Jumper.
In!
BUBBA by Stephen Solomita
The way it goes down, I’m more than ready. The moron’s been riding me since the first minute of the first quarter. He does not shut up, not for a minute. You got nothin’, you white bread bitch. You can’t handle my shit. You slow. You old. You ain’t now and you never was.
And me, Bubba Yablonsky, I’m trying to keep the game close because at the end, when we make our move, I want everybody worked up. So I’m letting the moron go by me and I’m missing my shots and this inspires him to even greater rhetorical flights. Where’s yo game, white bread? You leave it with yo mama? Ah think she done stuck it down her panties. ’At’s ’cause it stinks.
I put up with it because I’m basically a goal-oriented guy and because I’ve learned to control my anger.
We’re well into the fourth quarter, the game tied at 38, when their point guard takes a jump shot that comes off the far side of the rim. I box out the moron, who compensates by twisting his knuckles against my spine, then go up for the rebound. The ball drops into my hands, but I don’t catch it. I tip it, instead, toward the sideline.
Spooky Jones, our small forward, is closest to the ball and he fears after it, leaping over the sideline and into the third row of benches. While he’s in the air, I slam my elbow into the moron’s chest, then scrape the heel of my Nikes against his shin. As expected, the moron begins to throw punches, and a moment later both benches empty. Now all eyes are on the combatants, all eyes except those of Road Miller’s wife, Louise. Her eyes are on her work as she yanks at the waist of Spooky’s shorts and jams a small package down into his crotch. The package is bound with double sided tape and molds so nicely to Spooky’s abdomen that when he finally pulls himself up and dashes off to the locker room, nobody notices a thing.
I don’t see the rest of it, of course, because the moron has me by the throat and one of the screws is pounding on my back like I’m the one who won’t let go. But the plan is for Spooky to dump the package beneath a pile of dirty towels in the hamper, then come back on the court. Later, Freddie Morrow will push the hamper to the prison laundry, remove the package, and bring it to yours truly.
It’s an eminently workable prison hustle, brilliantly conceived and elaborately planned. The package contains two ounces of powder cocaine which sells on the inside for two hundred dollars a gram. As there are twenty-eight grams in an ounce and the two ounces are costing me and my partners twelve hundred dollars… well, the math speaks for itself.
I let myself be pulled away from the moron and back to the sidelines where my teammates are already gathered. Spooky Jones isn’t there. That’s because he’s lying in a shower stall, his throat slashed and the product vanished. He’s still bleeding when we find him, his heart still fluttering. His breath whistles through the hole in his throat while a deputy warden screams into the phone for a doctor; his eyes remain open and imploring until the doctor rushes into the locker room. Then Spooky’s breathing stops, for good and forever.
I can’t help it. I’m a criminal. I don’t mourn Spooky. Yeah, he was a good guy and we’d split many a joint during our stay at the Menands Correctional Facility, a minimum security joint with a spectacular view of the Hudson River. But if there’s anything a thief can’t stand, it’s being ripped off. Somebody took my coke and I want it back. As for Spooky Jones, he’s past caring.
Deputy Warden Ezekiel Buchanan rakes me over the coals. Him and Coach Poole, who’s also, technically, a deputy warden.
“You started the fight,” Buchanan tells me. He has a thin face and a long nose and unnaturally red lips. “Can we agree on that?”
I’m thinking, If I was still in Attica, the screws would be working me over with ax handles. I’m thinking, That’s exactly where you’re going, dickhead, back to Attica, where your life is on the line every minute of every day. Say good-bye to paradise.
“Coach,” I finally respond, “I didn’t have anything to do with… with what happened to Spooky. I was on the floor every minute, which you know because you were there. For me, that’s an alibi.”
Coach Poole doesn’t respond. He looks devastated, like a jilted lover. His ebony skin has a grayish cast and his small chocolate eyes are shot through with jagged red veins.
“You wanna answer me, Bubba? Answer the question I asked you?” Buchanan’s a patient guy, a twenty-year man who’s worked a dozen institutions, and he also thinks he’s been betrayed. That’s because he personally recruited the Menands’ basketball team from some of the worst prisons in the system, choosing very carefully from the pool of eligible talent. In the process, he’d put his reputation on the line.
“The only point I wanna make,” I say, “is that the entire team was on the court when this went down. I don’t see how you can blame us.”
“I asked you if you started the fight.”
“It was the moron threw the first punch.”
“After you elbowed him.”
“This is prison basketball, Deputy, which, as you know, is characterized by aggressive defense. You want us to play nice, you tell the officials to start callin’ fouls. They’re your officials, right?” Again, I’m thinking, If you talked like that to a deputy warden in Attica, they’d find pieces of your body in Montreal.
Now I’ve got two goals. I want my coke back and I want to finish my bit at Menands, where life is easy, where the food is edible, where there are no rats, where the screws don’t begin every conversation with Hey, you piece of shit.
“Jones flies into the cheap seats. You start a fight. Jones disappears into the locker room, where he gets killed. Am I supposed to believe this is all coincidental?”
“I didn’t start the fight, Deputy. And I didn’t see when Spooky took off for the locker room. But anybody in the stands could’ve followed him and nobody would’ve noticed.”
We go around and around for another hour. I’m polite and respectful, but I stick to my guns. Fights, I insist, are common under the best of circumstances and this was the New York Prison League’s championship game. High feelings were to be expected and the refs were allowing us to play. Thus, when the very predictable confrontation finally went down, person or persons unknown had taken advantage of the resulting chaos.
Coach begins to perk up toward the end. I’m giving him an out and he knows it. Sure, Menands is a minimum security prison, but it’s still a prison. Assaults among the populace are uncommon, but they happen. Murders are quite rare, but they also happen. I mean, if a murder occurs in the dining hall, do you blame the cook?
When Buchanan finally dismisses me, I plant a seed. “Coach, we’re gonna play a makeup game, right? This is for the championship and we were tied.”
I’m back in living unit 8, locked down, me and the rest of the starting five. Hafez Islam, our starting two-guard, is busting my balls, which I don’t need. Hafez is a prison-converted Black Muslim, the only one at Menands, which has a majority-white population. I’ve never seen him when he wasn’t angry about something, and from time to time (when that anger was directed at me) I was tempted to slap his mouth shut. Unfortunately, our stay at Menands depends as much on our nonviolent behavior off the court as on our game-day ferocity. Which meant that I mostly have to eat it.
“I know you up to somethin’, Bubba,” he tells me. “You coulda took that rebound, only you tipped it out. What’s up wit’ that? You fuckin’ wit’ us?”
“What I’m up to is none of your Allah-damned business, Hafez. In fact, you’re disrespecting me by asking the question.” I pause long enough to let the message hit home. “And you better think about something else. If Warden Brook decides that we had anything to do with Spooky gettin’ capped, he’s gonna ship us back where we came from. In your case, if I remember right, that was Green Haven.”