“Times, Tribune, Mirror,” Max says.
His attendant hands us the papers and I jump off and run up the driveway until I am close enough to toss the paper and land it in the right place. I take pride in how I can fling those papers sidearm, an easy flick of the wrist that sails the Tribune up and over a hedge, or curves it around a column, so that it lands right on the welcome mat. I get so good, I can fire off three papers in three quick motions, about four seconds, each landing where the subscriber only has to open his front door to pick it up.
And then my favorite part—running back to the van and jumping back on. I get so good, I can leap back onto the moving van from eight feet away, land, grab the door frame, and Max doesn’t even have to slow down.
Max tells me it’s easy for me. “You got those big hands, Jule. You were made to be a paperboy!”
But Sundays, man, Sundays are the worst, with those monster newspapers that weigh a few pounds.
I don’t mind working, I’m thinking, but I’m not gonna be a paperboy.
By the time we get back home, it’s seven a.m., and my mother, brother, and sister are all just waking up. I turn on the TV so it can warm up and Mom comes padding out of her room in her robe and starts cooking us some oatmeal or pancakes and I get dressed. I have a few minutes, so Marky and I watch cartoons or Our Gang and then we can eat breakfast. I always bring home a paper for Mom.
I make $12 a week and give my mom $10 and keep $2 for myself, so I can buy Converse and maybe some hair care products.
Marky and I walk the mile and a half to Prospect.
“Can I do the paper route with you, June?” Marky asks.
I tell Marky I don’t know. I’m twelve, and you’re supposed to be fourteen.
But I don’t think Marky can handle the route. It’s too cold in the morning, you have to get up in the predawn darkness, and Marky doesn’t seem strong enough to handle it.
8.
At school, it’s a struggle to stay awake in the warm classrooms: I’ve been awake for hours and, with my stomach full and my eyelids drooping, I have to rouse myself by rearranging my pencils and shifting in my seat. I will not let my grades slide. I know Mrs. Ryan won’t let me play ball for the Sal if I show up with a column of Cs. So I’m sitting in history class, half-asleep, listening to the teacher, something about the Fugitive Slave Act, the Slave Trade ban in Washington, DC, the Compromise of 1850, when the class is interrupted by the squeal of the Tannoy turning on, followed by a moment of hum, and then our principal telling us that our president, John F. Kennedy, has been assassinated.
We are told that school is canceled for the rest of the day. We’re to go home.
I go to the lower school and find Marky and we walk home in silence.
Mom always told us that Kennedy was good for black people; he was on our side. We have a photo of him up on our wall, next to Dr. King, and I always liked the look of him, his toothy smile, his gentle eyes. Dr. King had told blacks to vote for Kennedy, and Mom did, she told us. And Kennedy had sent federal marshals in so that a black man could attend college in Mississippi. He’d also sent in the National Guard. We’d seen that on television.
When I ask Mom what’s gonna happen, she just shakes her head, saying, “It’s not good for us, June. It’s not good for America.”
9.
I have a step-cousin whom I’ll call Theresa, and she is three years older than I am and lives on the second floor of our building. She’s always real nice to me and one day I’m over at her house and we’re watching TV and she asks me to come into the bedroom with her and she pushes me back down on the bed and pulls her panties off. She tells me to pull down my pants and underwear, and she climbs on top of me and then introduces me to the real deal.
This isn’t rubbing. This time I’m inside and I understand what the big fuss is about, why everyone is always talking about this, and it seems to dominate the conversations of all the older guys. I’m confused and a little frightened by this whole experience, by the sight of a woman on top of me and the obvious pleasure she is taking in this and—it ends quickly.
What just happened?
I’ve been taken advantage of, but I also feel like this has been for my own benefit, like thank God I now know what this is all about.
Theresa often stops me when I’m climbing the steps or if she sees me around the neighborhood to tell me that her parents are going to be out this afternoon and I should stop by. This is my introduction to sex, at age thirteen, before we even cover the subject in school. By the time we do get to sex education, I’m thinking, Okay, I know all about that. But I am lucky, to be active at that age and not have ended up a father way before I was ready.
10.
Prospect School is mixed, we are white and black kids in equal numbers, and we are all expected to participate in the full range of studies, which means I play the cello. And I win the poetry contest reciting by memorizing “If” by Rudyard Kipling. I’m even the lead in a school play.
I’ve become a student leader.
I’ve already been chosen by the teachers, by Bill Zaruka, the gym teacher and the principal, to be a captain for Field Day. I’m to lead the Blue Jays, one of four teams. I am the best in the school at the high jump and long jump. I’m the quarterback of the eighth-grade football team (Archie is my go-to receiver) and, of course, I’m the star of our school’s basketball team. I play baseball, though I’m not sure I can even hit my weight in batting percentage, as Don tells me any player must do, but at Prospect—and at the Sal—I participate in everything. What is important, however, is that my being chosen captain makes a kind of mathematical sense; it is the only logical outcome of my success in all these sports: the rows and columns are all stacked up just right.
11.
The Hempstead gangs are starting to recruit from around our projects, jumping on several of the basketball players I play with at the park. We’re in Imperial Warlord territory, and some afternoons they hang around on the benches outside the projects, combing their hair, harassing women whose men are too frightened to tell them off. These guys are seventeen, eighteen years old, older even, and some of them were Hempstead Tigers in the past, but none of them were ballplayers, or not so that you ever heard about them. I usually know how to avoid them, taking back ways, going up a stairwell in the rear of the building and then crossing over on the roof if I have to and then going down our stairwell, avoiding the courtyard in the front where the Warlords are holding court. I don’t want anything to do with them. They’re into drugs. Knocking over parking meters. None of it looks promising to me. After the news agency in charge of my paper route found out I was under fourteen, they fired me. Newsday eventually rehired me, but that job also required collecting the subscription money along with doing the deliveries, and I found I was earning much less for doing much more work. I quit that job and was now looking for another, but I was not considering joining the Warlords.
One afternoon I was walking home with Sonny Boy, who I used to help with his homework by tossing mine out the window so he could copy and return it in time for school. Sonny Boy wasn’t a great student and he’s not known as an athlete as I am. The gangs tend to leave the athletic kids alone. A ballplayer with a rep could get a pass, though not always. But the Warlords were already recruiting Sonny Boy, and when they see us together, the head Warlord—he has a mustache and smokes a filterless cigarette—gives Sonny Boy a big handshake and looks me over.
“Who this?”
“That’s Julius,” Sonny Boy says.
“He looks like a chicken,” says the Warlord. “Chicken chest. Long legs. Big hands. What you do with them big hands?”
I shrug. “Nothin’.”
“Needle-dick motherfucker. You got them big hands. How you even gonna jerk off? That must be a sight.”
He mimics looking for his penis in his hand. “I can’t find it in my palm.”
The gang laughs.
I look at Sonny Boy. I’m thinking about running, but a few of th
e Warlords have taken up positions behind me.
“Now, Sonny Boy, why don’t you knock out Chicken Chest? Man, that’s what a Warlord would do. Just knock this skinny, bony, big-hand freak the fuck out.”
Sonny breathes heavily. He doesn’t know what to do. I don’t want to fight. I’m not a fighter. I don’t fight with anyone. Not even on the court. And I’m not even angry with Sonny Boy. How could I be? I’ve known him all my life. We played Hot Buttered Peas right here, next to these benches, beside this crazy little Biddy hoop.
“Come on,” Sonny says. “Jules is a basketball player.”
The head Warlord shrugs. “I don’t care if he’s Connie Hawkins himself.”
Sonny puts up his fists and comes toward me. He launches a weak shot at my shoulder. “Come on.”
I get in my best Cassius Clay pose and we start circling each other, launching soft shots against each other’s shoulders. We are dancing more than fighting, making sure that we don’t inflict any real pain.
“Come on, fight, you chickenshits.”
We continue our circling, and by now the Warlords are getting bored.
“Man, Sonny Boy, you’re nothing but a pussy if you can’t knock out this Chicken Chest.”
“You ain’t even trying to hit him.”
They tell Sonny Boy that he isn’t Warlords material. And they chase me home, up the stairs, which I can now leap up in one huge jump, so they don’t really have a chance to catch me as I do my usual sprint up to the roof and then down another stairwell and then I’m back home.
12.
Mom has a new man in her life, a sanitation worker named Dan Lindsay, twenty years older than she is. He’s a garbageman, riding trucks for the Department of Sanitation. He used to be Archie’s mom’s boyfriend, and I’d seen him over at Archie’s before he ended up over at our house, sitting at our table, eating Mom’s barbecue spare ribs and egg noodles with sauce. He’s tall, muscular, always wearing a flat applejack cap, and chomping on a short cigar. His skin is always clean shaven, as if he’s been worn smooth from a hard life outdoors, first as a horse trainer, which is what he did down south before he injured his leg, came north, and became a garbageman.
He still walks with a bow in his leg.
When he stays over, he gets up at four a.m., which is earlier even than I ever got up for my paper route. At first, I find it strange having him in the house. I’m the man of the house, but I also realize that Mom enjoys his company. He plays pinochle with her, listens to the same fish sandwich music she likes—Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald—and she is entitled to some happiness of her own.
That summer, Marky, Freda, and I go to Point Lookout, to Jones Beach. We throw our blankets down, run into the ocean, splash around. I learned to swim at Point Lookout. I had no choice after being thrown in the water by older kids. That’s how we learned: it was either dog-paddle or drown. We’d been going for years, Freda taking Marky and me. And now that we’re older, the three of us still go, only these days she stays sitting on her towel, talking to boys, while Marky and I go clamming or make sand castles. Then I pick up Marky, carry him across the sand, and toss him in the water. He looks terrified, his head bobbing between the swells.
“You got to swim, Marky,” I shout.
He nods, looks serious, but then he’s paddling, keeping his head above the water.
“Keep paddling, keep breathing.” I swim out next to him.
In the summer, Marky’s hair turns almost reddish.
“I’m d-d-doing it, June.”
“Yeah you are, brother, yeah you are.”
Joe would sometimes come with us, and Archie and Al, there’d be a gang of kids all at the beach listening to a transistor radio playing rock and roll—Fats Domino, Chubby Checker, and my favorite, Little Anthony and the Imperials.
I’m on the outside, looking in, oooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Archie and I stand in the breakwater and sometimes talk about our futures together at Hempstead High, about playing JV ball as freshmen next year for coach Ollie Mills and then varsity as sophomores.
Freda is going to be a senior.
“Your sister is fine,” Archie says, admiring Freda on her towel.
“Don’t be looking at my sister,” I warn Archie.
He smiles.
I know Archie would never do anything to anger me, and that includes being disrespectful toward Freda.
And we charge into the water, plunging in and then riding the waves back to the beach.
Later, we play touch football, about a dozen of us, white kids and black kids, and we score hundreds of touchdowns. Marky even scores a few.
We take the bus home from Long Beach, up across Island Park to Rockville Centre where we change for Hempstead. The sun is setting behind us, the early evening light yellow and buttery, warming our necks as the bus makes its rumbling progress. We sleep on the warm seats, our skin sticking to the vinyl, Marky laying his head in Freda’s lap, Archie sitting by the window. I’m dreaming of playing ball this fall. We’re so happy, I’m not even that worried about making it back after seven p.m. Freda is with us and Mom trusts her.
Mom is waiting for us in the kitchen. She’s made a roast, some potatoes. I’m so hungry, I sit down and eat before I shower, with my feet still sandy from the beach.
Usually, Mom would grab me by the ear and lead me to the bathroom if I tried that, but this time, she just sits down, telling us to eat and explaining that she already had her dinner.
“Dan and I are getting married,” she says.
And . . .
“We’re moving.”
Mom explains it in her even, steady voice. She and Dan have seen a place over in Roosevelt, a proper house with three stories. They have made an offer on the property, and they’ve secured the mortgage.
“Roosevelt!” I say. “That’s clear on the other side of the parkway.”
She may as well have said we’re moving to Canada or China. I’ll never see my friends. I’ll have to start a new school—I’ll never be a Hempstead Tiger!
What about Archie? Al Williams? My Salvation Army teammates? We’re supposed to play high school ball together and win our South Shore Division.
Freda also looks forlorn. But I can tell she had seen this coming. She’s more observant than I am, a better listener.
And Marky? Marky seems the least upset.
“As long as we’re all moving, right? It’s not so bad,” he says.
But I shake my head. It’s awful. Roosevelt? That’s on the other side of Uniondale.
That must be three miles away.
I tell Mom I had it all planned out. Playing ball for Hempstead. Being a Tiger.
“Man plans, God laughs,” Mom says to me.
13.
We move into the house at 90 Pleasant Avenue. My mom and stepdad paid $6,000, and each of us kids gets a bedroom. I have an insulated attic room with slanted walls so that I can only stand up in the middle of the room. The house is spacious compared to the projects, but I don’t know anybody in Roosevelt.
We have a proper living room and dining room with a console where the nice silver and crystal is neatly stowed, new wooden table beneath a little chandelier, a separate kitchen through a swinging door, and up the stairs is my mom and Mr. Dan’s room and Marky’s room, and on the top floor is Freda’s and mine.
Down the street from our new house is Centennial Park and we’re a few blocks from Roosevelt Park. The ballplayers down at Centennial don’t know me, and all they talk about is being Rough Riders, that’s the name of the Roosevelt team. I wait by the side of the court for a game, keeping quiet, watching the action. It seems like a higher-level pickup game than those down at Campbell Park in Hempstead. For one thing, there aren’t any girls playing up here. And it’s all brothers. No white guys running in this game.
Still, by now I’ve come to believe that inside those lines, on a basketball court, there is always a spot for me. By now I am sure of this. From years of playing with Don Ryan at the Sal
, and walking into hostile gyms throughout Long Island, I know that the basketball court is the one place where chaos always gives way to order. I try to believe there is an order and logic to life, though by now, with the deaths of Bobby and then my father, with moving from Hempstead, I suspect there is no underlying logic, or none that I can see. There is only the order and structure that I can create, can will into existence, by keeping my room tidy and my clothes neatly folded, and also by finding a basketball court and imposing my will upon that.
I know I can play with these guys the same way I knew I could play for Don. I’m sure I can outrebound most of these guys and get my shot off, but you never know until you play. I ask who’s got next, and a well-built kid in a T-shirt, shorts, and Converse says he does.
“Can I run with you?” I ask.
He shrugs.
But when the game ends and five new players take the court, I step in with them and I do my thing, picking up the rebounds, taking off on the break, and finishing with little flips and spins around the hoop. I’m not the tallest guy out there, but nobody can jump higher than I can, and nobody, on any court, anywhere, can beat me to the ball off the rim.
At one point, coming down the court, the kid who told me he had next passes me the ball in the lane, and there are at least two guys clogging up the middle. There’s no way around them. I jump, thinking I can get enough clearance to lay the ball in over them, but instead I watch them both spring up and then come down, and I’m still . . . rising. Instead of laying the ball in, my hand turns over, and—
I dunk it. A rim-shaking jam, a skill honed from practicing on eight-foot and nine-foot rims.
The game stops. Guys are whooping and hollering.
“Damn, what’s your name?” the kid who passed me the ball asks.
“Julius.”
Dr. J Page 6
