I stood in the middle of downtown renovation, watching frat boys push their sorority sisters around the only block the Refurbishment Project hadn't turned into rubble. Greeks were dressed in green doctors' gowns while the sweethearts of Alpha Omega, pretending to be patients, lay under blankets in beds that had wheels the size of hockey pucks. It certainly wasn't my idea to spend Thanksgiving Day covering the third annual Red Races as a sports event. That brainstorm belonged to my editor, Marty, who assured me the effect would be funnier than bell. Marty was wrong. A KRNA deejay called each heat live, then jumped off the sound stage to interview the winners like they'd just won Preakness.
I suppose I should have been in a better mood, should have tried to ask the racers how they took that last comer at hairpin speed, but my seven-year-old son, Barry, is a diabetic who devotes the majority of his waking hours to staying out of the hospital, so the sick humor of the whole charade didn't do a whole lot for me. Also, "Iowa" is an old Indian word meaning "beautiful land," not "urban renewal." The college kids are in one long stupor the four years they're here. They couldn't care less about the trashing of River City. I live here, though. The pedestrian greenway and Sycamore Mall and Plaza Center One have ruined this town, and now the Old Capitol Center promises to bury it under eight feet of cement.
The students were celebrating Happy Hour and everyone seemed to be having a fine time and it was all for a good cause, since the prize money was going straight to Mercy Hospital's cystic fibrosis fund. Race Beds So Others Might Leave Beds. The Stallion mascot whickered at anyone who wasn't decked out in River State roan-and-gray in honor of the first basketball game of the season later tonight. Most stores boast a Stallion Medallion department, where everything from key chains to lounge chairs are available in red roan-and-gray. A couple of cheerleaders, delectable girls with too much makeup, let me kiss the tiny Stallions painted on their cheeks.
“What's your prediction?” the Stallion asked me. The mascot never appears in public without his horse costume because he suffers from the Midwest's worst case of acne. I inevitably feel like I'm conducting a conversation with Mr. Ed.
“Take Omaha and the points.”
“No, really, come on.”
“River state in a romp,” I said. “Menkus'll be sky-high.”
Mr. Ed danced in place, hooves flying.
The Stallions used to be called the Indians. There used to be a shoe repairman who, if you weren't careful would talk winter boots with you until closing; a café where regulars lingered over lunch, reading the paper I write for and getting free refills; a laundromat owned by a guy so pasty and roly-poly that I suspected he'd gotten tossed into the rinse cycle once too often; a sporting-goods dealer who knew more about goose down than geese do. They're gone, all of them, all the friendly stores run out of town or onto rural route 6 by what my wife, Deborah, calls chichi shops. I now know why the Amish refuse to drive their black-box buggies in from Kalona.
Water taps belch sludge, the air smells sooty, and we feel the tremor of drill presses all day long. It wasn't always like this, I keep trying to tell people, but they don't believe me or don't especially care. A few years ago the Old Capitol Building, the first state capitol, was named a national historical site, which locked up the past in a nice neat mausoleum and gave carte blanche to development boys bent on turning downtown into a rock quarry. The unfinished malls and parking lots and abandoned foundations make me feel my life isn't being lived so much as put on hold, traded even-up for an urban planner's dream of the entire business district as a quiche dispensary. They've seen the future, these boys, and it takes place in a plastic bubble.
Kappa Kappa girls rooted home their housemates. The contestants the deejay interviewed said how thankful they were they could do something to help people who had cystic fibrosis. The sky had the Astrodome quality it gets when snow is working its way south from the Great Lakes. The wind picked up as dusk darkened, making it difficult to want to stay here. Some kids had stopwatches and actually timed the bed racers as they skirted the edge of building demolition and street repair.
This was a slightly worse assignment than usual, but I'm assistant sports editor on a two-man staff. Marty sticks close by the office, doing layout and only the major articles, while I cover bowling tourneys and Tae Kwon Do seminars and the dog races in Cedar Rapids. I wanted out and that out took 80 east to Chicago, then 94 north to Milwaukee, where I was still in the running for a job at the Journal, an "employee-owned" paper that gives reporters a lot more leeway to free-lance. Milwaukee: I yearned to chart a sailboat on Lake Michigan and go to Marquette games and Bucks games and Brewers games at County Stadium and get sloshed in German beer halls. I was on the lookout for a solid story to dig my claws into because so far the piece of mine the journal brass like best was a Where-Are-They-Now? thing on Bob Pettit, which was less a transcript of my telephone conversation with the ex-All-Pro than an ode to my youth, when the game of basketball rang deepest and loudest and clearest in my soul.
As a kid I worshiped Pettit because he had a perfect jump shot and kept track of how many points he scored, and those were my main problems, too. My father was always away on the tennis circuit and, until she became an alcoholic, my mother was always out showing houses; I needed something I could practice nonstop to prove my significance, and I found it in bombs from the top of the key. Once, when Pettit played valiantly in a lost cause, the radio announcer said he had the guts of a cat burglar. I felt the force of truth, cried into the couch, and wanted to be his partner in crime. The summer between my junior and senior year in high school I attended the Bob Pettit Coaching Camp in St. Louis. After watching me throw behind-the-back passes during a weave drill, he lifted me off the burning asphalt and said, “Stop fartin' around like you're Cousy. Work on your jumper.” His voice had the sound of a train horn and he resembled a balding giraffe.
Now, though, pushing forty, I was going all out for Belvyn Menkus, who is as different from Bob Pettit as I am from my wife, a scholar. The first time I saw Menkus's name was three years ago at the bottom of a recruiting list under the heading "Best of the Rest" in the Midwest Basketball Monthly; a six-foot-three guard averaging twenty points and ten assists for Franklin Vocational, a Chicago sports factory River State has plundered ever since I've been in town. I'd read glowing scouting reports on him, but I learned long ago that blue-chip high school seniors with flashy stats are nothing new. His Sioux City highlight film portrayed him as one more community college gunner, which completely obscures the picture, since he is above all a giver, a point guard with great court sense. Preseason practice was closed to the press, so I wrote the usual puff for the Register.
Halfway through the first game, I started believing every word of the hyperbole I'd been writing about Menkus most of November. Even now I would gladly trade a year of my life or the slow side of my brain for two hours inside his skin because, although he looks like lead alto in an Oak Park choir, he plays basketball like he just invented jazz. This winter I was so madly in love with what his body can do in a gymnasium, so obsessed and depressed and driven nuts by daydreams, that sometimes I thought the only relief would be to plant a kiss in the middle of his mug or at least squeeze his immense right hand, to show my awe but also to make sure he wasn't a ghost. It's a long story.
Before going to the gym, I bought an orange plate of cholesterol at Arby's and wrote a fingernail-thin story about the Bed Races while catching clips from football games on a television sitting on top of the cigarette machine. Then I had to call Deborah at her chairman's house in North Liberty and tell her I wasn't going to have time to get out there for Thanksgiving dinner.
It was difficult to hear over the crash of academic chatter at her end, but I think she said, “Well, won't you at least tell Richard that you deeply regret being unable to clink sherry glasses and wax witty with him over this year's bounty?”
Richard Tolliver is her department chairman. Deborah actually talks like this. I said no.
The River State field house was built in 1926 with metal and brick and a very low ceiling to create beautifully bad acoustics. Chairs are packed close together on top of the court and the balcony seats are all benches: when one person cheers, that cheer flows into the bloodstream of the next person, and you get a cumulative effect. Every sound echoes and re-echoes; every ovation is shared with your neighbor. It's such a great gym, with so much energy and character, that Coach Hinselwood wants the athletic director to declare it a fire trap and build him an oval sports complex with perfectly regular dimensions. The old barn can come alive in the cold, and even tonight, on this chilly Thanksgiving, when wiser heads would have been watching the game at home, adding kindling to the fire, a capacity crowd wearing gray slacks and roan shirts stampeded to its seats. The Stallion Battalion, rowdy students who sit together in the northeast bleachers, was out in full force.
Menkus was the only person on either team not goofing off during warm-ups. He paced the time line, cradling the ball in his humongous hands like he was trying to read Spalding on the leather. It was the damndest sight, this skinny junior college transfer standing alone at midcourse, oblivious to ushers and vendors wandering courtside, kids wanting autographs, klieg lights burning in his face, and Hinselwood shouting at him to get some shots in along with the rest of the team. Hinselwood's assistant coaches, Ott and Nagel, scribbled on clipboards. The manager got water ready and folded towels. Happy, a deaf-mute who always carries his Instamatic and a sandwich board of Stallion buttons, tried to get Menkus to say cheese.
Anyone else stomping around the center circle I would have dismissed as a head case, but there was something immediately, absolutely serious about Menkus that made me leave the press balcony to go watch him from the scorer's table. Twenty minutes before game time, Menkus was already stripped down to his uniform. Under his jersey he wore a ludicrous gray sweatshirt that had been through a thousand washings and made him look twelve years old. He worked strenuously on a pack of bubblegum.
“Belvyn, how's it going?” I heard myself ask. “Ready to run?”
He didn't say anything. He was so far gone into his own voodoo I doubt he even heard me. I couldn't expect him to remember who I was on the basis of a couple of media sessions. He jogged while moving the ball between his feet and behind his back and around his waist--coaching-camp clichés, but you could barely follow the ball and he controlled it like he was playing a private round of Atari.
He popped a few line-drive jumpers from straightaway. All of them went in, and on all of them he jumped at least a foot and a half off the floor, cradling the air in his hand until the net lifted. Then he whipped the ball off the arms of empty chairs and the legs of tables; it kept rebounding into his hands. The Stallion Battalion, ensconced in the safety of the first tier, razzed him a little, but I don't think he was hotdogging it. He was just doing what he loved doing and, in this age of glory hogs and tally counters, it was probably difficult for the drunken idiots in the northeast bleachers to comprehend that there was one poor kid left whose main passion was still passing.
His right leg was lightly bandaged, he needed a shave, and his birch-white face carried absolutely no expression. From a distance, his profile might make you think you were watching a lummox. Up close, he awakened terror. In Menkus's eyes was that typical athletic meanness which my junior varsity coach at West Des Moines said separated the wheat from the chaff, and which he also said I lacked and would always lack. Menkus's green eyes looked everywhere and nowhere, telling you everything and nothing at all. He had bushy sideburns halfway down his cheeks and a blond Afro that was about to come uncurled any minute now.
Tuning up in the west bleachers, the pep band sounded like they still had a couple of numbers to rehearse. The Stallions' trainer retaped Cliffie Davis's black piano-key fingers. Omaha finished warming up and sat down. River State ran to the bench to the roar of 12,200. Standing-room only. Since Katie Koob had been an Iranian hostage for thirteen months, her mother and father were supposedly here as guests of Governor Ray. An Episcopalian pastor delivered a benediction. Orange-and-brown streamers were let loose. A pilgrim waving a bazooka chased a kid in a turkey outfit around the court, and the Stallion borrowed the pilgrim's bazooka as a megaphone to whip up the crowd. I felt like the only traitor under the big top, not singing the national anthem, not even pretending to sing, but standing in the eclipsed corridor, devouring the cheerleaders, who were perched on tiptoes with one hand holding their pom-poms and the other touching their breasts, their skirts hiked high to mid-thigh, their roan braids holding their permed hair in place, the Stallion emblems on their cheeks gleaming under the glare.
While I was making my way through the crowd in the foyer, a great roar went up, not so much in appreciation of a good tenor as in anticipation of the game. I heard the thump of the houselights going off before both teams were introduced. I was suddenly covered in blackout and tripping up the stairs. I paused at the first landing to catch my breath and peer through the shadows. I saw Menkus standing at mid-court in a circle of hot light. He was announced as the Stallions' starting guard. I heard the fans' clapping hands, which sounded like maybe a million horses trodding down a hard dirt path. And they were all for him.
Returning to press row, I was surprised to find Deborah sitting in my seat two chairs to the left of the last pole. She's not exactly what I'd call a basketball groupie, but she's open to almost everything and a great one for finding some zany meaning in it. She'd moved my coat and typewriter down a space and was drinking a Tab. On the table in front of her she had several student papers, the last draft of the last chapter of her book on autobiography, and a program to help her follow along. No one's got more going in the idea department than Deborah. All her verbal activity is just her brain doing double-time, pushing through the surface to assert itself. Even her elbows are sharp.
“Hello, hello,” I said, kissing her and smelling all that delicious turkey and dressing as Omaha's starting five was introduced. “What are you doing here, hon?”
She cupped her hand over her ear like she was deaf, as a loud round of boos for the visiting Bluejays drowned out my question. I couldn't get over the fact that it was Thanksgiving and it didn't look like there were going to be any no-shows.
“Hi, sweetheart, I love you,” I shouted just as the boos died down. Scattered chuckles from my colleagues. “I'm sorry I didn't make it. How was dinner?”
“Wonderful until everybody from American Studies started talking about your pieces on Belvyn and asking me how he was doing in class. Richard ended up rushing us through and insisting we all drive over to see what the fuss is about. I mean, is he actually that much better than the other boys?”
“Where are Richard and those guys sitting?”
“Behind one of the baskets,” she said, pointing at the court with her straw.
“Where's Barry?” Our son, who is infatuated with farming equipment and so far doesn't feel he's being challenged by the second grade.
“I stopped by the house on the way over and dropped him off at Laurel's.” His tomboy baby-sitter who lives down the block.
I was battering my wife with questions, curious how she got past the guard into the press section. She flapped an orange tag that she'd pinned to the bottom of her blouse and that said A. Biederman, Sports, River City Register. The picture on the tag looked nothing like me and even less like Deborah, who has willed herself into having almost classic Jewish features despite being raised Quaker. She has a full head of kinky dark hair and big eyebrows and brown eyes, a jutting nose and chin and wonderful lips and cheeks to chew on, but all of this softened somehow and curbed by her going to Society of Friends meetings in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, until she was seventeen. The balcony guard is an old gaffer named "Bat" Farrell.
“You didn't steal me any cornbread, did you?” I asked.
She shook her head and offered me a sip of Tab.
When the referees walked onto the court, the Stallion and the pompom girls led the crowd in chanting what the Register always has to refer to as "barnyard epithets." These refs were the two guys who a couple years ago made a call against River State with no time remaining in the last game of the season which kept them out of the NCAAs. It was a beautiful sight to see—young men rolling their wheelchairs onto the concrete apron, farmers in overalls, housewives trying to look like their daughters and their daughters trying to look like their mothers, students and the professors who would soon flunk them, fat-cat alumni, the obsequiously polite River State secretaries and janitors, all joined together in a spirit of hatred. Stallion fever runs hot. It's not uncommon for divorce settlements to pivot on who gets season tickets.
Menkus jumped center against Omaha's seven-footer. With his body turned sideways, leading with his left hand and his head pulled into his chest, Menkus looked like he was holding onto a parachute. For all I know, he might have been. Either that, or he tucked afterburners into his Nikes. At the top of his jump he did what only real skywalkers can do: contradicting all laws of gravity, he seemed to gather himself and jump again. The Bluejays got the tap, but you couldn't have asked for a more impressive debut.
In the first five minutes of the game, though, Menkus threw the ball out of bounds twice, missed three shots from the field including an uncontested lay-up, and was beaten back-door by the University of Omaha's slowest, shortest man. Maybe it was a case of trying too hard to meet outlandish expectations. The first time he touched the hall, he received a standing ovation from the Stallion Battalion and proceeded to double dribble. The second time, the field house roared encouragement, and he was called for charging. The third time, a smattering of boos originated in the northeast bleachers. Hinselwood chewed on a towel for nourishment.
Menkus' s main impulse was to set up other players and organize the court, but the rest of the team was completely out of sync with him or he with them. He threw a lead pass that hit Cliffie Davis, a guard from Detroit, in the head. Menkus lobbed a lead pass that fell half a step out of Dwayne Gault's reach; Gault, a superserious forward from Chicago, stood arms akimbo for ten seconds in disgust. Menkus beat his man to the basket only to get hung up in midair when Norm Dorland, a local moose with white man's disease, neglected to roll to the hoop. Gary Tomlinson, a good-hit, no-field small forward from Des Moines, was wide open off a Gault steal and Menkus wiped a behind-the-back pass halfway to the Quad Cities. Menkus's teammates didn't understand how he could know they were open before they knew they were open.
So far it looked like he was just trying to show off a lot for any pro scouts who happened to wander into the stadium for his first non-conference game. If he was, it wasn't working. He was too unselfish, too unpredictable, too fast, and no one knew what to do with him yet. Least of all the good cop-bad cop referees, who whistled him for traveling when he beat his man so badly on a rock-and-pump fake that they either had to call steps or alter their understanding of how the game operated.
I must admit I felt an odd sense of relief that Menkus was having his first-game jitters. He wasn't an archangel. He was a junior transfer from Sioux City Trade and Extension. Deborah tells me a lot of people like to think William Shakespeare didn't actually write all those dramas. They were written by a committee of clergymen—something like that. I forget how the theory goes. Sheer genius is a scary thing. Menkus dealt the middle of a three-on-two break and threw the ball into the box seats.
Behind 14-9, River State called time-out. The cheerleaders, who are semiofficially called the Mares, spelled out Stallions a few times too many. Omaha is from the lowly Heartland conference; the fans, expecting a rout, were restless with River State's slow start and didn't cooperate very much with the Mares' enthusiasm. The Stallion, knowing when not to force the issue, cooled his heels and shook hands with little kids. One huge whale of a guy stood up and yelled at the bench, “Put in Malakovich,” Malakovich being the last man on the team. You can tell when Hinselwood is mad because he pretends to consult with Ott and Nagel before talking to the players; what he's really doing is simmering down. The Omaha coach, a health nut, swigged Perrier.
I turned to Deb and asked, “Can you follow the game at all? Do you know what's happening?”
“It's kind of interesting, but I'm not really paying attention,” she said, fluttering loose sheets from chapter nine. Peter Keil, a solid, smart scrapper, checked in for Cliffie Davis, which struck me as a good move: Menkus would become the only hall handler and might relax a little. “Why do they clap, though, whenever Belvyn has the ball—because he did something good?”
“No.” I whapped the program against her leg, loving her for how little she knew about anything except the outer realms of literature. She looks so sexy, so slinkily professional in slacks. “They're hoping he'll do something good. They're trying to encourage him.” I lowered my voice. “But what no one seems to appreciate is that he's already doing some pretty amazing things. They're cheering him on like he's trying to come out of a slump. It's not his fault.”
“Well, maybe they should stop trying to encourage him so much,” she said, blinking her contacts into place. “He's a nervous wreck out there. I can tell. You'd think I was about to ask him for a definition of the perfect participle or something.” Deb is Menkus' s teacher for Rhetoric and reading lab, and has been working with a specialist to see if he has dyslexia.
The strategy worked: River State scored off a set play to Gault after the time-out and the 1-2-2 offense made more things happen inside than the 2-1-2, but Omaha continued to play better than anyone had reason to suspect. They did a lot of zoning and pressing and just generally outhustling the Stallions. The Bluejays led by seven with four minutes left in the half. The basic problem, so far as I saw it, was that everyone in the area was looking to Menkus to dazzle, and he was looking over his shoulder, making sure he didn't trip. Which was a problem I'd definitely contributed to, with my weekly columns of pre-season promo beginning the end of October when the football team was already fading fast.
Menkus wasn't god-awful. He was just out of mesh with his teammates. No one is more dependent on timing and intuition than a good give-and-go man. He made some great plays and some not so great plays. Twelve thousand people came for the picture of divine perfection, and so far we'd seen the raw stuff of youth, unconnected to anything but its own energy.
Then something happened.
With two minutes left Omaha played keep-away, trying to take a six-point lead into the locker room by putting the hall into the deep freeze. At about the ten second mark Lamont Knight, their lead guard, telegraphed a soft bounce pass to his weak-side forward, who did not go out to meet the hall. Go out to meet the ball —one of the trusty pieces of advice that followed me from coaching camp to coaching camp throughout my youth.
Menkus intercepted the hall with his left hand. In one moment, he slapped it through his legs into his right hand to keep from drifting out of bounds while establishing an angle against Knight, who rushed back on defense to atone for his mistake.
“Please let it develop,” I said to myself, begging for just a little magic.
“Look at him go,” Deborah yelled. She waved her rolled-up program like she'd been doing this forever. Menkus had brought the game alive for Deb, bookworm of bookworm, and Cliffie Davis, who had come back in for Tomlinson, sprinted across mid-court to help Menkus, hoping to pick up a cheap bucket on the break by slipping into the far corner. I was positive Menkus didn't see him as he worked one-on-one down the left lane. He took a quick look at the clock and three hard dribbles to drive off Knight, then performed the single most beautiful feat I have ever seen on hardwood.
He brought the hall to his hip like he was going to throw a behind-the-back pass to some imaginary player standing along the left baseline. At the last instant, thirty-five feet from the hoop, he lofted a wraparound alley-oop to Cliffie, who crashed down the key without breaking stride and jammed it home with two hands, though it was such a perfect pass he could have touched it with his pinkie and it would have cut the cords.
Through the first and second balconies, on the north and south sides, steel support beams have been restricting fans' vision for over fifty years. I could have sworn those beams were bouncing when the whole place went bonkers over Davis's buzzer-beating slam. Everyone's Thanksgiving dinner settled, I guess, just about the same time. We turned the field house into a great noise corridor that just kept shaking. Menkus and Cliffie jabbed fingers in each other's faces, then high-fived, and Hinselwood clapped clipboards with Ott. The fat guy who earlier had been calling for Malakovich clenched his fists over his head and hugged his wife. An overexcited whippersnapper sailed his little stick-Stallion onto the floor. A grizzly old man in a wheelchair popped a wheelie. My favorite cheerleader, Liz Cheng, matched the Stallion cartwheel for cartwheel. A typhoon of roan pom-poms.
Deborah jumped up and down and clapped, which you're not supposed to do in the press box. “That was so glorious,” she positively screamed, losing the cap to her pen and spilling Tab all over her students' papers.
“It was a great pass,” I said because I didn't know what else to say. I didn't want to talk about it. I kept reliving it in my mind, getting shivers down my back.
“What Belvyn just created was an absolute work of art.”
“Oh, for Chrissake,” I said, looking around to see if anyone was listening. I didn't want to get caught in a conversation like this when my pals were milling about, studying halftime stats. “It was an incredible move. Menkus is a born point guard.”
“Albert, don't you understand?” she said. Both of us were only children and we live in our own heads; that's how we get along so well. She lit up, but you're not supposed to smoke in the press gallery, either, and I blew out her match. “It was pure autobiographical expression.”
“Please,” I said, looking around again. Everyone was too busy talking field-goal percentage and turnovers to pay any attention to the professor's lecture. “I'm glad you're enjoying yourself, honey, but don't analyze it quite so much, okay?”
“Belvyn's always bored in class,” Deb said, plopping a piece of Care-Free into her mouth since she couldn't smoke. “Due, I'm absolutely certain, to dyslexia. He's uninterested in learning about anything except basketball, but at that moment, when he directed the ball over to that other boy closer to the goal, one person became another person, one soul… ”
However much I love Deborah, this speech would have driven me crazy if I'd listened to it any longer, so I offered to get us some coffee downstairs. She nodded and began working out what looked like a formula on the back of her program while I chatted with a few of the fellows from Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Dubuque. The main topic of discussion were Cliffie Davis's slam dunk and Menkus's first-period mistakes. They all groused about "playground ball"; some idiot from Davenport say he hoped Menkus would be able to adjust to River State's more disciplined style of play.
I didn't have any change for coffee and headed for Letterman Lounge, a VIP rumpus room tucked away in the basement. Bigwigs and press leeches congregate here at halftime. Standing in the outer lobby because she didn't have full credentials was Vicki Lynch, who's on the sports staff of the Stallion and works for us as a stringer. She's more or less my gofer, since Marty still hasn't forgiven the Baltimore Orioles for hiring batgirls and would sooner stop taking his nitro pills then let a "coed" run around the locker room, doing his legwork for him. With her Adidas and frayed jeans and short hair, her baby-blue eyes and pug nose, Vicki doesn't look just young. She looks like she couldn't possibly have passed the ninth grade. She usually acts nervous around me, tugging at her clothes and fixing her face, but she was worse now than I'd ever seen her and her twitch was going mad, like a bee caught in the corner of her eye, trying to get out.
“Boy, am I glad to see you,” she said. “I've been looking everywhere, I went over to your seat, but some lady was sitting there, looking incredibly serious.”
“What's up?” I said, walking into the lounge.
“I can't go in there.” She hooked onto my arm.
“Sure, you can, just don't act like you don't belong.”
She scooted around the chunky dignitaries, who wore roan-colored suits and haircuts from the fifties and smiles tight as their belts. Beefcake bodies with cupcake brains. Vicki piled her plate with cold cuts, potato chips, and carrots, and we sat in a darkish corner where she simply attacked her dinner. Gold cups sat behind glass, and championship pennants were the wallpaper. Inhaling the food seemed to calm her down somewhat, and when she finished her bug juice she said, “Thanks a million, Albert, really. I was famished.” She swayed back and forth on a cushion and put her plate down, staring at the roan shag carpet.
“So why were you looking for me?” I asked.
“You're not going to believe this.”;
“Try me,” I said, taking the few potato chips she'd left and getting my hand slapped.
“Fifteen minutes before game time I was standing in line for a Coke. This very slutty-looking girl, who was wearing a lot of burnt-orange rouge and red-black lipstick and—”
A bell gonged, meaning the second half was starting soon. “Never mind her lipstick. What—”
“She said she wanted to sell me 'the inside scoop' on Belvyn.”
“How did she know who you were?”
“She must have noticed my press tag. She threw me out of line and then kept squeezing my wrist. Strongest girl I've ever seen. She was wearing these very weird, tight—”
“;What else did she say?”
“That was really it. That she knew Belvyn and wanted to talk about him. I told her to get in touch with you.”
“Wonderful,” I said. Some drunk booster nearly tripped over us and apologized.
“I'm sorry. Was that really stupid?”
“No, no, you did the right thing. This always happens at the beginning of the season.”
The bell rang again. Vicki was twitching, so she went over to the buffet to get more punch and another sandwich before the grub got cleared away. When she came back she said, “What are you going to do, Albert? I mean, you're not going to pay her anything, are you?”
“I don't know,”; I said. “If she gets in touch, I'll see what she has. I assume it's nothing.”
Vicki suddenly looked mopey. She's one of this new breed of female that lives for sports talk. The only way I could lift her spirits was to ask, “What did you think of the first half?”
“Menkus is an incredibly brilliant playmaker. He could have had ten assists if they hadn't blown most of them.”
“Good for you,” I said and put my arm around her. I was relieved to hear someone agree with me in words I understood. She followed along back toward the balcony, trying to convince me to bring her to the post-game press conference, but stringers aren't allowed in the sports information office. That's a pretty strict rule, which made me curious where Wonder Woman might be hiding out.
When I sat down with the coffees, Deborah flashed a scary smile and said, “Who was that pretty young thing pawing you on the way up the stairs?”
“Just some kid who works for us. She was giving me bits and pieces on her research on Menkus. She says he loves electric trains.”
“Huh, that's interesting. Trains stay on track, which is what dyslexics have trouble doing; their eyes jump all over the page.”
Right then I suppose I decided I wasn't going to tell Deborah everything I discovered. Menkus was the first player to stir my imagination in eighteen years of covering River State basketball. I didn't want to hear nasty rumors about him and I didn't want to share him with anybody, which was odd, since he wasn't mine.
Deb took a couple sips of coffee, pronounced it tepid, and waved for the soda boy's attention while the teams took the floor for the second half. Happy shook every Stallion's hand and smiled and took pictures of their hacks. Deb showed me the diagram she'd drawn during halftime. Your ordinary person's halftime diagram will be a plan for, say, a 3-2 trap press off a made free throw. But Deborah's featured squiggles and arrows and boxes and algebraic notes and counter-arrows and boxes within boxes. It looked like a map of River City's Downtown Refurbishment Project.
“I'm symbolizing the game,” she said.
“That's great,” I said. “That's great, honey.”;
The second half was pretty much the same story. The Bluejays did even more pressing than they did in the first half, taking the Stallions totally out of their game. River State didn't look like it was in shape yet to handle such a quick pace. They just hadn't jelled. Menkus broke Omaha's press with a dribbling exhibition, then he and Cliffie squabbled about something or other. Menkus leaped above the Bluejays' seven-footer for a board and tip-tapped the ball out to Tomlinson on the wing to begin a break, a blind lead pass that brought Deb, cheering and waving, to her feet. The only trouble was that Tomlinson wasn't on the wing, and Hinselwood called Tomlinson and Menkus over for a quick consultation to avoid such shenanigans in the future.
I was certain Menkus could have taken the contest into his own hands and thrown up twenty-footers, but it was equally obvious he wasn't going to do that. The fans wanted a sideshow, with him in the spotlight, and he attempted to produce just the opposite: a three-ring circus with Tomlinson, Davis, and Gault as star attractions. This was only the first game, after all, of a long winter, and he wanted to set the tone for the rest of the season. It seemed to me he was trying to teach the golden rules of basketball. Go and I shall give. Pick and thou shalt roll. When he gave, Tomlinson didn't go anywhere. And when he rolled, Gault didn't flash behind the pick.
Everyone ran around in circles, trying to carry out Hinselwood's hallowed motion offense, which mainly consists of bodies running around in circles. Menkus made Omaha's zone slide and slide and slide. Then, through the space that only he had created and only he had seen, he whipped the ball into Norm Durland who, unable to understand why a second ago he was surrounded by defenders and now was holding the ball, kicked the thing out of bounds.
In the second half, there weren't any spectacular alley-oop slam dunks to bring the crowd together and turn things around. The old guy in the wheelchair fell asleep. The Mares flirted. I finally located Deb's teacher contingent, and they seemed barely to register the fact that a game was going on as background to their colloquium. River State fell farther behind. It became increasingly apparent that it wasn't going to happen, not tonight, anyway. Menkus was trying to play chess in sneakers, and everyone else was still piddling around with Chinese checkers. The game plan wasn't working. Something had to change. Hinselwood, sucking on a water bottle, sent in Monroe Terry, a stumblebum sophomore with size 15-D shoes.
"Bat" Farrell, the balcony guard, brought me a note that said Mr. Beaterman, Your assistant said maybe you'd like to talk to me about Belvyn. Give me a call, okay? I'll be here all weekend. Rita M. (331-0598)
“What did you get?” Deborah asked.
“Oh, nothing, just a note from Marty about paste-up. He didn't leave me much room.”
“Well, concision—isn't that what journalism's all about?”
The Stallion Battalion chanted and stomped, trying to get a rally going, but with three minutes left the Stallions were down fourteen. When Hinselwood took Menkus out, he got a polite ovation that was a sad, low answer to the insanity he inspired at the end of the first half. They didn't know who they were cheering for, and neither did Deb, really, when she stood and applauded while Menkus wrapped a towel over his head on the bench. I was glad for an ally and happy for love, though there was no way she could gather how rare a thing Menkus had tried to pull off, and for some reason I couldn't or didn't want to explain it to her. Tell me Rita's last name wasn't Menkus. The last thing I wanted to explore was a paternity suit.
Deb's car was parked on the far side of the ramp, and she wanted to vamoose before getting caught in traffic. With reserves filling the floor, she was bored and made ready to leave at the two-minute mark. A lot of fair-weather friends joined her.
“I'll see you later,” she said, stuffing student papers, diagram, chapter nine, program, notes into her blue backpack. “Have a good press conference.”
“Don't ask for the impossible.”
“You may beat me home. I'm going to my office to do a little work on my last chapter. I just find the whole game and Belvyn's performance incredibly provocative in terms of the self.”
“Okay,” I said. “Bye. Watch the ice on Melrose.”
Menkus didn't show up for the press conference. Neither did any other players. Hinselwood stood over us with his tie undone and a piece of chalk in his right hand, which he crushed every now and then to make sure we got certain sophisticated points of strategy. I've had trouble with this guy since he came here in '74. He was hired to return River State to its glory years of the mid-fifties, when they finished second and third in the Incas and won a conference crown or two. Shortly after that, their first two blue-chippers from Chicago got caught in a point-shaving scam, and the program floundered through the sixties and seventies. Dick Homewood was given ten years to turn it around, and he'd already blown the first six. The faculty despised him because, with his summer coaching camp, TV and radio shows, and endorsements on top of his base pay, he could buy and sell any four of them, though he smoothed over yelps of protest by paying constant lip service to "grades coming before games."
After coaching in Arizona high schools, northern California junior colleges, and at the University of Idaho, he developed a reputation as a program saver, a motivator who could nudge a team out of the doldrums into high mediocrity. So far River State had moved from ninth to sixth in the Mississippi Valley Conference. Wherever Hinselwood went he took his Complete Achievement Chart, which awards pluses and minutes for every action a player performs. You can easily score fourteen points and grab half a dozen rebounds but wind up in the red because you threw the ball away twice and hogged the water bottle during a timeout. The chart is based totally on fear, encouraging players to avoid errors rather than attempt miracles. The miracles are always what I've been most interested in.
More than any other sport, basketball is based on freedom. Only by letting out all the stops can you play the game right; only when you're completely out of control do you find a deeper kind of control. When it really gets going, it takes you out of regular time altogether. Onto this ad-lib ballet Hinselwood wanted to graft the virtues of predictability and safety. Some people feel he's just too well-manicured and handsome to coach basketball, and I'm afraid I have to agree with them, as I'm the one who started the rumor. He's 6'2', 185, Romeo-lipped and Valentino-eyed, and he has the perfect rugged jaw of all Viking hucksters. He should be out selling life insurance.
Now he was talking about "sloppy schoolyard hall and lack of mental composure," which meant Menkus shouldn't have been having such a good time out there on the court, and "the media putting too much pressure on the rookie," which meant I shouldn't have been basing my articles on athletic department press releases. If anyone was to blame for the loss, it was Hollywood himself, who should have handed the game ball to Menkus and let the other planets revolve around the sun. Francis Drexler, the best play-by-play man in the history of Iowa TV and radio, sat in the middle of the back row, monkeying with his cassettes while asking too many questions and smoking his life away. Two seats over, my editor, Marty Reeves, tied flies and took notes. What was he doing here? I was perfectly capable of covering the event which, even for a Hinselwood press conference, was extraordinarily soporific.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Marty.
“Tying flies, ” he said.
“Yeah, Albert, what are you doing here?” Francis said.
“Oh, just the usual—pursuing the truth wherever it leads me.”
“You let me know,” Francis said, “when it starts pursuing you.”
Marty and Francis—Laurel and Hardy—and me smack-dab between them. Marty's a little hiccup of a guy who wears gigantic sweaters he's always tugging at and black glasses he pokes into his nose. The perpetually startled face of the runner-up in the junior high science fair. During the Civil War, when Marty was a teenager, maybe he threw a few rocks at apple trees or tackled his cousins in an open field, but he never played sports seriously. He's an old-style outdoorsman who tolerates organized athletics to the degree it frees him up to go beaver trapping. Francis is a little taller than Hinselwood, has the legs of a stork, the gut of a penguin, the shoulders of a little old lady, and a dark, chiseled Indian chief's head that bobs when he walks like he's lost at sea. He got the Des Moines prep scoring records I broke fifteen years later.
“So what did you think of the game?” I asked him.
“I thought it was one more game,” he said.
“Hey, quiet back there,” some out-of-town schmuck hissed at us, though we were whispering and Hinselwood was still just finding his stride.
“You didn't think Menkus was exciting in spurts?”
“In spurts I'm sure he'd be exciting.” He always sends these over-the-top double entendres my way, confident no one else is going to catch his drift. “No,” he said, “I don't think he has it. He's showy, erratic, impatient, and too clever by half.”
“You don't think he has the promise to—”
“Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising,” Francis said, which to my ears sounded like a quotation from a dead man.
Some granddad from Des Moines cranked up an amazingly long-winded question, exploring all the ramifications of match-up zones.
When Hinselhound got through skirting that one, I stood up and asked him how Menkus did on the Complete Achievement Chart.
“Next question,” he said. He knows in what low esteem I hold his numerology graphs.
“No, really, Coach. How did he grade out?”
Painstakingly, he took an envelope from his inside coat pocket and said, “With all the passes he threw away and all the shots he missed, he's lucky he finished no worse than minus seven. Behind-the-back dribbling isn't on the list, Biederman, in case you forgot.”
Everyone laughed except Francis, who was having trouble lighting his cigarette, and Marty, who wasn't listening.
“Sure, he looked jittery at times and threw some stupid passes, but it seems to me he has a deeper feel for the game of basketball than anybody River State has seen in— ”
“Deeper feel?” Francis said under his breath.
“Belvyn has all the tools, no doubt about that,” Hinselwood said. Whenever he damns a player with faint praise, he sounds like he's giving halting approval for one of his kids to use the car. “What's your question?”
“He's a playmaker who's still getting to know his teammates, and I just hope the system can bend a little to take advantage of his special talents.”
“Who's coaching this team?” he said, which answered nothing.
“You are, m'lord,” I said, but when he stiffened the other reporters went silent in his support. I couldn't help lashing back by asking, “There's no truth, is there, to this week's rumor about Menkus?”
“Next question.”
“I don't know, I got this crazy note from—”
“Next,” he said and was all ears for a veteran sycophant from the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
I got my coat, stepped outside, and shut the door. Francis gave me a sitting ovation. I walked halfway around the arena and sat in the lower deck, which was totally empty now except for a Boy Scout troop picking up garbage. Ed, who's been here forever, was folding and stacking metal chairs. He waved. I felt like I was trespassing his territory by hanging around so late after the game. All the lights were down or dimmed and the air was gray, like fog got trapped in the field house. I already wanted to be back in the sports information office, listening to Tinselteeth drone on and Francis make bad jokes. The scoreboard hadn't gone down to zero yet, and I kept replaying that miraculous pass Menkus made, the wraparound alley-oop; then I saw myself standing again on the blackened stairwell while Menkus was introduced. The loud thump, the crowd pushing past me on the way to their seats, Menkus shadow dancing: there has always been some strange connection for me between basketball and the dark.
I started shooting hoops after school in the third grade, and I remember dusk and macadam combining into the sensation that the world was dying but I was indestructible. I played all the time, in all seasons, instead of other sports, played until my sad, mousy, immaculate mother stopped long enough from showing houses to take me home. In fifth grade I developed a double pump jump shot, which in the fifth grade is almost unheard of. Rather than shooting on the way up, as everyone else did, I tucked my knees, hung in the air a second, pinwheeled the ball, then shot on the way down. My friends hated my new move. It seemed tough, mannered, teenage, vaguely Negro. I don't know how or why I started shooting differently. I must have grown weary sometimes waiting for Mom to drive by, or Dad to return from his unsuccessful tennis road trips, or maybe it was my attempt to copy the Drake players I watched at Veterans Auditorium. The more I shot like this the more my friends disliked me, and the more they disliked me the more I shot like this. It was the only thing about me that was at all unusual, and it came to be my trademark, even my nickname. Double Bubble Biederman.
One afternoon, when I was playing Horse with Beth Norton, she threw the ball over the fence and said, “I don't want to play with you anymore, Albert. You're too good. I'll bet one day you're going to start for Drake.”
Beth had by far the prettiest eyes at Valley Elementary and a grin so infectious it made me grin whenever she looked at me in math. She had a way of moving her body like a boy but still like a girl , too, and that game of Horse is one of the happiest memories of my childhood: dribbling around in the dark but knowing by instinct where the basket was; not being able to see Beth but smelling her deodorant mixed with dirt; keeping close to her voice, in which I could hear her love for me and my career as a Drake Bulldog opening up into the night. I remember the sloped half-court at the far end of the playground, its orange pole, orange rim, and wooden green backboard, the chain net clanging in the wind; the sand and dirt on the court; the overhanging elm trees, the fence the ball bounced over into the street; and the bench the girls sat on, watching, trying to look bored.
The first two weeks of summer Beth and I went steady, but we broke up when I didn't risk rescuing her in a game of Capture the Flag, so she wasn't around for my tenth birthday party when I begged my parents to let Ethan Saunders, Jim Morrow, Bradley Gamble, and me shoot baskets in City Park until sunrise. Having been eliminated early from some class-B tournament somewhere, Dad was home for once, and he swung by every few hours to make sure we were safe and bring more Coke, more birthday cake, more candy. There is no safer place in the continental United States then City Park Playground in West Des Moines. Dad's occasional high beams were the only intrusion into the all-dark court we ruled this one night.
For short periods two or even three of us slept on benches like baby bums, and we had the usual disagreements about the last piece of cake and someone's dishonest count in Twenty-one, but all of us stayed till dawn. Around five in the morning Bradley and I were playing two-on-two against Jim and Ethan. The moon was failing. We had a lot of sugar in our blood, and all of us were totally zonked and totally wired. With the score tied at eighteen in a game to twenty, I took a very long shot from the deepest comet. Before the ball left my hand Bradley said, “Way to hit, Al.”
I was a good shooter because it was the only thing I ever did and I did it all the time, but even for me such a shot was doubtful. Still, Bradley knew and I knew and Jim and Ethan knew, too, and we knew the way we knew our own names or the batting averages of the Cubs' infield or the lifelines in our palms. I felt it in my legs and up my spine, which arched as I fell back. My fingers tingled and my hand squeezed the night in joyful follow-through. We knew the shot was perfect, and when we heard the ball, a George Mikan special, a birthday gift from my sweet mom, whip the net we heard it as something we had already known for at least a second. What happened in that second during which we knew? Did the world stop? Did my soul ascend a couple of notches? What happens to ESP, to such keen eyesight? What did we have then, anyway, radar? When did we have to start working so hard to hear our own hearts?
I heard a lot of commotion now at the other end of the stands, winch probably meant the press conference was over.
“Yip, yip. Okay, Albie, let's go,” Ed said. “I'm closing up shop.”