THE DANGLER

The day began badly, and I shouldn’t have expected it to get any better. But growing up when I did, where I did, under the circumstances I did, optimism was learned and expected. Later in life the aphorisms might come in handy—prepare for the worst, hope for the best, when life hands you a lemon make lemonade, every cloud has a silver lining, look on the bright side—but at that stage of the game they seemed like damnation by way of faint praise. That morning everytime things started to look up, they looked down. Like when I poured the last of the milk on my cereal and it turned out that the milk had gone sour. Or when I stepped out in my brand new Converse basketball shoes and they soaked through with dew off the grass. When I looked up to see the morning sun a cloud immediately passed in front of it, as if by an act of God.

Come to think of it, I guess that was an act of God. I don’t suppose he was speaking directly to me, but if anyone was responsible for shoving a cloud between me and the sun, it had to be God. It was 1974, I was 14, and I was on my way to a basketball tournament.

As I walked up the street towards the church, I spied three old friends of mine standing around on the sidewalk. It seemed a bit odd at first. They were standing at the top of Jay’s driveway—Jay, Jeff and Trey, I’d known them since first grade—but still, they weren’t doing anything, just standing around on the side walk. As I approached, they recognize me and started whispering and giggling amongst themselves. I sensed a kind of predatory indolence, a kind of social stalking going on, and since I didn’t have any idea why I might serve as a target, I had no idea what to do with it. Too, they were on the sidewalk between me and my destination, and there was, literally, no way around them. So on a sunny day, walking under the dappling canopy of oak trees, I approached my childhood friends, greeting them “What’s up, fellas?”

Jeff, foremost to me in the trio, looked up and said “Sex.”

Jay seconded “Violence.”

Trey concluded “Violent sex.”

The three commenced giggling before I could register anything, especially the shock they intended to inflict. It was the giggling that really caught me off guard. They expected me to be humiliated by their impetuous rudeness. Later I would hear that impulse referred to as hubris. Just then I just thought they were being stupid.

I didn’t want to be humiliated. Not then. So, pausing to survey them, I retorted “Violent sex, huh?” They glared at me triumphantly, a vacant glaze in their eyes. I passed by them saying “That’s a fucking shame.”

Ten years later, that would turn out to be the funniest thing they’d ever heard in their lives, but right then it took the wind out of them. As I passed by and made my way, it dawned on me that they were smoking. Hanging out on the side walk and smoking. In that day and age it was a gang habit we had heard happened in New York, and it was almost always the precursor to some act of senseless violence, a mugging, a rape, the commandeering of a wheelchair-bound victim for a brutal joy-ride of sorts. The same behavior had since turned up in Raleigh, and the experts were concluding that random acts of mayhem in our own town were not far behind. But in Charlotte, in my home town, at least on my side of town, the actual smoking of cigarettes was probably the gravest sin that this behavior would elicit. The invocation of violent sex, coming as it did without rejoinder from challenge, was itself null and void.

It was less than a twenty minute walk from our house to the church. Not our church, as Mom was an Ayn Rand atheist, unable to believe in a being superior to Man, and Dad was a lapsed Catholic who, as he was fond of saying, gave confession up for Lent. We didn’t have a church. Which was something that had passed as a curiosity when I was young, but which had actually, as it was becoming increasingly evident as I grew up, cut me off from a large proportion of social activity that I might have otherwise engaged in.

Trey, Jeff and Jay, for example, belonged to churches. Trey’s family attended Providence Methodist, Jay’s family went to St. Peter’s Cathedral, and Jeff’s folks dragged him out to a Baptist outfit way out on the South side of town where they spoke in tongues and were possessed by the Spirit and all but handled snakes. Up to this age, they went to barbecues and retreats and revivals, respectively. Now, hanging out on the side walk, smoking cigarettes, letting their hair grow long and wearing their workman’s blue oxford shirts unbuttoned over t-shirts for bands they had never seen was their way of rebelling against a society that I had never known. In kind of the same way, the blue oxford shirts were our city's professional men's way of protesting against the encroaching business world: any man who still wore a blue collar couldn't be all bad. (Nobody wanted to be seen as Management.) My own way of rebelling was to embed myself in my family at an age when everyone else was alienating themselves from their own.

Thus the ball game.

I had always been a good basketball player. I loved the game, but that was nothing really special. I knew lots of guys who loved the game and couldn’t play for squat. (Trey was among those. Before he started smoking, at least.) I even had a favorite court, at a park half a mile from downtown, adjacent to the area of town that housed the two major hospitals and a dozen or so other medical professional buildings that served our part of the community. The courts there drew a mix of unemployed young black men who had nothing better to do that play ball all day, the younger black boys who were vying for sports scholarships as a way out of the ghetto—and we did have ghettos—and arrogant medical students who were out to prove, to themselves if no on else, that they weren’t racists. (The black guys always assumed that the med students were racists; they knew I wasn’t, because they had grown up with me.) The South court was for the amatures and the meek, and also for the doctors who had come before as med students who couldn’t bring themselves to give up the games in the park. The North court was for the warriors. The ones who played the game with concentration and ferocity. The ones for whom the game was a matter of honor, or of life and death.

I played the outside. I left the flashy stuff up to others. The inside jumpers, the sky hooks, the dunks, all that was for the other guys. My job was to bring the ball down court, view the field, pick the positions, and find a way to move the ball into play before anyone knew what I was doing. When I scored, it was usually a lazy lay-up courtesy of the up-court boys, who cleared the way and made it seem like they were waiting to receive an incoming pass. I also had a fade-away jumper that I could plug in when the field was too crowded. Sometimes we planned it that way. Not in advance. There would be that moment when everybody got that slight, silly grin on his face, and I knew that the rest of the guys would make it look like they were hustling for position, keep their opposites covering them like gloves, then shoop, in goes the jumper from just outside the line.

My park was lush and green, with three kinds of swings and two tennis courts. One of my pals, Lucas, invited me to their park once, up in the projects just North of downtown. It was parched red dirt and cracked asphalt with dangerous looking swings. At one point, the City’s idea of park improvements was to install chain mail nets on the basketball hoops. The rope nets, the reasoning went, would just get cut down by vandals. Once Lucas and his friends saved up some money and bought a Carolina Tarheels commemorative net. The City sent a maintenance crew around to take it down. The summer after his senior year in high school, during a pick-up game at the park by the projects, a player checked Lucas a bit too hard during an attempted dunk; Lucas made the dunk, but brushed his hand against the rim where someone had forcibly ripped the chain-mail net from its moorings. The net support had been left a ragged metal shard. It ripped an inch-long gash in the index finger of his right hand. Since he had earned, been offered and accepted a full basketball scholarship at Virginia Tech, and the injury to his index finger made him ineligible to play his first season, the City ended up paying for his college education in order to avoid a lengthy and nasty and potentially embarrassing law suit.

Justice.

Playing organized ball was my Dad’s idea. He happened to be driving by the park one day, dodging traffic by cutting through a side street, when he saw me on the court. He stopped and watched. Dad, of course, Senior Academia, was no sports fan. He couldn’t bear to watch the stuff on television, and the only game he ever took us to was, and I quote, “to watch the 49’ers choke” the one time they were in an NCAA tourney. But he loved the idea that his son was good at this thing. He stayed and watched and beamed. He made my guys a little nervous, and as a result we missed a couple of scoring opportunities, but just the same we put the med students down good and hard that day, and they grinned their admiration as they threw Gatorades at us from their coolers and used their shirts to mop the sweat off their arms and chests and necks. Dad cornered me and Lucas. It was mostly inadvertent; Lucas had me t my Dad, and the other guys didn’t talk to white men, just didn’t. So Lucas became the unintentional sounding board to my Dad’s well meaning coercion.

“You’re pretty good at this, huh?” Defaulting to Lucas: “He’s pretty good, huh?”

Lucas, shrugging with that lop-sided grin of his, “Yeah, he’s pretty good.” In different company, he would have added “For a white boy.”

“Maybe you ought to consider playing on a team?” my Dad offered. It took me by surprise. Years later it would register: not being a sports fan, Dad had never pressed any of us to play team sports. My older brother, Bill, ran cross country—three years my senior, he was already in high school—and later my sister, Maggie, two years younger than me, would play on the tennis team, only giving it up for medical school in her mid 20’s. And we would all three be on the debate team in our high school years, pretty much by default, whether we really liked it or not. But aside from backyard baseball and driveway basketball, and now my pick-up games in the park, none of us had ever gone in for teams or team sports. Dad polled Lucas: “You’re on the team, aren’t you, Lucas?”

“Yeah,” Lucas said, grinning though his embarrassment.

“How is it, is it pretty good? You like it?”

“Yeah,” Lucas said, intoning to me that he was telling my Dad what he wanted to hear.

My Dad went on for a short time about the benefits of team sports, a subject on which I assumed he knew less than nothing, then, offering me a ride to my objection that I wanted to stick around and shoot some baskets, he gave salutations to the crowd in large and mounted his Jeep to return home. The med students and the black guys waved and grunted to him, and, commingling, began to choose sides for a new game. Lucas, turning away from me to join the line up, gave me a side-long grin and said “Man,” indicating that I was, in his estimation, doomed.

“MY NAME IS MR. STEELE, S-T-E-E-L-E STEEEEELE.” A pudgy, red-faced red-neck, Mr. Steele was a man of little patience and a booming voice, which he used to address us in the most insulting manner he could project. Whether exhorting us to do our best or telling us to run laps around the basketball courts, he made it clear that he thought less than nothing of us. He was the only man I ever met who could address a group using the word “PEOPLE” and make it sound as if he thought the group assembled before him was sub-human. His whistle was shrill and loud, and he used it often. Many of us who were new to the team, and that was most of us, didn’t understand that he used the whistle for instruction and inflection. Assuming that, when whistled at, we were to stop what we were doing and pay attention, we did, often earning a torrent of invective for being lazy or not concentrating or stopping in the midst of a strategically planned play. And that was just in practice. Also in practice, he showed his proclivity to play favorites. Lucas, Matt and I kind of stuck together. Lucas was the only black kid on the team, Matt had been my next-door neighbor and kindergarten car-pool mate years before, and we were all three on the coach’s least-favored list. There were others; of fifteen players on the team, only nine played regularly, two of those were told to stay back court the entire game and wait to flush rebounds, and the rest of us sat on the bench. After the second game of the season, Lucas tried to get in the game by dodging through a planned out defensive formation and tipping in an up-from-under from beneath the basket. MR. STEELE, S-T-E-E-L-E, blew his whistle, and bellowed “KNOCK OF THAT SHOW-BOATIN’ THEY AIN’T NO ‘I’ IN ‘TEAM’!”

My Dad didn’t make it to many games, but it wasn’t his fault. That was the year they were making the movie, and he was fighting so hard to keep them from ruining the story that he and Mom almost got divorced, and when he wasn’t out West he was trying to keep the University from filling his position in his absence. One night I invited Lucas back to our house after the game, since his Mom couldn’t pick him up until she got off work at the Purina plant at 10, and we walked into the living room to find Dad trying to bring a dozen or so students up to speed on a half a semester of American Military History he hadn’t been able to teach them in the past two months. “How was the game, boys?” he asked, genial and obviously a little bit drunk.

“Fine,” we said, treading to the kitchen.

Dad sensed there was something amiss, and declared a break in order to follow us out to the kitchen. While I looked in the fridge, soaking in the cool and avoiding confrontation, Lucas answered Dad’s command “What’s wrong?” by dropping his eyes to the floor, shaking his head, and saying “Coach won’t let us play, Dr. Pete.”

He didn’t know quite what to say at first, but after a moment of reflection, he said “We’ll see about that.”

Since most of the kids who went to my junior high school lived within a few miles of each other, and many in the same neighborhood as me, it was a short order to get the word spread that something was rotten in the state of junior varsity basketball. Those affected, “The Scummy Seven,” as one of our colleagues had dubbed us, knew that pressure was being brought to bear, that Steele had been summoned to the principal’s office twice, but none of us thought anything would come of it. We continued to warm the bench and man the backfield and await rebounds, and if anything the coach’s invective became more personal and vicious. Then, finally, came the All-City Finals.

Largely a ceremonial thing, the All-City finals pitted every school basketball team against every other school’s team, until more or less everybody had played everybody. There was no process of elimination, and after three days of competition they tallied the wins, and the two winningest teams played an “exhibition” game, the winner of which took possession of the JV trophy for the following year. The favorites for the final game were always a known quantity, either the private Catholic school or the private Presbyterian school, although one year the scrappy kids from the crappy middle school on the North side of town, a slap-happy mix of red-necks and blacks who would have killed each other had they not been teammates, pulled an upset and whupped the tar out of the Presbyterian kids. The betting began early and escalated until the final game, and legend had it that one year the used car magnate who (again, legend had it) more or less single-handedly started NASCAR, lost two grand on the Catholics, and in an act of penance donated a science lab to their school. As the tournament approached, we all began dreading it, even Steele’s favorites. Three solid days of being whistled at and abused, not to mention playing some of the thoughest teams in the city, and on top of all that, we had all come to realize that Steele’s defensive plays were full of holes and his offensive plays just plain stank. The day before the finals, the coach sat us all down for a big speech.

“In the finals,” he said, “you will all play. Every single one of you.”

That was it. That was all he could bring himself to say.

The first day and the second day, I rode the bench. Lucas got put in for half a period, but it was against his instincts to follow the coach’s dumb-ass plays, so the coach took him out for not following orders. Matt played two whole games the second day, evidencing the fact that Matt sucked. He did manage one neat play, a slick bounce-pass through heavy traffic that surprised everyone, including the recipient of the pass, who nearly missed the ball and almost didn’t get off the close jumper that gave us our one and only goal so far in the finals—I kid you not, one goal in two days. My Dad attended the tourney the whole time, and per our prior agreement he spent most of his time learning about basketball by watching other teams and talking to other dads and coaches. He kept a schedule of who we would be playing and on which courts, showed up at the beginning of each game, and left when it became apparent that I would not be playing that game. On the way home after the first day, he swamped me with an impressive array of terminology he had picked up; on the way home after the second day, he spared me.

On the third day, at the second to last game on our schedule, Dad hung around longer than usual. He had gotten into a conversation with one of the other dads, but Steele, in his own lunk-headed way, got it that Dad was sticking around to make sure I played. He stuck Lucas in at the same time, and between us we managed to get the rest of the players to abandon the coach's dumbass stratagems and just play damn ball. Even for eighth graders, we were pretty slick. Right up to half-time, we beat the bejesus out of Piedmont Middle School. They weren’t that good, true, but still, it was fun. Lucas would steal the ball, pass it to me; I’d take it down just past half-court, assay the field, make some oblique signals, feint one way, charge the other way, and send the ball flying into play. As was the rule, one guy was assigned to cover me, and every single time I went to put the ball into play, he dropped his jock. Late in the second period, the field got choked up. In a move of sheer genius, Matt shagged his white ass in front of the guard covering me, and I let the ball loose in a lazy arc that flopped through the hoop like an afterthought, swish, picture perfect, nothing but net.

Halftime came, and Steele was pissed. Despite the fact that we were up by eight points, never mind that we were scoring for the first time in the entire tournament, he read us the riot act. We were slackers, we weren’t covering our positions, we weren’t concentrating, we weren’t making our plays, our defense was all over the place. I thought to look and see if my Dad was still in the audience—I guess I didn’t want to know he was watching this, or maybe I was hoping he was far enough that he couldn’t hear what was going on—but the red heat of anger and shame was boiling up in me. I was so mad that I could barely hear anything the coach was saying. It almost didn’t register when he told me that I was back in the game. And I didn’t realize until just before play resumed that my being put back in was penance, not reward. As I approached the court, Steele grabbed me by the upper arm, tight enough to almost hurt, and yelled over the noise of the collected crowds “YOU SEE THAT GUY? THE ONE WITH THE BIG OL’ NUMBER 12 ON HIS CHEST? NOW, YOU COVER THAT MAN, AND DON’T LET HIM SCORE!”

I got in the game, and I covered the guy, and every time I strayed at all, there came that damned whistle followed by “COVER YOUR MAN, BERG!” After the second or third time, I was so steamed that I could barely even see straight, so angry that as a ball player I was useless. Somewhere in my addled head a thought formed: cover my man? Fine. And I did. I covered him so close that he couldn’t breathe. Covered him so close that you might have thought 12 was my number. I was on him like white on rice, and the next thing I knew was he was under our basket, and the last I had seen his side had the ball, and so hell NO he wasn’t gonna get the ball, wasn’t gonna score on ME.

Unknown to me, the other team had flubbed a pass, our team had gotten the ball, and a guy on our team named Chris who I didn’t know very well, reasoning that I was closest to the basket. Heaved at the ball at me, forgetting my name for the moment, and thus being unable to alert me to the pass, and CLUNK! The ball struck me square on the back of my head. I head-butted Number 12, and the two of us went sprawling on the boards to the unending amusement and laughter of the crowd.

And both teams.

I went back to the bench. The coach hadn’t taken me out. I took me out. Steele looked at me and almost spoke, but he could see how angry I was and thought better of it. He sent Matt in for me. The periods played out and the clock ran down and slowly but surely our advantage dissolved and disappeared, but I didn’t care. After the game I gave Steel a glare that told him in no uncertain terms that I was quitting. Lucas gave me one of those side long grins of his, one that said “You can, man, but I ain’t.” We had another game to go, but I left anyways. Dad met me at the bleachers with an iced Gatorade. I drank it down and for the first time since the end of the first half realized that I had been thirsty. I was that angry.

Alhtough the church was within walking distance of the house—the tournaments always took place at the big church on Providence, whose rec hall held eight ball courts, properly divided—but my Dad had driven anyways. We got into the jeep, top down despite coolish Fall weather, and started the slow drive home. As we crossed out of the parking lot and into the street, Dad said his first words to me since the game:

“I’m sorry your coach is an asshole, Ben.”

As he said the words, the tension I had been sitting on diffused, whoosh, like a cool wind off the lake on a summer day, whisking away the heat like magic. “Thanks, Dad.”

A line from a James Taylor song flitted through my head for a moment: “Lord knows, when the cold wind blows, it’ll turn your head around.” I tried to make it mean something, but I couldn’t. We turned a corner and were headed up our street to the house when I heard my Dad chuckle. I turned to look at him and he said, shaking his head once, “That one shot, though, that was a dangler.”

I remember feeling proud and bothered at the same time, and I felt myself blush while I fought off a smile. “A swish, Dad,” I corrected him, “They call it a swish.”

He gave me his smart-ass grin and said “You call it what you call it, and I’ll call it what I call it.”