The Last Shot Read online

  “What were you fighting about?” I ask him.

  “I don’t know. I guess I was just in a bad mood because of the SATs.” Russell drapes his arm over my shoulder. “Never let a girl see you sweat. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that?” Russell emits a peculiar mirthless cackle. I look at Corey. He shrugs and traces a circle around his temple with his index finger.

  It’s late November now, and the days are getting shorter. By the time practice is over, the sun has long since dropped into its slot behind the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, out past the western end of the Coney Island peninsula, and the sky at twilight is covered with bleak, wintery clouds. Since it’s much too cold to hang out on the Coney Island courts, and no one feels like going straight home after practice, Russell, Corey, and Stephon often go over to Willie Johnson’s barbershop on Flatbush Avenue, and I usually give them a lift on my way home.

  Most nights now, as we drive past the brightly lit bodegas and rice-and-beans joints and used-car lots along Flatbush Avenue, the signs of approaching winter are upon us: homeless men sleeping over heating grates, and fires raging out of metal drums, circled by shivering men trying to keep warm. Everywhere we go in Brooklyn, we also pass nomadic groups of black teenagers, usually dressed like the Lincoln players, in high-tops and hooded sweatshirts. Tonight Corey looks out the car window and says in a high, fragile voice, “Oh, no. I just hate it when the Negroes wear those hoods. Scary! Oh! So scary!” Russell and Stephon burst out laughing, and Corey lifts his own hood over his head. He knows that when he walks around like that, cops will stop him on the street and pedestrians will turn away from him in fear. “Only in America,” he says.

  After the laughter subsides, Corey grows serious and brings up the subject of his older brother Louis, a.k.a. Sweet Lou, who is a freshman this year at the University of Buffalo. Evidently Louis and the team’s other black players have faced so much harassment in Buffalo that Louis is considering transferring to a New York City school. “It’s racial up there,” Corey says. “He goes into stores and they make him stand in front, saying, ‘What you want?’ They won’t let him go in. Now what kind of shit is that?”

  “Damn! And Louis is a light-skinned nigger, too,” Russell says. “What do you think they would do to someone with my complexion?” He covers his dark face with his hands. “Man, even if I pass my SATs, where am I gonna go? I can’t go to Weber State—Utah’s got the KKK and all those Mormons. Boston is racist, I hear, so forget about BC. Wichita’s in the boondocks. And in Texas every time you walk out at night they say, ‘Hey, nigger boy, what you want?’ And they can do that, too, ’cause the sheriff’s always in with them.” Russell looks up morosely. “Man, I do not want to go some place where I’m not wanted. No way.”

  Corey’s mention of his brother’s Buffalo experience makes me realize how long it’s been since I heard Corey talk about his own college plans. So I ask him the question I seem to have been avoiding—whether the continuing absence of visits and letters from the coaches is starting to worry him. He smiles and says, “Nah, Coach Hartstein got a whole boxful of mail for me. He’s just keeping it—especially all the Big East mail—so I’ll work harder.” Apparently Corey’s occasional peeks into Hartstein’s mailbox continue to convince him of his good situation, although recently he’s been getting far more form letters than personal appeals.

  “Still got to pass those SATs,” Russell warns bleakly.

  “I’m not scared,” Corey replies. “I do well on tests. Especially the vocabulary part. Anyway, we’re seniors. This should be our year to relax.”

  “Yeah, if Corey don’t get his seven hundred,” Stephon assures me from the back seat, “he goin’ to the moon!” This is the sort of admiring comment Corey would do well not to hear; he is starting to believe that his reputation as the team’s smartest and coolest player grows in inverse proportion to the work he does in the classroom and the grades he receives. “That test is hard,” Stephon goes on. “I looked at it once and almost fainted. I read somewhere that David Robinson got a thirteen hundred. Is that possible? Man, if I got that, I’d be the happiest guy in the world.”

  “I heard there are players now who get other guys to take the test for them,” Russell says. He looks at me. “How do they get away with that? Find someone who looks like them?”

  This is not a good sign. One of Russell’s friends at Grady, who had been scoring lower than he on practice tests, suddenly got his 700 and signed with a top program; and some Lincolnites have begun wondering whether the Grady players are using stand-ins to take the test.

  ***

  Business is brisk tonight at Willie’s barbershop when we arrive; either that or a lot of guys are using the place to stay off the street and keep warm. Willie and his partner are cutting with dispatch, and still a half-dozen guys are hanging out, passing around the basketball that Willie keeps on hand and watching sitcom reruns on the TV. As a rule, Willie refuses to charge Russell or any family member for haircuts. “Unfortunately, that includes about half of Coney Island,” he explains as we walk in the shop. Five of this year’s twelve varsity players are cousins of the Johnson family; one project building in Coney Island has fourteen Johnson relatives spread among eleven floors. “They leave,” Willie says with a sigh, “but more just come and take their place.” What he loses in barbershop fees, though, he makes up for in family atmosphere. As always, the shop tonight feels like a social club; beneath the benevolent gaze of Jesus, Nefertiti, and the Reverend King, everyone looks to be having a fine time. Outside, the early winter darkness has fallen like a black curtain against the shop window, but inside Willie’s it’s bright and warm.

  Corey, whistling the theme song to “The Andy Griffith Show,” grabs a razor and stands next to Russell, trimming his right sideburn. Corey has always been solicitous of Russell’s fashion needs; when Russell started dressing with flair this year, Corey remained in the locker room to troubleshoot in case Russell hit any snags knotting his tie. And now that Russell has let his hair grow back, Corey is making sure it does so in an orderly fashion. “What’s up with Terry,” he asks.

  “I still love her; don’t get me wrong,” Russell answers solemnly. “But I can’t show her that, can’t be saying, ‘Terry, I love you, I want to be with you.’ Maybe she say, ‘Russell, I just don’t feel that way.’ What if she decide she don’t want to be with me?” Russell searches Corey’s face unhappily. “I would take that hard, I’m telling you. I got to act like I don’t care, got to keep myself covered, got to keep her on a long spoon.” Lately I have seen, amid Russell’s usual stack of SAT review books, a volume called The Black Man’s Guide to the Black Woman.

  “You just got to tease her a little, is all,” Corey says authoritatively. He moves behind Russell to trim his neck hairs. “Like, instead of kissing her on the lips? Kiss her on the nose. Then kiss her on the eyebrow. Give her a kiss on the ear. Before you know it, she’ll be beggin’ you, ‘When you gonna kiss me on the lips?’” Corey laughs and laughs, confident that his advice has been thoroughly market-tested.

  Across the room, I hear Willie Johnson give a snort of disapproval. Willie is cutting Stephon’s hair, but mostly he’s been keeping a weather eye on his younger brother.

  “Whatever you do with Terry,” Corey says, moving in front of Russell in order to even off his sideburns, “just don’t bust inside her. That almost happened to me.”

  Hearing this, Willie begins clipping Stephon’s hair with growing agitation. “Corey’s smart, but he’s stupid too,” Willie says to me. “You know what I mean? In junior high, he was a virgin with a ninety average. Now he’s got a sixty-five. You tell me.” I start laughing, but Willie says, “No, I’m serious, man. I’ve been trying to talk to him. I say, ‘Don’t you want to go to college? Don’t you know you got to sacrifice for things you want? Don’t you know why no coaches have been coming to visit you yet?’” Willie is going at Stephon’s head with angry abandon, and Stephon has sunk low in his chair, hoping to avoid a scalping. “C
orey could do his homework one-two-three, but he’s on the phone all night talking to girls. I say to him, ‘There are always gonna be girls around, brother. Girls will be around until you die.’ I say to him, ‘You got a personal problem? Just tell me.’ But he says, ‘No, there’s nothing wrong.’ ‘But why lie to me?’ I say. ‘I’m your brother. I’m not gonna make you or break you.’” Willie lifts his scissors from Stephon’s head and looks across the room at Corey. “Sometimes I just want to hit him.”

  Willie is giving voice now to everyone’s worst fear: namely, that Corey will not only fail to secure his college eligibility, but that he will get one of his girlfriends pregnant. At times, it has seemed that the concern over Corey’s dating habits borders on the extreme, but Willie argues that it may not be taken seriously enough. As many Coney Island players have abandoned their college dreams because they became fathers as have those who became drug dealers. Chocolate, for example, left behind a three-week-old baby when he was shot. “Girls and crack,” goes the mantra in Coney Island. “Girls and crack.” In fact, girls and even the simple distractions of friends are considered such a threat to a college career that the neighborhood’s talented athletes are being urged to give up the rights and privileges of adolescence altogether and attend a high school far from home; they will be lonely, but they will keep on the straight and narrow. Corey’s brother Louis took this strategy one step further, deliberately avoiding Lincoln High for the seclusion of a predominantly male school, then spending an extra year at a prep school that serves as a sort of academic rehab clinic for basketball players. Not coincidentally, he passed his SATs and became the first of the six Johnson boys—indeed, one of the first Coney Island players in years—to avoid the juco system and go directly to a Division I school.

  Louis Johnson was so dedicated to his craft that he would practice his shot under the Garden lights until four A.M., even in the driving rain. Everyone—not only Willie, but Disco, Mr. Lou, and the rest of the neighborhood—wishes Corey shared his brother’s singlemindedness. But Corey’s sensibility is much too quirky for that, and I am finally understanding the danger that represents in Coney Island. If Corey lived anywhere else—certainly if he had grown up twenty-five miles north, in one of New York’s white suburbs—he would play the offbeat writer whose poor grades and popularity with girls earn him a four-year sentence at a midlevel school like Colgate, to be served while his classmates all go Ivy. In the movie version, Corey would be played with dashing ennui by Matt Dillon or Keanu Reeves, and he would end up in the climactic scene getting the girl and a job after he learned to stop slacking off. But Corey fools around in an arena where there is, of course, no such thing as a safety school—nor, for that matter, safety nets of any kind—and where the credits usually roll on far less sanguine endings.

  There is, in addition to the grave threat this represents for Corey’s future, a sad bit of irony in all of this. Black, inner-city kids are always accused of doing nothing but throwing a ball through a hoop. At least that’s what a lot of white suburbanites assume they’re doing. Then along comes someone like Corey, who takes pleasure in a million other things. (He may not show up in the morning for first-period class, but Corey will happily stay in school late to dazzle his classmates with his singing and dancing in the annual talent show.) In Coney Island, however, you deviate from the one and only path to college at extreme personal risk—scholarships for athletes being significantly easier to come by than those for underachievers or ghetto poets.

  ***

  By the time Russell and Corey submit themselves to Willie’s shears, it’s already late, so I agree to drive them back to Coney Island. All three are tired, and we ride along Flatbush Avenue and down Ocean Parkway in a rare moment of peace and quiet. Finally, Russell turns to me and says, “What do you know about Rob Johnson?”

  Oh, boy.

  Johnson is a street agent, a middleman, a flesh peddler. Worse than any high school or college recruiter, he makes his living by getting chummy with high school players and brokering them to colleges for a fee, though the coaches who pay it swear they’ve never heard of him. According to the latest allegations, Johnson used to recruit players for the B/C camp, then moved on to bigger fish, getting himself (and Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, among others) entangled in an NCAA investigation. But Johnson’s recent notoriety hasn’t kept him from showing up regularly at the Lincoln gym this year—a tall black man with an enormous gut, Day-Glo Nikes, and a thick gold chain around his wrist. Lately Johnson has been attending varsity practice, where he sits alone in the bleachers, then lingers around the star players afterward, offering to drive them home or take them to the movies. He is, I can imagine, an appealing figure to broke and fatherless kids like Russell.

  “Has Rob offered to be your agent?” I ask. Russell looks out the window and says, “He called me last night. Said he liked the way I played. A lot.” I tell Russell he might want to check out Rob’s reputation, but Russell says, “It don’t matter. I’ve decided to sign with South Carolina. They really want me. They said they would love to sign me.” Having surprised us all with this sudden decision, Russell pulls out a paper bag with his customary after-practice snack: a plain bagel and a carton of Tropicana.

  “You should at least visit before you make up your mind,” Corey advises. He’s stretched luxuriously across the backseat. “They’re all gonna make it sound good.”

  “But I already know I want to go there,” Russell says between mouthfuls.

  “Russell, you’ve never been outside Coney Island! How the hell are you gonna know? Look”—Corey lowers his voice and tries to speak to his best friend in tones of unimpeachable reasonableness—“Russell, say you’re gonna marry someone. You gonna marry the first girl you sleep with? No. Of course not. You’re gonna look around, see what the other girls can do for you, and then make your decision. Same with colleges. You got to go up there and have a careful look around.” Corey is utterly confounding: he’s blowing his own talent and won’t listen to anyone’s warnings, yet he knows exactly what his friend should do and feels obliged to speak his mind. Maybe that’s what he gets from this odd friendship with Russell—the chance to say out loud what he himself should do, even if he never takes his own good advice.

  “Nobody can make me take visits if I don’t want to,” Russell protests.

  Corey laughs. “Nobody’s gonna make you do anything. But you might as well let them show you a good time. Let them wine you and dine you. When my recruiting starts, I’m going to have me some fun.”

  Russell, having finished his snack, balls up the paper bag and tosses it out the window with an air of finality. “I don’t want to be wined and dined.”

  As much as he hates Coney Island, Russell has never lived anywhere else, and I know that he fears his dark complexion will get him into trouble outside his home turf. That may explain why he doesn’t want to take any recruiting visits. But something else is up. Corey notes this and changes strategy. “What’s your reason?” he asks Russell. “You got to have a reason.”

  “I’m not like everybody else,” Russell replies, staring sullenly out the window.

  “Yes,” Corey says slowly. “This is true.”

  “Look, all the best players sign in the fall. Only the scrubs wait until spring. April signers is the leftovers.”

  “I’m not telling you to sign in the spring,” Corey says, “I’m just saying you change your mind every day.”

  Russell twists around to look his friend in the eye. “I’m telling you, Corey, I’m having a great season. My stock is going up. I’m gonna be big time. I’m gonna have Big East schools recruiting me just like Tchaka by the end of the year—it’ll be funny.” Russell is getting worked up now. “And when those schools that lost interest in me, like Rutgers and Duquesne, come back in the spring, I’m gonna be, like, ‘So why did you come back now!’ I’m gonna be, like, ‘Too late, sucka!’ I’m gonna be throwing it on niggers all year! Tomahawk jams! Reverse alley-oops!” Russell starts thrashing
about in the front seat, dunking his orange juice carton into the ashtray of my car.

  “Man, you are one crazy nigger!” Corey says. “I’m not talking about dunking! I’m talking about whether you should sign at some school you never even seen in your life!”

  “Don’t matter. It’s my decision. And part of growing up is learning to live with your decisions. Even if it turns out to be a nightmare.”

  “But why?”

  “Don’t push me, Corey.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I don’t want to talk about it.” Russell’s voice is rising up the scale.

  “That’s not a reason.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “BECAUSE I HATE ALL THIS FUCKING RECRUITING!” Russell screams. “All right?”

  Corey leans back against his seat, defeated. “Okay, well, at least that’s a reason.”

  Nine

  IN EARLY DECEMBER a cold front hit New York City. In Coney Island, the wind coming off the icy Atlantic sped down the canyon of Ocean Parkway, and when the players and I left the school building after practice, it stung our eyes and lashed our cheeks like a whip. Sometimes the players collected by the bus stop outside Lincoln to review the day’s events before heading home. As we stood around in the six o’clock darkness, stamping our feet and warming our hands with our breath, I couldn’t help noticing how the expansive after-school talk of last spring—about city championships and summer camps—had been reduced to the essentials: which coaches were still calling, which ones had lost interest, how many more opportunities the players had to take the SATs.

  And as the gap between Tchaka’s fortunes and those of his Coney Island teammates widened, so too did the fault lines that ran just beneath the surface of this team. For a long time I attributed the friction between Tchaka and the Coney Island crew merely to geography. After practice, Russell, Corey, and Stephon often hung out together in Coney Island or at Willie’s shop while Tchaka went home to Queens. But among black neighborhoods in New York, I see now that geography speaks to a more delicate issue: social class. “Man, Coney Island is fucked up,” Tchaka said to me one day. “Out by the projects, it’s crazy, like another country. I remember I was walking down Surf Avenue once. I saw about forty stringy-haired niggers coming straight at me. I’m looking right and left, figuring where I can run. Then someone I knew from Lincoln came up and rescued me. I thought, ‘Thank God. You just saved my life.’ Out there all you gotta do is look at someone wrong and they want to shoot you. After I get to college, I’m never going into fucking Coney Island again.”