Frank screamed in triumph and relief as Double O howled with disbelief and fell backward to the floor. All the other players in the gym — the eyewitnesses to a little miracle — shouted curses and promises, screamed in harmony with Frank, slapped one another’s hands and backs and butts, and spun in delirious circles. People laughed until they were nauseated. Nobody held anything back. Because he had no idea what else to do with his excitement, one skinny black kid nicknamed Skinny, a sophomore in electrical engineering, ran out of the gym and twenty-four blocks to his house to tell his father and younger brother what he had just seen. Skinny’s father and little brother never once asked why he’d run so far to tell the story of one hoop in one meaningless game. They understood why the story had to be immediately told. In basketball, there is no such thing as “too much” or “too far” or “too high.” In basketball, enough is never enough. At its best and worst, basketball is all about excess. Every day is Fat Tuesday on a basketball court.
“Did you see that? Did you see that?” screamed Double O as he lay on the floor and flailed his arms and legs. He laughed and hooted and cursed. Losing didn’t embarrass him; he was proud of playing a game that could produce such a random, magical, and ridiculous highlight. There was no camera crew to record the event for SportsCenter, but it had happened nonetheless, and it would become a part of the basketball mythology at the University of Washington: Do you remember the time that Old Indian scored on Double O? Do I remember? I was there. Old Chief scored seven straight buckets on Double O and won the game on a poster dunk right in O’s ugly mug. O’s feelings hurt so bad, he needed stitches. Hell, O never recovered from the pain. He’s got that post-traumatic stress illness, and it’s getting worse now that he plays ball in Cleveland. Playing hoops for the Cavaliers is like fighting in Vietnam.
In that way, over the years, the story of Frank’s game-winning bucket would change with each telling. Every teller would add his or her personal details; every biographer would turn the story into autobiography. But the original story, the aboriginal hook shot, belonged to Frank, and he danced in fast circles around the court, whooping and celebrating like a spastic idiot. I sound like some Boy Scout’s idea of an Indian warrior, Frank thought, like I’m a parody, but a happy parody.
The other ballplayers laughed at Frank’s display. He’d always been a quiet player, rarely speaking on or off the court, and now he was emoting like a game-show host.
“Somebody give Oh Shit a sedative!” shouted Double O from the floor. “The Old Indian has gone spastic!”
Still whooping with joy, Frank helped Double O to his feet. The old man and the young man hugged each other and laughed.
“I beat you,” Frank said.
“Old man,” said Double O, “you gave me a trip on your time machine.”
If smell is the memory sense, as Frank once read, then he was most nostalgic about the spicy aroma of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Whenever Frank smelled Kentucky Fried Chicken, and not just any fried chicken but the very particular and chemical scent of the Colonel’s secret recipe, he thought of his mother. Because he was a child who could not separate his memories of his mother and his father and sometimes confused their details, Frank thought of his mother and father together. And when he thought about his mother and father and the smell of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Frank remembered one summer day when his parents took him to the neighborhood park to picnic with a twenty-piece bucket of mixed Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a ten-piece box of legs and wings only, along with a cooler filled with Diet Pepsi and store-bought potato salad and apples and bananas and potato chips and a chocolate cake. Harrison and Frank had fought over which particular basketball to bring, but they had at last agreed on an ABA red-white-and-blue rock.
“Can’t you ever leave that ball at home?” Helen asked Harrison. She always asked him that question. After so many years of hard-worked marriage, that question had come to mean I love you, but your obsessions irritate the hell out of me, but I love you, remember that, okay?
On that day, Frank was eleven years old, young enough to sit on his mother’s lap and be only slightly embarrassed by their shared affection, and old enough to need his father and be completely unable to tell him about that need.
“Let’s play ball,” Frank said to Harrison, though he meant to say, Prove your love for me.
“Eat first,” Helen said.
“If I eat now, I’ll throw up,” Frank said. “I’ll eat after we play.”
“You’ll eat now, and if you throw up, you’ll just have to eat again, and then you’ll play again, and then you’ll throw up, so you’ll have to eat again. It might go on for days that way. You’ll be trapped in a vicious circle.”
“You’re weird, Mom.”
“Yes, I am,” she said. “And weirdness is hereditary.”
“I’m weird, too,” Harrison said. “So you got it coming from both sides. You don’t have a chance.”
“I can’t believe you’re my parents. Did you adopt me?”
“Honey, we certainly did not adopt you,” Helen said. “We stole you from a pack of wolves, so eat your meat, you darling little carnivore.”
Laughing, feeling like an adult because his parents treated him with respect and satire, Frank sat between his mother and father and almost cried with happiness. His chest tightened, and his mouth tasted bitter. He cried too easily, he knew, and sometimes had to fight school-yard bullies who teased him about his quick tears. He usually won the fights and usually cried about his victory.
Sitting with his parents, Frank closed his eyes against his tears, blinked and blinked and thought of the utter hilarity of a dog farting in its sleep, and that made him laugh a little. Soon enough, he felt normal, like a kid made of steel and oak, and he could breathe easily, and he quickly ate his lunch of Kentucky Fried Chicken, but only wings and legs.
“Okay, I’m done,” he said. “Let’s play ball, Dad.”
“I’m too tired,” Harrison said. “I’m going to lie down in the grass and fall asleep in some dog poop.”
His father was always trying to be funny. He was funny sometimes, maybe most of the time, but nobody could be funny all of the time. And being funny was sometimes a way of being dishonest.
A few years back, Harrison had told Frank’s third-grade teacher that Indians didn’t believe in using numbers, that the science of mathematics was a colonial evil.
“Well,” the mystified teacher had asked, “then how do Indians count?”
“We guess,” Harrison had said with as much profundity as he could fake.
Okay, so maybe Harrison was funny because funny was valuable. Maybe being funny was usually a way of being honest.
“Come on, let’s play ball,” Frank pleaded with his father, who had flopped onto the grass with a chicken leg and a banana.
“I’m going to eat and sleep and fart,” Harrison said.
“Dad, you said you’d show me something new.”
“Did I promise you I would show you something new?”
“Well, no.”
“Did I sign something that said I would show you something new?”
“No.”
“That means we don’t have an oral or written contract. We don’t have an implied contract, either, because you don’t even know how to spell ‘implication.’ So that means I’m going to eat chicken until I pass out from a grease overdose.”
“Mom, he’s talking like a lawyer again.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I hate it when he does that.”
“And I can, too, spell ‘implication,’” Frank said.