Losing My Cool (8 page)

“What's up, Coach?”

“What's up is that you're coming off the bench today.”

“What? But Coach, this is my hometown. That's embarrassing!”

“I know,” he said. “And that's the point.”

I played less than five minutes that game, while Larry dropped more than twenty points and laughed at me from the court. Scotch Plains won by double digits. I went home in a terrible funk. Pappy, who never could acclimate himself to the idea of a white man dressing down a black boy in public, whatever the reason, wasn't happy when he heard about it. He ordered me to quit and offered to transfer me from Union Catholic to a list of other schools, but to the surprise of us both, I balked at this deal, at the thought of not being around Stacey every day. In this way, I was what Ant called “a terry cloth nigga”—
too
soft. I just couldn't do it. To my shame, I felt the need to stay put, to stay with Stacey at all costs. The truth is that, more than even playing basketball, it was being with Stacey, I felt, that validated me. I couldn't imagine losing that validation for anything. Instead of leaving, I decided to play AAU ball and go to summer camps, hoping that would be enough to get a scholarship to college, even though I knew it almost certainly would not.

One of the camps I attended the summer after quitting the team was run by Bob Hurley, the coach of St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, consistently one of the top-ranked teams in the nation. His was the only school for which I might have been willing to part with Stacey. The difference between the varsity squad at St. Anthony and the one at Union Catholic is the difference between Paris, France, and Paris, Texas—they're not on the same map. All week long at camp I played hard, trying to shine in front of Coach Hurley, whose own son had famously made it to the NBA. I did well in league play, and when Pappy came to the rural campsite to pick me up he introduced himself to the renowned coach, who told him he had noticed me and that I was welcome to work out with his team, the Friars, when school resumed in the fall.

My mother drove me out to St. Anthony twice.What I remember most about the long trek there from Fanwood is the overwhelming stench that sets up shop in your nostrils as soon as you approach the Jersey City exit on the Turnpike. It smells like a little patch of Mexico City has been grafted onto the Garden State and you are waylaid in it. My mother and I rolled up the windows and turned off the highway, creeping through bleak service streets, looking for the gym, which, to our surprise, was smaller and of even more modest construction than the one I had used as a child at Holy Trinity. Inside, though, there was nothing modest about the game that was under way. I spotted Coach Hurley—besides my mother, the only Caucasian in the room—stalking the sidelines, tracking the action with the severest blue eyes in the world.

As I approached, he studied me for a second—piercing through me, it felt like. He was polite, neither friendly nor unfriendly; he greeted my mother and then smiled at me with his mouth but not those eyes. Get loose and link with the other boys on the sideline, who have next, he told me, and then his attention was no longer mine. That is the way a Don looks upon the face of a flunky, I thought and began to stretch. Two or three of the players in the gym I recognized from camp, the rest I hadn't seen before, and one of them I knew by reputation to be Anthony Perry, the star of the team (insofar as there are things like individual stars at a place like St.Anthony), a soon-to-be McDonald's All-American, and one of the best high school players in the country on anybody's list. His team won.

I stepped with my five onto the court and it occurred to me that I was the most conspicuously dressed player in the room, with my patent leather Air Jordans, black Nike socks and matching shorts and shirt—matching everything, Nike everything, from head to toe—and this made me self-conscious. The other boys mostly were dressed in old maroon-and-maize St. Anthony gear and the sneakers they'd been given, which made me think that clothes either were the last thing on their minds or a luxury they couldn't afford, or both. I was running in the off guard position now because the point guard of the team was on my squad. He was this short, thick, almost eggplant-black boy (“blurple” was Stacey's term for the color), with a squarish head. He reminded me of one of the scowling members of Full Force, those bullies Kid 'n Play were always fleeing from in the old
House Party
movies. The boy had declined to speak to me when I introduced myself to him, which didn't especially bother or surprise me; I figured he was just focused—everyone in this gym was so damn focused you got the impression that were they to apply similar effort to, say, the study of medicine, they'd find the cure for cancer or the secret to immortality.

On the first play of the game, my man, who I had inches on, took the ball directly at me, hard, leaned me on my heels, then stepped back for a mid-range jumper. He missed and I boxed him out for the rebound, which was coming directly at us. I assumed I would grab it over him with ease. I kind of half jumped for the ball and, anticipating myself, began to turn my attention toward the other basket and to offense. I had one hand on the ball when suddenly it began to lift itself up. In a flash, I saw the crotch of one of the forwards from the other squad in my face as he hammered the pill back through the net and swung from the rim. “Let's go!” he shouted, and sprinted back on defense, squatting at half-court to slap the ground. I went to get the ball and inbound it to the point guard, who was staring right through me.

“D the fuck up, nigga,” he said as I trotted back behind him.

My team got run off the court that game
.
I managed to get through it without any egregious mistakes. I hit a jump shot, guarded the rock, didn't commit any turnovers. My man scored on me several times, which was a problem, but all in all I didn't feel so bad—you win some and you lose some. I sat down on the sideline thinking about what to do better next run but not displeased, when the point guard with the quadrilateral headpiece walked by. He was still breathing pretty hard, harder than I was. I looked up at him and he looked down at me, and just when I thought he was about to speak, he began to clear his throat, really clearing it out, from somewhere deep down in his esophagus or even deeper. He looked me in the eye and then he spat, emphatically, hawking what turned out to be the single largest gob of phlegm I have ever seen onto the floor beside me. It hit the wood almost with a splash and formed a kind of jiggling, glossy puddle there. What the fuck—does this guy have emphysema or something? I thought. Before I could register a reaction of any sort, though, he turned his back on me. This exchange (
exchange?
no,“exchange” is not the word—complete dismantling is more like it; I think my mother was in the stands) rattled me to the core. In one bold stroke, he had established his territory and annihilated my confidence, snapping that shit in two like a stalk of celery.

The second time I went to St. Anthony, a week or so later, was much easier simply because on a certain level I had stopped caring. I found myself on Perry's squad. At game point, I caught the ball at the top of the key, pump-faked, and drove past my man for a quick pull-up jump shot. In the air, I spotted Perry on the baseline drifting to the basket and dumped the ball down to him with both hands. He caught it and flipped it behind his head for an easy layup. Our team won. Perry pointed at me and nodded and a couple of players gave me dap as we headed to the sideline. One of them took me aside and said: “Yo, you had that shot, son; don't just look to pass, go for yours next time.” I nodded and said I understood.

Sometime after I got back home I told Pappy that I didn't think I needed to go back to St.Anthony. He looked puzzled, but said that was fine—he had meant it when he told me that he didn't care to see another black athlete or entertainer. One thing he wanted to say, though, and something he wanted me to think hard about was what Coach Hurley had told him. “Thomas doesn't have the toughness,” Hurley said. “He isn't from where my boys are from. I could tell that he was out of his element the moment he walked through the door, and so could my boys. My boys are hungry, and Thomas is not.”

That assessment, as much as it stung, was fair. Though my comparative privilege embarrassed me, and I clung to the delusion that I could be just as hard as Hurley's boys if I tried, I knew deep down that I wasn't nearly as tough or as desperate. The truth is that I
wasn't
all that hungry for a life devoted to sports or entertainment when I really thought about it—and Pappy had made it plain from the beginning that I didn't have to be.

Like hip-hop, basketball had simply always been around me: You're black, and you'd better know how to hoop. I was better than average at it. But coming into such close contact with the life-and-death manner in which the boys at St. Anthony approached the game, the frenzied and terrified way they played basketball—a sport at the end of the day—the way they made this game their lives gave me real pause. Even I knew the disheartening math, even I knew that only one or two players—at generous maximum—from that undefeated St. Anthony squad, perhaps the best varsity boys' team in the whole country, would get a shot at a career in the NBA. And what becomes of the rest of them?

That was my junior year, what Pappy called the single most crucial phase of a high school student's life, the moment the SAT moves from abstraction to reality. How you do on this test, Pappy said, more than anything else you can do right now, will determine what kind of life you will be able to lead. I was still trying as hard as ever to keep it real and I continued to play AAU ball and to understand myself mostly through my body, but I also began to suspect that “going for mine” now would need to mean something more than taking open jump shots.

 

 

 

P
eople say that hip-hop is more than just a genre of music—it's a certain bounce in your stride, it's the way you shake hands, it's the ideas that circulate in your head. It's the ideas that don't circulate in your head. A philosopher might say it's a way of
being
in the world. An authority on the subject, like the rapper Nas, says, “It's that street shit, period.”

 

 

 

 

As I exited my senior prom, it was one of Nas's songs, a track titled “Street Dreams” that rattled out of the trunk of my friend's new chrome-rimmed Acura RL, filling the banquet hall's parking lot with a thugged-out adaptation of the Eurythmics classic.That night, in a monsoon wave of Fahrenheit cologne, Cuban-link gold chains, freshly braided cornrows, gravity-defying hair weaves, pastel-colored tuxedos, gator boots, painted-on evening gowns, and six-inch stilettos, several dozen African-American members of the Union Catholic Regional High School class of 1999 hopped into a cavalcade of rented Range Rovers, Mercedes-Benzes, Cadillacs, and BMWs and sped down the Garden State Parkway to a seedy and unassuming strip of beachfront motels in the Seaside Heights section of the Jersey Shore.

There, far from any chaperone's probing eye, I found myself sprawled in a smoke-filled box of a hotel suite, passing back and forth bottles of Hennessy and passionfruit Alizé. Between hot sips of cognac, I could make out classmates gutting Dutch Masters cigars and filling the brown paper shells back up with sticky mounds of Chocolate Thai. Eyelids narrowed into slits as orange-tipped blunts lit the darkness like fireflies on a still summer night. Biggie Smalls's baritone vocals bumped from the stereo, punctuating the charged silence, his lyrics virtually begging us to see life his way:
“The williest/Bitches be the silliest/The more I smoke, the smaller the Phillie gets.”
The sex, like violence, erupted fast and without warning: Kids broke off into twos—and threes—keeping time to some secret rhythm as the beds turned into one big horizontal dance floor. We were enacting scenes straight out of our favorite rap songs:
“Tell your friends to get with my friends and we could be friends, shit we could do this every weekend,”
Puff Daddy boasted on “Big Poppa,” Biggie's paean to group sex, weed-smoking, and general thug living. That was the theme song for our weekend; those guys were our role models. We knew these songs by heart. Stealing glimpses of myself in the mirror was like watching late-night Black Entertainment Television—Medusa-faced Versace sunglasses glaring at me; a gold Jesus-piece medallion swinging back and forth across my chest like a tetherball; and a faceless, honey-toned piece of flesh bouncing up and down,
in flagrante
.It was, as the saying goes, all good.

 

 

 

 

Night had dissolved into early afternoon when I awoke.Takira—in whose arms I was almost certain I had fallen asleep—was no longer lying next to me. The room stank and was deserted except for Charles, who sat at the table in the far corner, smoking a Newport Light and talking to his friend Nate in herky-jerky gestures and rapid-fire sentences.

“Word is born, yo, I had Latitia like:‘What's my name, what's my name!'” he cried, pantomiming the act, grinning wildly.“I think I left her pigeon-toed!” His words trailed off into hiccupping laughter.

Nate, who doled out emotional cues like a miser hands out C-notes, made an expression that could have been interpreted to mean just about anything.“Yeah, I had my way with Candy, too,” he said, his face disappearing behind a plume of minty smoke.

The three of us got dressed and went upstairs to the room where our female classmates were staying. After a couple knocks, the door, its paint peeling in off-white sheets the size of an open fist, swung open to reveal Candy in a Union Catholic phys ed T-shirt and silk headscarf, her bare thighs the color of mahogany. I could see Takira and Latitia in the background, lounging on the two beds. Last night was no dream. We waddled into the room, busting sags so low that with one false step our pants would fall around our ankles. I was hitching size 36 jeans onto a twenty-eight-inch waist.The girls' room looked like a scale model of Tupac's mythical Thug's Paradise: There were half-naked bitches with full black asses prancing around, ashtrays heaping with stubbed-out blunts, discarded fast food wrappers, empty liquor bottles, and, with our presence, a trio of niggas with attitude to spare and deep pockets full of condoms.