Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts Page 23

  OCTOBER

  Five-on-five, shirts and skins. Ten guys on court and thirty or so who stand and wait. Getting noticed is your only chance. When Nin, a shirt, gets poked in the nose and starts to roll around on the court, Damon, on the sideline, sprints for his own T-shirt.

  But before Damon gets back, pulling on the shirt as he runs, Scoogy has waved another boy in. Damon shrugs his thick shoulders and slowly pulls the shirt off. He stands all of five-five; his naked back is a taut black triangle. The other boys tease him for being so eager.

  Damon wasn’t going to try out. His desperate hope of making the Red Raiders survives alongside an almost certain knowledge that he won’t. Damon didn’t come out for basketball in his first three years of high school. He could kick himself for that. Scoogy is close to the other point guards who did play, guys like Lamar (Maury) Boyer, who started a few games last season, and Dennis (Doober) Holmes and his cousin Kris Bottoms, who were on the jayvee team. Maury and Doober wear their jersey numbers on their earlobes, having stuck tiny, white-numbered videocassette labels there. Maury is a lock to make the Red Raiders. Doober is a strong candidate, as is Kris, who a few years ago moved to Coatesville from New York—Poughkeepsie to be exact, but the boys aren’t big on geography, and to them New York means, like, Harlem. “He grew up playin’ on the playgrounds in New York,” says Damon, unduly intimidated.

  Then there’s Nin (short for Ninja), perhaps the most skilled of the four. But he’s just a sophomore. Scoogy will probably stash him on jayvee.

  Even so, there’s too much traffic at point guard. Damon feels that because he didn’t come out in previous years, he has marked himself for doom. He always had a reason for not trying. As a sophomore it was a bum ankle. Last year it was his asthma; it started kicking up something awful. At least that’s what he told his friends. “The real reason is, I was scared of gettin’ cut,” Damon says, offering up the worm in his gut. “I went out and saw how good the other guys was, and I just quit.”

  Quitting was better than getting cut: it preserved the illusion that he would have made the Red Raiders if he had tried. This was the fragile base that sustained Damon’s ego. Until last summer, that is, when his mom found $275 that she could hardly spare and sent him to a one-week summer basketball camp in Reading, with Scoogy and the guys on the team. Damon played with them day and night and slept in the same dorm with them. They bonded. “I overcome my fear,” Damon says. “It’s like I’m on the team. I hang with the guys all the time. We always be playin’ ball. I know all the plays. I hustle. Other people, they good, but when I hustle I can play with any of them. I decided I got to do it for my mom. If I get cut, I get cut. I can handle it. I think I’m gonna make it, though.”

  Two weeks into intramurals, Mark comes home in a funk. He dumps his books in his bedroom and emerges with a deep pout. His mom, Kathy, prods. “Scoogy’s got me running with the third and fourth teams,” he says. Mark knows that won’t be good enough to make the varsity. He’s a skinny six-one, with an Adam’s apple so prominent that it gives a sharp angle to his long, thin neck. He ranks seventeenth out of 517 students in his class, but schoolwork is a secondary concern to him. Basketball is his obsession. He is an exception; whites make up 65 percent of Coatesville’s student body, but the Caucasian boys have all but conceded basketball to the black kids. Mark and Eric are the only white guys at intramurals. Mark’s friends call him the Great White Hope.

  Mark lives in a redbrick colonial house with a basketball hoop in the driveway. His dad, Jim, drives him down to Ash Park in the summer so Mark can play pickup ball in the playground, where teams of high schoolers often take on teams of older guys, many of them former Red Raiders, and get whipped every game. Mark is often the only white person there.

  He thinks he has a shot at varsity this year, but he’s not sure. Scoogy doesn’t like to load the jayvee with juniors, so there’s a chance Mark won’t make varsity or jayvee. “I don’t know what I’ll do if that happens,” he says. “My dad said that if he has to, he’ll send me to Bishop Shanahan [a Catholic school about sixteen miles away in West Chester], where I know I could play.”

  Later, out in the yard, Jim says, “I don’t know if I can afford Bishop Shanahan. We’re just praying he makes this team.”

  Scoogy is constantly annoyed by the boys’ inability to dribble with both hands. He blows his whistle to interrupt play for a speech: “Can anybody here honestly tell me they worked on their weak hand? Anybody? Too busy trying to dunk”—he mimes a comical dunk—“tryin’ to dribble between your legs, tryin’ all this fancy shit. Work on your weak hand! That’s what summers are for. The weak hand! The weak hand! The weak hand! You need to put your body between your opponent and the ball. You’ve got to be able to use both hands. That’s the difference between a mediocre player and a good player. Which hand is your good hand? Put it in your damn pants! Play with yourself! I don’t care! Just get rid of it.

  “Y’all are lookin’ at me with that coach-be-talking-shit look. Tell me I’m wrong. Because I know I’m right. Know why I know? Because I did the same thing when I was your age. Listen here”—his voice drops to a stage whisper—“this is wisdom talking. I’m trying to pass something along here.”

  Tion has shown up. It’s a few days into the second week of intramurals. He’s the tallest kid on the court. He can dunk from a two-step jump. He looks born to the sport. Anybody surveying the crowd of boys playing in this gym would pick Tion as the one with a future in basketball.

  Scoogy runs the boys in teams of five. Though he doesn’t say which is the first team and which the second and third and fourth, the kids can tell. On one of his first days out, Tion is asked to replace Glenn Gray, the six-three center who played varsity last season, on the first team. “Tion, we’ll give you a break,” says Scoogy. “This’ll be interesting. You ought to be dead by the time you run up and down the court twice.”

  Tion plays hard, and well, for about ten minutes. Then he poops out. “What, hurt again?” Scoogy asks scornfully as Tion shuffles upcourt. Tion says nothing. Scoogy motions for someone to replace him. Tion skulks off the court and eases himself to the floor, grimacing as he slowly stretches his long, slender legs. “My hip,” he says. “I had it x-rayed. Doctor said there’s no damage. But it hurts.”

  When Tion came out for intramurals last season, he left in the middle of the first session. Just walked off the court and out of the gym. “I had a problem with the coach,” he says. “I can’t stand to have nobody fussin’ at me.”

  When Eric screws up, he balls his fists at his cheeks and mouths a silent scream. He doesn’t get in that often, and he plays timidly. “I do better when I’m just playing pickup, you know, not running all these plays,” he says. “When I get out here with these guys, I tense up.”

  Eric has the kind of size Scoogy needs. He’s six-two, and he’s solid enough to stand his ground under the boards, but he’s got flat feet and moves like a caricature of the thick-legged white guy. As a sophomore Eric made the junior varsity under Coatesville’s longtime coach, Ross Kershey. But last season, when Kershey retired and Scoogy took over, Eric was cut. He thinks Scoogy has already dealt him out this year, too. “You can tell by the way coaches talk to you,” Eric says, “and by the players they like to put into certain situations. They always leave me out. I know that I’m not as fast as these guys.”

  Eric probably wouldn’t have come out if he hadn’t received a letter from a Division III college recruiter who saw him in action last summer at a basketball camp. The letter convinced Eric that he could play, even though he didn’t grow up breathing basketball on the Coatesville playgrounds. He’s grimly determined. What he lacks in gifts he tries to make up for in heart.

  “I hate this part of coaching,” Scoogy says. “No, don’t say ‘hate.’ I don’t like to use that word. There’s too much of that in the world already. Say I ‘extremely dislike’ this part of coaching.”

  Scoogy is off to one side of the gym with jayvee coach Nick
Guarente, taking a break from all his strutting and hollering. His long legs are stretched flat on the floor before him, his big feet drooping to the side. In a few weeks he will have surgery for a ruptured disk between two cervical vertebrae, but the real pain in his neck right now is deciding which boys to leave behind.

  Last season be got lucky. He had forward-center Richard (Rip) Hamilton, a player with talent and determination. Rip was one in a million, and he led Coatesville to a 26–4 record. He’s now a freshman at Connecticut, where he’s starting at guard-forward. This season Scoogy has a group of boys who…well, let’s just say “state championship” doesn’t spring to mind. At one extreme are the gifted who won’t work; at the other, the inept who will walk through walls. Scoogy will keep twelve who fall in between and make them run, run, run. The rest must go.

  Last year Scoogy cut a big player with megadreams and slow feet. Scoogy put up the cut list at 7:15 a.m., and the kid’s parents were at his office before noon. “It was one of those love-is-blind situations,” says Nick. “In that case, stone blind.”

  “They called me everything but the N-word,” says Scoogy. “As much as said I cut the kid because he’s white. I hated to cut the kid. I’ve got a rainbow mind. I’m out here looking for talent. The kid’s mom told me her son was going to go on and play in college and prove me wrong, and I told her, ‘Good, I sincerely hope you’re right. I wish him nothing but the best.’” The kid did not speak to Scoogy again. Just walked past him in the halls without a look. Scoogy could feel the boy’s hatred. “Some of these boys, I have them in my phys-ed classes,” he says. “I came up with their parents. Some go to the same church as me.”

  Damon, the muscular little point guard, is inserted into a scrimmage. He plays like a dervish. While playing pressure defense, he ties up two men by himself. They pass back and forth at midcourt, but Damon keeps up with the ball, finally slapping it downcourt and then outracing everyone to it. He dribbles back toward half-court, allowing his teammates to set up on offense, and then, with a flurry of fakes, he makes a suicidal drive into the key. The ball ends up across the gym.

  “I got one word for you guys who love all that playground razzle-dazzle shit,” Scoogy scolds loudly. “It’s a four-letter word. Most of you haven’t heard it. It’s ‘pass.’”

  Late in October, Mark is regularly playing in the first five. He’s so blond and pale he could be a film negative of the other boys on the court. His torso glows pink with exertion. Mark was the best player on his Catholic school team in the eighth grade, but the first time he came out for basketball at Coatesville, he says, “It was, like, whoooah. I was getting killed. The black kids were just way quicker and had more skills than I had.”

  Jim Hostutler says many white parents in the area discourage their kids from playing basketball. “I’ve seen kids with talent playing with Mark and heard their fathers say, ‘Why waste your time?’ Because they just assume their kids can’t compete with the black boys from the playgrounds. The white parents steer their kids to football and baseball.” Coatesville’s football team is 58 percent white, 42 percent black. Its baseball team had one black player last season.

  Asked who he thinks Scoogy’s final twelve will be, Mark picks out players intently. Among them are two from the football team who haven’t come out yet. Mark does not pick himself.

  On the court, meanwhile, Scoogy is amazed. Doober puts a particularly good juke on two men in the key, faking a move to the foul line and then cutting back to take a nifty pass from Nin and casually drop in a layup. Scoogy leans his head against the gym wall and howls. “Aaaaaooooohhhhh! That was the first person groaning,” he shouts, both saluting the offensive play and chastising the defense. “Aaaaaooooohhhhh! That was the second person groaning. I can’t believe it! That was so wide open!”

  Tion walks through the door of his aunt’s house on Coates Street, a block of ancient row houses on the East Side, several blocks uphill from Main Street. He lets his backpack slide to the floor, moves to the leather couch without saying a word, slips one big hand under the warm belly of his sleeping two-month-old sister, and gently lifts her to his face. He nuzzles the sleeping baby, delicately fixes the pink blanket around her, and speaks to her softly.

  This house is his cousin Doober’s place. Doober and Poughkeepsie Kris are upstairs in a tiny attic bedroom. Its slanted walls are decorated with pictures of girls from magazines and with drawings and photos of Coatesville High basketball players. Doober’s mom, Roxanne, videotaped all the jayvee games last year. Doober has quite a stack of cassettes. He likes to hang out upstairs with his buddies, running the tapes over and over. Roxanne’s voice provides loud, hilarious, emphatically one-sided commentary.

  “I get so tired of hearing my voice on those tapes,” Roxanne says. She’s a cheerful woman whose long hair is woven into hundreds of thin, shiny braids. She and her sister, Cassandra, Tion’s mom, who is expressing milk for the baby, practically share their children. Tion spends most weekends in this house and often comes here after school. This is also where a lot of basketball players congregate. “They come over because they like to see themselves on the tapes,” Roxanne says.

  Damon drops by, breezing through the front door without knocking. This is home. There are dangers on the streets of Coatesville, but there is also an emotional network connecting these boys to one another’s kin and friends from one end of town to the other. Scoogy is famous in this world, and infamous.

  “Scoog ought to praise these boys, not be ragging on them all the time the way he does,” says Cassandra. “Other guys this age? They’re already out on the corner selling drugs. These are good boys. If they’re out there playing basketball and trying hard, he ought to praise them all the time. They deserve it.”

  Scoogy is always telling the boys, “If I ain’t giving you a hard time, it’s because I’ve pretty much given up on you.” There’s an example of this toward the end of the month. Tion has been coming to every intramural session, but he just sits. It’s the hip. This evening he’s draped in a chair a few yards behind one basket.

  “Tion, get on your feet!” shouts Scoogy when a couple of players come crashing down near him. Tion stirs, stands up, and moves over a little to the side. At half-court Scoogy reconsiders, stops, and shouts, “I don’t care if you sit, Tion, just don’t sit there.” It doesn’t penetrate, but in the code of the gym, the coach has told the player, You might as well go home.

  Eric can read his own subtext. Scoogy never gives him a hard time. He says only nice things to him—when he speaks to him at all. Eric, whom the other boys have taken to calling E, is the opposite of Tion. He has gotten the message, but he won’t stop hanging in there under the boards.

  Scoogy regards his surplus of capable point guards with dismay. There’s the hard matter of choosing among boys with similar skills. Scoogy could make one or two into shooting guards and bump his bigger shooters to forward, but he would be left with no size underneath. His only hope for rebounds this season is the hefty Glenn, whom he calls Bubba and rides constantly about being out of shape. Glenn never answers back. He has thick round shoulders that slump when he’s tired or depressed. He’s lugging twenty extra pounds. His belly rolls over the top of his drawers. Seeing the boy’s soft edges provokes Scoogy, who loathes off-season complacency.

  “Some of you guys think you’ve got it made,” he says. “Just because you played varsity last year, you think it’s going to be handed to you. You come out here all lumpy and out of shape. Well, believe-you-me, nobody is giving away jack. You got to be hungry. You should have been running all year long.”

  In the suicides Scoogy stands at midcourt counting off the seconds while the boys sprint. If one of them fails to finish the run in thirty seconds or less, they all have to do it again. Trouble is, Scoogy kind of scooges his count. After about ten sprints, Glenn is galumphing up the rear. His late finish dooms everyone else to another round. “Did not make it!” the coach shouts. “Come November, those are the four ugliest word
s in the English language.”

  NOVEMBER

  “I don’t know,” Damon says. “I’m not a hundred percent. My chest been hurting me. It started about three intramurals ago. I don’t know if I’m gonna come out or not.” Damon is getting cold feet. It’s the last week of intramurals. Official tryouts start in four days. “I’m having a hard time keepin’ my hopes up,” he says. “I ain’t even gonna be mad if I don’t make it.”

  But he’ll be embarrassed. “‘You didn’t make it, you’re not as good as me,’ that’s what people be sayin’,” he says. “I don’t think I can handle that.” Then he sees another possibility. “If I don’t make it, maybe I’ll be manager. Sometimes Scoogy, he let the manager suit up, be a backup. He did that twice last year.”

  It all comes down to two days of deciding. Snow falls on the fateful first morning, the second Monday of the month. “Intramurals are over, boys,” says Scoogy with a giant grin as he greets the players in the chilly gym. “Now you’re mine!”

  He makes them run a mile outdoors in the freezing air, a torture whose advent was rumored for weeks but fervently disbelieved. Some of the boys are pleasantly surprised by their times. Scoogy is not. He makes all of them run a mile again the next day, indoors this time.

  On the second day of tryouts, even some boys who should have an idea of where they stand don’t. Despite what he senses, Eric remains stubbornly hopeful. “I don’t know,” he says. “Ask me after this practice.”

  Damon, who has come to the formal tryouts after all, just shrugs and smiles sheepishly. “I’m tryin’,” he says.