This wasn’t as drastic a form of education as it would have been in a big city. Trenton wasn’t the sort of place where the presence of a white boy on a mainly black playground would create an automatic flash point. But it was drastic enough. The black kids played a physical game with absolute determination. If you were white and backed down from them, they wouldn’t do anything or say anything. They would merely run right over you with a cool aloofness. Without so much as a word, they’d let you know that you deserved no respect. After one day of it, Jojo resolved never to back down from a black player again.

The playground game wasn’t so much a team sport as a series of duels. If you had the ball and passed it to the open man under the basket, nobody considered that admirable. All you’d done was throw an opportunity away. The game was outdueling the man guarding you. Making a terrific jump shot from outside didn’t get the job done, either. The idea was to fake your man out or intimidate him, outmuscle him, drive past him “into the hole,” soar above him, score a layup or dunk the ball if you were that tall, and then give him the look that said—this was where Jojo first learned it—“I’m kicking your ass all over the court, bitch.”

One day Jojo was defending against a tall, aggressive black player they called Licky. Licky feinted this way and that, then gave Jojo a shoulder in the chest, drove for the basket, and soared for a layup. But Jojo soared higher and blocked the shot. Licky yelled, “Foul!” They began arguing, and Licky decked Jojo with a single punch to the face. Jojo got up seeing red, literally. A red mist formed in front of his eyes, and he threw himself on Licky. They exchanged a few wild punches, then went crashing to the asphalt and rolled in the grime. The other players stood there rooting for Licky but mainly just enjoying the beano. After a while they broke it up because Licky and Jojo were running out of the energy required to make it interesting; they wanted to get back to the game. When it was over, Licky was on his feet, heaving for breath to the point where he was unable to enunciate the curses he intended to direct at Jojo, who was sitting on the asphalt with a bloody cut over one eye, a split lip, a fat nose, and blood running down from the nose and the lip and dripping off his chin. He struggled up, wiped the blood off his face with the tops of his forearms, walked to the center of the court, and made it obvious that he was ready to resume play. He heard one player say to another, sotto voce, “That white boy’s got heart.” He took it as the greatest compliment of his young life. He had it in him to command the respect of black players.

If so, why had Charles and them just frozen him out? Well, if that was the way it was going to be, he couldn’t let it bother him, could he…All the same, it did! The black players ruled in basketball, but he couldn’t believe they’d distance themselves from him. On the court there was no color line. All were close-knit and worked together as one—and joked together as comrades-in-arms—on a team that had won the national championship last season with him in the bruising position of power forward. He looked at the picture above his locker…Jojo Johanssen soaring above a lot of flailing black arms and stuffing the ball against Michigan State in the Final Four in March. He had broken through the glass ceiling in this game…or he thought he had.

Such speculations kept rolling around in his head while he took a shower and got dressed. He was so lost in his thoughts, he was surprised when he realized that he was the last player left in the locker room. Him and the polished oak lockers and the foul mouth of Doctor Dis were all that remained. As usual, the doctor was venting his vile spleen:

“Know’m saying?

What you saving yo’ cunt for, bitch?

Some rich old sucker you be hunting for?

Motherfucker he be stuffing shit up his nose, too,

For a brain fuck, ain’t having no truck with ho’s, yo.

Know’m saying?”

Then Mike, already dressed in his T-shirt and jeans, came back in.

“You still here?” Mike said. He headed for his locker. “Forgot my fucking keys.”

“Where you going?”

“See my girlfriend,” said Mike.

“What girlfriend?”

“The girl I’m in love with”—he gestured in the general direction of the court.

“Oh, come on, not the one with—you didn’t…I hope to hell you’re shucking me.”

“I wouldn’t shuck you, Jojo. What are you gonna do?”

“You’ve gone fucking balls to the walls, Microwave.” Jojo shook his head and gave Mike the twisted smile you give an incorrigible but amusing child. “Me? I don’t know. I’m beat. Go get a beer, I guess. That fucking game went on forever. Coach just sits up there in the stands…”

“Ummm.”

“You know we scrimmaged for three hours? Without one fucking break?”

“Well, it beats running,” said Mike. “Last August, eighty-five degrees and you’re out on a track running laps.”

“Everybody has such a fucking edge on,” said Jojo.

“Edge?”

Jojo looked about to make sure nobody else was in the room. “The first day of so-called practice, and I’d like to know who the hell was practicing. Everybody’s out there playing as if their whole goddamn season depends on impressing Coach on August whatever this is. Everybody’s out there trying to cut your legs off to get their minutes.”

“You mean Congers?”

“Yeah, him, but it’s not just him. I’m sick of the whole black player thing. Coach—now, he’s white. Most of the coaches are white. But they just assume if two players have equal ability and one’s black and the other’s white—they just assume the black player’s better. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I guess.”

“When I was at the Nike camp that year, I practically had to dunk the ball with my fucking feet before they noticed me.”

“They noticed you, or you wouldna been at the camp, and you wouldn’t be here.”

“But you know what I mean. And it’s actually worse than that. They think—the coaches think, I know this for a fact—they think that in a clutch situation, like the last seconds of the game, you gotta give the ball to a black player to take that last shot. He’s not gonna choke. The white player of equal ability will. The white player will choke. That’s the way they think, and I’m talking about white coaches. It’s gotten to the point where it’s a fucking prejudice, if you ask me.”

“You know that for a fact? How do you know that for a fact?”

“You don’t believe me? Look at your own situation. You’re the best three-point shooter on this team. There’s no fucking question about that. I bet you not even André himself would dispute that. If Coach ever had one of those three-point contests like they have at the All-Star game, you’d annihilate André. But he’s the starting shooting guard and you’re not.”

“Well…Coach thinks he’s better on defense.”

“Yeah, thinks. That’s just the point. You know that’s bullshit, and so do I. You’re just as fast as he is, maybe faster. The fact is, he assumes André is faster, and he assumes he’s gonna be more aggressive and less intimidated if he’s gotta defend against some hot black player.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that—”

“Why do you think they call you Microwave?”

“I don’t even remember,” said Mike with a shrug. He began smiling at the recollection, however.

“You think it’s a compliment, don’t you? Well, it is, up to a point. They know Coach can pop you into a game and you’ll score a whole batch of three-pointers right away, just the way you can pop a piece a meat into the microwave and get yourself an instant meal. But they don’t think you’re a finisher, and Coach dud’n, either. Coach’ll take you off the bench and put you into the game to close a big gap in the third quarter, but he won’t put you in to make the big shots at the end of the game—and you’re the best shot on the team, maybe the best shot in college basketball!”