The Last Shot Read online

  “Damn, there’s just no air in here!” After his final game of the day, Corey stumbles out to the parking lot and grips the gym door for support. “I don’t like that. I don’t like not to breathe.” Corey takes pride in keeping in superb shape; even during the fiercest competition he comports himself as though he were playing in top hat and tails. However, he has also never played in an oven before. He collapses to the ground, his chest heaving. “You see my game? You see my teammates?” he pants. “I’m playing with beginners! I try to understand. I pass it to them right where they want it, but it hits them in the head! These guys are loafs. Bread loafs.” Catching his breath, Corey picks up a pebble and skips it across the asphalt. “It’s hard to keep yourself up, you know, with teammates like this. I try, I try, but if this doesn’t change, I’m gonna need some therapy.” Noticing that I’ve stopped writing in my notebook, Corey nods for me to pick up my pen again. “And the guys we’re playing against?” he continues, finishing his postgame interview and mocking the ritual of it at more or less the same time, “I would say this about them. I would say they’re animals!” Corey raises his hands in surrender. “At this point I’m just trying not to get hurt. Some kid was actually hanging on my leg. I said, ‘Excuse me? Is this the kissing game?’” Corey swivels his head back and forth, conversing with himself. “‘No, we call this game basketball.’” Corey as kindergarten teacher: “‘Can you say basketball?’”

  The gym doors swing open and Russell appears, weaving unsteadily on his pins. He looks equally spent, but finds less humor in it than his friend does. “Man, my team stinks. We haven’t won a game all day,” he says, sinking to the ground beside us. Russell arrived in Gettysburg determined to stay calm about the camp scene, but his worst fantasies—and there were many of them—didn’t prepare him for B/C. “To tell you the truth,” Russell says, “I wouldn’t mind getting this all over with. Yeah, soon as I pass my SATs, I think I’m gonna sign early with Rutgers. Just gimme that piece of paper, boy, and I’ll sign right now. ’Cause I can’t take any more of this camp shit.” He looks at Corey and offers a casual chuckle, but it’s tinged with something close to hysteria. “Later for this, right?”

  After the two of them have rested for a while, we walk over to the college dormitory where Corey and Russell have been assigned to bunk with three other campers—“just like roaches and rats,” Corey remarks serenely as they enter the room. Russell doesn’t move to take off his uniform; he stands by his bed, hands heavy at his sides. But Corey peels off his clothes, takes a quick shower, and flips on his boom box as he towels himself off. D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince fill the air. “That’s better,” Corey announces, stretching out on his bed wrapped in a wet towel. “A nice cool shower and some relaxing music.” Lying there, he raps along for a while: “Back in Philly we’d be out in the park. Guys out huntin’ and girls doin’ likewise, honkin’ at the honey in front of you with the light eyes.” He props his hands behind his head: “She turns around to see what you beepin’ at. It’s like the summer’s a natural aphrodisiac.” Finally he closes his eyes: “It’s late in the day and I ain’t been on the court yet. Hustle to the mall to get me a short set.” Every minute or so he interrupts the Fresh Prince to let out an indulgent sigh—“Aaaaah”—and to mumble “Loafs. Bread loafs.” Then the strain of the day leaves his face and his breathing becomes shallow and regular. Corey may cherish his ability to rap and rhyme, but evidently he doesn’t let it interfere with a good nap.

  ***

  A week later, we’re all back in Coney Island. Russell starts his evening workouts at the Garden again, clearly relieved that the summer season is winding down. Corey sometimes shows up, too, but usually in shades and street shoes, and then wanders off alone to pursue his other interests. As much as he hates Coney Island, Russell often feels uncomfortable away from his home turf, but Corey goes club-hopping in Manhattan and every time he shows up for a game—no matter where in the city it is—some girl he dated in the long-forgotten past recognizes him and starts shrieking out his name. Corey’s shrewdness on a variety of topics—basketball, rapping, writing poetry, dating, fashion, churchgoing, and cooking—has earned him the nickname Future, because, as Russell once explained to me, “Corey’s a future-type guy, crazy-smart, a walking genius. There are no limits to what he can do.”

  Nevertheless, the infrequency of Corey’s appearances on the Coney Island courts this summer is giving rise to speculation over just how much he wants that college scholarship after all. No one expects Corey to be as highly recruited as Tchaka or Russell, but he too might have made the cut for the Empire State Games if he hadn’t missed the second try-out. And he certainly would have made the B/C camp’s all-star game on the final day if he had paid his discounted fee on time. (Coach Hartstein had even sent the money.) Corey is starting to get a reputation in Coney Island as a little “lost in the sauce” and “too cute for his own good,” caring less about the quality of the college he will attend next year than whether it offers an acceptable male-female ratio. On a team where playing unselfishly is considered the best way never to get recruited, Corey often baffles his friends by ignoring wide-open shots if he sees an exotic pass to be made. And Corey has yet to live down a heretical incident that occurred last year in one of the season’s crucial games. Corey was all alone under the basket, tried a fancy lay-up, and blew it. Coach Hartstein and his two assistants rose to their feet, howling in rage. As Corey jogged downcourt, he shrugged, palms turned toward the ceiling. “Relax, guys,” he said, nonchalance itself. “It’s just basketball.”

  But measuring Corey’s ambition is a complicated business. He once had a beautiful jumper to complement his slashing, ball-to-the-basket game, which made him a threat inside and out. And some Coney Islanders believe that the only thing preventing Corey from signing with a high Division I school is his refusal to practice that shot, which now comes and goes depending upon his concentration. Yet Corey is not undisciplined. In practice, he is often the only player to execute Coach Hartstein’s drills perfectly on the first try. He never gets caught in a game going the wrong way on one of the team’s set plays—and anyone who does is found by Corey to possess a “weak mind.” Even his penchant for distributing the ball to his teammates has a certain deliberateness to it. “Maybe I have given up my shooting game a bit,” he acknowledged to me down at B/C. “But everybody on this team is always arguing about not getting their shots. So I’ll pass the ball just to keep everyone from fighting so much. Not everyone agrees with me. All my friends be saying, ‘Shoot! Shoot!’ every time I touch the ball. But this is my team, and I’ll do what I want.” Some of Corey’s friends think he may be too amiable for his own good.

  Perhaps the one person who understands Corey best is his brother Willie. The Johnsons are one of the few stable, intact families I know in Coney Island. Corey is the second youngest of eight children, all raised by a mother and father who still live at home. Corey’s father, Bill Johnson, earns a decent living running his own plumbing business; I often see him driving around the neighborhood, waving cheerfully from his van. And though they live in the Coney Island projects, among families in this neighborhood the Johnsons are considered relatively fortunate.

  One day, curious to hear his thoughts about Corey, I went looking for Willie Johnson. Willie is only twenty-one years old and he often wears a black mesh tank top, the better to display his impressive physique and the tattoo of a dragon on his arm. But he has a quiet, considered way of talking that belies his youth. Like all the Johnson boys, Willie played varsity ball in high school. After he scored 1100 on his SATs—the highest in anyone’s memory—he became the Lincoln team’s in-house tutor and had his pick of college programs. Instead, he decided to go into business for himself as a barber. And business at his shop, across town in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, is now thriving.

  Willie’s shop is on the second floor of a commercial building just off Flatbush Avenue, but Willie has given it a homey feel. Taped to the mirrors ar
e photos of the extensive Johnson clan—Corey, Willie, and their six siblings. A T-shirt commemorating Lincoln’s championship last year is pinned to the wall, next to a painting of Jesus, a bust of Nefertiti, and four portraits of Martin Luther King. Willie has also slapped up an assortment of bumper stickers that seem to represent a range of interests among the Johnsons: MORE HUGGING, LESS MUGGING and TO ALL YOU VIRGINS . . . THANKS FOR NOTHING.

  “I made it and I’m doing all right. But I’m fortunate, considering I didn’t go to college,” Willie says to me. “Most of the guys who didn’t go to school—well, they ain’t doing as well.” He pushes a broom across the barbershop floor, ioo collecting masses of cut hair. “That’s why I been telling Corey, ‘You got to go to school; you got to go to college.’ I say to him, ‘You want to be a writer? That’s cool. But how you gonna do that if you don’t go to college?’” Willie frowns. “‘And how you gonna go to college if the coaches never see what you can do with a basketball?’ I talk and talk, but to tell you the truth, I’m not sure how much he been listening.”

  Corey’s assiduous cultivation of his image as the team’s philosopher-king often keeps adults at arm’s length. Any other kid on the Lincoln varsity who courted such academic trouble, as Corey did last spring, would have received a withering tongue-lashing from Hartstein. But Corey is so dignified and aristocratic that adults sometimes keep their distance, if only because they can’t quite believe that someone as obviously smart as Corey could be screwing up the way he is.

  Willie stops sweeping for a moment and props his broomstick beneath his arm. “To tell you the truth, I think Corey cares more about his recruiting than he’s letting on. He just don’t think it’s cool to show how much. But you don’t play as hard as Corey does if you don’t care.” I mention to Willie something I had recently learned from Tchaka: that Corey, who still hasn’t seen his recruiting mail because Coach Hartstein wants his grades to improve first, apparently sneaks a peek at Hartstein’s school mailbox to see whether he’s getting any letters. When Willie hears this, his eyes light up. “See, I told you he cares,” he says with a laugh. Then he grows serious again and nods, once, to himself. “I’m going to have to have a little talk with Corey real soon.”

  Five

  NOSTALGIA ASIDE, it is fair to say that few New York neighborhoods have changed as radically over the years as Coney Island. In the early 1900s, of course, Coney Island was known primarily as an immigrant destination, as boatloads of Jewish, Irish, and Italian families found homes in the neighborhood, moving side by side into the two-story bungalows, with gardens in front and porches out back, that covered the peninsula from end to end. That was also the heyday of the great Coney Island amusement parks—Steeplechase, Luna, and Dreamland—famous not only for the technological wizardry of their rides and exhibits but also for the utopian ideas that inspired them: that in this burgeoning, polyglot city, where the lines of ethnicity and class were being drawn ever more indelibly, there might exist at least one place where urban discord gave way to the happy carnival scene of Ferris wheels and roller coasters, romance and Nathan’s franks. Every day, for a nickel fare, New York’s new subway system brought millions of people to Coney Island. “Nowhere else in the United States will you see so many races mingle in a common purpose for a common good,” wrote a local historian. “Democracy meets here and has its first interim skin to skin.”

  Today, Coney Island displays the results of a different experiment in city living: urban renewal. The neighborhood’s transformation began in the late 1950s. By then, European immigration had slowed, and all but a few amusement park rides had vanished, victims of suburbanization and the auto craze that sent New Yorkers spinning northward for their leisure. City officials, desperately in need of affordable housing, bulldozed block after block of multifamily homes in Coney Island, and over the next twenty years erected in their place one of the largest collections of federal, state, and local housing projects in the city. Whenever the housing authority needed to relocate poor black families from another New York neighborhood, Coney Island made itself available: a thirty-square-block area devoted to nothing but high-rise apartment buildings.

  Blacks did not gravitate to Coney Island naturally, as they did to Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the city’s two largest African-American communities. Among the row houses and tenements of Harlem and Bed-Stuy, one feels a connection both to midtown Manhattan, an easy commute, and to other black neighborhoods nearby. But there is nothing whatsoever near the Coney Island projects—for all intents and purposes the end of the line. Coney Island is the end of Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn’s principal thoroughfare, which traverses the entire alphabetical grid of the borough’s streets before crossing Avenue Z and plunging into the shadow of the high-rises. Coney Island is also the end of four different subway lines, each originating some thirty miles to the north and terminating on elevated tracks just blocks away from Nathan’s and the Atlantic Ocean. And Coney Island, of course, is also the end of New York City. Surrounded on three sides by water, and cut off on the fourth by the great ethnic divide of Brighton Beach, the Coney Island peninsula feels like a separate territory, as removed from the rest of New York as Guam. City officials have grown accustomed to treating the neighborhood that way. During the urban-renewal years, Coney Island became a dumping ground, the terminus of forced migrations for hundreds of black families who were pushed to the sea.

  Just to get to Coney Island from Manhattan requires an hour-long subway ride, since few of the neighborhood’s residents own cars, and then a mile-long walk out to the projects. And once tenants arrive at the end of the peninsula, home to the largest concentration of buildings, they find none of the amenities that New Yorkers take for granted; there are no supermarkets or public libraries, no police precincts or hospitals, no restaurants or nightclubs. The streets offer none of the bustling commerce and pedestrian life that are the great compensations for city living. In fact, for many long stretches one sees nothing but slate-gray project buildings, vacant lots, and basketball courts. Despite the concentration of tenants in each building, the project courtyards and walkways often look emptied-out, as if all but the drug dealers have been put under curfew or quarantine. In this desolate, urban-lunar landscape, one doesn’t even come across many unfamiliar faces; no one simply passes through Coney Island on the way to somewhere else.

  Unmoored as it is from the rest of New York, Coney Island has found some compensation for its isolation by evolving into one of New York’s most closely knit African-American communities. Although I failed to see them during my first few visits there, several informal networks exist in Coney Island to help defend the neighborhood against the forces of anomie. There is the Coney Island Gospel Assembly on Neptune Avenue, which draws large crowds every Sunday. There are the recreational centers on the ground floors of many project buildings, which provide small islands of community. And above all there is the neighborhood’s faith in, and sponsorship of, the game of basketball.

  Basketball is so inextricably woven into the fabric of Coney Island life that almost everyone in this neighborhood has grown up playing the game or following the fortunes of those who do. Huge crowds show up to watch the summer tournament games at the Garden, and almost everyone can recite a complete oral history of the neighborhood’s great players—a remarkable number, too, considering the actual size of Coney Island. There was Eric (Spoon) Marbury and Norman (Jou-Jou) Marbury, Stephon’s older brothers; Dwayne (Tiny) Morton and Carlton (Silk) Owens; Bernard (T) Mitchell and David (Chocolate) Harris. People remember the exact scores of games played at the Garden more than ten years ago, or describe in rapturous detail the perfect arc that Silk Owens put on his jumper before he was shot in the elbow in 1982. Videos of Lincoln games are circulated from apartment to apartment, and dog-eared copies of a ten-year-old University of Georgia catalogue, with a picture of Spoon Marbury playing with future NBA great Dominique Wilkins, get passed around the neighborhood like samizdat.

  Every summer night, as
soon as the day’s heat begins to break, the Garden fills with players at their devotions; and the code of conduct that governs activities there is more rigorous than I have seen at any other Coney Island court or, for that matter, any other neighborhood in New York City. Players sometimes get into shape for the summer season by playing full-court one-on-one while their compatriots watch from the sidelines, cheering them on. It is not unusual to find guys falling into two ruler-straight lines to practice lay-ups and crosscourt passing. One day I walked by the Garden while ten players halted all competition to work on a double-down defensive rotation and to trade tips on the most effective way of handling the backcourt trap. Some of the neighborhood elders serve as freelance coaches to the younger kids, and during games at the Garden players actually heed their coaches’ sideline instructions—especially during the summer tournaments, which are often better organized than games in the PSAL. During tournament play, everyone pitches in to buy team T-shirts and trophies—even to hire a ref and to persuade him, against his better judgment, to stay out at the Coney Island courts and officiate the games until they conclude, usually sometime past two A.M.