And we are very good. Don says we’re the best team he’s ever coached. He says he’s going to schedule some more difficult competition, find us better opponents. Mrs. Ryan comes along to plenty of the games and sits in the stands, knitting while she watches us. My mom, Marky, and Archie’s mom, Daisy, come when they can. But mostly it’s Don and Andy who drive us, cheer for us, and then take us out to White Castle after the game, buy us a hamburger and a Coke. I love the way those little hamburgers taste after we win, and we win a lot.
My leg is healing. I feel strong. I have my hops back. I can jump twice in the time it takes other kids to go up and down. I can tip the ball to myself and then jump up and get it while other kids are still coming down from their first jump. I believe that every ball in that gym, every shot that doesn’t find the bottom of the net, will be mine. It’s a fantastic feeling, a sense of confidence about my place in the world. I belong. Here. Under this basket.
I take a rebound, I begin dribbling downcourt, I weave through traffic. I rise. I rise.
I lay the ball in.
The coach calls a time-out.
“Julius,” Don tells me. “Pass the ball to the guards. Now sit down on the bench.”
Don teaches us about life. He tells us to “win without bragging and lose without crying.” He says that even when we feel like showing up another team, about celebrating a good shot, we have to restrain ourselves. Humility, Don preaches, is an underrated virtue. If you’re humble in victory, then even your opponents will have to admire you, despite the fact that you just kicked their butts.
We are so good that the gyms we walk into become crowded with people coming to see us, a Biddy Basketball team playing for the Salvation Army. The local newspapers, Long Island Press and Jewish Exponent, do some write-ups about us, mentioning Julius Erving as among the best players. They add that Julius Erving is expected to attend Hempstead High School.
Don has us playing some games against older kids, against fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, and we still beat them. We’re going over to the Courtsman AA tournament in Queens and playing against teams from all over the city, and Don starts looking to schedule games against teams from Schenectady, Trenton, Newark, Philadelphia. He takes us to NBA doubleheaders at the Garden, where we watch New York, Philly, Boston, and Baltimore, where I first see Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain.
We take the station wagons down to Philly, a three-hour ride, my longest trip away from Mom and Freda and Marky. I wear my blue blazer, my white shirt, brown corduroys, dress shoes. We’re playing a tournament in Philly, a few Catholic schools, the local Salvation Army. We’re playing two games Saturday and then another two on Sunday, spending the night in a real hotel, the Divine Lorraine, and we’re going to see the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall. Don tells our parents it will be an educational as well as athletic experience. Whenever we go on a road trip, Don always tries to add something cultural and makes sure we go to a church on Sunday.
I don’t know what it’s like to have a real father. I had Tonk, gone too early, but I only saw him a few times in my life. I begin to see Don as kind of like a father. He’s tough but fair, and I feel like I can ask him anything, even for help with my homework, which I could never ask my father for. Even about girls, who I am becoming interested in, I can ask Don what he thinks.
Too many young men lose their way because of girls, Don tells us.
3.
The Divine Lorraine in Philadelphia is a monstrous, arched-windowed, dark brick building that hunkers on the street like a big haunted mansion. We’ve all seen too many horror movies, and each of us is even more terrified when we follow Don into the lobby to check in and the guy behind the desk is this huge black man, he has to be six foot five and weigh 250 pounds and wears the largest shoes we’ve ever seen.
“Quasimodo,” Archie whispers. “The Hunchback!”
He limps around behind the desk, gathering our keys and breathing through his mouth. He glares over at me and nods, his frown frozen.
I’m rooming with Archie up on the fourth floor. We can see out the window, the cars driving by on Broad Street, the clouds rolling in, Philly gray and cold-looking. I unpack my bags, hang my blazer up on a hook, put my clothes in the dresser drawers. Organize my toothbrush, toothpaste, and comb in a nice straight line next to the sink. Archie, who usually rooms with me on the road, shakes his head.
Sometimes he’ll mess with my neat little rows, moving the toothbrush so that it’s perpendicular to the toothpaste, and then watch as I get visibly irritated by this and finally can’t resist straightening up the rows of toiletries.
“Jule, you got a problem.” Archie laughs.
“I just like my things neat,” I tell him. “In columns.”
We change into our basketball uniforms and sweat jackets and head out to play our game against the local Salvation Army—we’re in the middle of our longest winning streak yet, which will get to 47 games, and by now our hosts are assembling all-star teams to try to beat us. It doesn’t work.
We come back from the gym, change, shower, and go out to a dinner given by the local Salvation Army—chicken with gravy, some potatoes, spinach—and a few of the other coaches come over and talk to Archie and me, telling us how proud they are of what we’re doing.
“You mean winning?” I ask.
Archie looks at me and shakes his head. “They mean because we’re black.”
“Black’s not something you do,” I say. “You just are.”
When we return to the hotel, Don orders us into bed at eight thirty. We share the bathroom with the Conroy boys in the room next to us.
I’m the last to use the bathroom, and while I’m in there showering, the Conroy boys and Archie pull a trick on me and lock me into the john. I try the door, I knock on it a few times. Archie and the Conroy boys don’t answer. They must have fallen asleep.
I’m exhausted as well, from the drive, the two games today, the sightseeing, the dinner. I’ll just sit down here on the commode and take a little nap. I fall asleep right there.
While I’m out, Don and Quasimodo come by for the bed check. Don sees that I’m gone, asks Archie where I am, and Archie says, “I don’t know.”
Don and Quasimodo go room to room, searching for me. I’ve always been Coach’s most reliable player, and he promised my mother that he would look out for me if I joined the Sal, and now here I am, gone missing in the middle of Philadelphia.
I’m out during all of this. Archie bursts into tears as he confesses that they had locked me in the bathroom.
The bathroom door clicks and I wake up to see Quasimodo’s gigantic shoes, these two dark boats on the tile floor, and I look up and this monster is standing there, frowning down at me, this missing boy who was found asleep on the commode.
Don comes in behind him. “Julius? What are you doing here?”
“I fell asleep, Coach.”
He shakes his head. “Get in bed, Julius. We have church first thing.”
In the morning I put my blazer back on and we head to church, and then we come back, change, and go out on another little tour of Philadelphia, visiting the art museum. We ride in our station wagons back to New York, and when we’re crossing the George Washington Bridge, I realize I’ve forgotten my blazer in the cupboard, where I hung it up after church. Now I’m nervous. Mom is going to kill me. That jacket must have cost $15 from Robert Hall’s. It was my Easter jacket. I feel awful; I know how hard my mother works.
After we return, I tell Coach about it, tell him that I no longer have an Easter jacket and we can’t afford another one. I tell him that means when I go on road trips, I won’t have a jacket to wear to church.
Don arranges with the Divine Lorraine Hotel to have the jacket sent back to me, and it arrives in a brown paper wrapper with string around it and there is a note that wishes me and the team the best of luck.
“That’s nice,” I say, showing it to Don.
And he explains it’s the night manager, the Quasimodo fellow who
checked us into the hotel.
I realize something then, something simple but important: you can’t judge people by how they look, the color of their skin, anything. I have to take each person for who they are and believe in them until they let me down.
4.
In the middle of that winning streak, we walk into a gym in Locust Valley when I hear the word “nigger” being shouted. I’m eleven, and this is some grown-up white man shouting “nigger” at me and Archie. “No niggahs allowed in this gym,” he is shouting.
Archie and I are the only two black people in the gym. Don looks at me. “Let me handle it.”
He walks over to the guy and starts quietly talking to him.
The man shakes his head. “A nigger’s a nigger.”
“Leave my kids alone,” Don says.
Don comes back and leads us into the dressing room. “Some people have problems. Big problems. But I don’t want it to affect you. We’re a team. A team stands up for each other. Let’s do what we came here to do. Just go out and kick their butts.”
He takes me and Archie aside. “You guys okay?”
We both nod. “We’re ready.”
Don leads us back out. At the start of the game, we hear one or two more racist taunts, but after a few minutes, the crowd quiets. I don’t let that team get one rebound. I block every shot. Archie steals every pass. We score every time down the court. These poor kids may never want to play basketball again.
Late in the second half, Don keeps holding his hands up to his throat. “Press! Press!”
I look over at him. “Press? It’s eighty to twenty, Coach.”
He shrugs. Win without boasting.
5.
I still play in Campbell Park in the afternoons and evenings when I’m not at the Sal. And Juanita is still one of the best players there. She’s twelve, like me, and has physically developed into a young woman. Now we all notice her chest jiggling as she dribbles. She doesn’t go to Prospect Elementary with the rest of us. She’s a Catholic school girl, which gives her a certain status in the projects, in that her parents could afford whatever nominal tuition they charged.
After we’re done playing, I walk with Juanita back across Beech Street, to our project. She lives on the same floor as me, across the hall. Juanita is so beautiful, with dark hair, oval face, and thick lips, and she is a good ballplayer—which makes her seem even more beautiful to me. She wears these wire-frame glasses and when she’s talking to me, she keeps pushing them up higher on her nose.
She wears a T-shirt, jeans, and Converse like the rest of us. And I can feel in her, like I would later feel in my sister, Freda, a certain disappointment already setting in. These are gifted athletes, girls who can hold their own against men in track and field, in basketball, and yet our local schools don’t have programs for them to develop as sportswomen. So Juanita, who is better than most boys her age, has no high school sports to look forward to the way we boys do. We talk, at the Sal, on the court at Campbell, about playing for Hempstead, about what Archie and I hope to accomplish as Hempstead Tigers, and all Juanita can do at the park when we talk like this is just sit quietly.
We climb up the stairs, agreeing without speaking to take the steps as slowly as possible, to extend our time together. Finally, we reach our landing, and then our hallway. We can hear echoes from other floors of shouted good-byes and the squeak of sneakers against linoleum as other children make their way home. We stop and look at each other and I kiss Juanita.
My first kiss. And it’s with the girl next door.
“You call that a kiss? You’re doing it all wrong,” says a loud voice behind me. It’s James Smith, three years older than I am, one of five siblings of my friend Levi. “That’s not how you kiss a girl!”
Now James is a Golden Gloves winner. And since winning the junior boxing championship, he’s become even tougher. He walks over, pushes me out of the way, and plants a deep soul kiss—with tongue—on Juanita. It goes on for a while.
“See, that’s how you got to do it.”
I nod. This wasn’t what I had in mind for my first kiss.
6.
At school, I am also becoming intensely aware of the opposite sex. Though I am quiet and shy, my reputation as an athlete is enough to attract some attention from the girls.
There is a girl, Gayle, who I sit behind in homeroom. I don’t find her beautiful. But she is nice to me and smiles when she turns around. She sees that I arrange my pencils and pens a certain way in the pencil holder grooved into the desk and smiles.
“You always put them like that?” she says.
I shrug. I don’t want to explain to her how I am pleased by order.
We find ourselves walking together after class, and I’m not sure how it happens or why, but she leads me to a closet in the basement of our school and once we are inside, in between the boiler and some sort of storage bin, she pulls down her dress and panties and I pull down my pants and drawers and we begin to rub against each other. We don’t do more than that and I don’t achieve any sort of climax, we just have this intense friction session that lasts a few minutes until she seems satisfied and pulls up her dress.
I pull up as well and then we are off to class.
At lunch, I go over to where she is sitting, but I have a hard time talking in front of her friends. It is only when we are walking out of the lunch room and we can talk privately that I tell her that I have a good idea. At ten thirty every day, when I’ll be in math class and she’ll be in home economics, we will both raise our hands and meet together at the same spot.
She shrugs. “Okay.”
The next morning, at ten thirty, I raise my hand and tell Mr. Hairston that I have to use the john. I run down the stairs to the basement and open the door and there she is, waiting for me. I can’t believe my plan has worked.
We take our pants off and rub. Then, after a few minutes, Gayle decides to stop. We straighten ourselves up and she returns to her class first and I wait a few minutes and then head back.
We meet every day at the same time and in the same place for weeks, and we never kiss each other.
7.
The universe is expanding, they tell us at school, and I am expanding. I can feel the weight of astonishment at what the world might hold for me, at the animals and oceans and stars and planets and people and dreams. At how my own hopes, of leaping, of rising, can become a reality and how other dreams, of growing up, of life, can be shattered. We are suspended in a vibrating web—my mother explains that it is God’s love—but that web can snap and leave us falling and falling.
I want to rise.
I can move freely throughout Hempstead, from the Salvation Army, to the movie theaters, to Prospect Elementary, to Campbell Park, a boy’s ever-widening gyre of adventure and opportunity, of games and challenges. Archie and Al Williams—a fast little guard who has also joined the Sal—and I wander over to Kennedy or Eisenhower Park and look for games against other kids, often playing with guys a few years older than us. If there’s no game going on, then we check out a soccer ball from the park attendant and take turns dunking on eight-foot rims. We dunk in the gym at Prospect Elementary—some guys dunking tennis balls while I dunk a soccer ball. I can palm a soccer ball in my hand already. By the time I’m thirteen, I have hands bigger and fingers longer than some guys six inches taller than I am.
I enjoy pacing my steps off and then running toward the hoop and leaping, soccer ball in my hand as I glide up toward that short basket and then flush the ball through. Dunking is different from jumping. Once you can leap and touch, say, ten feet high on a wall, you can always jump and touch ten feet, but with dunking, just because you did it before doesn’t mean you can do it again. There are so many variables, starting with the quality of the jump itself, where you took off from, timing, the grip on the ball, and I’m talking about dunking without defenders trying to stop me. We take turns dunking, Archie and me, and beat up so many soccer balls slamming them through the rim that pretty soon
the park attendant won’t let us check out any more.
To earn money for basketballs—and new Converse high tops—I take a job as a paperboy with my neighbor Joe Farmer. Joe also has a process, his hair is all steamed and hot combed so that it is flat and he can sweep up the front into a pompadour like Elvis or Little Richard. His hair has gone from black to red. Joe says I should get a process, that everyone’s getting a process.
“You should do this paper route with me,” Joe says. “We’ll both have cool dos riding the truck.”
I study his red, oiled coif.
“I don’t know about that, Joe,” I tell him. “But I’ll do the paper route.”
He’s been delivering papers for a couple of years already and is two years older than I am but he says the fact that I’m underage doesn’t matter.
I wake up at four thirty every morning. I put on my galoshes, two pairs of pants, my light coat, and my wool coat because it’s wintertime and there’s “elements outside,” that’s what Joe says. Rain, sleet, snow: seven days a week we do this route. The manager, Max, comes to pick us up in his Volkswagen van and brings us to the White Castle, where he buys Joe and me each an eight-cent hamburger and a five-cent Coke. He tells us we can’t work on empty stomachs. A man needs fuel. He calls us men. I like that. This is his paper route, actually, but he has hired us for $1.50 a day and $3.00 on Sundays. After our fuel, he drives us over to the bus terminal, where we collect the papers, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the Daily Mirror. We gather all the sections, the front page, the sports section, the city section, and then assemble the morning edition of each newspaper sitting beneath that bus station roof, folding them into neat little rectangles and then loading them into the van. Then Joe climbs on one running board and I climb on the other and Max drives up Franklin Avenue from Hempstead to Garden City, taking the turn down residential streets.
Dr. J Page 5
