I'm Down: A Memoir (13 page)

Everywhere I looked huge majestic dark bodies jumped and sped through practice with perfect skill and grace, chests out, legs pumping. I was witnessing physical excellence for the first time—gods in training. I was totally fucked.

And then I saw Zwena. Zwena was like this wonderful oddity on the team. I spotted her loping on the other side of the field wearing her glasses with an elastic head strap and carrying an inhaler in her shorts pocket. She ignored all the coaches yelling and smiled as she remained completely in her own world, oblivious of the people dashing by her and the fact that we were supposed to be competitive. There was hope.

______

The ages on the team ranged from seven to seventeen so I was put with the younger kids because I was nine. The few older kids, from what I could tell, were stars and got their own personal workout from the coach. Not that we didn’t all share the same track, which meant if one of these stars was coming up behind you, they had the right of way. The muscular person moving at the speed of sound always has the right of way.

After school I immediately left my new school friends who were really starting to like me, and took a bus to a field full of neighborhood kids who would jump on my dead body if they thought it would add spring to their high jump. I know that because I slowed once on the track and didn’t move out of the way quick enough for twelve-year-old Jada to lap me. She body-slammed me to the ground and then, angry that her stride had been broken, pointed to her spikes and saying, “Next time, I’ll stomp your face and not think twice about it.”

Running at CDAC also seemed to have some weird association to a man named Jesse Owens. Jesse Owens was the meet we sponsored and the guy on the medals. Zwena didn’t know who he was, but I thought we might be his team. We both had the sense not to ask the coach who Jesse Owens was. My coach was a six-foot-three bulldog with a whistle. And I worried if I asked him who Jesse Owens was, he’d say, “You’re on his team, dummy!” Then he would call Jesse Owens over and Jesse Owens would karate chop me in the neck. Or worse, kick me off the team, which I would have no way of explaining to Dad.

One night, Dad came to watch the last half of my workout. I had really tried to hold my own on the field so he would be happy, and as we left practice I was truly exhausted. We got in the car and were at least five blocks from the track. “Dad, who is Jesse Owens?”

Dad looked at me quizzically and said, “I never told you the
Jesse Owens story?” Then he scratched his chin, “Okay,” he said. “Jesse Owens was a black man who won the Olympics, but he took a lot of shit for being black. I mean a lot of shit.”

I tried to imagine what that looked like. I said, “Did people throw rocks at him?”

“Well,” Dad said. “I don’t know all that, but he had to eat at different restaurants than the other folks on the team, and he couldn’t do all the stuff white athletes did. And he really pissed off Hitler.”

I was confused. “I thought Hitler hated Jews.”

Dad said, “Oh, he hated black people, too, a lot. Hitler hated all people who were different. And when Jesse Owens won all the Olympic races, it was in Germany, and Hitler got so mad he went off.”

“That must have been scary,” I said. “I mean Hitler is already scary. Was Jesse Owens afraid that Hitler would kill him in an oven?”

By now, my father had zoned out and he muttered, “Definitely.”

I looked at Dad proudly. I bet Kirsten’s father “the professor” didn’t know as much as Dad did about Jesse Owens. I was always amazed how much he knew about social injustice. I remembered when we had Dad’s friend Carl living with us for a while, who I hated until Dad explained to me that I didn’t know what it was like to be black and out of work. Then Carl stole our TV, but Dad didn’t get mad, he just said, “If Carl took that beat-up old TV, the joke’s, on him.”

I looked at the road and noticed we were driving past the turnoff for the house. “Dad, where are we going?”

He snapped back to attention and said, “Oh. We gotta get your sister from rehearsal.”

“What rehearsal?” I asked.

Dad looked at me like I was retarded. “The Sweet Beats.”

I didn’t realize we were taking them that seriously.

I had a lot of homework, plus we had seating tests for orchestra the next day, so I had to practice my violin. I asked Dad, “Dad can you just drop me home? It’s pretty much on the way and I have a lot of work for school.”

“You can hang out for a little bit. We have to support your sister’s endeavors, too.”

When we got to Maybelline’s house, I saw Reggie Dee’s car parked out front—so he was really managing them. Maybelline’s mom, Candy, was at work. We walked in to find the Sweet Beats hard at work in the little TV room while Maybelline’s socially awkward older half-brother, Carlos, holed up in his bedroom in silent protest. Reggie was sitting on the couch with a beer half watching the girls, who were in front of a mirror doing a dance routine that involved twirling an invisible hula hoop to Salt-N-Pepa.

I watched for a minute, trying to understand if there was some sort of order to what they were doing, but there didn’t appear to be any real throughline. Anora would do the running man, and Maybelline would follow. Then Maybelline would shake her butt and Anora would copy her. It was like dance class in the amnesia ward. I turned to see what Dad thought of all this, but he already had a beer open and was stretched out on the couch next to Reggie, like he lived there. The song ended and Maybelline asked, “What now, Uncle Reggie?”

Reggie looked up from the conversation he was having with Dad about the Raiders defensive line and said, “Um . . . just do it again.”

Two hours later, we were still there. Sweet Beats practice had dissolved into Anora and Maybelline in Maybelline’s room playing with her hair stuff. And Dad and Reggie were still on
the couch, only now the game was on. Candy, Maybelline’s mom, was nowhere in sight and I was nowhere closer to getting my homework done or learning the stuff I was supposed to learn on my violin for seat assignments for orchestra.

“Dad . . . ,” I asked. “Are we close to leaving?”

I used my quiet voice, hoping he would magically hear me. He didn’t. He just continued looking straight ahead, lost in the TV.

“Dad . . . ,” I repeated, whining a little.

“What?”

“Dad, I have a lot of homework to do. And I have to practice my violin.”

“So,” Dad said, “no one’s stopping you. Do what you gotta do.”

“But—”

“Oh, stop,” Dad said. “Everyone’s having a good time. Just get your stuff and do your homework.”

I stomped out to the car and got my violin and schoolbag—seething. Every step through the dirt yard was an angry thought.
What the hell . . . why couldn’t he just drop me home? Sweet Beats, my ass! I have very important things to do!

I wound up sitting on the kitchen floor and finishing my homework. It was clean enough for a girl who just ate dirt at track practice, but not as clean as a chair. Every now and then Dad would come in to grab a beer.

He looked at me with my books spread around me on the floor. “I guess I’m supposed to feel sorry for you, wif’ your little show! You look like a goddamn orphan!”

It didn’t take me long to finish my homework, but practicing for the seating in orchestra was gonna be a little more difficult. I walked back into the TV room where the game was over and, once again, the Sweet Beats were rehearsing. “Push It”
was playing for the fifteenth time that night, and Reggie and Dad were smiling and laughing. Dad got up off the couch and started shaking his hips to the music.

“Let me show you girls a thing or two,” he said, doing an exaggerated version of what Anora and Maybelline had been doing.

“Dad,” I said. “I really need to practice. I need to go home.”

“Practice in the kitchen,” Dad said, moving into the chicken dance. “You do every other goddamn thing in there.”

“But,” I asked timidly, “when are we leaving?”

Dad stopped dancing and looked at me like I was the world’s biggest buzz kill. “You better stop your whining. . . . You just do what you need to do. We’ll leave when I’m ready to leave.” That was his final word.

I started to unpack my violin, saying to myself as I set up, “Fine! If he wants me playing my violin here for the whole house full of people, violin he shall get!” I put the resin on my bow, set up my music on the counter and put my chin in the chin rest—Salt-N-Pepa still blaring in the background. I lifted my bow. I put my bow down. I lifted it again, and squeaked out a very quiet note. I put down my bow again. I tried to play the piece very quietly. It sounded like shit. I worried that Dad and Reggie heard it and were making fun of me in the living room. I popped my head in the living room—nope, still dancing. But I couldn’t take any more chances. One day I would be a real violinist and I would play loud and well and fill a house with sounds so beautiful that everyone would stop what they were doing and listen. Today was not that day.

I packed everything up and sat next to Reggie on the couch with my arms crossed where I remained until ten thirty when Candy came home and we finally left.

______

The next day at seating tests for orchestra I ate it. I walked into the little room where Mrs. Hathaway auditioned us, and forgot the piece I barely knew to begin with. Mrs. Hathaway just sat there with a pen and notebook writing furiously with an angry face. When I finished she looked at me over her glasses and said, “Mishna, that was terrible.” Mrs. Hathaway was one of those old-school teachers who didn’t know that she was supposed to coddle my developing self-esteem. “Really . . . just one of the worst performances I have ever seen. I don’t know why you are wasting my time.” She stuck out her bottom lip and blew her bangs off her forehead. “You know, a lot of these kids have been playing since they were five. If you want to participate, you have to really apply yourself.” At the end of class, she put out the seat assignments. I was last chair, last violin. And someone was gonna pay for it.

At track practice I was too angry to run. I couldn’t find it in me to put one foot in front of the other. I took a lap, and I was done. But I couldn’t leave. I had to find a way to make it look like I was working out without actually working out. I began to sort of move around the various events on the field in a way that made it look as though I had just finished up that particular event. I moseyed away from the long jump brushing sand off my shorts, before making my way to the pole vault, which I left rubbing my sore pole-vaulting arms. This was working so well that I hid under the bleachers for the rest of practice and either nobody noticed, or nobody cared. Either way it felt great to completely play hooky from track practice.

As the weeks went by, I got lazier and lazier. My only real goal became to escape notice. I was almost a ghost on the team. I even began to think I had the same powers to disappear in plain view that I had had at GSCC. When I wasn’t doing that, I just ran with Zwena and we’d keep up a pace that was comfortable to have a conversation at.

“How’s it going at smarty school?” she’d ask.

“I feel pretty much like the weirdest person there all the time,” I’d say. “How’s it going at private school?”

“Rich and white,” she’d say, but always adding, “But I like my classes.”

I was surprised when one day when we were walk-running and I asked, “I guess your dad pretty much made you run, huh?” And Zwena told me he hadn’t at all. She’d wanted to run and she thought it was fun. I just looked at her for the next lap, baffled. I couldn’t figure out why she would want to do anything that she wasn’t immediately great at.

Zwena and I had a good thing going, and then Dad reappeared at practice. He started by marching over to the head coach and having a long conversation with him. I could tell by the way they were looking at me from across the field that I was not as invisible as I had thought. From then on Dad came to every practice and coached from the sidelines. He even took to coaching Zwena, too, and suddenly she didn’t think running was so fun.

“Mishna,” he’d scream, “you still got half an hour left of practice—hit that like you mean it.”

I’d roll my eyes at Zwena just in time to hear Dad tell her, “Zwena. You, too! Stop actin’ like you’re dying. Neither of you two is gonna die from some wind sprints.” And the more involved Dad got in track, the more exhausted just thinking about a track made me.

Every weekend for the rest of the season Dad dragged me and Zwena to track meets, and I tried to invent injuries in the car on the way. I wasn’t that good a runner, I could imagine I was injured so deeply, I could actually cause swelling. I would limp into the car at 7:00
A.M.
on a Saturday morning whining, “Daaaaaad, my calf has a cramp . . . and on top of that, I think
I twisted my knee coming down the steps. It might be my rotator cap.” But Dad would just grin and say, “When we get to the meet you can take a few laps—walk it off.”

One night I was in my bedroom practicing my violin. My sister had made her usual show of running out of our bedroom with her hands over her ears.

“What?” I asked. “Am I that bad?”

“I just have to go,” she said. “That kind of music messes with my rhythm.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be done in a half an hour. Just listen to one side of your Salt-N-Pepa tape.”

“Ooh, good idea,” she said, and slammed the cheap pressboard door on the way out.

I had been practicing for thirty—or five—minutes when Dad walked in. I nervously stopped playing.

“I didn’t kick Anora out,” I said. “She left on her own.”

But Dad just looked at me for a moment before saying, “I think at the next meet we’re gonna enter you in the four-hundred-yard dash.”

“That’s a long way,” I said.

“It’s nothing,” Dad said. “And I really think that it’s the right distance for ya.”

But I was pissed. At the time I was doing fifties and hundreds, and four hundred yards—that was like miles.

“But, Dad,” I said. “I’m a sprinter.”

“First of all,” Dad said. “You’re too young to know what you are, and second of all, the four hundred is a sprint.”