Playing Without the Ball (10 page)

There’s one of those twenty-five-cent fire engine rides for kids going back and forth outside the store, only nobody’s riding it. It’s moving kind of jerky and going
whump
…
whump
…
whump
.

I go through the automatic door and between two checkouts and drift over toward the fruit. This is an old store—the aisles are narrow and everything’s tinged with gray. They’ll be closing in a few minutes; an older guy is mopping the floor behind the deli counter.

I hesitate by the magazines and scan for anything interesting. And I spend a couple of minutes over in the fruit and vegetable area, sort of blending in with the produce. But then I just get the stuff I need and a bottle of Gatorade in the original urine color.

When I come out, there’s only one light on in the parking lot and the fire engine is still going
whump
…
whump
…
whump
.

So I head for home.

M
onday I get another letter from my father. It’s a fat envelope, but my father isn’t the type to write a lot. He’s included a menu, just a photocopy, from the place he hangs out in near the beach: a steak-and-pasta restaurant. They have a different dollar-beer special in the bar every night of the week. He’s hand-written a note across the top: “Just like Shorty’s, only a hundred times better!”

There’s also an article he tore out of the
Los Angeles Times
about pickup basketball in Venice.

I take the letter to the diner. I hesitate in the doorway. Brenda—that newer waitress—is working the side to the left, so I take a booth down there. She comes right over.

“Hey,” she says, recognizing me.

“Hey.”

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. Need dinner.”

“You wanna see the specials?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“I’ll get you a menu.”

She brings it and a glass of water. “I’ll give you a minute,” she says.

I decide on roast chicken with gravy.

I unfold the letter. My dad says he’s getting in shape by walking and running a few miles every day, and he joined a gym. He says he thought he was in pretty good shape, “but out here EVERYBODY’S in great shape. You should see the chicks.”

Yeah, I should. But I’ve heard all this from him before. There’s a lot of stuff my father never got out of his system.

I catch Brenda’s eye when she brings the food. “Your boyfriend make that?”

She rolls her eyes, glances around. “That asshole.”

I give kind of a consoling smile. “Something wrong?”

“Jerk packed up and ran back to his girlfriend in Philly. The dumb shit.”

“Sorry,” I say. “You’re staying?”

“I’m not going back there.”

“No. So when did this happen?”

“Last weekend. The bitch called him up. I got pissed. He said ‘screw you’ and he left.”

“Just like that?”

She shrugs. “We’d been fighting a lot. This is like the third time we broke up. And the last, believe me.”

I start poking at the chicken with my fork.

“I’d better let you eat,” she says.

“It’s okay.”

“No.” She looks around again. “I gotta work.”

So I eat. I read the Venice article. The author is trying to
be hip, trying to give an insider’s take on the street ball scene out there. Trying to act like he’s humbled by the athleticism on the court, but letting you know he thinks of himself as a pretty bad dude, too. What bullshit.

Brenda brings me my bill. “So you still working across the street?” she asks.

“Yeah. You gonna come by?”

“I’m underage.”

“Oh.”

“They check?”

“Usually.” I think for a second. “Come around back sometime. I’m in the kitchen all night on weekends.”

“I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“It’s cool. You just visit with me. No big deal. There’s a good band playing this weekend; one of my friends is the singer.”

She smiles. “I’ll think about it.”

“Okay,” I say, smiling back. “Don’t think too hard.”

But Friday passes and nothing happens. I play ball in the afternoon on Saturday with Alan and some other guys at the Y. Then I go to work.

It’s busy as hell. People are home from college for winter break and there’s an NFL game on TV, so every bar stool and a couple of tables are full by the time I get in at 4 o’clock. I churn out a lot of cheeseburgers and mozzarella sticks. Time flies past. Before I know it, it’s 7:30.

Spit pokes her head in. They won’t go on until at least 9, but she likes to set up early.

“What’s up, Jay?”

“Nothing. You?”

“Big news.”

“What?”

“Got busted.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

She starts drumming on the sandwich table. “Stanley was letting me drive his car last night after the gig. I ran a light and got pulled over. I wasn’t drunk, but we had a six-pack on the floor and I tried to hide an open bottle under the seat.”

“You get DUI?”

“No, I was way under the limit. Careless driving and some shit about the bottle. Stanley says I’ll just get fined. No big deal.”

“No?”

“Nah. I expected the cop to be a dick about it, but he was okay. Just wrote me up and told Stanley to drive me home.”

I nod. “I guess there’s some advantage to having a lawyer for a boyfriend.”

She laughs and slaps my arm. “Oh, come on,” she says. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

The band is great tonight. She’s working in some early Beatles and a couple of Supremes songs, done unlike they’ve ever been done before.

I’m leaning against the kitchen doorway, just kind of pumping my hips to “Please, Please Me,” when there’s a rap at the back door. It’s Brenda.

“Hi,” she says, kind of nervous-like.

“Hi. You look great.” She’s got her hair down.

“I’m scared,” she says, but she’s smiling.

“Like I said, just stay back here.”

“Yeah, but I got I.D. One of the other waitresses let me borrow her driver’s license.”

“Cool. She look like you?”

“Some.”

She takes her jacket off and sets it on the counter. “I’ve never done this.”

“You don’t have to.”

“But I want a beer.”

I shrug. “Listen, you got nothing to lose. Just go to Bobbi, the woman. She might cut you a break.”

Brenda starts laughing, then scrunches up her nose. “Could you do it for me?”

“Forget it. They know I’m not legal.”

“Okay. I’ll try.”

“Good girl.”

“Just give me a second.” She takes a deep breath. “What was your name?”

“Jay. But don’t mention me.”

“Oh, no. I didn’t mean that.” She grips my arm. “Okay, Jay.”

“Brenda.”

“What?”

“Act natural.”

She comes back about three minutes later with a bottle of Michelob. The place is packed, so we’re shielded from the bar. We lean against the wall near the band, just a few feet from the kitchen.

The band is loud. I mouth, “wait here,” and go back in the kitchen. I take off the white cook’s shirt and put on my denim
shirt. I get a bottle of Coke from the refrigerator and go back out to Brenda.

She points to Spit. “That your friend?”

“What?”

“Your friend!”

“My what?”

Now she screams it at me, her mouth actually grazing my ear, and I hear it clearly. I get a heated chill.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding vigorously.

“Terrific voice.”

“Yeah. She’s … got a great voice.” Spit’s doing Springsteen’s “Brilliant Disguise,” fast and sort of pulsating. Brenda takes my hand and we start dancing.

When the song ends, I pull her into the kitchen. “You get proofed?” I ask.

“Yeah.” She looks around and giggles. “I hand her the license, and just as she starts to look at it, the other bartender taps her on the shoulder to tell her something.”

“That was Shorty.”

“Yeah. So she sets it on the bar, and I discreetly pick it up and put it in my pocket. When she turns back to me, she’s ready to take my order.”

“Great.”

“Yeah.” She raises the bottle up and finishes it. “I better get another one before she forgets who I am.”

“Good idea.”

“Get you one?”

I shake my head. “I’m working.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot.” She flicks up her eyebrows and walks away.

By midnight she’s had four bottles of beer and we’re both sweating from a lot of dancing. I’ve been going back and forth to the kitchen when Bobbi brings over orders, but nobody’s eating much this late. Brenda’s leaning into me, and we’re dancing sort of fast but very close. She’s singing to me, softly, and even that close I can barely hear her because of the music, but I can definitely feel her breath on my neck, her lips brushing gently against my ear. It’s like a fever right down the middle of my body.

I figure I just happen to be in the right place at the right time, but I’ll take it. I’ve been in the wrong place more than enough to balance it out.

Brenda hits the bathroom, and I go to the bar to ask Shorty if it’s all right to shut down the kitchen. He says fine.

“I’ll clean up everything in the morning,” I say.

“You splittin’?”

“Mind if I stay?”

He looks up the length of the bar toward the front door, then sweeps his eyes over the floor. “What’s up?”

“I kind of got a date.”

“Here?”

“Yeah. She doesn’t know how old I am.”

He squints a little and studies my face. As long as he doesn’t get busted he couldn’t care less. “Just lay low,” he says.

“Cool. I will.”

“If I see you with a drink, you’re gone, buddy.”

“I won’t. I don’t.”

He nods slowly. “You bangin’ that singer?”

“Who? Spit?”

“Yeah.”

“No way. No.”

“Whatever. Have the place cleaned by noon.”

“It’ll be spotless.”

T
he sunlight hits my window, and I open my eyes after four hours’ sleep. Brenda is scrunched against the wall, facedown, in one of my T-shirts and her blue cotton panties. I’m in just my underwear and it’s hot as hell in here.

I get up quietly and adjust the thermostat, which is turned up to eighty. I pick up the empty condom packages (two) that I got from the machine in the men’s room last night. Brenda opens one eye, then the other, and yawns.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

“How you doin’?”

“Good.” I kneel on the mattress and she pokes my thigh. “Some night,” she says.

“I’d say.”

She swings her legs around and sits next to me. She grins. “Do I know you?”

I laugh. “Pretty well by now.”

She squeezes my arm. “Thanks for getting me in there last night,” she says. “That was fun.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“I mean … all of it.”

“Yeah. You sleep okay?”

She shrugs. “Some.”

“Me too.”

She stands up slowly. “Can I use your toothbrush?” she asks.

“I think that’d be all right.”

She looks at me over her shoulder on her way to the bathroom. Then she stops, turns to me, grins, rolls her eyes, and shakes her head.

I spend an hour cleaning the bar, then gather my clothing in a pillowcase and walk three blocks to the laundromat. I’m down to my last pair of socks.

The third washer I look in doesn’t seem to have much hair in it, so I wipe it out and dump in some detergent. I always wash whatever’s dirty together—white stuff and everything else. Who cares if my underwear turns gray?

Sturbridge water is notoriously foul. No one drinks it—bottled-water companies must love this town—and on really bad days the wash comes out only semi-clean. Today it seems all right.

I could sit here and wait for the washer to finish, but I didn’t bring anything to read. There’s a row of chairs along the wall across from the dryers. A fat guy about fifty is smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper; a bleached-blond woman in her twenties, also smoking, has a young girl on her lap and is reading
Make Way for Ducklings
to her; and a guy a
couple of years older than me, with fuzzy red hair sticking out from under a Bulls cap, is just staring out at the street.

I’ll walk up to the deli for a sandwich. And I need to get quarters for the dryer.

We blow out the Presbyterians in the 6 o’clock game, then walk to the church for a meeting. I don’t say much on the way over. In fact, this is all I say:

—“Whoa. Watch it.” (When Beth stumbles slightly, stepping off a curb.)

—“Yeah, (laugh) I suck.” (When Alan busts my chops about throwing away three consecutive passes in the second quarter.)

—“Maybe …. Probably.” (When Josh asks me if I think he should try out for the high school team next year. He’d have no chance.)

The meeting is not a big deal. People play pool or Ping-Pong for a while, and others sit around and talk. I opt for pool. Then Alan runs a short meeting about paying dues, church attendance, the need for kids to help out with set construction for the elementary-grade Christmas pageant, and some deal about caroling at the senior citizens’ center. He also gives an update on the basketball team.

“The Saturday after New Year’s is our spaghetti dinner to raise money for the spring retreat,” he says. “I think everybody signed up for at least one chore.”