“Know’m saying?
Call yo’self a cop? Swap yo’ dick and yo’ass,
Ev’ry time you shit, yo’ balls go plop plop.
Wipe yo’ dick, and it bleeds choc’late.
You needs to fuck with yo’ butt, cocksucking cop cop.
Know’m saying?”
But the locker room itself was luxurious beyond anything the thousands of hooples who had watched the “pickup game” could have imagined. The lockers were made not of metal, but of polished oak in its natural light color with a showy grain. Each one was nine feet high and three and a half feet wide, with a pair of louvered doors and all manner of shelves, shoe racks, beechwood hangers, lights that came on when the doors opened, and a fluorescent tube near the floor that was on twenty-four hours a day to keep things dry. Above the door was a brass strip with the player’s name engraved on it, and above that, framed in oak, a foot-high photograph of the player in action on the court. Jojo’s was one from the publicity department. It showed him soaring above a thicket of upstretched black arms and tapping in a rebound. He loved that picture.
As Jojo entered the room, four black players, all with the shaved heads, he noticed, Charles, André, Curtis, and Cantrell, were standing around in front of Charles’s locker. Jojo couldn’t resist joining them. Had to…Their conversation offered the possibility of recognizing the triumph of Jojo Johanssen, the white boy who took no shit.
As Jojo approached, Charles was saying, “Say what? What’s that motherfucker know about my grades? What’s he care? He’s one dumb motherfucker, that motherfucker.”
André, grinning at him: “I’m just telling you what the man said, Charles. Man said you go over the library every night after study hall and hump the books. Said he saw you.”
“The fuck he saw me. That motherfucker’s so dumb he don’t know where the library’s at.” Charles was no longer his witty and ironic self. He had just been accused of not only getting good grades—it was rumored that his GPA was 3.5—but of trying to get them. “What’s he talking about—books. He don’t know what a book looks like. Motherfucker’s so dumb he counts on his fingers and can’t get past one.” Whereupon Charles extended his middle finger.
“Ooo-ooo-weee!” said Cantrell. “Gil hear that, man, he gon’ come gitchoo!”
“Shit, he ain’ gon’ come git nothing. He gon’ put his finger up his ass’s all he gon’ do. Talking about my grades…”
“Hey, man,” said Curtis, “what grades you be getting anyway, you don’t mind me asking.”
“Heghhh heghhh heghhh…” André began laughing from deep down in his belly. “Maybe we don’t need no more swimmies. We got Charles.”
Jojo sidled up to the group and said, “Take no shit from’m, Charles. You got grades!”
He glanced at the others to register their amusement at this witty turn on the expression “You got game.” Instead, he got three blank faces.
“Whaz good, Jojo?” said Charles with an empty expression of his own. Charles always said “Whaz good?” instead of “Whuzzup.”
“Not much,” said Jojo. “Not much. I’m beat.” He figured that would give them an opportunity to think about what had forced him to work so hard—and whom he had put in his place.
Nobody picked up on that, and so Jojo tried to amplify his point. “I mean, that kid Congers was all over my back out there. I felt like I was in a fucking sumo wrestling match for three hours.”
They looked at him the way you might look at a not particularly interesting statue.
Nevertheless, he doggedly pursued his mission and risked the direct approach. “Anybody know what happened to Congers? He okay?”
Charles cut a quick glance at André and then said to Jojo, “I assume so. He isn’t hurt, he just had the breath knocked out of him.”
Assume so! Isn’t hurt! Every time! Never failed! Every time the black players talked among themselves, they’d go into an exaggerated homey argot, with all sorts of motherfuckers and he don’ts and I ain’ts and don’t need no mores and you be gettings for you are gettings and where’s it ats. The moment Jojo arrived, they’d drop it and start speaking conventional English. He didn’t feel deferred to, he felt shut out. Charles’s expression was unreadable. Charles, who had laughed about it in front of him and Mike after it happened! He wasn’t even going to talk about it in front of André, Curtis, and Cantrell. The cool Charles Bousquet was treating him like some random fan he’d had the misfortune of running into.
A conversational vacuum ensued. It was too much for Jojo. “Well…I’m gonna take a shower.” He headed off toward his locker.
“Hang in there,” said Charles.
And what was that supposed to mean? Even after two seasons Jojo never knew where he stood with the black players. What had just happened? Why had they suddenly treated him like a hoople? Was it because he had just walked up and assumed he could join in a conversation among the four of them—or wot? Was it that none of them was going to talk to him about any friction he might have with a black player if another black player was present? Or was it because he had made a crack that was a play on “You got game,” which was a black expression? It made your head hurt…He tried to tell himself it wasn’t him, it was the whole racial divide. He was one white boy who had competed with black basketball players all his life, and he could play their game. He prided himself on that. He was so proud, in fact, that he had opened his big mouth to Mike about it, hadn’t he? Nevertheless, it was true, starting back when he was growing up in Trenton, New Jersey. His dad, who was six-six, had been the center and captain of the basketball team the year Hamilton East reached the state finals; he had a couple of feelers from recruiters, but no college wanted him badly enough to offer him a scholarship, which he would have needed. So he became a burglar-alarm mechanic, like his father before him. Jojo’s mom, who was plenty bright enough to have been a doctor or something, was a technician in the radiology lab at St. Francis Hospital. Jojo adored his mother, but she centered her attention—it seemed to him, anyway—on his brother, Eric, His Majesty the Brilliant Firstborn, who was three years older. Eric was a whiz in school, the best student in his class, and a lot of other things Jojo got tired of hearing about.
Jojo was an indifferent student who would show flashes of intelligence and ability one day and then inexplicably slump and drag his grades back down the next. Well, if he couldn’t be the student Eric was, he would be Mr. Popularity, the cool dude Eric never had been. Jojo became the class clown and class rebel, a pretty mild rebel, in point of fact, and then he became something else: very tall.
By the time he entered junior high school, he was already six-four, and so naturally he was steered toward the basketball team. He turned out to be not only tall but also a real athlete. He had his father’s coordination and drive. His mom worried about his size because people were going to expect him to be more mature than he actually was. But his dad was excited. His son was going to make it. Dad believed he knew why he himself never had, despite all his clippings and stats. He’d had the misfortune of playing in the 1970s, when the black players had begun to dominate the game at the college level and captivate the recruiters. Perennial basketball powers like Bradley and St. Bonaventure were daring to put all-black teams on the court. Jojo’s dad was no genius perhaps, but he had figured out one thing: the advantage the black players had was absolute determination to prevail in this game. To them it was a disgrace to let yourself be pushed around by anybody and a terminal humiliation to let yourself be pushed around by a white player.
That summer, when Jojo was fourteen, his father started driving to work in the morning and dropping Jojo off at a basketball court on a public playground in Cadwalader Park, a mainly black area—Jojo and a brown paper bag with a sandwich in it. The court was asphalt with metal backboards and hoops with no nets. His father wouldn’t pick him up until he got off work late in the afternoon. Jojo was on his own. He was going to learn to play black basketball or else, sink or swim.