Midnight (24 page)

It was almost eleven
P.M.
when we 120 ballplayers got out of there. We walked out calmly, no crowd or music or drama like last time. Probably each one of us was still spinning the dollar numbers around in our heads and wondering if it was real or not.

I couldn’t front. Vega didn’t seem like a coach but he got me open with those tickets. I had never been inside Madison Square Garden, although I walked right past it often. Of course I’ve seen it on TV, the world-famous home of the New York Knicks. Back in the Sudan, at my father’s apartment in Khartoum, we watched their games a couple of times on my father’s satellite television. My father even had an autographed ball by old-school point guard Walt Frazier. Now my blood was pumping at the thought of checking out the championship game.

The police were circling the area of the high school gym like sharks waiting for an easy kill. It was a reminder to all us Black youth that we were born suspects. But for once, wasn’t nothing jumping off with us teens. Cliques was regrouped and formed up and all walked off quietly in almost every direction. Tonight I could see that when somebody finally stops playing and starts talking real business opportunity to some young Black men, all that rowdy shit goes right out the window.

We three hung back a minute while everything cleared up. As soon as we went to push off, the girl with the dimples popped up out of the dark, walking swiftly toward us. She waved her hand with excitement.

“Hey, star!” she called out. All of us laughed. As she came into view I saw she had a T-shirt on that said midnight in bold, dark-blue letters across her breasts.

“Where are the rest of your girls?” Ameer asked her right away. She didn’t even look at him when she answered. She just said, “I don’t really be with them like that.” Ameer caught her intent.

“Anyway, I waited so long for you to call me, I got in trouble. I wouldn’t let anyone in my house use the phone. I kept telling them, ‘He’s gonna call. He’s gonna call.’ What happened? Did you lose my number?” she asked, smiling, full of energy and rocking back and forth on her feet like there was no way for her to keep still.

“Nah,” I answered.

“ ‘Nah’ what?” she asked.

“Nah, I didn’t lose your number,” I said.

“All right, superstar,” she said in a joking way. I smiled at her style. She had a nice complexion with smooth skin. Her hair was shining from the gel she used to swirl out her bangs.

“God, you got perfect teeth,” she said, after I smiled. I really didn’t know what to do with her comments. She seemed to say whatever was on her mind. She didn’t give a fuck that my two friends were hearing her every word.

“I’m not gonna worry about it. You’ll call me, I know it,” she said. “I gotta run. I got one minute before my grandmother locks the door on me!” She turned on her Nikes and ran full speed in her denim miniskirt, leaving Ameer and Chris doing double takes.

“I think you need to call her, man,” Ameer said. Him and Chris laughed.

“What y’all think about the money?” Chris asked. “Do you think the winners will really get paid like that brother Tyriq said?”

“Well if they don’t pay out, what the fuck can anybody do about it? The hustlers are the sponsors. Who’s gonna go to war with them?” Ameer asked.

“I think they’ll pay out. I got a feeling about it,” I told them.

“What kind of feeling?” Chris asked.

“You know, we thinking that it’s all about basketball. But they gotta have something riding on it too. Otherwise, why would they do it?”

“Something like what?” Ameer asked.

“It could be anything. You see how they cut the groups into teams and gave every team a color?” I asked.

“So,” Chris said.

“At least in the NBA you know who the fuck you’re working for. Your uniforms got colors, but you know who owns the team, who manages the team, and who you running for. In this league, we can’t see who’s behind it. Tyriq is the front man. But who does he report to?” I tried to get them to look at all the angles.

“If you believe that they’ll pay out to the champions, none of that shit even matters. We running for the money. That’s it,” Ameer said.

“But we all on different teams,” Chris said. “Ameer’s on the red and you on the black. I’m on the green,” he pointed out.

“It don’t matter,” I told Chris. “It just increases our chances of winning. Whichever one of us wins some paper, we cut it three ways, no matter what happens. That’s what up,” I said.

“You right. That is what’s up,” Ameer agreed with me.

“Oh, yeah. I can’t do the date with Homegirl tomorrow
night. My team got tomorrow evening on the schedule. It looks like if y’all still want to do it, I’m a have to do it on a weeknight, maybe a Thursday evening when we ain’t at the dojo.”

“Thursday evening,” Chris repeated. “That’s whack. But we’ll do it. Girls are good on any night!” he said.

At the train station we went our separate ways. On the ride home, I kept breaking the basketball situation into separate puzzle pieces. Ameer was right, it is all about the money. And if I could get my hands on a chunk of money like that, even after we cut it up, I could match Umma’s effort and speed up our move out of Death Valley, Brooklyn, into an even better house in a peaceful and safe place for her and Naja.

At the same time, I kept wondering what exactly the hustlers got out of it. Maybe it was a war over territory battled out on the court. Maybe it was all about ticket sales, concessions, or merchandising. Maybe it was a betting front. Maybe it was just a good-ass distraction from what the fuck was really going on.

After a while, I wondered if I was just thinking too hard. Maybe the hustlers was just some niggas with money to burn, who came up with a main attraction for Brooklyn cats to pile up at while they showcased their whips, jewels, and bitches.

Seemed like half of New York was outside Madison Square Garden trying to get in. The New York City evening air was more cool than cold as spring approached, but some degrees hotter around the Garden where people gathered.

I took careful steps in my Clarks. I didn’t want dog shit smashed into the grooves of my new soles. I didn’t want none of these overeager cats accidentally stepping on my new shoes.

It wasn’t hard to spot Vega. He was rocking a red Kangol and red suede Ballys, black slacks, and a red dress shirt.

The whole team and the coach had fresh cuts, including me. I could smell the scents of coconut oil and Afro Sheen and a strong cologne that I wouldn’t wear cutting through the odors of grime, gum, and piss on the New York pavement. But the bright and colorful lights of Seventh Avenue, the crowd for the Garden, the rest rushing to shop at Macy’s, made us forget any foul smells and made this the place to be. Besides, tonight we weren’t outsiders. We were ticket holders.

Vega greeted each Brooklyn teen in our crew as they arrived with a hand shake and a swift survey of what they was wearing, saying only two words, “Nice, nice.” He pinched the jute and burlap material on my tan dress shirt and said, “I like dat.”

Vega used his eyes to keep a silent head count going.
Every few seconds, he checked his Hamilton watch. When the second hand hit the thirty mark, the last teen showed up. Vega waved for us all to follow his lead.

We ended up where the rest of the Garden crowd wasn’t. We were at the VIP entrance to the Garden, where the college ballplayers were arriving in droves. There was a stream of Syracuse University players, over six feet tall easily, like it wasn’t nothing to it. They climbed down from polished trucks and up out of new whips. We Brooklyn teens was all watching what they was wearing on their bodies and their feet. We even checked the gym bags they carried, some by Nike, by Adidas, Puma, and whatnot. Vega watched us watching them and said casually, “And they say there is no money in college ball, yeah right.”

Three black vans filled with St. John’s players, coaches, and personnel pulled up. These cats poured out of the vans singing, giving each other pounds, waving at the crowd, and giving the small gathering of spectators a show. I liked the way it seemed like those players had a strong camaraderie and spirit, one team, one goal. Dudes from my hood wasn’t like that.

“See what I was telling you? You have to want it. Those niggas right there want it and tonight they gonna take it,” Vega said, getting caught up in their hype.

I never seen so many people packed in one place before. There was mad energy and excitement. Not one seat was empty except when somebody ran to the bathroom. Can’t front, quite naturally I started counting the black faces in this huge crowd. Most of the black faces were actually the ballplayers for Syracuse and St. John’s. Otherwise there were small handfuls of Blacks sprinkled here and there up against a sea of white fans who were pumped up like their lives depended on it. The food vendors began weaving in and out of each of hundreds of rows with their Cokes and franks, peanuts, popcorn, T-shirts, and team flags.

We Brooklyn teens had good seats, not on the floor but close enough to it. The twelve of us plus our coach dominated our row. We remained standing though. We were too excited by the newness of being on the inside. Besides, there was about fifteen girls flaunting their blue-and-orange panties, cheering for their players.

Everything moving caught my eye—the way the players were being introduced over the powerful speaker system, their names and jersey numbers announced with pride, then echoing around the crowd of 25,000 cheering fans. I watched the way each player reacted differently, some soaking up the downpour of admiration, others playing it down, some looking up at themselves as the cameras caught them in a candid close-up and projected their faces onto the mega screen above the scoreboard, some looking anxious to get the game going. I felt that anxiety.

Just the strength of the lights shining down on the flawless triple-polished court, the unripped new white nets, and undented rims, got me amped. I imagined myself down there playing on that court for the love of the game. Maybe my entire team was thinking the same thing. Maybe that’s exactly what Vega wanted us to be thinking. Well, if it was what he wanted, it was a smart plan. And these tickets must have set him back some. I saw scalpers hawking less expensive seats than we had for more than a hundred dollars.

It didn’t matter who any of us was rooting for. Vega was rooting for St. John’s, so if we thought anything different, we better had kept it to ourselves. He watched the game like he had money on it. The drawback was, when the first half was over his team was losing by thirteen points.

“Don’t sleep,” Vega said. “Get ready for the big comeback.” He was talking to each of us, the strangers on his new team, but it was as if his voice was mic’d up to the
ballplayers’ earpieces, ’cause just when he called it out, they burst out with a new setup, new confidence, and an unbreakable fury. For sixteen straight minutes they flipped the pressure on those Syracuse boys, and all hell broke loose when St. John’s player Ron Rowan pulled up and hit a fourteen-foot jumper with only eight seconds remaining in the game, bringing St. John’s to a one-point lead over Syracuse. While everybody went wild, Vega stood cool, chanting, “Eight seconds, eight seconds, it ain’t over, keep the pressure on, defense, defense!”

Syracuse player Dwayne Washington must’ve felt the same about the remaining eight seconds and the possibilities it left open. Washington drove to the basket with only three seconds left and was so sure his shot was on the money, he started celebrating before his feet touched the polished floor.

Just when him and his Syracuse boys thought they had it hemmed, St. John’s player Walter Berry unveiled his wingspan and blocked the shot. The buzzer sounded. St. John’s took it, the Big Eastern Championship, 70 to 69!

While our section of the Garden cheered and jumped and bumped one another, I stood still, thinking, Here is one thing that I’m real good at. This game is completely legal. And, everywhere in America, the whole country thinks it’s okay for a young man to play ball. You can’t get arrested for it. You can get paid and win props. You can get into a position to buy your moms a house, no problem, and save the family you love, while doing something that you love to do.

Vega told us to hang back while the crowd spilled out into the aisles, into the corridors and out of the building.

Soon enough, we were on the train together heading further uptown to get something to eat at a venue Vega chose. On the train each of us remained standing once again, leaving the seats for the other tired passengers. I don’t think any
one of the thirteen of us was scheming on any of the riders that night. We were all just thinking, hoping, dreaming that this night would work out in our favor and eventually put some paper in our pockets.

Our late-night dinner was at a spot on 175th Street and Broadway named Malecon’s. Whole chickens were roasting in their wide windows. The streets surrounding the place were lit up now at 11:10
P.M.
, same as if it was early evening. The streets were packed with youth, adults, and even babies being pushed in carriages. Inside, the restaurant was popping. Almost completely filled, there was still a line of people, plus more arriving to begin ordering dinner at this late hour.

Our table must have been reserved, I thought. There was six small tables pushed together, six chairs on each side and one at the head. I took the corner chair by the side window. Almost immediately I noticed that same buttermilk Porsche with the buttercream leather interior and the gold piping. It was parked on the side block.

Brooklyn heads were pressed against Manhattan menus. Only a couple of them tried to find out from Vega what some of the Spanish words on the menu meant so they could get their food orders right.

Not focusing on the menu, I was scanning the restaurant. My eyes landed on one group of nine well-dressed young cats, probably in their twenties or late twenties. I could tell each of them had a different status by the quality of their jewels and clothing. Only one of them wore a Rolex. He was rocking a twenty-four-karat gold, thirty-six-inch chain with a unique piece, a solid-gold baby shoe. I realized immediately I had seen it once before. He was a top-quality cat. He was definitely the only one in the restaurant wearing a cashmere dress shirt and diamond cuff links. I glanced down at his Gucci suede driving shoes. “Top grade,” I thought to myself.