Jake does not answer my question. I ask him again, softly this time: “Why’d you quit?”
He smiles at me in a strange way, a blend of pity and sympathy. “Is this part of your ‘Let’s talk about everything, let’s not be afraid of anything’ plan?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Because if it is…” He pauses, drains the last inch of beer down his throat. “If it is, I could use another beer.”
I get us two more Rocks. It’s not yet four o’clock in the afternoon, and my seventeen-year-old son and I are on our second round. In the little bit of time that we’ve been home, that magical narrow beam of light has begun to shrink with the turning of the world. Suddenly the light vanishes completely, and just like that the house is back to its old shadowy self.
Jake feels the jolt of it, too. He looks out the darkened window and says, “It’s like an eclipse.”
I hand him a fresh beer and return to the little bed. My hand is shaking so much that I almost chip a tooth, lifting my bottle to my lips. I’ve already asked my question twice, and I’m not going to ask it a third time. He knows what I’m waiting for, and at last he responds, at the end of a long, leisurely yawn.
“Well,” Jake begins, “it’s not as if it’s because I was afraid to compete.”
“I never thought you were. I saw every game you ever played, and you always wanted the ball.”
“Yeah.” He chuckles. “I wanted it too badly. Remember the time I stole the basketball from my own teammate?”
“Jesus, that was funny.”
“He didn’t think so. The coach didn’t think so, either.”
It actually happened, at a game on the Upper West Side. Jake was maybe twelve years old at the time, playing on a team with mostly black and Hispanic kids. It was a local league, a far cry from the white-bread private school team he also played for.
The star of the team was Eduardo, a lanky Puerto Rican who had all the tools—speed, shooting ability, the works. But he never passed the ball, ever, so once he had it his teammates might as well have sat on the bench and waited for him to do whatever the hell he planned to do.
Jake just got tired of it. One day, as Eduardo stood there bouncing the ball while glaring down five opponents, Jake slipped behind him, stole the ball, dribbled to the hoop, and scored a layup.
The whole gym exploded in applause and laughter. Eduardo stood stunned for a moment, then ran to Jake, fists flying. The ref and the coach grabbed him before he could land any punches, and then Eduardo was tossed from the game for unsportsmanlike conduct. In the history of that league, I’m sure it was the first and only time a kid ever got bounced from a game for unsportsmanlike conduct against a teammate.
I laugh out loud at the memory of it, and hoist my bottle toward Jake.
“Here’s to Eduardo,” I say, taking a pull. “Wonder whatever happened to that kid?”
“He’s dead, Dad.”
The shock of it hits me like a mallet to the back of my skull—shock over the news, shock over my son’s casual tone.
“Dead!”
“Uh-huh.”
“How?”
“He tried to hold up a bodega on 115th Street. He got into a shoot-out with the cops.”
“When the hell was this?”
“About a year ago, I guess.”
A year ago. That would have made him sixteen. A sixteen-year-old kid who used to play ball with my son gets shot dead during a holdup, and I don’t know anything about it. Of course, we never would have reported it in the New York Star—not a Puerto Rican corpse north of Ninety-sixth Street. The only way I could ever know was through Jake, who’d never told me until now.
“I wish you’d told me back then.”
“Why?”
It’s a good question. Why? What was I going to do, attend the funeral? I didn’t even know Eduardo’s last name. All he ever was to me was a ball-hogging punch line to a funny story.
“I don’t know why,” I admit. “I just…Jesus! What else do you know about it?”
“Not much. From what I hear, he ignored the warnings to drop the gun and ran outside, firing away. So they had to shoot him.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“What did you expect, Dad? That was Eduardo, all the way. He never gave up the ball. He wasn’t about to give up the gun.”
I stare at Jake, both awed and chilled by what he’s just said. My son, I realize, is very smart. I always knew he could regurgitate what he’d learned from books and spit it back out on exams, but this is a new level of intelligence, and for some reason it’s not a comfort to me. I would hate for him to think that I am stupid, and I wonder if he does. It’s never occurred to me before. I’ve often wondered whether or not he liked me, but this is something new to ponder, something new to worry about. Just what I need.
“Dad,” he says in the weary voice of one forced to explain something totally obvious, “you want to know why I stopped playing organized ball, right? It’s because the coaches wreck the whole thing, the way they carry on. The yelling, the screaming…I just couldn’t listen to it anymore. Does that make any sense to you?”
“I’ll have to take your word for it. I never had a coach.” Jake sits up straight on the bed, turns and looks at me. “You never had a coach? How is that possible?”
“I was never good enough to make any of the teams. And in the schoolyard games, it was always ‘We got Sullivan.’”
“What the hell is that?”
“Two captains would choose up sides for kickball, or dodge-ball, or whatever, and I’d always be the last one left. That’s when one of the captains would sigh and say, ‘All right, we got Sullivan.’”
Whenever I tell that story to people I get laughs, and I expect one from Jake. Instead he is silent for a few moments before saying, “That really must have hurt, Dad.”
I shrug. “You get over it in twenty years or so. Thirty years, tops.” I’m shocked to find that my eyes are misting up. I blink back the tears, smile at Jake. “That’s why I could never quite believe it, that I could be the father of a star athlete. Me, the guy they always chose last. And suddenly you just quit everything.”
“I disappointed you.”
“No, no, no. I just never understood why you did it, until now. Thank you for telling me.”
Jake gets off the bed and comes over to me. He puts a hand on my shoulder, gives it a squeeze. “It’s not like it was some aftershock from the divorce, in case that’s what you were wondering.”
It’s exactly what I was wondering. “I appreciate that, Jake.”
“You like to blame yourself for things, don’t you, Dad?”
“It’s not a question of liking it. It’s just that I’m good at it.”
“Well, give yourself a break on this one. I’m sorry I never told you about Eduardo. I thought I did. Maybe I found out about it on a weekday, and didn’t see you until the weekend, and forgot about it in between, you know?”
The gaps, those fucking gaps. “Sure, Jake. That’s probably what happened.”
“Listen, Dad, as long as we’re talking to each other, can I ask you to do something for me?”
It’s the first time he’s ever flat-out asked me to do something for him. I’m actually thrilled to hear the words, to feel that I’m needed in some way by my