Menzes was a Texas lifer; he’d had the job for twenty years, the old boys’ network loved him because he was one of the boys. Basketball’s a simple game. You find the kids with talent, and you let them show it, you get out of their way. That’s the kind of thing he said. He had the reputation as a players’ coach, because talent liked to play for him, but somehow nobody who came through the system ended up sticking in the NBA.
Like a lot of basically corrupt backroom-operator types, he had a manner that suggested integrity—so that even while nepotizing or doing deals, he could persuade you that he was acting in good faith and even occupying a kind of higher ground. By shaking your hand, looking you in the eye … He also kept in touch with a long list of acquaintances on a daily basis, even people who had ceased to be useful to him.
He showed up about a week before the end of the regular season, which must mean, late February. Just a miserable Saturday afternoon, pouring with rain. The yellow grass in our yard had a sort of gleam rising in-between like it was going to float away. Marcus and I were watching Columbo when the doorbell rang and my mom said, “Can somebody get the door?” and we didn’t move, and eventually she came out of the kitchen to answer it herself.
“You don’t know me,” he said, “but my name is Dick Menzes, and my guess is the boys on that sofa have a pretty good idea who I am.”
Marcus whispered, “Turn off the TV. Come on, turn it off.”
By that point I was sick of the whole process and wanted to see the end of the program, but I turned it off anyway when Dad walked in. Marcus on the weekends if he wasn’t playing basketball basically didn’t get dressed. Sometimes he even went out to shoot in pajamas and 176high-tops, and maybe a hoodie in winter if it was cold. So he excused himself to go to the bathroom, and when he came back again he wore jeans and the J. Crew shirt my sister gave him for Christmas. He looked preppy and said yes sir and no sir when Menzes asked him questions.
Questions like, You excited about the playoffs?
Yes sir.
I think you folks got Reagan coming up in the first round.
Yes sir.
I wouldn’t take them for granted.
No sir.
That kid Anderson is pretty quick.
Yes sir.
But you probably think you’re quicker.
Yes sir.
Good, good, that’s what you should think. Doesn’t make it true, he said, and laughed, and everybody laughed. I thought it was hilarious, and my dad said quietly to me, when he got the chance, Brian, don’t be an asshole.
What, what?
You know what I mean.
I honestly don’t.
But after that I kept quiet.
My mother offered Menzes something to drink, and he asked for any kind of pop—that’s the word he used. “I’m on my feet all day and need a little sugar rush now and then.” Dad’s a Mountain Dew drinker, so Mom filled up a tall glass of Dew, and we moved to the kitchen and sat around the table. It was like having a second cousin around, who was coming through town on business and decided to look us up for the sake of the family.
So everybody made conversation.
He complimented my mother on her home. To my dad he said, looking through the back-door window, “At this time of year at least you can let the lawn take care of itself.” 177
In general his policy was, let the kid come to you. It was part of his trick not to look like he wanted it too much. At some point, with Marcus sitting right next to him, Menzes turned to my dad and said, “Is he a good kid? Does he keep his nose clean? Does he do the dishes and take out the trash? Does he stay out of trouble?” and my dad for some reason started telling the story about the yam and pineapple casserole Marcus made for Thanksgiving dinner. He spent an hour with his mom on the phone, writing down the recipe. But the thing he wrote the recipe down on … got a little sticky with molasses and pineapple juice, and whatnot. You could have pinned it on the fridge if you wanted to, that’s how sticky it was … and Marcus kept calling his mom, after every step … while my wife was trying to get the turkey out of the oven …
I actually looked at my Timex, because it was one of those conversations where you think, the only thing that’s going to get me out of this is just, like, the fact that time is linear. Eventually my dad said, “And he was so proud of himself that he practically ate the whole damn thing by himself.”
“It was good,” Marcus said, and my dad said, “He’s no trouble at all, unless he tries to help out.”
I thought, Menzes probably listens to this stuff all the time.
Afterward, he shook Dad’s hand and promised to “keep tabs on the boy,” and my dumb father, who was always impressed by men who operated in the world and got things done, believed it. He said, “I’ve got an instinct about that guy that he’s not a shit.”
Later that night, we had a fight about him. My dad came to my room to say good night, he sat on my bed. I was trying to read and ignored him, and Dad let me read for a while, then he said, “Put down the book for a minute.”
“What.”
“I said, put down the book.”
“Why.”
“Because I want to talk to you about something.” 178
So I put down the book, and he waited, and eventually I said, “What? You said you wanted to talk.”
“I’m trying to think how to phrase it.”
“Can I read while you think?”
“I want to phrase it so that it doesn’t seem like a criticism, but just … something you could think about next time.”
“What do you mean, next time?”
“Because this kind of thing is going to keep happening.”
“What kind of thing?” But then I said, “If you mean, the whole embarrassing display this afternoon …”
And my dad said, “Display?”
“Whatever it was you and Mom were trying to prove. Although I don’t know why I’m lumping Mom in with this, because she at least had the decency to …”
“To what?”
“Forget about it.”
“What did she have the decency to do?”
“At least she didn’t actually get down on her knees and start …”
“Brian, please. This is upsetting to me.”
“It was upsetting to me. Just to watch everybody fawning over this guy, just because …”
“I like to think you’re somebody who understands …”
“It was embarrassing. You were embarrassing yourself.”
“I wasn’t in the least embarrassed.”
“Well you were embarrassing me.”
“I like to think that you’re somebody who understands … that there are times or occasions, when what’s happening to someone else is more important than what’s happening to you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know what it means.”
“I know what it means, but that’s not remotely an accurate description of what’s going on here.”
“Why not?” 179
“Because there are no times or occasions … there’s just … all the time, all occasions, when what’s happening to Marcus is more important than what’s happening to me.”
“Brian …”
“Are you actually going to dispute that?”
“He’s your friend. You asked us if we could help him out, you wanted him to live with us, and we said, okay. But that entails—”
“Do you actually believe that’s what happened?”
“At this period of his life, a certain amount of obligation, to see him through what must be an extremely trying period, with a decision he has to make, which will …”
“I never asked you to let him live with us. I never asked you that.”
“Brian, you did.”
“Coach Caukwell asked me to pass on the message, that’s all.”
He looked at me for a minute. “That’s not my recollection of events.”
“Because you weren’t paying attention.”
“If you think, for a second, there’s any question …” He was almost in tears.
“What? Because if the question is, who gets most of the attention in this house, who do we talk about and think about all the time … that’s not even really a question.”
“Brian, this is his opportunity. Right now. This is his chance. If he screws this up, what’s he looking at … what kind of future. You will have hundreds of opportunities in your life. I’m not worried about you.”
And that was really the end of the conversation. I picked up my book again and Dad said, “I want to come back to this, when we can have a reasonable conversation about it. But I want you to know, I’ve heard you. You’ve been heard. I hope you heard me.”
*
What Menzes said about Dai Anderson got under Marcus’s skin, which is what he wanted it to do. Marcus knew Dai from AAU ball, 180they came up against each other from time to time. In a town like Austin there are a limited number of alpha-dog high-school ballers.
Dai’s father was actually Reggie McWilliams, who played wide receiver and special teams for the Detroit Lions, until he busted his knee, so that Dai always had this cocky rich-kid attitude and drove a Dodge Viper to games. He was quick, though, he really was. He had this whole slow-slow-fast-slow kind of style, where he didn’t seem to be doing anything, he was just dribbling around, and then he suddenly slipped past you in a long slippery stride and by the time you knew where he was he was like, at the rim. His jump shot looked streaky, it looked a little pushy, his elbow stuck out, and like a lot of lefty shooters he didn’t really jump, he relied on surprise. But if his shot was falling, watch out; there wasn’t much anybody could do.
This is the kid we were playing against on the Friday after Menzes showed up. Something else that bothered Marcus afterward—the way he said yes sir and no sir, which is sometimes how he reacted to white men in positions of authority. That’s not how he talked to Coach Caukwell. After Menzes left, my dad said, “He seems like a straight-up kind of guy to me,” and I said, “Dad, you have no idea.”
“What do you mean I have no idea?”
I said, “This is a guy whose whole personality is designed so that you think, this is a guy I can trust.”
“What did you think of him, Marcus?” my father asked.
“He was like, one of those people you say yes sir no sir to.”
And my dad considered for a minute. “Maybe he was a little like that.”
I couldn’t sleep the night before the game. At six a.m. I saw the digital readout of my clock radio blinking at me and a few minutes later heard Marcus come out of his room and go to the bathroom. So he couldn’t sleep either. When I saw him at breakfast he had gone into totally private mode, which is also the mode you go into after a red-eye flight where all you can think about is, just get me through the day. 181
We wore jackets and ties to school. There was a pep rally at lunchtime; the whole student body assembled in the gym, where the band set up and tried to drown out the noise of a thousand kids with brassy instruments. Just the usual game-day bullshit, but in this case, I think Marcus had the added sense, which is partly what makes a professional athlete a professional athlete, that my whole life is about to be put to the test. Whereas in my case, if we lost, at least the season was over, and I didn’t have to do this stuff anymore.
Coach Caukwell told us to go home after school and eat whatever we wanted to eat but preferably something simple, a plate of spaghetti, cottage cheese and crackers, a bean burrito, whatever, and then stop eating and come back to Burleson around six o’clock for the shootaround.
My dad made Kraft mac and cheese and steamed broccoli and gave us a bowl of Blue Bell ice cream afterward, and then we just sat around watching Jeopardy! Shelley came by to wish us luck, but Marcus wasn’t in a state where he could interact with people. That old loose wire in his leg had started acting up, so Shelley sat on the sofa next to me and watched, too. I could feel her sweater, which was a cloud of blurry lilac wool, against the back of my neck. She always had an unusually clean, slightly detergent-y smell. Then she said, “I guess I better get ready, too,” and kissed her hand and touched the top of my head, and kissed her hand again and touched Marcus on his hair, which for some reason seemed more intimate than my hair. Then she left, and eventually we got our stuff together and Dad drove us back to Burleson. The parking lot was already filling up.
Before tip-off, Marcus and Dai Anderson did the handclasp and stiff-arm embrace at center court. A gesture that wasn’t particularly affectionate but more like some masonic acknowledgment that they belonged to the same fraternity … like X-Men making themselves known before battle. One thing I forgot to mention about Dai was that he had signed a letter of intent with Michigan. If Coach Fisher had said, Come to Michigan, I think Marcus would have come. 182
The cheerleaders set up behind the baseline, so Shelley stood twenty feet away. I tried to make eye contact, but she already looked totally engrossed in cheer-mode, which is a really weird mode. It’s like a layer of emotion all over your face, as thick as makeup, which she wore a lot of, too. Partly to cover up her skin condition, but also so people in the nosebleed seats could see the expression on her face, which was like a painted-on expression of good cheer. Like Go, Knights, Go! For two hours she kept this up. I found it annoying that she had access to so much superficial enthusiasm, but the truth is, she also looked really pretty. She looked like a cheerleader, with long strong legs under the pleated skirt, and her strawberry-blonde hair pom-pom-ing up and down, whenever she kicked and jumped and lifted her arm in the air. Anyway, I should talk about the game.
Dai started off hot. He hit a three off the tip, then he picked Breon’s pocket coming up court, and it was Dai Anderson 5 and Burleson 0 after thirty seconds of play. Caukwell didn’t want Marcus to guard him, because Reagan ran him through a lot of screens, a lot of off-ball action, and Coach didn’t want to wear Marcus out or get him into foul trouble. Our offense was fine if Marcus had the ball. There were guys who could fill in around him, hit jump shots or clean up the glass, but when Marcus sat down it became pretty clear: we were a limited offensive team. Gabe could do a little damage from the post. Breon was streaky, and sometimes, if his jumper was popping, could cause trouble one-on-one, but other than that … I could knock down free throws if somebody fouled me. That’s not an offense. Anyway, we needed Marcus, and Coach didn’t want to use him up. But in the end, he had no choice: Dai was killing us, and after the first quarter, the score was Reagan 19 Burleson 12.
He held out anyway. Marcus in the time-out said, “Come on, Coach, let me take him, I got him …” but Marcus already had two fouls. He picked up one climbing the back of the six-eight Reagan power forward, Shawn Dyche, to tip in a rebound, which made everyone stand up in their seats until the ref blew the whistle. 183
And Caukwell said, “You need to cool off, you’re rushing,” and actually sat him on the bench for the first couple minutes of the second quarter. So Marcus moved to the end of the bench next to me.
“Lot of time left,” I said to him, because it seemed like the kind of thing you say.
“What the fuck you know?” he asked.
We were down ten before Caukwell sent him in. The other problem was, for some reason, his shot wasn’t falling. The line was true, the release, the rotation, it all looked good, but everything front-rimmed or back-rimmed or rattled out. Maybe he was too pumped up and kept overcompensating, and then trying to compensate for the overcompensation. He was too much in his own head. That’s not a bad time for a coach to say, just D up, which is what Caukwell eventually said. Forget about your jump shot, just shut your man down.
“I want to take Anderson.”
“You got him,” Coach said.
Lamont actually had a pretty good game. He was one of those kids where it wasn’t really about skill. Playing basketball for him was like … something you do in the park. If you told him what to do, or how to do it, he sucked. But when he had fun, he was good. Once he pulled up for a three-point shot on the fast break and Coach said, No, no, no, until the ball dropped in. Caukwell started him in the second half because Shawn Dyche was killing us on the boards, and even though Lamont was only like six one, six two, he had a big barrel chest and football thighs and if he wanted to be an immovable object, he could be, and if he wanted to be the irresistible force, he could be that, too. Sometimes refs choke on their whistles when it’s a small guy pushing around a big guy.
And Marcus took Dai out of the game.
It was like Copperas Cove all over again, Marcus’s first JV game, where he was too hopped up to shoot and ended up putting the cuffs on Cyrus Millhouse instead. They used to call Gary Payton the Glove, because if he was guarding you, that’s what it was like—you 184wore him. Everywhere you went, he got there first. I love this kind of talk even though it’s mostly bullshit, because what actually happens is, guys miss a few shots, they turn the ball over, what you see is just a … variation in the probabilities. But there is a psychological element. Guys feel beat and the other guy feels like, I got you. Sometimes, at each new level, each increase of pressure or raising of the stakes, people revert to certain habits, and for a while I used to think, this is what Marcus is like, this is who he is. In the biggest games of his life, when the pressure is on, he chokes on offense but turns into a shutdown defender. Anyway, in the second half, Dai scored three points.
With a minute left, we were up two, and for a second I thought … Coach might even put me in the game. Just to hit free throws and ride out the win. But then Marcus finally knocked down a triple (he ended up 2 for 9 behind the arc), and it was game over. He finished with thirteen points, less than half his season average. Dai had twenty-one; it didn’t matter.
Afterward, Marcus went to find him and did the thing I’ve seen superstars do on TV, when they chase down the star on the other team and whisper sweet nothings in his ear. Even in high school, this kind of thing goes on. It’s basically a power play. But it’s also true, even though basketball is supposed to be a team sport, that the real intimacy on court is what happens between the two best players, going at each other.
Dad tapped me on the shoulder on my way to the locker room. He was sweating like a pig, hoarse-throated, happy. I was sweating, too, just from sitting on the bench.
“For a minute I thought he might put you in,” he said.
“That’s what worried me.”
When I came out of the showers, there was some kind of reception committee. A lot of middle-aged men were standing around. Caukwell introduced several people to my father. One of them said, “I hear you’re the man to talk to,” and Dad told him, “Marcus is an old friend of my son. His mother had to relocate for work reasons, so Marcus is living 185with us, because at his age, at this stage of high school, it didn’t seem like a good idea to disrupt his education.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” the guy said. He was an assistant at Michigan. “I really came down to see Anderson but you can always use a lock-down defender.”
My father said, “He had an off shooting night.”
“Do Dai and he have any kind of a relationship? Sometimes it can make a difference to these kids, coming up together. It’s a security blanket.”
“You’ll have to ask Marcus.”
“Well, I’m in the line.”
Representatives from Texas Tech, SMU, Rice, Arkansas, and a few other places had made the trip to Burleson High.
Marcus when he finally appeared wore jeans and unlaced vintage Air Jordans, which he never played in; a collared shirt and his Members Only jacket. He liked to go to the barbershop before a big game and always packed a travel kit of products in his gym bag, which included a shower cap. Sometimes I caught him checking himself in the mirror and taking one of the braids in his hand and wringing it out. It was a very patient process, and even though everybody could see him doing it and staring at himself in the mirror, he took his time.
When the guys in suits talked to him, he never said much, but he didn’t hurry either. He waited for them to ask questions and then he answered them with a yes or no or maybe a short sentence. “You like your chances next round?” somebody said.
“I always like my chances.”
He was a conversation killer, but people hung around anyway. They laughed even when he wasn’t joking.
At one point my dad said, “Maybe we should wrap it up, Marcus needs to get something to eat,” and then Shelley was there, and she said, “I can give him a ride.”
She wore a long coat over her cheerleading outfit but looked like maybe she’d washed her face and put on fresh makeup. 186
“I don’t mind waiting, I just thought—”
“Some of us thought we might … go out and celebrate a little. Some of the girls.”
“Marcus?” my dad said, and he lifted his head. “You want to come home with us? Shelley says she can give you a ride.”
“Brian, you coming?” Marcus said.
The gym was starting to empty out, and the floor had a gritty feel underfoot from all the street shoes. One of the guys from custodial was pushing back the bleachers against the wall. It felt like a party after the music stops and the lights come on and people have to shift gears before going home. There were three or four cheerleaders by the double doors that led to the parking lot waving at Shelley.
My father actually asked, “Is that okay with you, if Brian comes?”
And Shelley said, “Of course it is.”