okay. They call me Cousin Justin, and tell everybody I’m the white sheep of the family. They’re both on the Sandy Heath basketball team, and if they don’t make it out of summer school, next season is history. They’re both about six two already, so the three of us make a mean front line. I only play church league ball back home, but these guys would make anybody look great. They can both dunk, backwards. I can get two inches over the rim, so I could dunk like a marble. There’s a three-on-three summer league in Port Campbell, and we’re thinking about getting into it.
Mom’s always going on about what a waste sports are. She would only let me play soccer when I was little. They have this thing in Montclair called serendipity soccer, which everyone in town calls dip soccer, for good reason. They have leagues for everyone, five to eighty-five, is what they brag about, and the big thing about dip soccer is, like, they don’t keep score. Okay, I can see not keeping score in basketball. I mean, after a while, who knows if it’s 92–92 or 94–90? But most soccer games I ever played in, the score was either 0–0, 1–0, 1–1 or, if the goalies just didn’t show up, maybe 2–1. Now, how the shit are you
not
going to know whether you won or lost when only one goal is scored? Gee, Mom, I don’t know who won. We didn’t keep score. But we did kick theball in their goal once, and they didn’t kick it in our goal at all. Every five-year-old in Montclair could tell you his team’s won-lost record, and I’ve seen better fights in adult dip soccer games than I’ve ever seen in football.
In Montclair, only blacks and poor whites play baseball or, God forbid, football. All the university brats, like me, play soccer. If we’re like real lucky, our parents let us play basketball between fall and spring soccer. Dad and I would throw the football around when he still lived with us, and the kids in the neighborhood would play tag football in the street. I tell you what: Maybe football’s the inhuman, brutalizing thing Mom says it is, but it’s about five times more fun than soccer.
The thing about Winfrey and Blue is, I don’t think these guys are ever going to be pestered by the Rhodes scholarship people, even if they never touch a basketball again. And if they can manage to stay in school for the next two years, maybe somebody will give them some kind of college scholarship to play. Maybe they won’t graduate, but they’ll be there, anyhow, and maybe something will seep through. I know this much: Winfrey and Blue will be making tires at Kelly-Springfield, or dealing drugs, in less than two years if they don’t have basketball. True fact.
I’m their tutor, sort of unofficially. They live over in Old Geddie, which used to be Geddie, according to Granddaddy, but I’ve never gotten that straight. Anyhow, that’s where most of the black people around here live now. Sometimes I go over there, and sometimes they come over here to Granddaddy’s and we study on the porch. There aren’t many blacks in Montclair. Mom’s always telling me how badly they were treated in what she calls “the real South,” which shesays starts in Richmond, how our own family had had slaves and all, but we’ve never lived in a neighborhood with even one black family. I guess they just prefer those unpainted little houses over by the railroad tracks. Right.
Winfrey and Blue talk about “axing” questions and wonder if they’re ever going to “gradurate,” but that isn’t exactly the kind of thing you correct in someone else’s house, especially since everyone in both their families talks the same way. If everybody in my family said “ax” all the time, that’s probably what I’d say, too. It’d be almost disrespectful not to. But I can see where they aren’t exactly turning on to the stuff we’re reading now. I mean,
Lord Jim?
I can’t get into that too much myself. Mom says literature gets better in college, where they
Mom’s always going on about what a waste sports are. She would only let me play soccer when I was little. They have this thing in Montclair called serendipity soccer, which everyone in town calls dip soccer, for good reason. They have leagues for everyone, five to eighty-five, is what they brag about, and the big thing about dip soccer is, like, they don’t keep score. Okay, I can see not keeping score in basketball. I mean, after a while, who knows if it’s 92–92 or 94–90? But most soccer games I ever played in, the score was either 0–0, 1–0, 1–1 or, if the goalies just didn’t show up, maybe 2–1. Now, how the shit are you
not
going to know whether you won or lost when only one goal is scored? Gee, Mom, I don’t know who won. We didn’t keep score. But we did kick theball in their goal once, and they didn’t kick it in our goal at all. Every five-year-old in Montclair could tell you his team’s won-lost record, and I’ve seen better fights in adult dip soccer games than I’ve ever seen in football.
In Montclair, only blacks and poor whites play baseball or, God forbid, football. All the university brats, like me, play soccer. If we’re like real lucky, our parents let us play basketball between fall and spring soccer. Dad and I would throw the football around when he still lived with us, and the kids in the neighborhood would play tag football in the street. I tell you what: Maybe football’s the inhuman, brutalizing thing Mom says it is, but it’s about five times more fun than soccer.
The thing about Winfrey and Blue is, I don’t think these guys are ever going to be pestered by the Rhodes scholarship people, even if they never touch a basketball again. And if they can manage to stay in school for the next two years, maybe somebody will give them some kind of college scholarship to play. Maybe they won’t graduate, but they’ll be there, anyhow, and maybe something will seep through. I know this much: Winfrey and Blue will be making tires at Kelly-Springfield, or dealing drugs, in less than two years if they don’t have basketball. True fact.
I’m their tutor, sort of unofficially. They live over in Old Geddie, which used to be Geddie, according to Granddaddy, but I’ve never gotten that straight. Anyhow, that’s where most of the black people around here live now. Sometimes I go over there, and sometimes they come over here to Granddaddy’s and we study on the porch. There aren’t many blacks in Montclair. Mom’s always telling me how badly they were treated in what she calls “the real South,” which shesays starts in Richmond, how our own family had had slaves and all, but we’ve never lived in a neighborhood with even one black family. I guess they just prefer those unpainted little houses over by the railroad tracks. Right.
Winfrey and Blue talk about “axing” questions and wonder if they’re ever going to “gradurate,” but that isn’t exactly the kind of thing you correct in someone else’s house, especially since everyone in both their families talks the same way. If everybody in my family said “ax” all the time, that’s probably what I’d say, too. It’d be almost disrespectful not to. But I can see where they aren’t exactly turning on to the stuff we’re reading now. I mean,
Lord Jim?
I can’t get into that too much myself. Mom says literature gets better in college, where they
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