. It’s real quiet in the mess hall but everybody screaming inside. That’s how it is. Sometime it be noon before I’m ready to talk to anybody. Hear the goddamn bell first thing in the morning, I want to die. Want to turn over and go back to sleep and st
ay sleep.
You got time but you can’t do nothing wit it. I mean there’s twenty-four hours to a day in here just like out in the world. You ain’t booked up or nothing for most of them so you’d think you could take care of business, but ain’t hardly no business gets taken care of in the joint.
Cause it ain’t really your time. Don’t know how many evenings I sat down to write you or write somebody else and there ain’t nothing to say. Can’t write word one. It ain’t like I ain’t got time. I be itching to write all day. Writing letters in my mind while I’m doing other stuff. Can’t wait to get back to my cell so I can write this hot letter but then I’m by myself and I sit down and ain’t nothing to say. Ain’t nothing worth saying cause ain’t nothing happening, really. That’s why it’s good when you ask me a question or ask me to write about something specific. Sometimes that helps me get started.
Maybe it got something to do with being lonely. Being so fucked up inside you never feel like doing nothing. Being lonely’s one the worst things about the joint. Probably the worst. Always a lot of fools and crazy people surrounding you so you ain’t never alone but you always lonely. Longer I spend in here, the more I back away. Even back away from hangout time with the fellas on the range. I got to find my own space. Even if it’s tiny. See, in your cell you ain’t got nobody else to worry about but your own self. It’s one of the few safe places in here. Course people been offed in they cells. Ain’t no place really safe, but least you can be alone, be in your cell with your own stink and your own little bit of stuff and your own thoughts and do. Cause outside your cell ain’t nothing going on but the same ole shit. That’s what gets to you after a while. Repetition. Same ole, same ole all the time. Same bullshit on the hangout corner. Same slop at breakfast. Same nasty guards. One day just like the other. Same simple cats doing the same dumb numbers. Day in and day out, every day. It gets to you. It surely does.
Brothers and Keepers Page 29
