When I got up, it was nearly eleven o’clock. I remembered I was supposed to go over to my moms’s pad. I got dressed and went downstairs.

“It’s about time you got your butt up,” Harrison said. “I called you nearly an hour ago!”

“You called me?”

“Yeah, I shook your shoulder, too,” he said.

“What I say?”

He made a funny noise like a guy that didn’t want to wake up, and I figured it sounded like me. It sounded pretty funny, too. Only when he saw me smile, he started running it into the ground. I asked him what he was trying to wake me up for, and he said my mother was wondering where I was.

I went over to her house and listened to her mouth about how she could be laying up there with a heart attack and die before I came to see her.

“The rats be done eat me up before you come to see me!” she said. “Don’t you come crying when they lay this old gray head down beneath the ground, boy. You hear that?”

“Yeah, I hear that.”

“When I’m dead and gone, you go on and ignore me just like you doing now,” she said, “because as God is my secret judge, I can’t stand to see nobody crying and carrying on at no funeral when they didn’t give two cents for the body when it had life in it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But soon it will be done …” she went on.

I knew the rest of the sermon by heart. Trouble of this world.

“Trouble of this world …”

One more time.

“Trouble of this world … Yes, Jesus …”

The sermon went on a little longer than it usually did and I opened the refrigerator and saw that mama had picked up a little taste. I poured myself some of the rum, drowned that bad boy in some Coke, and drank it. Then I asked her if she had finished shopping, and she went into how she had to give some other mother’s son fifty cents to carry the package up the stairs that her son should have carried. Amen.

I looked in the refrigerator, and it was jammed full of food. I was glad I hadn’t been around to carry that load.

I kissed her and split.

I went over to Highbridge and went into the store that cashed the checks. It was in an arcade. I looked through some of the magazines, which were supposed to be for sale but were months old. The whole time these junkies kept coming in and heading for the back, and I knew they were back there shooting up on whatever they were on. The cat that ran the place was named Ugly. That was what his daddy named him when he was born. They got the name wrong because they should have named him Ugly Damn Dog, because that’s what he was. He was always running around talking about he didn’t believe in black power, he just believed in green power, the power of money. But he didn’t sell his dope to nobody green, just black people.

“Brother Lonnie.” Ugly came over to me and gave me five. “First time I seen you in about five years you ain’t got a ball in your hand.”

“No big thing,” I said. “Say, you seen Paul?”

“I ain’t seen my man for about a week now,” Ugly said. “He into that ball thing too, ain’t he?”

“Yeah, he into it,” I said. “What you got in the way of some extra dust over here?”

“Well, what you need, youngblood?”

“I need a pull,” I said. “It don’t have to be too heavy. You know, something like Paul got.”

“That’s safe,” Ugly said, “but it ain’t that tough. He got to be messing with the Big Man’s boxes, and if the Big Man catch you, you know you gonna catch some calendar space. Plus I can’t let him have but fifteen dollars a digit ’cause there’s just too much paper floating around. If you be needing dust, it’s angel dust that’s pulling in the bucks.”

I told him I didn’t like to mess with no angel dust because too many heads was messing with it. He said that was the chance I had to take.

I called the club to see if Mary-Ann was there and she was and I told her to meet me over at the Grant. She said okay. On the way over I tried to piece together what was going down. Paul was snatching them checks and selling them to Ugly for fifteen dollars apiece. But I couldn’t figure out why Tyrone was getting them. The only thing I could figure was that Paul was snatching them for Tyrone. But if he was doing that, why was Ugly involved in the thing? None of it made any sense, and I didn’t want to talk to Mary-Ann until I could say something. So instead of going into the Grant, I turned around when I got to the corner and went over to the center.

There was a little three-on-three action going down, and I got in and busted the first game I played. I was playing against this sucker from Milbank who swore he was bad. Everything I threw up dropped in. I was so bad I surprised myself. When I moved, my feet hardly touched the ground, and when I shot the ball, it didn’t touch the rim, just dropped through the net. I was getting that soft shot, like Cal. I tried his move, putting the ball up with one hand off the dribble. A chick that was watching screamed when she saw me do it, and I nearly grinned myself to death. Cal had told me I was nice, but even I didn’t know I was this nice.

Another game went by, starring and directed by me, and then I decided to book. I was about to leave when I see Paul come in the other way. I called him over and told him I wanted to see him in our room. He didn’t say nothing; he just followed me on in. Ox was in the room, feeding Sparrow, and I asked him to split.

“Y’all gonna do the thing?” he asked.

“Get out of here, man,” I said.

“Hey, brother, you know what I say.” Ox had put Sparrow back in his cage and was going out the door. “A chick is slick, but gay is okay!”

When Ox left, I closed the door and locked it, and then I asked Paul what was going on. He asked me what I meant.

“What I mean?” I looked at him like he was crazy or something. “You go around punching out some chick you don’t even know, you acting funny, you don’t say nothing to nobody. Unless you talking to your new la-di-da people.”

“What are you? The FBI?”

“I’m just asking, brother.”

“If I feel this big need to talk to somebody about what I’m doing, I’ll go to confession,” he said. “In the meantime, why don’t you just walk down your side of the street and I’ll walk down mine? Okay?”

“Look, man—”

“Look, nothing, save your looks for a peep show,” he said. “I told you I don’t want to hear what you got to say.”

“Hey, man, I ain’t that chick you punched out. If you feel froggy, just leap on over here, sucker!”

There were two things I didn’t think would ever happen. One of them was that Paul and me would ever have a serious fight. The other one was that anybody could hit me one time and put me on the floor. At first I thought he had damaged my brain or something because I saw all these little lights and it hurt so much. Then I realized the sucker had hit me with the lamp. I got up and he hit me in the belly and I grabbed him around the waist and lifted him off the floor. I took a few more punches before I could push him away from me.

I was mad at him, but there was still a lot between us, and I didn’t really want to hurt him too much. He came at me again, and I tried to just hold him off. Paul wasn’t weak. You just didn’t hold him off with no one hand. He was swinging with everything he had, like whatever it was that was messing with him he was going to get off on me. I tried to go light on him, but he was kicking my rump. I didn’t know he could fight that hard. He came at me again, and I could tell what he was going to do, but I hadn’t recovered from the last time he hit me, so all I could do was to try to get my hand up a little to block the blow. It didn’t do no good, and I felt myself going down. I didn’t even feel where he hit me at all. All I could feel was me going down. It seemed like I was taking my time about it, and I kind of remember trying to look up and see what he was doing as I went down.

I couldn’t get my head together for a while. Then I realized I wasn’t being hit. I tried shaking my head to get the cobwebs out, but that hurt. It was like in a flick. Me sitting on the floor, kind of watching things happen around me. I figured I’d better get up pretty quick before he came again, but then I heard the sound of crying. It was Paul, he was leaning against the wall, kind of holding on to it, and crying real hard. If I had been mad I stopped, and just wondered what was going on.

I went through my pockets and found some change and went out into the hall to get some sodas. There was a little kid in the hall. He looked at my face and asked me if I had been fighting.

“No,” I said, taking the second soda from the machine.

“You always look like that?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You sure ugly,” the kid said.

I went back into the office and closed the door. Paul was still sitting on the floor, and I went over and sat next to him. He looked at me and the Coke I offered him. He took it, and we sat for a long while just drinking the Cokes. Ox knocked on the door, and I opened it and told him to split. He asked me what happened, and I told him to split again.

“You and Paul have a fight?”

“Look, I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, still standing in the doorway.

“What happened?” He was trying to look over my shoulder.

“Ain’t you got no cool, man?”

“No,” he said. He didn’t either. I finally got him to split by promising him I’d tell him what happened later.

I sat down next to Paul again, and then I asked him if he wanted to talk about it.

“You see me hanging out with Lenny and trying to get into that middle-class thing—”

“You mean that semiwhitey thing?” I said.

“Hey, it ain’t about that. It’s about getting over, like I said before. You can run it into the ground, and maybe you can deal with who you are better than I can, but that’s the way it is.”

“Yeah, but you always been my man. How you get into these changes? One day you my ace boon and the next day I don’t know you.”

“One day my pops came around and asked me if I wanted to go downtown with him.” Paul took a deep breath and let it out hard. “I said okay. We went down where he works. It was his day off, and he just wanted to pick up some stuff from his gig. He works in this office building, doing maintenance, little odd jobs. So he went in and picked some stuff up, and his boss was sitting there with two other whiteys and this sister, and he told my father to go out and get some coffee for them. My father said he wasn’t working, and this whitey laughed and said he never was. Then he told him what kind of coffee they wanted. That got next to me, you know. I started to speak on it, and he said he used to catch an attitude when he was younger, but he started getting fired from gigs.

“You know what that was like to me? Seeing my father going for coffee and everything? Because you don’t think about going for coffee for nobody. You thinking about yourself fixing something or sitting in an office, that kind of thing. You don’t think about being a grown man and fetching coffee for nobody. It was like I was looking over a mountain and seeing where I was going for the first time. You want more soda?”

“No,” I said.

“I’m sorry about the fight, man,” Paul said.

“Go on about that other stuff,” I said.

“I ain’t much different than my pops. I kept on trying to tell myself that I was, you know, but I’m not. He’s no dummy, man. But he don’t have that piece of paper. Anyway, then I met Lenny and Joni, and they were like … what? Different, I guess. Yeah, they were la-di-da niggers, just like you said they were. But you know Lenny ain’t going to be going for nobody’s coffee, man. You just know that. And Joni’s going to be the chick sitting up with them whiteys telling somebody like me what kind of coffee they want. I know that. Anyway, I started to hang with them.

“Then one day I was over to Joni’s house and I was smoking some joints that Lenny had picked up. I fell off to sleep or something, and when I woke up, Joni and this chick she hangs with sometime—”

“Skinny chick?”

“No, a gray chick,” Paul said. “They’re out on the balcony—”

“They got a balcony?”

“Yeah, they got a nice place,” he said. “Anyway, they out there talking about me and this gray chick is asking Joni if she really digs me and Joni starts going on like that’s the biggest joke in the world. She says she just hangs with me sometime because she sees it as a chance to understand ghetto people.”

“You should have busted her nose for her,” I said. “And then busted that gray chick’s nose, too. Nothing them la-di-da niggers hate worse than you putting them down in front of their ace whiteys.”

“Yeah, maybe. But that’s not how I felt. I felt like I wanted to prove something, you know. Like I was okay for her to like maybe. Hey, if a black chick who’s into something don’t dig me, and I’m trying to get away from a certain kind of thing … I don’t know. So I start taking her out more and buying her things. I didn’t have no dust, so I took some checks from the mailbox in that building over the bank.”

“Welfare people live in that building.”

“Yeah, some,” Paul said. “A friend told me. He delivers mail in that building, and he told me that some people there get welfare even though it’s supposed to be a high-rent place. I was over there one time and I saw that they hadn’t put the mailbox in right and everybody was supposed to be going to the post office for their mail. Even when they started putting the mail in the boxes, the boxes would open if you hit against them.”

“So you ripped off the checks and took them to Ugly’s,” I said.

“How you know that?”

“Because Ugly told me,” I said. “I was over there and he asked me if I had seen you and I asked why and he said ’cause he could use some more digits.”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “Only Tyrone found out about it and said that a friend of his who’s a postal inspector was on to the whole thing and they were waiting for me to cop some more checks before they picked me up. He said they knew who I was and everything because somebody had spotted me. So he got the checks from Ugly, and he burned them up so they wouldn’t have any evidence.”

“He burned them?”

“Yeah, that way the only way they can bust me is to catch me copping some more checks, and there’s no way I’m going to do that.” Paul straightened his legs in front of him and rubbed his left knee. If he hurt it when we were fighting, I hoped it hurt like hell because my face was beginning to pound like I had a toothache.

“So he did you a favor and now you beating up women for him?” I said.

“Not because he did me a favor,” Paul said. “He had to buy the checks from Ugly, and I’m doing this to pay him back. He said I’m even now.”

“And he burned all the checks?”

“Yeah.”

“Why you think he doing this for you, man?” I asked.

“I think because he likes Mary-Ann.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Say, look, don’t tell nobody nothing about this,” Paul said. “All I want to do for the rest of the summer is to play some ball and forget what happened.”

“Yeah.”

After we rapped a little more, I went back over to the Grant. It was a heavy trip, what it was. I could get next to what Paul was saying about his pops because I felt the same way. I didn’t think about it all the time, but I did think about it some of the time. In another way I had even thought about trying to be like Lenny and Joni, but every time I saw a black cat acting like that, it made me disgusted. In a way they were always out for coffee.

Paul didn’t know that Tyrone hadn’t burned the checks, and I didn’t tell him. I called Mary-Ann, listened to her mouth about why I hadn’t met her before when I said I would, and then told her not to talk to Paul about what we had done. I told her it was important that she didn’t, and she asked me why. I told her what Paul had said and that we’d better try to get all the pieces together before we did any more talking. She said cool on that. Funny that she should be Paul’s younger sister because she seemed a lot older in the head than he did.

I went down and got a pint of wine and went back up to my room and drank it. Then I fell asleep and had this dream. I was playing ball for all these scouts. They were all white, and they weren’t sitting in stands or anything, but they were sitting around the edges of the court. And each one had two la-di-da niggers sitting with them, drinking champagne out of these little plastic champagne glasses. I was playing against about ten other guys, and we were all breaking our butts. Nobody was on teams. It was every man for himself. Whatever basket you took a rebound from, you had to go shoot at the other basket, and everybody was trying to stop you. And all the while we were playing, we kept looking on the sidelines to see if the scouts were digging us, and the la-di-da niggers kept getting up in the faces of the white scouts and smiling and carrying on so they couldn’t see us.

When everybody that was playing saw that the scouts couldn’t see us, they started carrying the ball and elbowing, and it really got to be a free-for-all. Guys were punching and trying to thumb cats in the eye and stuff like that. Every time a cat would fall down, everybody would come over to where he had fallen and stomp on him and chant until he was wasted and then go on with the game. Then there was just two players left, me and Snakeskin. I didn’t even know Snakeskin had been in the game. It had just seemed that there were people without faces, just black arms and black legs and the brown ball. Now it was me and Snakeskin, and the score was tied. I brought the ball down, dribbling through the piles of bodies, and Snakeskin was on my case. I was almost trapped between Snakeskin and a pile of bodies when suddenly I remembered the move that Cal had shown me. Down the right side, around the bodies, and then up in the air off the dribble for the slam!

When I did that, Snakeskin fell to the ground, and I went over and stomped him until he was still. Then I still had to score three more baskets before the game was over. But there wasn’t anybody to stop me now, and I could show off my stuff. Only the scouts couldn’t see me for the la-di-da niggers in their faces. I went over to the sidelines.

“Here I go!” I shouted. But all you could hear was those la-di-das teheeing and those glasses hitting against each other. I scored one basket, then another.

“Look at me!” I was shouting. “Look at me!”

But they didn’t look. I took the ball and ran up to one of the la-di-das and slammed the ball into her head, and she just turned and kept laughing.

She laughed until I woke up.