The Fugitivities, стр. 32

—

There was a point in his life, Nathaniel said, when he noticed a shift happening around him. He could feel it happening, not just to him but to everyone. At first, he chalked it up to a frustration that he didn’t have the championship rings he had always dreamed of winning. The hard facts of age and injury had dimmed that prospect, even as he battled the pains that became more frequent and that he refused to acknowledge. But it wasn’t just his body. The game was changing. It was glossier, louder, bigger somehow. The splash of money was in your face, and it changed attitudes. On the court, in the locker room, but most of all in everyday life. Things that weren’t done in his day were becoming common, some of them rumored, but a lot of them showing up in the newspaper and sometimes on the six o’clock news. He felt cut out, as if the segment of history to which he belonged had been dropped from the big board. He spent more and more of their games watching from the bench. He saw a shadow in his future, a time beyond the game that only recently had been unthinkable to him. How would he fill it? He thought about going back to school. He had always felt he had to hide his love of school. He never talked about it. But the truth was that he regretted how little he actually read in college. He had barely gone to class. If he had more time, and eventually he would, he could read whatever he wanted. He always had so many questions that lurked in the back of his mind. But the game was everything, his career, his future, how he put food on the table. He had pushed those questions out of bounds.

But he had always felt a deep desire to learn more about history. He knew his people were from the Carolinas. His grandfather had moved the family to New York in the migration. And he knew that his mother’s side had roots in Haiti. At least that was what they always said. In fact, his mother had even sung some Creole lullabies to him as a child. The little bird, ti zwazo, going where he’s not supposed to. When his mother sang it fired his imagination like the sun. It was all that kept him and his sister alive in those early years, the worst years, after his father left with no news until they learned he had been charged and locked up in another state.

Nathaniel had been hotheaded from the beginning. What his father called “a knucklehead.” The Bronx streets never gave an inch. In the static there was no other way to be. He’d seen his first body when he was eleven. A Puerto Rican boy only a few years older than himself in Echo Park with a hole in him and no one coming to help. He had seen the pimps handling the streetwalkers, and the women lined up and fondled by the cops on Southern Boulevard. By the time he was fifteen he had scrambled in and out of hot rides, seen a kid lose one of his eyes to a brass knuckle, had a knife pulled on him by a man twice his age who pulled him into an alley and told him he was going to die that day. If it wasn’t for his sister, Naia, who knew how to talk sense into him, he almost certainly would have ended up dead or behind the wall like his old man. It was really only by chance—and the fact that his high school coach took a liking to him—that he started playing ball. Discovered that he was unguardable off the dribble; could shoot the lights out when he wanted to. They let him know if he wanted to keep playing, he had to get his grades right. He was never happy with schoolwork, though. The desk chairs gave him cramps. In class, the way people snickered and put eyes on him when he spoke made him feel stupid. But he loved to read the paper, something he could remember seeing his father doing when he was a little boy. Especially the sports section, where alongside the gray columns and score boxes were pictures of the greats immortalized in their action. The Big Dipper rising for a layup, skywalking like a graceful astronaut.

He never had too many illusions about the business side of basketball. The trades, the scouts, the college reps, the coaches. He knew it all came down to the numbers: his stats, their cash flow, being docile, telling them what they wanted to hear, getting minutes. The only thing he cared about was getting a chance. He was good and he knew it. If he got the right opportunity, he could take over a game. They would see what he could really do and then it would be set. He would be able to provide for his mother. With his success he could give her the protection he had always dreamed of as a boy. He could move his mother out to Jersey. And not a day too soon. The block wasn’t just bad. By then, it had become apocalyptic.

He got his break and pressed his advantage as best he could. The years in the league flew by in a blur of sweat, bright lights, adrenaline highs, and crushing blows. He would never have believed the rise and fall through the seasons could happen so fast. He could replay entire games, or parts of them, in his head. Feel the gruel of a walk to the locker room. Hear the ecstatic roar of big wins. He had played alongside and against heroes and legends, guys who had changed what the game could be. Dr. J in Philly, Magic on the Lakers, Earl the Pearl with the Knicks. He was