God's Gym (19 page)

All of us understand it's just a matter of time. Sooner or later, in one way or another, everybody goes down. Each player extends a little unspoken blip of gratitude toward the one whose time to fall has come, thanks him for taking a turn so it's not anybody else's turn. Since the truth is somebody's always falling and the other truth is it's got to be one of us, deep down we admit to ourselves, Better him than me. The final truth—we're glad it's him. Other emotions primped up on our faces are mostly bullshit to cover up what's in the gut pit where the real deal lives.

I drop my eyes from the mile-high, exposed steel underwear of this domed, multisport, mega-event palace and mirror the face on the tallest head, the head belonging to Norman Oakes, our gentle big man. Remember the Jolly Green Giant in the frozen vegetable ads. Well, Norman Oakes's not bright green like him, but he's huge, goofy-looking, deep-voiced, and comical like the Giant. Norman no color really, he goes from pale as a ghost to pinkish to red to a gray dingy as bedsheets in crummy hotels where they used to stick us my first seasons in the league. Not white, not broccoli green, no permanent shade, even though he tries his best to go for black.

Norman's all flustered by a shit-eating grin he can't wipe off his big mug. Seven-foot-two and probably still growing, a soft, dumb-ox, flummoxy, country-looking white boy who can't hold back the grin anybody with half a brain and a smidgen of common sense would know better than to be grinning at a time like this.

He dresses in black. With lots of metal, lots of tattoos. They call it Gothic. To me it's plain ole Nazi. Owns the biggest carcass in the league but wilts (no disrespect to you, Mr. Chamberlain, the old original Goliath) if a black player of any size or color barks at him. Now, we got some large, surly, charcoal-broiled black brothers in this league and a few of these hard-legs put the fear of God in anybody, including yours truly, but plenty light-in-the-ass, light-complected, roadrunner-type black dudes too. Guess our Norman's like an elephant. Large as your average elephant grows, it still gets squirmy, worrying about little creatures scurrying and scampering in and out of the shadows at its feet. Or maybe since he's so blond and pale, Norman believes people can look right through his skin, figures maybe they see his sneaky mean streak, his evil thoughts, see through tons of pink meat and peep the hole card of his scaredy-cat heart.

Anyway, on the night Archie doesn't make it off the floor till they slide him onto a gurney, crank it up, and roll my man out the swinging doors, I take a cue from Norman's uncolored face looming half a head higher than just about everybody else's in the circle. With Archie laid out and still ain't twitched a muscle and the awful thought cruising our minds that he might not ever move except in a wheelchair, Norman's face does its best imitation of very serious, very unsuccessfully cause he can't hide the fact he's about to crack up. Something tickling the fool, no doubt about it. You know, like a big, scrubbed boy in the vestibule of a church, surrounded by his little-bitty mom and a posse of proper blue-haired old biddies and he's trying to act all nice while inside his balloon head he's jerking off or giggling at some nasty joke. Norman's lips quiver, he sucks in his peach-fuzzed cheeks, shyly lowers his gaze, covers his mouth with a ham-sized hand. None of it's working. Any second the clown will bust out laughing.

I chose Norman Oakes's face. Call up a wild story with no business being here, something dumb and raunchy I should be ashamed of thinking at a time like this, dissing Archie's danger,
dissing myself and the rest of the players around me who make faces, make believe they know which face fits when one of us goes down and the game stops and may be over for good for the one down.

Why not. Any look right as anyone else's. I don't pick it exactly. It picks me. Like the blues picks me certain days. A look on my face to get me through the blank space till play resumes. Because the game always resumes, doesn't it. We count on it. Isn't that why we bop till we drop.

Bopping till you drop's what they pay you for when you play major league for major bucks. Always on the road. One city fades into the next and you stop asking Where we headed next cause you're already there. But hey, fans think major leaguers got a lot going for themselves. And in a way we do. Money, yeah, and youth for a minute, talent, a small bit of fame, or publicity at least, enough so people are aware, some people anyway, aware when we hit town, aware we bring money to burn, exotic ways, quick hands, lean muscles, our burning, restless eyes. Why wouldn't city after city spread its legs for us. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's what being on the road means. The city opens doors never open for nobody not on the road. Doors marked
Black git back.
Doors so the city can sneak out and act a fool. Get juke-joint happy. Hucklebuck, drink moonshine, tell lies, and crawl up under our large, sweaty bodies. Like those old down-home tunes people hear a thousand times, just got to hear one more once again, we are welcome as a known quantity and as a mystery. An unbeatable combination whether the home team kicks our ass or we kick theirs.

People pay good money to watch us. Love us because we prove they are not alone. Maybe the game's main attraction. For fans. For us. Proving we are not alone. Proving the city's real. Must be a city outside the arena. Where else would the crowd come from. Where else would fans return after a game. Has to be a city to house all the unlucky people too poor to buy tickets.
Fans read scores, catch highlights on TV of games played in faraway cities. We prove a whole, big, fabulous country's out there, stretching from coast to coast, its cities glittering beads we string together, a country pitch dark until our long fingers hit a light switch and everything's bright and comfy as a suite in a high-class hotel.

Even if you're home alone, checking out a game on the tube, you're safe and connected like people on those cell phones every man, woman, and baby got to have nowadays to show there's somebody somewhere takes their calls, and shit it might be Michael Jordan or Ms. Universe on the other end of the line for all you know, sucker, their faces say when you pass people talking to themselves on the street.

Depending on the hour of our flight, a city slides into view peekaboo through layers of clouds and smog or it swims in blackness ten million quilts of light can't cover. On the ground we're shuttle-bused from airport to hotel to playing site, the city a maze of expressways, boulevards, avenues, streets with familiar names, same names we've read elsewhere on signs drivers followed to wind up in the same place these different signs with the same names will lead us tonight. Here we go again, time to go to work again. We learn to nap and drowse our way through cities, their presence faint as however many ticks of our Rolexes, however many ticks of our hearts required to count down the space separating us from the moment a referee blows a whistle and summons both teams for the tip-off at center court. Once I woke up sitting half naked on a bench in front of an open locker and no clue whether I should be putting on clothes or taking them off.

Some nights you hope the game will last forever. Or wish it had never started so you won't have to deal with it stopping. Back in the day, the thrill of playing made you wish games would never end. Your youngblood fear and cockiness a high-octane, adrenaline rush only playing burns off. Hungry for the
next game before the one you're playing's over. Always worried you won't get enough game. Then one day your beat-up body's begging for shortcuts, not more game, would phone ahead and cancel games if it could. Though your body whines and wags its nappy head,
huh-uh, no-no,
still some nights you don't want the game to be over. Wanting to play, wanting to be a star's got nothing to do with the feeling. What's up is fear. Maybe tonight your night to go down or, worse, your night to step off the court, out the arena's back gate, and fall, falling and falling, no sidewalk, no sparkling city out there under your feet.

On such a night Satterwhite, Archie Satterwhite,
the
Archie Satterwhite, the last player as usual left in the locker room besides me, tries one more time. Archie's my main man, we've been through it all together, so he tries to convince me one more time. Not tonight, Sat, I ain't hanging out tonight. Tired, man. My heart's not in it. You go on ahead without me, Sat.
Sat
an old nickname hardly anybody uses anymore. Nobody's allowed to use it except us few old heads who remember Sat's short for Sat-the-Bench, the teasing name tagging Archie his rookie year when an aging white hope kept Sat sitting instead of playing. No way Sat could hope to win the veteran's spot by virtue of talent, hard work, pure, unadulterated superiority in every facet of the game. So Sat sat the bench night after night till the white dude went down, and Sat an all-star every season since. Should have been all-league his first season except the sportswriters gave it to White Hope for old times' sake.

Sat hollers over his shoulder, What you mean you ain't hanging, man. Thanks, man. Thanks a fuck of a lot. What I'm spozed to do with two bitches.

Do these ladies have names.

Don't go getting cute now. Course the hoes got names. Lena and Rena.

Last names.

You hanging or not, man. Got no time to be messing wit
you. Told you it's Lena and Rena. Sisters. Or go for sisters. Or cousins. How the fuck am I spozed to know. Jackson. Johnson. Jefferson. Take your pick. Since when you been so particular about names. Take your pick.

Bet you already picked the fine one. Left me the bow-legged, wall-eyed little sister.

You know Sat wouldn't do nothing like that to his bro. Both ladies fine as wine.

Not tonight, Sat. I'm tired. Got a letter to write. Some reading I've been trying to get to.

Reading. I'm worried about you, blood. Reading. Letters. Shit. The night still young. Ladies all fired up. You getting old on me, man.

Instead of answering I stare at my feet. Think how strange they look in street shoes. Wonder why I bother with street shoes just to walk to the bus. Hear the locker room door wheeze open. Sat hovers an extra beat or two, giving me another chance.

Who's the one getting old, Sat. Once upon a time when you a young man, two ladies wouldn't have presented no problem to the Great Mr. Satterwhite.

After he slams the locker room door, after Archie Satterwhite crashes to the hardwood floor, after I toss and turn for hours too busted-up and road-weary to sleep and decide this season's my last go round the league, before I inch the final mile of waking up, I'm standing in a crowd alongside a freshly dug grave. A body wrapped in rags lies on a plank next to a deep hole in what I take to be red Mississippi clay. A gaping pit, blacker and blacker if you dare peep over the crusty edge, down, down into never-ending darkness. The people around me are Africans, brown men, women, children, a gang of strangers who are also, if I look closely at any one of the sad faces, a teammate or a person I've known my whole life. No one's lips move, but I hear a loud humming like millions and millions of bees or locusts whirring in the woods behind my grandfather's
house in the country, where I used to be sent summer weekends to keep me out of city trouble. Or maybe the music plays only inside my skull like the goddamn tinnitis plaguing me. No sign the others beside the grave hear what I hear. But how can you ever know what somebody else is hearing or thinking. All you can do is ask, and if the other person bothers to answer, why would you believe he'd tell the truth. So I don't ask. Anyway, if these other people are Africans, and somehow I'm sure they are, how would they understand my question. What language, whose language, should we speak here, wherever
here
is. Wherever this impossible shit happens and drags in more strange stuff. I'm not in charge. This space belongs to someone older, smarter. Maybe the ancient, crippled-up grandfather of my grandfather. Babysitting that old, old man my grandpa's job when he was a boy in South Carolina. Watching his grandfather sleep, listening to his grandfather's stories, feeding him, tending his slop bucket. Maybe I'm listening to my great-great-grandfather remember a secret gathering of slaves in the woods, slaves in a circle chanting, returning one of their own to Africa or a place even more distant and older than Africa, an unnamable, desirable place none of us huddling around the grave will ever reach alive.

I'm changing. Happy to change, though I'm not sure why I'm happy about becoming a slave. Soon I'll remember my tribal name, the name of the dead traveler. I'll be able to pick out members of my clan from the crowd, speak to them. If none of my kin survived the raid on our village, the long, forced march in chains, the nightmare voyage across oceans, I'll begin here and now to fashion a new family. New flesh, bodies linked to mine, determined to soldier on with me in spite of how much we've been hurt, how much we've lost. Soon, soon, a pair of eyes set in one of these brown faces will catch a glint of light, fix me in a kinsman's all-seeing, welcoming smile. Or perhaps I'm the one who's on the ground, giving it up, my warm skin cooling, at last, at last, in the bundle of rags and the humming background noise an arena slowly drained of all its scurrying, scrambling occupants, the busy traffic of thousands of feet fleeing in many directions that is really the same direction, away, away, a termite mound emptying, like my body emptying, leaving me behind. Everybody gone and me left behind. Or everybody left behind and me gone. It could be happening. Must happen one day.

Goody-bye, goody-bye.
What I read Africans used to say to spirits coming or going. What they chanted to send one of themselves back across the water with letters from survivors not quite ready to return. Africans flying home, Africans floating, skywalking and skyrunning the air of Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas.
Goody-bye, goody-bye.
Africans shape-shifting from one skin to another. Faster than the speed of light. I read that the message-bearer who's called home, sent home, must be silent. Only silence has room for the humming I'm hearing, room for cannons booming, flames roaring, room for the screams of the murdered, wailing of captives, room, room, and still more room to drown our sorrow while we circle this grave and still more room for messages we send to the other side. Room for a freshly fallen body and our weary bodies, room for words we're not ashamed to load on the dead's shoulders, the shoulders of the unborn, greetings, wishes, confessions we hope they will not be ashamed to repeat. An ocean of silence, untroubled, unmarked, lost-and-found room for everything, no matter how much noise, how many burdens we shovel into the hole.