Midnight (25 page)

“You gon’ order, man?” one of the players asked me. I looked up at the thirty-something-year-old Boricua waitress stuffed in a tight dress, smiling down on me with her pad in her hand and pencil ready.

“I’ll take the mofongo with chicken,” I ordered and pulled out my twenty dollars and laid it on the table.

“I got the team tonight,” Vega informed me. “Put your money away.”

I held the twenty up toward the smiling waitress and said, “Just add this to your tip.” Vega smiled quick and nodded. “A’ight.” The waitress folded the bill, slid it in between her breasts, and left, smiling, and rushing to place our team’s big order.

Instantly Coach went around the table trying to recall each Brooklyn teen’s name from memory. He messed up right away and called one of our team members Mateo instead of Michael. The guys laughed at his mistakes.

“Who could do better? You niggas don’t even know each other’s names,” Vega challenged. He laughed a little and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Here goes twenty for whoever can call out the names of every team member, no mistakes.”

Two players tried and failed immediately, causing everybody to crack up. Neither one of them knew my name ’cause up until now I never said nothing, never signed nothing. For some reason Vega turned toward me and said, “How ’bout you? Go ahead, give it a shot.”

“Panama Black,” I pointed out first. I remembered his name ’cause he was black like me and wore two gold-framed teeth in the front of his mouth. “Machete,” I called out second, ’cause who’s gonna forget a dude named after a deadly weapon? “Jaguar,” I called out next. I remembered his name because I was always intrigued by people who named themselves after animals. My father named his friends and enemies
after certain animals when telling a story, a technique he learned from Southern Grandfather. Whichever type of animal a guy picked to name himself after, I was sure it told something about his ways and personality. “Braz,” I called out next. I heard him speaking on the pay phone once right before our last basketball meeting started. He was speaking Portuguese and that caught my attention. I wondered whether he was from Angola or Brazil.

I called off all eleven team members’ names easily, ending with my own. “Midnight,” I introduced myself.

I lifted his twenty-dollar bill off the table. A couple of guys clapped two times for me, gave me props. Next thing I know, Vega is telling the player Panama, seated right next to me, to switch seats with him. As the waitress delivered some of the food orders, the new coach sat on my side.

Eventually, Vega said to me quietly, “I see you got it.” I didn’t know what he meant.

“You want your twenty dollars back?” I asked him, figuring he was a sore loser like the cats on my block who fight and bust shots after losing a dice game.

“No. You won it fair and square,” he said. “But let me tell you something,” he said with a slight Spanish accent slipping into his Black English. “Always remember to make me look good. I take dis shit personal.”

I didn’t answer back nothing because I didn’t know what he was talking about. I ate my food quietly and so did he, while the other players’ conversations grew louder and louder.

I watched the sharp cat with the Rolex on the other side of the restaurant signal to Vega. Vega saw the signal then looked toward the restaurant door. Another cat entered the place carrying a bunch of Foot Locker shopping bags.

At one in the morning we were all standing on an outdoor Brooklyn ball court. Vega threw every team member
who complained about playing ball in their dress-up clothes a new pair of shorts and sneakers from the Foot Locker bags.

“Did you niggas think you was on vacation?” he asked the team with a new seriousness. “You don’t ever get something for nothing. It’s time to run it.”

I wasn’t mad. This is around the same time I would normally be hooping it on my own. Now we were divided into two squads.

I went on and played it like I was on St. John’s.

We had 24,989 fewer fans, but I could see the nine well-dressed cats from the dinner spot standing outside the fence, their cars shined up and double-parked, talking among themselves.

When I pulled up to take a jumper, I told myself, “If this one goes in, the light-skinned cat with the Porsche, Rolex, and diamond cuff links is the boss.”

I sank it. It was all net.

Heading home at 2:30
A.M.
, coach and ballplayers on a train, the real hustlers riding in their cars, Vega asked me, “How did you do that?”

“Do what?” I asked him.

“Remember all those names,” he said. I could see my little twenty dollar triumph was still fucking with his head. “Did you know some of the guys before the league started up?” he asked.

“Nah,” I told him.

“Then how did you do it? In the gym, each player only mentioned his name once.” He was staring me down for a real answer.

“I don’t know,” I answered. I wasn’t gonna tell him that I study people, their names and faces, mannerisms and gestures, jewelry and possessions, cuts and bruises. I wasn’t gonna admit that I am a ninja who is always anticipating
an attack. Why should I tell him? Sensei taught me that there is an art to concealing my weapons. I could see now that my mind, my memory, and my observations are weapons too.

Rethinking the moment, maybe I shouldn’t have exposed my weapons to Vega just to win his twenty dollars. Maybe I alerted him and caused him to pay closer attention to me in the future.

My schedule now was tighter than it had ever been before. I realized that being happy about the ten-thousand-dollar wedding commission Umma and I had headed our way was only one level. The next level was the doubling, tripling, and quadrupling of our workload, Umma’s and mine. I spent my days doing several more deliveries than ever before. I was traveling to new, faraway routes like Mount Vernon and even New Rochelle.

I encountered new businesses and new business people. Orders had to be placed, tents rented, painters hired. I even ended up at a midtown Manhattan music store renting band equipment from a request the wedding party made. I had to go deep into Brooklyn to locate the Tambour and Dallooka drums that are specific to the Sudan.

Even our Sunday family days were being consumed with all of us working side by side for that money. Naja was a polite part-time receptionist on the Umma Designs phone. She also was becoming skilled at mixing oils exactly how Umma taught her, and preparing the elixirs for the crystal bottles.

Squeezing in dojo practice, weapons training, basketball practice, and keeping up with homeschool work, it was looking real tight on me spending time with Akemi. But I was thinking about her five or six times every day.

Determined, I doubled up my efforts on Sunday, Monday,
and Tuesday. Even on Wednesday, the day me and her were gonna get together, my feet were moving fast on the pavement early that morning, so that by the time I met up with her, I wouldn’t be focused on unfinished business.

Her eyes slowed me down and softened me. This was our truest form of communication.

Today there was no more winter whip or frost in the air, only a subtle wind. Coats were out and sweaters, hoodies, and long-sleeved T-shirts were in. It was March 21, the first day of spring.

I could see that she also had used her time well. She seemed real relaxed. Her skin and hair glistened. She was wearing a cantaloupe-colored jumper. It was a loose fit, not hugging or riding the curves of her shapely petite body. It looked fashionable but was too short. She had her legs covered with tights colored several psychedelic shades of tangerine, a style only an artist type would find and choose to wear. She had her little feet tucked into a creamsicle-colored pair of Pumas, a color I never seen before, foreign kicks.

Her Vuitton knapsack was riding on her back. The burnt orange leather straps brand new, hadn’t darkened yet.

Her pretty neck was out. No jewels on her hands, and she had only the slightest tip of each of her fingernails painted in a sparkling orange polish with the rest of the nails left natural. Her hair was worn in a stylish side slipknot.

As she watched me finish checking out every detail, she smiled. Then we were both smiling and standing still among the busy New York travelers.

She slid her hand into her one odd-shaped front dress pocket and pulled out her used up, worn Japanese map of the New York subway system. She pointed out, using the tip of her nail, the location she wanted us to travel to today.

Her finger landed on the stop for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. My smile faded away and my mood changed, which she noticed immediately. She slung her knapsack to the front and rifled through it, pulling out another folded paper, handing it to me.

It was a flyer for the Cherry Blossom Festival, a Japanese cultural celebration of the arrival of the first day of spring. The paper boasted Japanese foods, Japanese drummers, and a Japanese Kabuki Theatre group in the Brooklyn park.

I took her map from her and pointed out a different location, Central Park located on Fifty-ninth and Broadway in Manhattan, a park that, from what I knew, every female couldn’t help but love. Taking over, I grabbed her hand and pulled her along. She came easily.

On the train I sat her by the window on the inside of me. She placed her little foot right beside my foot, which looked so much larger than hers in comparison.

My mind drifted from the light and simple, fresh, citrus clean scent of Akemi’s skin to that cold night in the Brooklyn bush at Prospect Park. Clearly, I recalled the image of the bullets rearranging the slow, confident, yet crooked swagger of Gold Star Tafari. The blast brought his bent style to attention before he folded and dropped down.

It was my last memory of what was a gigantic and wondrous park, miles and miles of natural beauty and public peace and privacy that sometimes made it okay to live in Brooklyn. Now there were real reasons why I stayed away from the place.

I had read in a magazine once, while chilling in The Open Mind bookstore, that the police expect and wait for a shooter to return to the scene of a takedown. The author of the article said that the police experts guarantee that guilt will bring every criminal back to the scene of his crime. The writer told a story of a case where a woman was strangled to
death inside her suburban home. After the murder, the police on the case would drive through her residential area daily, just knowing that the guilty person would fit the formula and return to the scene.

One day on a random drive down the victim’s block, a young kid came through zigzagging and popping wheelies on his bicycle. The officer driving the police cruiser waved him over. Casually the kid rode over, smiling and innocent. While he chatted with the cop, he rested his left hand on the roof of the cruiser.

“How come you’re not wearing a bicycle helmet?” the officer asked him.

“ ’Cause I’m good on my bike. Didn’t you see me?” Now the kid extended his arms, balancing himself on his bike, his feet on the pedals, yet standing still. He smiled with great confidence.

“I can even do a somersault on this thing! Watch!” The kid rode off and started showing off his miraculous bike tricks.

The cop gave him the thumbs up and his partner even applauded.

Next, they drove straight off to the lab and had the roof of their cruiser, where the kid had inadvertently placed his hand, dusted for fingerprints.

According to the cops, the lab, and the magazine article, the kid was the killer. The jury convicted him and the judge sentenced him to enough years so that no one would recognize him upon his release. He was a popular junior high schooler. The victim was his teacher, who chose to embarrass and expose him in front of his classmates instead of privately encouraging him to do better. Her constant demands for him to conform and comply with her, irritated his gangster.

He would have got away with it. One stupid error, placing one hand on the roof of the police car, got him caught. I learned from reading the details of that article to never
return to a scene of a takedown. And I didn’t and wouldn’t. It was easy for me though. I didn’t feel no guilt. There was no crime scene, and Gold Star Tafari was no victim.

I realized from living on my Brooklyn block that boys and even men in America expected and allowed strangers and motherfuckers to threaten, and fuck with, and play with their mothers, sisters, and women. They allowed other men to make false promises, to impregnate them, to make them cry and sometimes to even kick, slap, and beat them. Back where I come from we don’t.

Akemi was staring into my face almost nose to nose, eyes to eyes, and lips to lips. She snapped her fingers to break me out of my spell. Softly she said, “Heeey!”

I came back from the hot spot where my anger is stored, and let her capture my attention once again. She wasn’t the only one who showed up for our date with a plan. I had places to take her, things to show her all mapped out in my mind.

A little while later, her orange fingernail tips were pressed against the glass walls on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building. Her eyes were looking down on the whole of New York City. Her face was filled with amazement.

We were 1,500 feet in the air. Still, she stood on her tiptoes. When finally her eyes had surveyed enough, she turned back toward me and flashed a natural smile across her face.

Kneeling down, she unbuckled her knapsack. I thought maybe she would pull out a camera like most of us who weren’t born here would. Instead, she stood up holding a pencil and an unlined index card. Her pencil point was already gliding and sketching out something.

Everyone else up here had cameras—small ones, Kodak disposables, expensive Nikons, various-sized lenses, even zoom lenses. Akemi didn’t seem to care for photography, I thought. She seemed to prefer capturing the details of what
she felt and saw with her handmade, hand-drawn, or hand-painted pictures. I was impressed now that I saw her creating with a pencil her own styled postcards.

Giving her space and time, I stepped back, pulling my book out of my jacket pocket and picking up reading where I left off last.