This is the Part Where You Laugh (6 page)

“Hey, Creat. Why do you write about those Russian princesses?”

“I don't know, baby.”

I say, “You have to know something. Some reason.”

“I do,” he says. “I do.”

“And that is…”

Creature spins his basketball in his hands. He says, “I guess it's like this: they didn't have any power.”

“Who?” I say. “The princesses?”

“None. Everything I read about them, they were powerless. Being a Russian princess is like being some no-name skinny-ass clothes model in New York City. You just put on whatever clothes they give you, walk out on that runway, and look as good as you can. Then you walk back to wherever you stay all day and do jack-shit nothing for the rest of your time. Maybe you smoke some cigarettes. Maybe you don't eat too much. That's it.”

“Is that right?”

“I think so.”

I say, “If that's how it was for the princesses, then why do you write about them?”

“I guess I like to put me there too. With them. What if we had love affairs? What if we had powerful love affairs? What's the difference in our lives?”

“The difference between you and a Russian princess?”

“Exactly.” Creature taps his chest with his index finger. “What do I have?”

“You've got basketball.”

“Right,” he says. “Basketball could bring me money. It could bring me wealth. Same as being a Russian princess.”

I shake my head. “It's different.”

“How?” he says. “Tell me.”

“I don't know. You get to play, for one thing. You
get
to. You don't
have
to.”

Creature spins his ball in his hands. “Tell me, baby, what do we have here? What power? What influence? We live in a fucking trailer park in a middle-class town in the western United States. You and I are shit on by everyone at school unless they're afraid of us. We go to Taft, a trashy, rich-person school.”

“Yeah, but we've got basketball, man.”

“And the princesses, well, they get to be princesses. So tell me: What happens if you take that one thing away from us? What happens if we lose our
one
thing? What happens then?”

I bike to meet Creature at the Washington-Jefferson Bridge courts, and these are the rules:

I lock my bike and find Creature shooting on the far rim. He says, “We're gonna be ‘a pair of ragged claws tonight, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.' ”

I nod. Take a warm-up shot.

“Nothing?” he says. “T. S. Eliot, baby. ‘All the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo'?”

I say, “My poet is Rajon Rondo.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he says. “Let's find some big men to run with.”

Creature and I pick up three forwards and wait to get in on the next game. Creature says, “Pick and cut through for easy layins and dunks.” Then he points at me and says, “You play the point and I'll take the two, got it?”

“Yep.”

“Off the ball,” he says, “I'll commit murder. Plus, we'll run the pick-and-roll up top. If I'm not open on the roll, you pop or hit one of these big guys underneath. Keep the other team honest, right?”

“Right.”

Creature's only 6'1", but he dunks bigger than 6'1". And on the first pick-and-roll, that's exactly what he does. His man slides in front of me, and I hit Creature over the top for an uncontested dunk down the middle of the lane. The rim is reinforced, no breakaway, and Creature takes a moment to do a slow pull-up on the double rims. He yells as he drops down. And then the rout's on. We win that first game 11 to 2, the other team never figuring out how to stop Creature.

The next game is the same. And the next. I pass to the three big men a little more because I want them to stay interested in playing with us, but Creature's always my outlet on the break. I don't have to shoot, so I almost never do unless they drop two to the paint on the pick-and-roll.

Fourth game. Some thug-looking guys from Portland step in.

I play defense, dribble, and pass. Bring it up top to reset. Drive to draw the defender. I love this part of a game, when I get to run everything but don't have to take a shot. I start to get into a flow where it's just me. I'm myself and I'm alone, and there are motions when I have the ball and motions when I don't have the ball, and I think about my footwork, my body position, square up my shoulders, backpedal with my butt low, point at the cutter, play the left-side top of the two-three zone.

Sometimes when it's like this, I don't hear anything, or I guess I hear things and I react to what I hear, and I talk to my teammates, but even that isn't conscious. Even that part of my brain goes away somewhere, and then there's just this flow of the game and everything I love about it.

Creature snaps me out of my head. He yells, “I'm eating your entrails right now, bitch,” and he's wagging his finger in a gangbanger's face, and the gangbanger looks pissed. Then I can hear. And I'm with everybody else, and one of our bigs seems worried.

Two possessions later, Creature dunks and does another pull-up on the rim. Says, “I'm just getting so damn tired from all these dunks on you.”

“Fuck you,” the gangbanger says, and takes it all the way to the rim at the other end, but one of the bigs blocks his shot.

“Foul,” he says.

“What?” Creature jogs up next to him.

“I called a foul, motherfucker.”

“Even though he blocked you clean and clear as day?”

The big looks at the gangbanger, then back at Creature. “Whatever,” he says. “He can choose to call that.”

“No,” Creature says. “Everyone and
your
mother”—he taps the gangbanger's chest—“knows that wasn't a foul.”

“Keep talking,” the gangbanger says, “and I'll cut your mouth out with a razor blade.”

“Oooh,” Creature says, “talk dirty to me, baby. I like that,” and he winks. “I guess we'll check you the ball, then.”

I step over next to Creat as we set up on defense. I say, “Chill a little. Let's roll these guys and get on to the next game.”

“Really?” he says, and he says it loudly enough for everyone to hear, even the people on the sidelines waiting to take next. “You think this guy is getting tired of me dragging his limp dick up and down the court?”

Someone courtside yells, “Boom, Creature! Damn!”

And Creature smiles at me. “Sorry. I had to say that.”

Everyone laughs but the gangbanger. When the next ball goes out of bounds, the gangbanger says, “Keep talking, I'll wreck you. You'll see.”

Creature steps up eye to eye with him, right there on the baseline, and the game stops. Everyone can tell that Creature is as athletic in a fight as he is on the court. His hands are huge for his size and he leaves them open before he fights like he might do anything. Maybe rip a man's arm off. Maybe break his teeth. Gouge out eyes with his thumbs.

Creature says, “We could just squabble right here, P-Town boy. Right now. Is that what you want?”

That gangbanger doesn't know what to say. He isn't in his hometown, on his home court. He can't just call for backup, and I see his eyes flicker back and forth as he looks at Creature and considers his options.

I step up next to both of them and say, “Hey, boys, can we just play some more ball, huh? Give this one up?” I try to allow them both a chance to step away. Then I use a phrase I saw my uncle Henry use once outside a bar. I say, “Y'all both look tough enough to me.”

And that does it. It works.

“All right,” Creature says, and nods. “I think we're done here.”

After that fourth game ends, we play the next game and win, but not like we should. Creature keeps looking over at the gangbanger, who's on the sideline now. Creature keeps flexing his chest, winking at him, kissing the air when he hits a shot. And twice Creature gets beat on fast-break layins at the other end while he's showboating to that sideline.

“Creature,” I say, “the game's right here, man. It's right here.”

This side of Creature annoys me. Even in league games, in games that count, he can get like this. And when he does, I spend all my time thinking about him. I can't lose myself in the game the way I want to. There's no flow. No rhythm. No pace. And we don't dominate like we should.

Creature says, “I got this, baby. I got this locked down.”

“You better,” I say, “ 'cause this is garbage.”

We win the fifth game 11 to 7—sad to me because the fifth opponent is the worst we've played yet. I have to use our three bigs over and over because Creature isn't setting quality screens anymore, and we certainly aren't killing anyone in the pick-and-roll.

In the sixth game, my bigs are tired and we get run off the court. The gangbanger walks off somewhere near the end of the game, so Creature can't talk trash to him on the sidelines anymore. Creature tries to step it up after that. He scores three baskets in a row, but it's too late. We lose the game 11 to 8.

On the sideline, Creature and I share a jug of SunnyD. I say, “You've got to focus better than that, man. You were trash out there.”

“Focus for this?” he says. “This isn't even real basketball. This isn't a D-1 game or even a high school game. No, baby, I don't have to focus for this. My mind's full of poetry and that's all that matters right now. I'm just too T. S. Eliot.”

“Hey, T. S. Eliot,” I say, “remember the other day when you told me that some people aren't worth the scars on the backs of our knuckles?”

“Yeah,” he says. He takes the SunnyD from me and chugs three gulps. “But what I say and what I do are two totally separate things. I'm a hypocrite. I'm a complicated human being. It's like my writing. I don't even talk like that, you know?”

More people have come to play and there's a crowd, a long wait to get back in. We're standing on the sideline, waiting for our turn at another game, and I'm pissed. I don't like to wait to play basketball when we could've stayed in the whole time. Creature's next to me, his arms crossed. He doesn't joke around or say anything to me now because he knows I'm frustrated.

We're standing there, the crowd all around us, when I see, past Creature, someone coming through, pushing through, and it's the gangbanger, and I see the flash of silver in his hand.

“Run!” I yell. “Creat, run!”

Creature breaks to my right and I follow him. We swim through people, other players warming up, stretching, people milling around, standing in circles, drinking. We bust through all of them, keeping our heads low, sprint past the first bridge pylon into the dark side, and I look back and see that the gangbanger's there, coming through the last of the people.

Years ago, under the north end of the bridge, someone shot out all of the lights, and whenever the city fixes them, someone shoots them out again. So it's dark above us, and we run along the horseshoe pits in that gray dark, more careful now, slower, trying not to hit anything in the dark, knowing it's hard to follow anyone there, past the old playground and the chained-up bathrooms. I look back again to see if there's anyone following us. I could see an outline against the backlight if he was there, but he's not.

“We're good, man. Let's keep going a little farther, but we're good now.”

At the fourth pylon, we cut up and slide in behind the big cement pillar above the ivy slope. “Watch out for needles,” I say. “Don't just sit down here.”

Creature and I scrub our feet back and forth on the bare patch of ground beneath us, trying to kick syringes or shards of glass aside if there are any. It's impossible to see, so we both edge our shoes back and forth, clear space until we're sure there's nothing on the ground there, then we sit down.

Creature says, “So what did he go get?”

“Some kind of silver pistol. I don't know. I just saw it and booked.”

Creature says, “Probably went back to his car and got it.”

“Yeah, I guess he got fed up with
somebody's
trash-talking.”

“All I have to say is that it was his fault. He was a weak-ass little punk. Couldn't play defense and was too scared to fight. So he had to go get himself a pistol to even things up.”

“Creature, that's how it is sometimes. You know that.”

“True. But still…”

In the dark, I can see the outline of Creature with his arms wrapped around his legs. We're both leaning back against the cement. I'm still sweating from the basketball game and the running down here, but it's colder against the cement, in the gap under the bridge. I rub my legs with my hands to keep warm.

Creature says, “Sorry about tonight.”

I'm still frustrated, annoyed that we lost games and had to run away, but I say, “It's all right.”

“I should've chilled out. You were right, baby.” He bumps my knee. “Huddling here isn't as fun as playing ball, is it? Sorry about this.”

I say, “Don't worry about it,” and this time I mean it. Creature's out of control sometimes, gets a little crazy, but it's still fun. He's not boring, at least.

There's a spark in front of us, down the slope, 30 feet. Another spark, but the lighter doesn't catch. Someone gets out a butane, and it flames blue. There are three people down there, all of them wearing layered, heavy clothes. Two men and a woman. One of the men holds a straight glass pipe. He puts the butane flame to the end, clicks it, inhales on the other, and the rock bubbles. He hands the pipe to the man next to him, and that man takes a drag before handing it to the woman. The three of them pass the pipe and the lighter until the rock's killed.

Creature says, “Do you think about her a lot?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Do you look for her?”

“Sometimes. I can't help it. But she might not even live here anymore.”

I can't see the three people clearly without the lighter going. I see the outlines of them. One of them sitting down. The other two walking away.

Sometimes when I think I see her it's like I've swallowed a piece of glass and I wonder where it's going to cut me. I picture the glass going down my throat, through my esophagus, the sharp edges of it as it enters my stomach, and I wonder where it will lodge, or where it might cut through. Sometimes I feel that piece of glass in my intestines, working its way down, and I start to think that it's really there, that I really swallowed a piece of glass.

Creature says, “I'm not trying to be a dick, but that woman down there looks a little bit like her.”

“A little,” I say, “but she's not shaped right. Even in those clothes, I can tell. Something wrong about her shoulders, the way she holds her head.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, but for a second, I thought so too.”