God's Gym (10 page)

To top off the plan, he'd prepay a double funeral. Ride off with his daddy in a horse-drawn black hearse. A glorious New Orleans goodbye parade winding through the streets of Homewood. The Pittsburgh Rockets Drum and Bugle Corps leading the march. Shiny trumpets and tubas. Umpah-umpah. Ratta-tat-tat-tat. Tease of jive and boogie in their mournful playing, their precise highstepping. Barbequed kielbasa with red-hot sauce. Coolers full of icy Iron City. Hmmm. Oh, didn't we ramble, Daddy. Oh, didn't we.

You never know, do you.

The big-eared, retro phone smirks at him. So much ado about nothing. No opportunity, after all, to play God. Game called on account of rain. The coy old AME Zion deity working in his own good time his wonders to perform.

At the hospital, not counting his father, three of them in the room when a nurse breezes in to brief the family. Very sound reasons not to count his father, but how could you ever be sure. Introducing himself as Clarence, folks, the nurse flashes a silver-starred front tooth. In six months, if he lives that long, will his eyes still be able to read the tattoo on the nurse's hairy forearm. A posse of needles, tubes, gauges, pumps, suction, drips protects the bed. Virtual life puttering on forever in printouts, on screens, in beeping monitors, whether or not a glimmer of vitality in his father's eyes.

Of course, even now, at his dad's direst moment, at this sad, affecting denouement, the son flies elsewhere, faster than the speed of light, father forgotten, son dreaming ahead to what it will be like at his own miserable countdown. Shit, he's thinking. Shit. What's the point. What's the horseshit stinking point.

The nurse updates them.

We can't get Mr. Wideman to eat. Goes on to explain why it's important for patients to eat. Explains that patients die if we don't manage to start them eating post-op. Explains the options, mouthwise or IVs, folks, and how the mouthwise method is much preferred by doctors, staff, studies, you know. And next thing I know, after Lil Sis's husband and I crank up the bed, I'm standing beside my father waving a spoonful of vanilla ice cream (go figure) I'm supposed to coax, wheedle, beg, sneak, lever, ram down his throat. I try to steady my shaky hand. Inch the spoon closer, closer to cracked lips the exact shape and color of mine, lips I swam through like a fish when I was birthed a second time
John Edgar, John
my dead mother's dead father's name,
Edgar
my father's, both names chosen by my mother to bind me to the men she'd loved most in the world.
Entitles,
my South Carolina grandfather would have called the names my father whispered to Reverend Felder and the good reverend's bass intoned loudly to family and friends gathered around the baptismal font of Homewood AME Zion.

And dead as he is, as I am for all intents and purposes, I find myself touching my father's mouth, prying open a space between what dwells outside him and all that's indwelling, and then into the passage propped open by thumb and finger I attempt to slip a spoon, ease a spoon, pray a spoon the way I'd heard my mother on her knees pray, the entire congregation of Homewood AME Zion pray and chant Sunday mornings to a God I never could love, not even then, long ago when I was a boy, only fear, only address when I desired something very badly I knew I wasn't going to get anyway so why not ask, why not believe a different life possible, joining the other fives I daydreamed daily. Lives not in my father's house nor my mother's bosom nor God's bosom nor the streets of Homewood. Made-up lives like this one I try to save holding open my father's mouth.

His teeth chatter, his jaw twitches as uneven surges of air enter and leave. Losing most of the load maneuvering the spoon through a broken fence of snags anchored in corpse-foul gums, I keep Lil Sis busy wiping vanilla drool from our daddy's chin as I ladle what I can into him, down him, and nothing, nothing else matters.

The native American rubber-ball game played on a masonry court has intrigued scholars of ancient history since the Spaniards redefined the societal underpinnings of the New World.

—Scarborough and Wilcox,
The Mesoamerican Ballgame

T
HE SEMINAR ROOM
was packed.
Packed
as in crowded,
packed
as in a packed Supreme Court,
packed
as in a fresh-meat inmate getting his shit packed by booty bandits. In other words, the matter being investigated, "Who Invented the Jump Shot," (a) has drawn an overflow crowd of academics, (b) the fix is in, (c) I'm about to be cornholed without giving permission.

The tide of the session let the cat out the bag. It advertised two false assumptions—that at some particular moment in time the jump shot had appeared, new and fully formed as Athena popping from the thigh of Zeus, and that a single individual deserved credit as inventor. "Who Invented the Jump Shot" will be a pissing contest. And guess who will win. Not my perpetually outnumbered, outvoted, outgunned side. Huh-uh. No way. My noncolored colleagues will claim one of their own, a white college kid on such and such a night, in such and such an obscure arena, proved by such and such musty, dusty documents, launched the first jump shot. Then they'll turn the session into a coming-out party for the scholar who invents the inventor. Same ole, same ole aggression, arrogance, and conspicuous consumption. By the end of the seminar's two hours they'll own the jump shot, unimpeachable experts on its birth, development, and death. Rewriting history, planting their flag on a chunk of territory because no native's around to holler, Stop, thief.

And here I sit, a colored co-conspirator in my lime-colored plastic contour chair, my transportation, food, and lodging complimentary, waiting for an answer to a question nobody with good sense would ask in the first place. Even though I've fired up more jumpers than all the members of the Association for the Study of Popular Culture combined, do you think anybody on the planning committee bothered to solicit my opinion on the shot's origins. With their linear, lock-step sense of time, their solipsism and bonehead priorities, no wonder these suckers can't dance.

Let's quietly exit from this crowded hall in a mega-conference center in Minneapolis and seek the origins of the jump shot elsewhere, in the darkness where my lost tribe wanders still.

Imagine the cramped interior of an automobile, a make and model extant in 1927, since that's the year we're touching down, on a snowy night inside, let's say, a Studebaker sedan humping down a highway, a car packed with the bodies of five large Negroes and a smallish driver whose pale, hairy-knuckled fingers grip the steering wheel. It's January 27, 1927, to be exact, and we're on our way from Chicago to Hinckley, Illinois, population 3,600, a town white as Ivory Snow, to play a basketball game against Hinckley's best for money.

Though he's not an athlete, the driver wears a basketball uniform under his shirt, you know, the way some men who are not women sport a bra and panties under their clothes, just in case. In any case, even if pressed into playing because the referee fouls out one of us, the driver's all business, not a player. A wannabe big-time wheeler-dealer but so far no big deal. Now he's got a better idea. He's noticed how much money white people will pay to see Negroes do what white people can't or won't or shouldn't but always wanted to do, especially after they see Negroes doing it. Big money in the pot at the end of that rainbow. Those old-time minstrel shows and medicine shows a goldmine and now black-faced hoofers and crooners starring in clubs downtown. Why not ball games. Step right up, ladies and gents. Watch Jimbo Crow fly. Up, up, and away with the greatest of ease. Barnstorming masters of thin air and striptease, of flim and flam and biff-bam-thank-you-mammy jamming.

Not the world-renowned Globies quite yet, and the jump shot not the killer weapon it will be one day, but we're on our way. Gotta start somewhere, so Mr. Abe the driver has rounded up a motley squad and the Globies' first tour has commenced humbly, if not exactly in obscurity, since we headed for Hinckley in daylight, or rather the dregs of daylight you get on overcast afternoons in gray, lakeside Chicago, 3:30
P.M.
the time on somebody's watch when Pascal Rucker, the last pickup, grunts and fusses and stuffs his pivot man's bulk into the Studebaker's back seat and we're off.

Soon a flying highway bug
splat
invents the windshield. The driver's happy. Open road far as the eye can see. He whistles chorus after identical chorus, optimistically mangling a riff from a herky-jerky Satchmo jump. The driver believes in daylight. Believes in signing on the bottom line. Believes in the two-lane, rod-straight road, his sturdy automobile. He believes he'll put miles between Chicago and us before dark. Deliver his cargo to Hinckley on schedule. Mercifully, the whistling stops when giant white flakes begin to pummel us soundlessly. Shit, he mutters, shit, shit, then snorts, then announces, No sweat, boys. I'll get us to Hinckley. No sweat. Tarzan Smith twists round from the front seat, rolls his lemur eyes at me,
Right,
and I roll my eyes back at him,
Right.

The Studebaker's hot engine strains through a colder than cold night. Occasional arrhythmic
ftutter-fluups
interrupt the
motor's drone, like the barely detectable but fatal heart murmurs of certain athletes, usually long, lean Americans of African descent who will suddenly expire young, seemingly healthy in the prime of their careers, a half-century later.
Fluups
worrying the driver, who knows the car's seriously overloaded. Should he pull over and let it rest. Hell, no, lunkhead. Just let it idle a while on the shoulder. Cut off the goddamn motor and who knows if it'll start up again. The driver imagines the earful of them marooned, popsicles stuck together till spring thaws this wilderness between Chicago and Hinckley. Slows to a creepy crawl. Can't run, can't hide. An easy target for the storm. It pounces, cuffs them from side to side of the highway, pisses great, sweeping sheets of snow spattering against the tin roof. How will he hear the next
fluup.
His head aches from listening. Each mile becomes minutes and minutes hours and hours stretch into an interminable wait between one
fluup
and the next. Did he hear the last one or imagine it.
lifluup's
the sound of doom, does he really want to hear it again.

Some ungenerous people might suggest the anxious person hunched over the steering wheel obsesses on
fluups
to distract himself from the claustrophobia and scotophobia he can't help experiencing when he's the only white man stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere with these colored guys he gets along with very well most of the time. C'mon. Give the driver a break. He rides, eats, drinks with them. To save money he'll sleep in the same room, the same bed, for Chrissakes, with one of them tonight. He'll be run out of godforsaken little midwestern towns with the players after they thump the locals too soundly. Nearly lynched when Foster grins back at a white woman's lingering Chessy-cat grin. Why question the driver's motives. Give the man the benefit of the doubt. Who are you, anyway, to cast the first brick.

Who handed you a striped shirt and whistle. In the driver's shoes—one cramping his toes, the other gingerly tapping the
accelerator—you'd listen too. Everybody crazy enough to be out on the road tonight driving way too fast. As if pedal to the metal they can outrun weather, outrun accidents. You listen because you want to stay alive.

Or try to listen, try to stay alert in the drowsy heat of the car's interior, your interior hot and steamy too, anticipating a rear-end assault from some bootlegger's rattling, snub-nosed truck. Does he dare stomp harder on the gas. Can't see shit. The windshield ice-coated except for a semiclear, half-moon patch more or less the size of his soon-to-be roommate Smith's long bare foot. The driver leans forward, close enough to kiss the glass. Like looking at the world through the slot of one of those deep-sea diving helmets. Squinting to thread the car through the storm's needle eye makes his headache worse. Do his players believe he can see where he's going. Do they care. Two guys in the front seat trade choruses of snores. Is anybody paying attention. Blind as he is peering through snow-gritty glass, he might as well relax, swivel around, strike up a conversation if somebody's awake in the back.

It's fair to ask why, first thing, I'm inside the driver's head. Didn't we start out by fleeing a conference hall packed with heads like his. A earful of bloods and look whose brains I pick to pick. Is my own gray matter hopelessly whitewashed. Isn't the whole point of writing to escape what people not me think of me. In my defense I'll say it's too easy to feel what the players feel. Been there, done that. Too easy, too predictable. Of course not all players alike. Each one different from the other as each is different from the driver. But crammed in the Studebaker with someone not one of them at the wheel, players share a kind of culture, cause when you get right down to it, the shit's out of your hands, anybody's hands, ain't nowhere to go but where you're going so kick back and enjoy the ride. Or ignore the ride. Hibernate in your body, your good, strong, hungry player's body. Eat yourself during the long ride. Nourish your muscle
with muscle, fat with fat, cannibalizing yourself to survive. Cause when the cargo door bangs open you better be ready to explode out the door. Save yourself. Hunker down. Body a chain and comfort. Body can be hurt, broken, disappear as smoke up a chimney, but because we're in this together, there's a temporary sense of belonging, of solidarity and weight while we anticipate the action we know is coming. Huge white flakes tumbling down outside, but you crouch warm inside your body's den, inside this cave of others like you who dream of winning or losing, of being a star or a chump, inventing futures that drift through your mind, changing your weatherscape, tossing and turning you in the busy land of an exile's sleep. If it ain't one thing it's another, raging outside the window, my brothers. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Whatever I pretend to be, I'm also one of them. One of us riding in our ancient, portable villages. Who's afraid of insane traffic, of howling plains, howling savages.
Howling. Savages.
Whoa. Where did those words come from. Who invented them. Treacherously, the enemy's narrative insinuates itself. Takes over before you realize what's going on. Howling savages. It's easy to stray. Backslide. Recycle incriminating words as if you believe the charges they contain. Found again. Lost again.
Howling savages.
Once you learn a language, do you speak it or does it speak you. Who comes out of your mouth when you use another's tongue. As I pleaded above, the mystery, the temptation to be other than I am disciplines me. Playing the role of a character I am not, and in most circumstances would not wish to be, renders me hyperalert. Pumps me up, and maybe I'm most myself not playing myself.