Two nights later, I was sitting at the dinner table with my parents in our cramped and steamy kitchen. Mom had made her masterpiece: pasta aglio e olio. That’s spaghetti without tomato sauce. It’s cooked with minced garlic and olive oil. A spindle of it sat twirled around my fork just long enough to shovel into my mouth and wolf it down.
That’s when Dad put down his fork for a moment and said, “Your mother and I both have the same question. What’s with all these bruises on your arms? Are you playing basketball or training to be a prizefighter?”
I hadn’t really noticed the bruises. But as I looked up and down my arms, they were certainly there in every shade of black and blue and purple.
“It’s a rougher game at that new park,” I answered. “That’s all.”
“We’re just worried about you getting hurt,” said Mom, who worked five days a week as a receptionist at a bank. My parents would always joke with each other about getting the combination to the vault so they could sneak inside and roll around on the floor with all that money. “We don’t want you being beaten up.”
“I can handle myself,” I said. “It’s not a problem. Really.”
“You sure? Because I’ve seen the guys who play there,” said Dad, with a sudden spark to his voice. “There are teenagers. But there are adult men too. And I don’t want any man beating on my son. Or else I’ll come down to that park, and they’ll have to deal with me.”
Dad ran the shipping/receiving department for a stationery company. He made sure all the orders were sent out on time from the loading dock where he had seven people working beneath him. He came home every night with stories about how he had to put the hammer down on somebody who’d slacked off. But the one time I went to visit him at his job, Dad’s workers pulled me aside and made a point of telling me how much they loved and respected him for having their backs with the bosses. Then I told them Dad was exactly the same way at home: forever on top of me about something but always on my side.
My eyes tilted upward slightly, catching sight of the blades of the ceiling fan slowly turning overhead in our kitchen.
I knew that Dad was serious. If he thought I was being abused, he’d march right onto the court in the middle of a game, willing to fight anybody. I’d fight them all too—Pirate, Snake, Round Mound, even Reggie—if I were forced to. Of course, winning that fight would be a completely different story. It would be okay for me to get my behind whipped in public. But not Dad. I figured he’d never be able to face me or Mom again if that ever happened.
“Maybe we should let him fight his own battles. He’s old enough,” said Mom, probably sensing Dad’s pride and temper about to spike.
“It’s just like when you were growing up. Remember you told me about those games at the Educational Alliance on the Lower East Side. The indoor ones with the columns running from floor to ceiling, right on the court. How players tried to knock each other into them,” I reminded him. “It’s not anything more than that. Just super-competitive ball without a ref.”
“All right, but I want you to be careful. And I want to know if any of those men cross the line with you,” he said, jabbing a finger into the thick air between us. “Because then I’m going to take matters into my own hands.”
“Understood,” I said, nodding my head and keeping eye contact with Dad until he went back to his meal.
* * *
That Saturday morning at the Proving Ground was a wild one. The teams were pretty well split up between our guys and theirs. The longtime regulars weren’t necessarily trying to intimidate us. Instead, they were too busy beating on each other.
I had Monk and Hot Rod on my squad, along with Surfer Joe and a dude everybody called J-Train, a six-foot-four powerhouse of a subway conductor. J-Train would smile and joke with you all through the warm-ups. But once the game began, he’d fire his elbows at people’s jaws like a runaway subway car speeding down the track.
Pirate’s elbows were sharp and bony and could cut you. J-Train’s elbows were meaty, driven by massive biceps. They were the kind of on-rushing object that could knock you and your front teeth from where you stood today completely into tomorrow.
Gene the Dream took offense at one of those elbows and, for a moment, had J-Train in a wrestling headlock. After that, the pair barked at one another relentlessly up and down the court. I was doing my best to keep clear of that physical war between them. Then Surfer Joe accidentally hit Snake, who was driving to the basket, with a forearm to the chest.
“That’s a foul on me,” said Surfer Joe, willing to give Snake the ball.
But Snake lashed out at him. “What, are you like these new guys now, trying to be polite? I don’t want the foul. Keep the rock. I’ve got something special coming for you!”
Suddenly, Pirate was trying to play while holding up his pants. The button on his shorts had popped off. Without a hand on his waistband, his shorts were falling down.
“Who’s got a safety pin?” asked Pirate, in a tone somewhere between annoyed and embarrassed.
“Why would anyone here have a safety pin,” hollered Reggie from the sideline. “You’re just too damn skinny to keep your pants up, you old fart.”
Everyone was laughing, even those on-court combatants. And just for a brief instant, the tensions seemed eased.
Only Pirate wouldn’t step out of the game. He dropped his shorts and played ball in his drawers—a pair of Fruit of the Loom tighty-whities.
Monk turned to me and said, “Pets, there’s no way I’m putting a hand on him to play defense. This is insane. If anybody from my real life ever saw me in this game, I’d die.”
Pirate played like that for a good five minutes until somebody standing on the sideline produced a pair of swim trunks from his car.
I was impressed that Pirate could completely focus on his game while running around like that in public. In my eyes, it was a total commitment to balling.
“Don’t worry, I’ll wash them before next week,” said Pirate, stepping inside those trunks and tying the drawstring tight. “And there were no skid marks on my underwear. Right?”
That was the last bit of comedy on the court.
With the score tied and just two baskets to point-game, things got nasty again fast.
I glanced outside the fence, and there were my parents. They’d come out of the supermarket across the street pushing a shopping cart full of groceries. They moved slowly up the block with their eyes on the action.
There were three brutal fouls in a row and a lot of cursing in response.
The rock kicked loose as my squad was playing defense, and I grabbed it. There were probably sixty-five feet of open asphalt between me and the unguarded basket at the opposite end. So I took off for it like a jackrabbit on the run.
Behind me, I could hear Gene the Dream and Snake gaining ground with every stride as I dribbled toward the rim. I wasn’t worried about them stopping me from making the shot. It was all about what they’d do to me after the ball left my hand and I needed to slow up to avoid the fence just beyond the backboard.
A few feet from the rim, with them both breathing down my neck, I planted my left foot and let the rock gently roll off the fingertips of my right hand. Then I turned hard to the right without ever breaking stride, an instant before the two of them slammed into the fence.
The cheers from my teammates meant the basket was good. My parents had witnessed the whole thing, reaching the far end of the block.
“Remember, sometimes the rabbit gets caught,” said Gene, who’d scraped his forearm raw against the fence. “What do you think happens then?”
Mom and the shopping cart were gone. But Dad remained on the corner by the traffic light, still observing.
My squad had a stop on defense. Now we had the rock in our possession, and it was point-game.
Snake had two hands around my waist, unwilling to let me move in any direction. Then Hot Rod found J-Train down low beneath our basket and passed him the ball. Snake abandoned me thirty feet from the hoop to help double-team our big man.
That’s when the rock got passed to me, standing wide open. I knew if I held onto the ball I’d get run over, so I let the shot fly.
It hit the front lip of the rim, bounced against the metal backboard and then fell through the basket.
My teammates were rushing over to give me high fives, while Pirate was screaming at Snake for walking away from me. But my eyes had settled on Dad, who’d seen it all from a distance and was now headed home.
* * *
Almost two hours later, I walked through our front door. Dad, screwdriver in hand, was fixing the leg on a kitchen chair turned upside down in front of him. I’d grabbed some bread and sliced roast beef from the refrigerator before I noticed two sandwiches, each on its own plate, on the table.
“I figured you’d be hungry, so I made us lunch,” he said, raising his eyes up from the chair to meet mine. “I watched you play ball a little bit this morning.”
“Yeah?” I said, attempting to sound surprised.
“You handled yourself alright out there,” he said. “Of course, your mother’s still concerned about you. But I told her that’s what streetball is. That you had it under control.”
That moment meant more to me than any of the high fives I’d received on the court that morning.