Then what? I said.
Then you’ll have a new car and a new chance at best health. So let’s start soon, he said. No, let’s start right now, he said, and stuck out his hand.
I fished out an old pack, the pack I’d just bought, the loosies I kept in the side pocket.
We stand alone in a lot for so long it feels flagrant. Champ trots off, checks sticker prices, peeks in windows, while I pop a stick of smoker’s gum and slow-chew, waiting for my craving — how will I make it a month? — to die down. There’s a stoplight a block off and bouts of traffic stop and go without anyone coming to help. When we turn to leave a man dashes out too late after us.
No such trouble at the next lot, where the salesman blurs to our side, tells us he has the perfect car, coerces us over to an electric-blue Honda. He raises the hood, shows us a small clean engine, and recites facts about pistons and horsepower and miles per gallon. He gets in and fires it up and the engine sounds like an engine. He asks if we’d like to take it for a test drive, and there isn’t a hint of desperate in his voice.
We roll off the lot with the windows down and the music high. We’re out in Southeast, but what I wouldn’t give to be in the old neighborhood, sailing early mornings past crowds at the bus stop. What I wouldn’t give to be seen zooming away from an NA meeting or pulling warm and dry up to my job.
The wheel shudders, and I let off the gas and check the mirror to see if Champ felt it too. You take care of this and it’ll run for one-fifty, two hundred thousand miles easy, the sales guy says. I take 205 north for a ways. I get off and get on the southbound side and head for the lot. We end up in the office, a mangy mobile home that smells of mildew. Our sales guy hunts the manager, and the manager — my first mind says he’s lived for years off faux-pride — sits a slab of papers on the table. Looks like today is your day, he says. Let’s talk numbers.
My credit score, these days, is slapstick. Who’d believe me about the brand-new rides I drove off lots — the Spitfire, the Mustang, the Taurus, the Datsun? Who’d believe the times they gave me low-interest loans, no-interest loans, incentives up the yang? Champ asks if I’m sure I want it. He flips through the top few sheets and slides them back to the manager and asks me to wait in the lounge. I hear him tell the manager he’s paying in cash.
When you’ve got a new car and a full tank and nowhere to be, you ride. You ride the freeway, ride local streets; you roam, hoping for witnesses, with your windows cracked and the heat blasting; you whip by the same bus stops where most days you can’t stand more than a few heartbeats without someone you know tooting their horn. Time on my hands, so I wheel by the Alberta market and the mall, ride past the parks; I cruise Ainsworth, Dekum, Lombard, dying to be seen. But there isn’t anyone out today but strangers, and I refuse to share this feeling with strangers. This is why it’s time to find Pat. My brother Pat is in one of a few places always: either at one of his kids’ mother’s house or the tavern. I stop at the house where his boys stay, and tap the horn. Someone cracks the curtains and fast shuts them closed. I toot another time and Pat’s youngest boy shuffles onto the porch in pajamas. He stops at the top of the steps and squints to see who’s in the car.
Where your mama at? I say.
Who that, Aunt Grace? he says.
Yeah, your auntie, I say.
He disappears in the house and returns with his mother clomping behind him.
Hey, girl, how you been? I say. My brother there?
Girl, this the first week of the month which means that brother of yours is MIA. Liable he’s somewhere guzzling up his half of the rent.
Well, when you see him, can you tell him I came by? I say.
As I said, Pat’s at one of a few places always. One of his favorite’s the tavern. The one tavern in all of the civilized world that sells 40-ouncers by the bottle. By car it’s a hop-skip from his woman’s place. To be true, too near for his whereabouts to be in question, but that’s my brother. I haven’t stopped in — why would I? — since forever, though forever ago this place was about what it is now. There’s a man racking pool balls, another one playing a pinball machine, old men collected around a table slapping cards. Pat’s among the cardplayers doing what he does best — running his mouth. His back is to me. He jumps when I touch him.
Say, sis, don’t be creepin up on me like that, he says. You almost got fired on.
Boy, you ain’t about to fire on nobody, I say. What you doing besides boozing away the rent?
Oh, I see you been by my lady’s, he says, and swigs his 40. Well, I’ll have you know this here ain’t the rent. That gone yesterday. This here’s the light bill.
Sometimes I think my brother’s the happiest man alive — drunk, sober, or any state in between. Once, when he was staying with me — he’s stayed with me off and on for years — I asked him his secret. He said he’d show me. Said to stand still and don’t look ahead nor behind. Now feel, he said. Feel the right now. That’s all we have, he said. You wanna know what it is, that’s it.
Pat’s wearing a checkered shirt and jeans and combat boots and needs a haircut in the worst way. Waste not, want not, he says, and downs the last of his beer, and pushes away from the table.
What’s the word, sis? he says. I know you ain’t swung through to shit talk with me and the fellas.
Right, I say. Come.
Pat staggers out behind me and waits swaying while I open the car and climb in.
Who ride’s this? he says.
Who you see in it? I say.
That right, he says. Thought you said they had you down there slaving for them nickels and dimes, he says.
They do. Champ bought it, I say.
Oh, he says. Well, I’ll be good and gotdamned. Nephew gifting cars now, eh? He must be into some mighty sweet shit.
What you trying to say? I say. Why can’t you let me have this?
Sis, have it, he says. Have it all you want. But you and I both know anything seem sweet as this got that bitter marching right behind it.
Pat, please, I say.
Say no more, say no more, he says. He climbs in and straightens his seat and fingers the upholstery and fiddles the disc player’s controls.
Look like you and old neph picked a winner, he says. What this, bout an ’86, ’87? What the miles on it?
What miles matter? I say, and start the car — it starts easy; it should all be this easy — and lower the windows and crank my system. My music stomp into the street.
Chapter 14
But maybe it’s just here. In my city. Not yours.
Peoples, You listening?
Bet.
This is how it go.
If you’re cold enough they name you.
Clutch or Jack Knife or K-Dub or 3-D or Dead Eye or D-Reid or Big Third or Smooth or DaBell — score twenty or thirty a season, and bam, you’re Stu or Pickle or Free or Fish or Big Blass or King Cole or Doc — they’ve christened you T-hop or B-hop or Pooh or Fluff or the Honey Bee or Houseguest or B-Moore or J. D. or Bookie. Handle your biz lugis luge and everywhere they’ll say your name, call out T-Cage, T. T., Gumby, Banger, A-Train, Nickle, Action, P-Strick, JoJo, L. V., T-Jones, Blazer.
We’re talking MVPs and state champs and first-team All-Everythings, dudes who any day you wanted it would kill your weak ass at the park.
In my city, hoop’s the hegemony.
In the Rose City, the P, what the deal is, if they name you, you’re anointed. And in the P that’s what we cherish, what we love if nothing else: Year after year after year we harangue who’s greatest of the ones who dropped 40s and 50s pre a three-pointer, which phenoms scored 60! 70! 80! Guys named J-Bird or Zelly-Roo or T. B. or D-Stoud or Slash or T-Bone or T-Ross or T-Hamp or Juice or Ice or Silk — middle school man-childs who played not a lick beyond the eighth, or the luckier-than-thous who hangtimed off to college handcuffed by the city’s collective hope. The General and 2-Ounce and Stretch and Big City and Slider and Truck and Duke and the one we named the GOAT: legends, a few of them, all-leaguers in every league they played.