Playing Without the Ball (7 page)

“Nah. Just regular.”

She yawns. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. But regular sucks.”

“You know better,” she says. “Goofy optimism, remember?”

I rub my hands together. I’m not so down, really. “Just reflecting on life,” I say, trying to sound ironic.

“Life. Yeah.” She climbs up on the table to sit. “Purge it, man. Force the moment to its crisis.”

I give her what feels like a blank stare.

“Eliot,” she explains. “The real one. Go.”

I feel myself blush. She’s different tonight. Way wired. “Frustration. You know, sexually.”

“Hey,” she says, “tough it out. The human body can endure.”

“Yeah? Like forever?”

She shrugs. “No biggie, bud. I haven’t had sex in almost a year and I’m all right.”

I smirk. I don’t like her this way.

“Well,” she says, “that’s not entirely true.”

“No?”

“Not if you count this afternoon.”

“Today?”

She takes another swig of wine, this time from the bottle. “Well, it barely registered. But yeah.”

I’m wondering who this could have been with. A guy in the band, maybe? But she worked all day.

“We had nothing to do, so he calls me into the office and asks if I want to smoke some grass with him.”

Oh, shit. “You went to bed with the lawyer?”

“A couch.” She laughs. “He had really good grass. I hadn’t been high in a long time, so I said what the hell. Then, you know. Whatever.”

Whatever. “The fat lawyer?”

“It was just recreational.” She giggles. “It’s pretty hilarious until you think about it.”

I shake my head.

“Why do you care?” She says it with a smile, but with a bit of a challenge, like she’s testing whether I’m jealous. She puts her arm across my shoulder. “Come on, let’s crash,” she says. “The room is spinning and I’m beat.”

I wake up to the soft sound of gagging and find Spit all hunched up, puking on my bed. I lurch away and turn on the light, checking myself for vomit. “Spit?” I say.

Her skin is very pale and there are tiny drops of sweat all over her face. She’s still got her eyes closed and she doesn’t answer right away. Then she groans. “My stomach is killing me,” she says.

The puke looks bloody and I turn away fast.

“I’m dying,” she says.

“You are?”

“Oh, shit. No. But I ought to. Oh, shit.”

I don’t know what to do. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning. I look around the room, out the window.

“Get an ambulance.”

“Really?”

“Really. Oh, shit. Go on.”

I run downstairs to the bar and dial 911. I tell them the situation
and they say they’ll get right over. I’m not sure if I should go upstairs or wait by the back door till they get here. Son of a bitch. I go back upstairs.

She’s throwing up again when I get there. “They’re coming,” I say. I go into the bathroom and wet a washcloth. I wring it out and put in on the back of her neck. I really don’t know why.

She manages to say thanks. I go outside and the ambulance pulls in about three minutes later, lights flashing but no siren. Two paramedics get out and I point to the stairs.

They go up and one of them takes her pulse.

“You the boyfriend?” the other one says.

I shake my head. “No. Just a friend, man. She was just crashing here tonight.”

“What’s her name?”

“Spit … Sarita.”

“What does she have in her?”

“A lot of wine, I guess.”

“Any drugs?”

“I don’t know.” I never know with Spit. “She was taking some cold medicine. A prescription. It’s in her shirt pocket.” I look for the shirt. “Over there.”

He frowns. “Anything else?”

“I really don’t know. It’s possible. She was smoking grass this afternoon.”

“Okay,” he says. “She have parents?”

“A mother.”

“You better call her.”

“I don’t know her.”

“Oh.”

They start talking to Spit. She’s not exactly coherent.

“We’ll take her in,” one guy says. He looks around the room. “You better come along.”

I sit in the waiting room for at least an hour, but they aren’t telling me shit. They said she’ll be all right; that’s about all.

I’ve been nodding on and off in a chair, wishing I’d brushed my teeth. I look up and there’s a heavier, older, more conservative version of Spit by the desk. It has to be her mother.

She comes over and takes a seat, smiling at me.

I smile back. She seems pleasant. Kind of pretty for her age and the time of day. “You Spit’s mother?” I say.

“Yes. I’m going in to see her in a moment.” The mother does have an accent. New Jersey Hispanic.

“They said she’ll be okay,” I say.

“Yes. This time. But this isn’t the first time. And probably not the last.” She squints a little and looks me up and down. “And who might you be?” she asks.

“Oh. I’m Jay. I work at the bar. Where her band was.”

“Ah,” she says. “And you are not having your stomach pumped this evening?”

I smile, hold back a laugh. “No. I don’t indulge.”

“You’re wise,” she tells me. “Wiser than Sarita, I see.”

I tilt my head. “I don’t know about that.”

She raises her eyebrows, then stands up. “I’ll go and see her now. Perhaps you should, too.”

“I don’t think they’ll let me.”

“
I
’ll let you. Come along.”

We walk to the emergency room and I punch a square red button to open the doors. Then I push another square red button to open another set.

There’s a guy sitting on a bench with blood on his shirt and his right hand wrapped in gauze. We walk past him and look into an empty room, then walk to the next one.

Spit’s lying on a bed in there with an I.V. tube in her arm. “Hi, Mom,” she says weakly. She stretches out my name. “Jay.”

“You’re alive,” I say.

She laughs. “Yeah. But that eternal footman was leering at me big-time.”

Her mother puts her hand on Spit’s forehead and frowns. “Oh, daughter,” she says.

“Oh, Mommy.”

I let out a sigh of relief, but suddenly I feel like I’m intruding. I give Spit a little wave. I catch her mother’s eye and say good night.

They both say good-bye. Her mother says thank you.

I leave through the sets of double doors and I can’t wait to get home and back to sleep. But then I remember what my bed looks like and imagine how the room smells. I look up at the clock; it’s 5:37. I rub my eyes. I guess I’ll go get breakfast.

I have to wait fifteen minutes for the diner to open, so I sit on the steps with my eyes closed. At about five of, a waitress opens the door. I look up and she smiles at me.

“Going fishing?” she asks, like she’s making a joke.

“No.” I turn my head toward her. “Just had an unusual night.”

I know this woman, sort of, because I have breakfast here a couple of days a week. She’s kind of like you’d expect a morning waitress at a diner would be, sort of motherly.

“Come on in,” she says.

I sit in a booth even though I’m alone, because it’s a hell of a lot more comfortable than the counter. I rub my eyes with my fists.

“Do you know what you want, honey?” the waitress asks.

“I guess pancakes. With fried ham and orange juice. A huge orange juice.”

I figure I’ll ball up the sheets and dump them in the sink for now, drag the mattress out into the hall, prop the window open with a brick, spray deodorant around the room, put on a warm sweat suit, climb into my sleeping bag, and stretch out on the floor. I’ll do laundry this afternoon. I can deal with all this. But only after I get some sleep.

M
y mother left home the same evening I got hit in the chest with an orange she’d flung across the kitchen. I didn’t get hurt, and the orange had been aimed at my father, but she left in tears anyway, saying she was no good for me.

I was nine and I didn’t agree, but I see it clearer now. She was a drunk and she hated my father, who she accused of sleeping with every warm body he could get into. The funny thing is, in the eight years that he and I lived alone together, he never slept with anyone that I know of.

The orange didn’t hurt, like I said, and I don’t think the verbal assaults did either. “You’re just like your father” has always been her most frequent statement to me, though in what way I was like him was never made clear. I think it’s her way of praying that I
don’t
turn out like him. I suppose that’s the best she can do for me.

Monday. I take a tray and push it along the lunch line, looking around the cafeteria for Alan Murray. I don’t see him. The two girls in front of me are giggling, talking back and forth. One’s short and the other’s tall, but they’re both slender and they’ve got tight faded jeans on and attitudes that make it clear this school is just water off their backs. “So I went out with him,” the shorter one is saying, “but, like, just to make Kurt jealous.”

The taller one turns and looks my way. I meet her eyes but I don’t hold them.

I take a hoagie and a chocolate milk and get out of line. And I see Alan over in a corner, sitting with two black guys. If you count Alan, there are nine-and-a-half black guys in the whole school. One of the guys with him is Jared Hall, who starts at forward. The other one is Anthony something, and he doesn’t play sports that I know of.

I go over anyway. I set down my tray and they look up. “Anybody here?” I say, mostly looking at Alan.

“No,” he says. “Sit down.”

I nod to Jared, who’s sitting across from me.

“Tough break getting cut,” he says.

“Yeah. It sucks.”

Alan looks at me, nods.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” I say.

“What?”

“What do you know about this church league? I mean, can I get on your team?”

“Maybe,” Alan says. “We got like seven guys now.”

“Six,” says Anthony.

Alan turns to look at him. “You bailing?”

“I was only going to play so you’d have enough,” Anthony says. “Take this man instead.”

“Yeah, take me. But keep him, too,” I say, pointing to Anthony.

“Well,” Alan says, “you’re supposed to be in our youth group to play.”

“So sign me up.”

Alan rubs his jaw. “You start coming to meetings?”

“I guess. Yeah.”

“I mean, I’d like you to play,” he says. “You’re a good player and all. But I do care about the youth group. I mean, some people think it’s a joke.” He takes a sip of his Sprite. “I don’t.”

Anthony looks around at me from the other side of Alan. “He’s president,” he says.

Okay, so there’s a condition attached to my being in the church league. I actually have to hook up with a church. Fair enough.

“So when do you meet?” I ask.

“We meet Sundays at six,” he says. “This week we meet at the Y. For practice.”

I smile. “I can handle that.”

Alan fixes his eyes on me. “Services are at eleven,” he says. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”

We play half-court on Tuesday morning, which is more a test of skill for me than my full-court running game. But I play well; it feels good to be back. Later I ask Dana how the jumping’s going.

“Hit a snag,” she says. “We were looking at tapes and decided that I’m not going to go much higher unless I try a new approach. A variation on what I’ve been doing. So it’s like back
to square one.” She pulls up her tank top to wipe the sweat from her face, revealing her tight abdominal muscles.

“So now I’m struggling to clear five-six,” she says, “but once I nail the new form I’ll be going higher than I ever would have before.”

“Is that frustrating?”

“A little,” she says. “I find myself lapsing into the old style just to get over the bar sometimes. But I fight it. I know I have to regress a little in order to get better.”

Spit doesn’t come around until Wednesday, but she seems like her old self. She rushes into the kitchen.

“We got another gig,” she says.

“Where?”

“Ground Zero. Over in Weston.” She does a comical little dance, like the twist. “I’m psyched.”

“When?”

“Friday. This Friday. Somebody backed out and they called us.”

“You ain’t playing here?”

“Not this week. No. We weren’t supposed to. Shorty’s bringing in a DJ on Friday and some other band on Saturday.”

“So you’re moving up in the world.”

“Nah. We’ll be back here next week. But this is cool, isn’t it? We never played anywhere else.”

“Wow, what’s next? Scranton?”

She laughs. “Oh, jeez, that’d be like too much to even think about. I mean
Scranton.”

I give her a high five. She’s beaming. I notice that her eyes are sort of bloodshot.

“What’s with the eyes?” I ask.

“Nothing. Remember last weekend when my body was rejecting my stomach? I broke some blood vessels from barfing so hard. No big deal.”

“You kind of overdid it.”

“It was just that medicine,” she says. “I think I was allergic to it.”

I roll my eyes. “Maybe it was the thirty glasses of wine.”

“Whatever. No big deal.”

I fold my arms and squint at her. I’m not about to lecture, but I can’t believe she’s blowing this off. “Do you say this stuff just to bust my chops?” I ask.