She's Got Next Read online

  We won our first game during the third season, accepting our pizza and beer coupons with pride. Maybe it’s a little sad that, at this apex of achievement, my time with the Sports Monster league was coming to an end. I had started going to different parks to get in pickup games, an activity I was able to muster up the courage for thanks to Nothin’ But Net, which had taught me, if nothing else, to look unflinchingly into the eyes of humiliation.

  The more street ball I played, the more I wanted that old go-all-day freedom of the driveway. Sitting in my urban hovel apartment or working at my new job or making chitchat at dinner with multicultural men, my mind drifted to my high-tops, my ball, my bike, the court. A game was always out there, calling me into the street, and I answered, every chance I got.

  Funny, what a convoluted route it can be to wanting what’s home.

  Nothin’ But Net finished the season with a record of one and seven, and a new girl on the team threw a Christmas party for us. None of us were dating each other, or apparently anybody else, because we all came to the party alone.

  The girl’s new condo seemed especially warm that night, with its Christmas tree and coffee table full of dirty glasses and all its walls coated with fresh, hopeful paint. It was the sort of party you suffer through fifteen bad ones for, a gathering where everyone is just tipsy enough, and it’s impossible to do anything other than act like you’ve got good sense.

  It was getting late when I found myself sitting alone on the couch, relaxed and unworried about not mingling for the moment. Dave sat down and snuggled into the cushions beside me, and, at the feel of his bony hip against mine, I began to snicker. He hunched his rounded shoulders to lean in close to me and coo, “You and me, Melissa, we got chemistry.”

  It was nonsense, and he knew it, and I was charmed. My giggle was all that was needed to egg him on.

  “Don’t deny it now,” he said, his voice hypnotic with goodwill and disregard for consequences. “You know it’s true.”

  Will sat on the other side of me, saying nothing but jokingly focused on me as if he, too, had always thought I was all that. Matt stuck to his corner, watching and looking confused.

  We held at bay for a few more minutes the frigid walks to our far-parked cars as we enjoyed being the hockey guys, the losingest team in Sports Monster history. Unlike Everyday People or the North Siders or the Corporate Clones, we’d earned the right to come together and laugh at ourselves. I barely noticed at the time how happy that felt, carried along as I was in the larger movement of always leaving.

  At Eckhart Park, this court where I used to play in my neighborhood, there were three Latino guys I played with sometimes. The first time I saw them, one of the guys was wearing a T-shirt that said I LIKE MY HUSBAND, BUT I LOVE MY SNOWMOBILE.

  He didn’t speak English too well, and my theory was he bought the T-shirt at a thrift store because he liked the color, which was, actually, an appealing purple. Somebody must have told him what “husband” meant, because he had taken white shoe polish and marked out the word. You could still see what it said, but I guess the shoe polish effort let everyone know, yo soy heterosexual.

  The guys were new to the game, and they played hard, running after loose balls and hustling for rebounds and playing good defense. The most experienced player, who was also the tallest and the best English speaker, was the one who’d asked me if I wanted to play. I’d been at the other end of the court shooting baskets, making furtive glances at them. It wasn’t difficult for me to get noticed, being the only woman and the only white person on the court.

  The way things worked was, I would shoot around, make a point to have them notice me noticing them, act slightly tough and a bit boyish, as if to say, “I got skills. I play all the time. I know what you’re thinking, but what you better be thinking is, are you good enough to play with me?”

  Eckhart was the kind of place I liked to find when I went out looking for a game. It usually wasn’t too serious there, and every player filtered crazy differences in size, skill, or experience through his brain to come up with an approach to how hard he’d play, how hard he’d expect his teammates to play, how much he’d get in the lane, and how much trash he’d talk. It was the kind of place that might make room for a kid with Down syndrome, a guy with only one good hand, and people so hopelessly uncoordinated they could barely run, much less hit a jump shot. You’d see dunking studs there, too. There was a little bit of everything in the games I liked.

  When a court was really competitive, that was okay, too. Sometimes I’d play, and sometimes I’d just walk on to go look for ragtag situations where everyone played hard but they let the guy with one good hand catch his pass and they let the kid with Down syndrome get his shot off.

  I’ve always tried to look like I have some game when I’m dribbling around trying to get in, but I never say too many cocky things like “I got skills,” or “Get that weak shit outta here,” or “Not in my house, baby,” or much of anything else, really. Words can get squirrelly sometimes, and I know I’m just an average type of player. I don’t even wear that great of shoes or flashy sports clothes, because I never want what I’m wearing to be better than I am. I mean, I don’t want to look like I don’t know how good I’m not.

  So I did my furtive checking-out routine, and when the tall, good-English-speaking guy asked me to play two-on-two, I did. My team won two games in a row. I played some more after that, with another group of guys. The teams kept melding and interchanging with new groups of people coming to play.

  The sun baked the concrete, and there was a slightly sickening smell of sweetness and chocolate in the air from a nearby candy factory. An ice cream vendor came by from time to time, his bell tinkling pleasantly. Everyone on the court was speaking Spanish, and while Snowmobile and his crew were there, they interpreted for me if I gave them a look that asked what was happening. After they left, the only words I could make out were choc-oh-lah-tay, seemingly directed at the only black kid on the court, and niña, me.

  I stayed for hours, forcing my body to keep moving long after I was too tired to be there. My legs shook as I pedaled west up Chicago Avenue toward home. It was typical of my routine.

  A few days later, I saw the Latino guys sitting on the grass and watching a serious five-on-five game. Snowmobile #1 wasn’t there this time, and Snowmobile #2 and #3 were having trouble getting in. I sat down on the ground next to them.

  We chatted for a while as the game moved up and down the court. They told me they were taking an English class four times a week, and they apologized because they couldn’t speak English. I told them yes they could.

  I had three semesters of Spanish in college, but I can barely speak a word of it. And I made As all three times, for God’s sake. It’s hard to learn another language. I kept wishing I could say things in Spanish to those guys and to all the Spanish-speaking people around my neighborhood.

  I couldn’t understand why the Snowmobiles weren’t getting in the game. For me, being a woman, sometimes I just get the sense that a court is not exactly an equal opportunity situation, but it seemed like any guy should be able to play.

  They said they weren’t good enough. I told them yes they were.

  A young black kid bounced his ball around on the side of the court, pacing, yelling at the players in the game, “I’m gonna kick y’all’s tired asses when I get in there!”

  Snowmobile #2 told me I could join them next weekend at this park they played at sometimes where there was always plenty of room. “They have sodas,” he said.

  Back in college, when I was taking those Spanish classes, I sometimes had dreams that I could really speak Spanish. In my dreams the words flew out in whole sentences with a perfect accent, and I didn’t have to struggle or even think about it. Now that I was playing outside again, I was having that same kind of dream about basketball. I’m making every shot, flying toward the basket, never tired, no one can stop me.

  Waking up from that dream on weekdays, I felt like a house dog cha
sing rabbits in her sleep, legs twitching.

  I took this racquetball class one time. My partner was a slightly plump, likable girl with a blond, swingy ponytail, and what I remember most about her was how the instructor’s face lit up when she came around. She and I played each other every class, and one time, after I’d won a few games in a row, she said to me, smiling and as nice as ever, “You should let me win sometimes.”

  She would have fit in well at the women’s open gym I went to for a while. The players there stuck together like that, the athletic version of girls who don’t go to public bathrooms by themselves.

  The women’s open gym met every Monday night at a Park District complex on Chicago’s North Side. Most of us were professionals in our late twenties and early thirties, and white, with the exception of Tori, a black woman from the West Side who often made remarks about all the white faces. She seemed to like us and everything, but I noticed how often she pointed out that she was different.

  The open gym had been started years earlier by a high-ranking Park District employee who was still a regular player. We were all supposed to contribute some money to keep the court reserved, but we never did, because we were in good with Jack, the guy who worked the front desk. Jack controlled that gym like a potbellied grizzly bear in tube socks and polyester coaching shorts. He liked us, or maybe he was just paranoid that, if he didn’t kiss our asses, the high-ranking player would get him fired through some strange and twisted power she wielded from her office job at the Park District.

  We weren’t exactly “I got next” types. Instead of showing up and looking like we had game, we used Jack as our backup in a weekly coup over the kids who filled the gym until we got there. The minute the clock hit six Jack lumbered onto the court and roared at them to get out, abruptly ending all the kickball and chase going on as the shorties scattered to the nearest exits.

  When we had too few women to play full-court, Jack still kicked the kids off the other end. It would’ve been easy for one of us to give him the nod that it was okay for them to stay, but nobody nodded. We couldn’t let up like that, because control over the court depended on the mean-teacher authority we assumed when any kid considered sticking a toe across the out-of-bounds line between six and nine. It made me feel a little bad, grown women kicking kids off a court like that, but I wanted to play, so I came back week after week, wondering where the kids went on the night we had the gym but never taking a stand.

  You had to be careful at the women’s open gym, because a frown on someone’s face or an elbow swinging for a rebound or a too-abrupt “Over here! I’m open!” was not acceptable to some factions. They didn’t like it if you were too intense like that, which I was.

  The women wouldn’t call fouls, but they got mad if they thought you fouled and you didn’t call it on yourself. That’s just how they were. Of course, it was completely acceptable and well regarded when this one woman called official timeouts during every game to readjust a barrette or take off one of her five necklaces while everyone stood waiting. The girl shot two-handed from the center of her chest, and she traveled so much we finally quit calling it unless a game was at stake or it was just too obvious to ignore. Then we’d call the walk and she’d argue that it wasn’t, even though she knew less about basketball than anyone. She never listened to anybody, and she never got much better. People could get by with that kind of thing there.

  As bad a player as the traveling girl was, she did have a natural basketball player’s body: tall and skinny, but strong. Her crazy-looking shots went in more often than they had a right to, and when she stuck her mile-long arms out on defense, she deflected shots like a windmill. She was pretty annoying, but sometimes she’d bring her two little boys, who were four and five, and they were so cute and happy and well behaved, sitting on the sidelines and cheering for their mom, that it made her seem okay.

  Two of the women, one a decent enough player and the other not so much, would work on dribbling drills, the kind we used to do in high school, before everyone arrived at the gym. I was a little snobbish about the drills, I have to admit. I thought they weren’t very street, and I’d shoot around by myself while the two women practiced dribbling between their legs.

  Before we started playing one night, Tori, the black chick, and Melinda, the decent enough dribbler, got into a discussion about whether or not the large, fluffy-looking person we all saw as we were walking into the gym was a teenage boy or a woman in her twenties. Tori had just gotten there, and she changed into her basketball clothes standing on the sidelines in the gym. It was a little brazen, but people hadn’t started arriving yet.

  “It’s a guy,” Tori said, standing there in her sports bra.

  “She has breasts,” Melinda argued.

  “Well, he’s not wearing a bra then.”

  “So?”

  John, an inexplicable and regular exception to the no-kids/no-men rule, was there. It was just the four of us because there was no air conditioning, and it was really too hot to play. We were the diehards.

  John had a thin, very basketball-looking slump about him that reminded me of a poster a guy I used to date had hanging on his wall. The poster was called “Skins and Shirts,” and it was a drawing of a bunch of black men going up for a rebound at the same time, stretched out all long-limbed and elegantly gangly toward the sky, everyone on both teams moving in what looked from a distance to be a synchronized unit, like a flock of geese making instinctual inflight formations. John looked like those guys in that poster.

  John was listening to the conversation about the androgynous employee, but, as usual, he wasn’t saying much. He was a spooky kind of guy, with wide-open eyes that were a little crossed, and if a ball bounced off the rim toward him, he ducked and covered his head like he was being shot at. When you tried to talk to him, he answered with an abrupt nod or shake of his head, or one word at the most. I was kind of afraid of John when I first met him, but I figured out after a while that he was all right. Thinking back on it now, I guess he was a little afraid of us.

  John was shooting around, looking like he was in his own world, but not really, and I said, “Hey, John, do you think that person working the front desk is a man or a woman?”

  “Boy,” he blurted, looking at me from the corner of one eye.

  “This guy walked by me once,” Melinda said, taking a shot. “It was really cold. I was bundled up and waiting for the bus, and he walked by and he goes, ‘Hey, dude.’ I told him, I said, ‘Hey, I’m a woman.’”

  Then Tori said she was in a car wreck once, and while she was waiting for the ambulance to arrive, she was laid out on the floor of a convenience store in layers of Chicago winter clothes. People kept coming up and looking over her and saying, “What’s up with dude? What’s up with dude?” She said she drifted in and out of consciousness saying, “Hey, I’m a woman.”

  We never did come to any conclusions about the person at the front desk.

  Maybe it was that old, painful memory of being mistaken for a man that made Melinda especially sensitive to our gay invasion, made up of two openly lesbian players who were regulars for a while.

  One of the gay hoopsters always wore a baby blue North Carolina mesh basketball set with a matching do-rag wrapped around her head all tight and smooth and tied in the back. The girl was pretty intimidating on the floor, and she was good, but she was mostly intimidating, with her authentic basketball garb and her swagger and her tendency to grab her crotch when she laughed and to give her teammates chest bumps when they did something good. She certainly had court presence.

  She always told everybody it wasn’t that serious, while she played her ass off. When she did something she was proud of, she’d break out in a current hip-hop dance move that most of us couldn’t achieve even if you paid us.

  Her girlfriend sat on the sidelines and watched, looking like somebody’s mom in her regular jeans and glasses. She kept score for us, and she laughed a lot.

  It was a real luxury to have someone keeping
score, because it’s hard to play and remember the score at the same time. We sure as hell needed lesbians to have a scorekeeper on hand. Nobody’s boyfriend would have sat on the sidelines and kept score. I never once saw a boyfriend even come to watch. The girlfriend never was wrong on the score either. She always got it right, and everyone knew it and never argued with her. And she never acted bored or told her girlfriend to hurry up and get through playing either. They had a pretty good relationship, as far as I could tell.

  One night not long after the invasion, Melinda and Tori and I were the first ones there again. As we shot around and waited for the others to arrive, Melinda said the two lesbian players touched her in inappropriate ways, and she didn’t care if someone was gay, but why did they have to be so obvious about it?

  That was crap, of course. Melinda cared all right. Those lesbians were just playing defense.

  There was a television commercial airing around that time that showed a WNBA player talking about what she liked to buy on her credit card. “I’m very prissy,” she would say, and the camera would go to another scene showing her playing street ball with a bunch of guys, screaming like a crazed warrior, “Put up or shut up!” as she drove the basket.

  “I love to get my hair done, get manicures, pedicures, but my greatest weakness is shoes,” she said, and then we were back to her discussing what she bought with her credit card as she walked through a mall in a trendy outfit.

  The WNBA was just getting started then, and the commercials were hell-bent on proving that the league was full of nice, tall girls who did all the things nice girls are supposed to do. It made me wonder why women have to try so hard—why we have to declare a shoe obsession or slobber over chocolate or sit at the movies and pine at romantic comedies, why we always have to seem a little stupid or a little crazy—to qualify as socially acceptable females. The way some women talk with such pride about their greatest weakness sounds as fake as a politician sometimes: safe, pseudo-edgy personalities lifted directly from sitcoms and greeting cards.