Headline Junky: The Thing About Slim

The Thing About Slim

The thing about Slim was, he had no shot. Not that it mattered, really. Slim was such a good ballplayer, he almost didn’t need one. He could dribble through rush hour traffic with his eyes closed, and thread the needle with a pass while he was counting change. And talk. Slim could talk. Slim could’ve shown up at courtside in a wheelchair and talked his way into a game, I’m sure of it. He had this way of putting you at ease, a patter that snuck up on you and drew you in. When Slim was talking to you, you felt special. Like you were part of a private conspiracy that only you and him knew about. The two of you against the world.

How else could you explain him hanging around at all? Varmont was an exclusive private school on the Upper East Side, all limestone and green ivy. Which just about says it all about the place: white and rich. And even though the playground we used was a public facility, Varmont had exclusive access to it during school hours by special arrangement with the City. So if anyone had complained about Slim, he would’ve been gone. If it seems farfetched that someone might have complained, consider this: until Slim started coming by, I was the closest thing to a streetkid they had there.

I was a scholarship baby from Brooklyn, easily the toughest kid in the school. This meant primarily that I’d been listening to rap music since before 1980, and that I’d given Dexter Tillman Chase the IVth a black eye in the ninth grade for calling me a Jew-boy. Nobody being particularly fond of Dexter Tillman Chase the IVth, I was quickly welcomed the way fresh air usually is. Having made a place for myself, I soon came to feel comfortable in it. I did well enough to renew my scholarship each year (though I was no Einstein), and was captaining the basketball team as a junior.

But Slim, he might’ve been from another planet for all the cloistered world of Varmont knew. I still remember the first time he came by to play. We were a bunch of us in the courtyard playing twenty-one: Fimberley, Addleson, I think Collins was there. The ball skipped loose and rolled out of bounds. I took a quick second to catch my breath and wipe my forehead. When I looked up again, there was Slim, standing at the side of the court with the ball cradled in his hands: a tall Black guy, thin as a rail, with lazy eyelids and a rakish gangster lean. His black denim pants and t-shirt were pressed to a crease, and his black baseball cap was set backwards on his head.

“Hey, fellas,” he said. “Got room for one more?” Fimberley looked like he might shit his pants, and I thought Addleson was going to burst into tears on the spot. “Long as you take it easy on me, that is,” he went on, “cuz I ain’t played ball in months.”

The corners of his mouth pulled slowly back into a smile, his eyes creased into thin slits and his square, white teeth flashed wide against his black skin. Then with a nod of his head so slight that you just might have imagined it, he winked one eye closed. The magic that Slim possessed, that he dispersed like a precious gift, was in always knowing exactly who to direct that smile towards. In this case it was to me and I didn’t hesitate. “Twenty-one,” I said. “Two points from the floor, one from the line. Your ball up top. Check.”

He played with us for about half an hour that day. It was clear from the way he watched Addleson (who barely had the co-ordination to lace his sneakers) score a lay-up on him, and how he later let Collins (at whom Coach Oldham used to positively scream, “Collins, if you ever got two inches off the floor you’d be all-League!”) grab a rebound over him that Slim wasn’t going all out. In fact, it looked like he was trying as much as possible to avoid contact. “Good move, baby,” he clapped at Addleson. “You caught me that time.” And to Collins, patting him on the behind in jock fashion, he said, “Way to hustle, big man. You outworked me is all.”

He left without checking the time, saying he had to get back to work. In his absence, what had felt like an occasion suddenly turned back into a boring game of twenty-one. Within five minutes it had broken up and everyone had drifted back to class or to the Deli for lunch.

He was back the next day and this time there were enough of us there for a fullcourt five-on-five. Demitt was there that day, and Lipscombe and Lessing, which including me made four starters from the team. That was the first time I saw what Slim could do with a basketball in his hands. How suddenly he could slice in and out, changing directions on a dime; how gracefully he could glide down the court, head up, taking in the scramble and chaos around him; with what ease he could transform that chaos into the order he desired, shaping it by means of the very space he occupied and the tempo he applied.

Time and space, that’s all basketball really is. An ordinary player responds as best he can to the position and motion of the other players on the court. A good one uses them to his advantage. But a great one, a player with a gift, sees not just what is, but what might be, anticipating the various possibilities and selecting the very one he wants to exploit. And then he creates it. He makes it happen. That’s what Slim could do, what he did do repeatedly, in any number of ways.

It might be a rebound would come high off the rim. Slim would sky for it, slipping free of whoever was trying to block him out to greet the ball at the very point it became reachable to human hands. Cradling it, he’d land with his feet already moving, give a couple of quick dribbles to keep the ball safe in the tangle of the backcourt, and quickly find space to accelerate down the open court. That was where I loved watching him, where if I happened to be sitting one out I would stop whatever I was doing to keep my eyes on him. That was where the boundaries of what was possible seemed to expand before him, leaving him (and anyone watching him) in a world no longer constrained by the everyday limits of time and space.

He’d lope down the court, head up, eyes alert, his fingers now long, black feathers floating above the ball, meeting it on its every obedient ascent and caressing it back downwards to the asphalt. A stray hand might grab for it but Slim would simply cross the ball, lightning quick after this deceptive stillness, out of reach. Slowly the mad scramble of bodies racing down the court would take shape around him, an order gradually gaining awareness of itself: the two boys on either side of him transformed as if by his very will into the wings of a fastbreak, the one lone defender forced to stake his ground in the middle, the very easiest position to outflank. Then at the top of the key, Slim would make his move.

He might look to his right, luring the defender into committing himself that way, only to shovel a no-look pass to his left, leading his teammate perfectly into the now open lane. Or he might take the ball behind his back off the dribble, drawing the defender to his left, only to lay down a lethal bounce pass back to his right. But just in case you thought you might cheat a step or two into the lanes, Slim might just decide to keep the ball. Then he’d cross over his dribble to get you twisted up on the wrong foot, and with a slight stutter step he’d freeze you in place. And before you even realized you were helpless, he’d be by you and in the air.

That moment when he elevated and, hanging in the air, floated towards the rim, time seemed to teeter on the brink of standing still, and everyone and everything seemed to grind to a halt: all the motion around him on the court, all the noise and racket of the schoolyard and a hundred kids at play, all of it just faded into the background. Everything but Slim, suspended in a private stillness of grace and power. When he finally reached the rim and threw down a tremendous one-handed dunk, rattling the metal cylinder and setting the backboard rocking, everything sprung back into motion and the clamor rose up once more, and it was only then that you realized they’d ever been missing. Then you’d be just one of a dozen or so guys on the sidelines shaking their heads and smiling sheepishly, thankful it wasn’t you, alone and embarrassed beneath the rim, taking the ball inbounds.

That day as he left to get back to work, I walked over. “Yo, Bee,” I asked him. “What’s your name?” He just smiled and pointed to his belt buckle, where big block letters spelled out the only name I’d ever know him by: Slim. “They call me Izzy,” I told him. We slapped hands intricately, Slim nodded and winked, and in a second he was gone around the corner.

*****

The street talk, the handslaps, they were codes: part of a larger, elaborate system of behavior that included everything from the way I laced my sneakers to the way I stood on the subway. Simple mannerisms, perhaps, but with quite a bit at stake. My classmates and others who sniffed that I was just “trying to be Black” had never been the only white kid on the Nevins Street subway platform – transfer point from the (white) Manhattan express to the (Black) Brooklyn local – at 3:30 pm, alone there among a throng of Black teenagers not once but every afternoon, at a time when the wedge between Black and white in New York was being driven deeper with each new wave of Yuppie gentrification and Reagan-era budget cuts. Ever since I’d avoided a beatdown in third grade because of a Jackie Robinson biography I happened to be carrying home from school, I had appreciated the value of appearing less… what? Less square, I would have liked to think, but also, yes, less white.

Of course, it was more than just a question of getting home safely. At Varmont, for instance, among the scholarship kids (more code for poor, Black or Hispanic), it allowed us to create a world apart for ourselves. Between Vladimir Ramirez, a Puerto Rican in my year, Tyrone Banks, a Black kid one year behind us, and myself had emerged a camaraderie that served to reverse the values that characterized the social world of Varmont. It was typical, one reaction of the excluded being to, in turn, exclude. There was admittedly a certain necessity to the way we hierarchized. Having no choice but to take the subway at all hours of day and night, we ridiculed Addleson for the chauffeured Mercedes that waited for him outside of every house party. (“Ever been on the subway, Addleson?” I needled him once. “No, Bernstein, I haven’t. Ever been to Chamonix?” he countered. There was no small amount of cruelty to the way we drew lines about us.) Our speech, laced with the latest street lingo, our manner of dress, even the flashy way we played ball were all formulated to set us apart. And in turning the tables, in celebrating the very causes of our exclusion, we succeeded in making ourselves and our private insurrection fashionable. But in this, we had help.

To begin with, it didn’t hurt being starters on the varsity basketball team, as Vlad and I were (Vlad was all-City that year), and as Ty would have been had it not been for Oldham’s unswerving loyalty to Varmont tradition, which held that only juniors and seniors should start. (Seniority was supposed to develop a sense of leadership among the upperclassmen. Instead, all it ended up accomplishing, along with Oldham’s ancient offense, was to keep us from being competitive, since Ty would have surely been all-City had he started at point, whereas Demitt couldn’t have made a Special Olympics squad on a good day.)

And then there was rap music, the ultimate code. From the first time I’d heard a summer-league teammate rapping years before, I was captivated by the clever word-play, drawn in at once by the mysterious order of the rhymes falling into place one after another. Listening to him on the van-ride back from a game, I was filled with envy, a desire to be on the inside of the mystery, to know the order before it was revealed. The next afternoon I bought the record he had been reciting and sat alone with it in my small room, playing and re-playing it until at last, late for dinner and with my father’s threatening voice calling at the stairs, I had learned every word of its fifteen minutes.

“Have you ever gone over a friend’s house to eat and the food just ain’t no good?/ I said the macaroni’s soggy, the peas are mush and the chicken tastes like wood,” I recited that night over my father’s notoriously bad cooking, bringing a smile to my brother’s face and a grimace to my father’s, and drawing a stern reminder to eat my food before it got cold.

By the time I’d reached high school, the new music, although it had just begun to show up on the mainstream radar, remained tantalizingly hard to come by. And its very elusiveness, in turn, functioned as an identifier of sorts. Vlad and I, and later Ty, had something in common, something that set us apart from the rest of the kids at Varmont, and it was rap that allowed us to recognize each other behind enemy lines. Vlad had come to Varmont as a sophomore, already my second year there, morose and brooding those first few weeks, keeping mostly to himself. When basketball practice began he kept his distance, keeping everyone at arm’s length, showering quickly and rushing off to the subway. “What do you think of the new guy?” Lipscombe had asked me in the locker room after our first full scrimmage.

“Looks like we finally got us a post player.” It was a bit of a dig. Lipscombe was ostensibly our center. (‘Lipscombe,’ Oldham used to positively scream, bringing practice to a standstill, ‘generosity is a virtue, but not on the damned basketball court! Control the post!’)

“He’s not much for team spirit, is he?” Lipscombe persisted.

The image of Lipscombe transported thirty blocks north to a locker room in Spanish Harlem flashed past my mind’s eye, and for a second I thought about trying to explain to him what it means to feel like you don’t belong someplace. But only for a second. “Give him time,” I said. “He’s new.”

A week or two went by and pretty much the only thing anyone had heard Vlad say was still “Yes, sir,” to Oldham the few times Coach had found a reason to correct him. One day after practice, I stood in the steam-filled shower, shampoo lathered into a foam on my head, soaping my body. “I’m proud to be Black, y’all, and real brave, y’all/ and, motherfucker, I could never be a slave, y’all…” It was an advance single off the new Run-DMC record that I’d just heard the night before on Medgar Evers College radio. I recited rhyme after rhyme, the sound of my raised voice echoing pleasantly against my body in the small tiled room. Opening one eye, I saw Vlad peeking his head around the wall of the shower entrance. I might as well have been levitating in there judging by the expression on his face.

“Aaaaaah!” I laughed. “You heard that one yet? That shit’s fresh, right?” I went under the water again to rinse off. When I opened my eyes he was still there.

“How do you know about rap?” he asked. Up till then, it was the most I’d heard him say at one time.

I shut the water off and began drying off. “Yo, Bee,” I said from under my towel. “I’m Brooklyn down.” He hung around as I dressed and slowly, feature by feature, his face came out from behind the sullen mask he’d been wearing for the past month and came alive. We walked to the subway together and let three express trains go by (he went uptown, I went downtown), comparing notes, each of us growing more and more excited to find a kindred spirit.

The next day at the shootaround before practice we raised eyebrows, the two of us tucked away under a rim at the far end of the gym, tossing up shots and jawing. Before long we had started to trade rhymes, each of us taking turns accompanying the other by imitating a beatbox with our mouths. By now the other guys had stopped shooting, leaving the rest of the gym almost silent.

Lessing was the first one to approach, just standing there and watching us. Anyone but Lessing I would have told to buzz off, but he had such a simple, unaffected decency to him it was hard not to like him, even if he was kind of dull. Vlad got a little self-conscious but I did my best to keep it going. Pretty soon the rest of the guys started coming over in trickles, Lipscombe and Demitt, then some of the scrubs, until finally there was a small circle of them around us, eyes wide and excited.

“How do you do that?” Lessing asked after Vlad blew a rhyme and the two of us broke up laughing. “It sounds just like a drumkit, I swear.”

It was a big hit, and it broke the ice for Vlad. When Ty joined the team the next year, the three of us naturally became a little set, giving impromptu performances in the locker room, or in the courtyard after school, or even in the staircase between classes. Between basketball and rapping, we had become minor celebrities at Varmont, and the balance of power had shifted.

*****

The rapport that quickly developed between me and Slim was in the same vein, a stamp of legitimacy that confirmed that I, too, didn’t really belong to the world of Varmont. All that spring and into May, he came by the courtyard lunchtimes and any afternoon he could get a short break. It wasn’t long before he was fairly well known and the sight of him rounding the corner, fresh on his lunchbreak and looking for a quick game or two, became something of a routine that we took for granted. The way he put people at ease, Slim had no trouble fitting right in, and not just with me and the other ballplayers. Everybody seemed to want to get next to him.

Once I came upon him and Addleson, of all people, needling each other about the NBA playoffs. “What’s wrong with your Lakers, Slim?” Addleson was saying. LA was having a tough time with Phoenix that year in the Western Conference semis. “Looks like they’re going to stand the Celtics up this year.” The Celtics were a smart team (code for white), while the Lakers were merely athletic (code for Black).

“Come on, Addleson,” Slim smiled good-naturedly. “You know my boys ain’t gonna let me down. They got too much for Pheonix.” He began counting off on his fingers. “Magic. Worthy. Ka-reem. Coop. Pheonix cain’t stop all that.”

“Maybe Pheonix can’t, but the Celtics can.” Addleson tapped his forehead. “Too smart for ’em.”

The thought ran through my mind that it was probably the first time Addleson had ever spoken to a Black person who didn’t work for his father. “What the fuck do you know about the Celtics, Addleson?” I said sharply.

Addleson looked down his patrician nose at me smugly. “Actually, Bernstein, my father’s a major shareholder.”

I rolled my eyes. “Figures.”

Slim was more enthusiastic. “Addleson! My man! How ’bout some tickets to the Finals?” He held his hand out, palm up. Addleson clearly did not understand the gesture and left him hanging. Slim shot me a wink, then turned back to Addleson, pawing at him and laughing. “Waddup, Addleson? You gonna hook me up, baby?”

“I just might, Slim,” Addleson smiled. “If the Lakers make it, that is.”

“Courtside, though,” Slim said, suddenly mock serious. “I only sit courtside.” Then he broke up laughing and trotted onto the court as someone called out ‘Next.’

Addleson looked over at me with a goofy, triumphant grin on his face. “He’s a real ballplayer, Slim is,” he said. Buried somewhere in Addleson’s remark, I knew, in the slight but unmistakable emphasis he put on the word real, was the implication that I was somehow less than a real ballplayer. I simply rolled my eyes and joined the others on the court.

Still, Addleson was right about Slim: he was a real ballplayer. He always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, which as I said is all basketball really comes down to. He could run the open court about as well as anyone I’d ever seen or played with, and he could jump so high, sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t going to bring rain back down with him.

But he had no shot. As a shooting guard, I could tell at first glance, even if Slim did his best to hide it. Most times, shooting around between games or in the afternoon when not enough people were there for even a three-on-three, if he’d line one up at all it was from out past 3-point range, where no one would really expect him to make it. He’d bring the ball up beside his temple and in one fluid motion, from the plant of his long, thin legs up to the lithe curve of his back, through his square shoulders and out to the extension of his feather-like fingers, he’d release it in a high arc towards the basket. And more often than not, he’d miss, sending the ball bouncing high off the rim for a long rebound. Then he’d shake his head sharply as if something had briefly caused him pain, and his eyes would close into slits and his teeth would flash wide, as if to say, ‘Next one’s going through.’

One day after school in early June, I was stopping by the deli on my way to the subway. The novelty store where Slim worked was just next door, and Slim was outside on the sidewalk, unloading some boxes off of a small van. He put down the box he was toting and nodded. “Whattup, Slim,” I said, holding my hand out, palm up. He gave me a pound, laughing at the intricate hand ritual I engaged him in effortlessly.

“Damn, Izzy, I swear. You the baddest whiteboy I ever knew.” He shook his head. “Where you from?”

“From Brooklyn, Bee, same as you.” We’d run into each other on the train once, our loud banter that morning drawing curious glances from sleepy-eyed readers of both the Wall Street Journal and the Daily News alike.

“Naw, man, I mean where you from? What kind of name is Izzy, anyway?”

“Short for Israel,” I shrugged.

“Like the country?”

I nodded. “My father’s European,” I offered as explanation.

Slim squinted at me, his head cocked off to the side. Just then a voice came from the door of the store. “Slim, come on, let’s go. We haven’t got all day with those.” It was his boss: older, balding, white.

Slim looked over his shoulder. “I’m on it, boss,” he said cheerfully, turning back to give me a quick pound.

I looked at his boss, sucked my teeth loud enough for him to hear, and rolled my eyes. To Slim, I said, “I’ll see you later, Black.”

Slim’s boss took a step out of the doorway towards me. “You got something to say now?”

Startled by his aggressiveness, I quickly screwed my face up and cocked my head, but Slim moved in casually between us. “Ain’t no thing, boss. I’m back on the job. Call that my coffeebreak.”

I prepared to turn away, but Slim’s boss wasn’t finished. “Little punk trying to tell me how to run my store?”

This was more than I was willing to take. “Yo, step off, Baldy. Ain’t nobody care about your weak-ass store,” I called out. By now some passersby had turned to watch us.

“I got news for you, punk,” he yelled after me. “You’re white!” I backed away down the sidewalk, slowly, tauntingly, waiving my middle finger at him as I went. But seeing a couple bystanders begin to chuckle, I felt my cheeks flush red.

The next day saw me and Slim alone on the court, lazily tossing up shots and jawing. “You ain’t got no shot,” I called out as he lined up an eighteen footer. This was code for ‘I’ll tell you like it is, even if no one else will.’ But there was playfulness in my voice, even if I wasn’t smiling.

He screwed up his face and dribbled the ball a few times. “Whatchoo mean, I ain’t got no shot?” He obviously wasn’t used to anyone challenging his game, and not for nothing.

“Just what I said,” I told him. “You ain’t got no shot.”

He sucked his teeth. “What’s this then, Izzy?” he said. He released the ball into a high arc towards the basket. Sure enough, it rattled the rim and bounced off.

I gathered in the loose ball. “What’d I say?”

“Come on, Izzy,” he cajoled playfully, “lemme get that back.” I shrugged and tossed him the ball. He launched another one. The rim clanged and again the rebound came to me. “One more. One more’s all I need.” I exhaled dramatically, shaking my head and rolling my eyes up to the sky, but tossed the ball back to him all the same. Another shot, another clang, another rebound.

“See?” I said. “You gots to leave the outside shooting to me, Cuz.” I tossed the ball with backspin to about eighteen feet out, ran to meet it as it came back towards me, pivoted to the hoop, and fired an arcing shot with perfect rotation. The ball contacted the back of the cylinder, and the sound of it hitting the sweet spot – thoong! – rang out as it went down. I skipped in an arc to the hoop, hand up, calling for the ball. Slim gathered it up beneath the rim and shot me a chest pass, which I caught and fired in one motion. Thoong! I skipped along an ever-widening arc, backing further and further away from the rim. Thoong! And again. Thoong! And again. Thoong!

I remained with my hand frozen in the curled followthrough after the last one. “You cain’t fuck with that, baby. That’s pure shooting. They cain’t teach that. That shit cain’t be taught.”

Anyone who’s ever played pick-up basketball in New York knows about the dozens. They’re good-natured, but the underlying stakes – the pecking order – are high. Slim wasn’t about to roll over, especially now that Ty, Lipscombe and Lessing, sensing something was up, had shuffled over to the side of the court. On some level I knew that. “You talkin’ like you wanna git it on, Izzy,” Slim said, grinning wide. “You and me? One on one? You don’t want that.”

Ty slapped Lipscombe’s shoulder, nodding at us and smiling. “I gotta see this.”

I held my arms out and shrugged. It was too late to back out now. “Let’s do this. Hit or miss, on me.” I took the ball to the top of the key, dribbled it twice, and spun it in my hands. From a crouch, I slowly straightened into my release. Thoong! “My ball.”

Slim’s teeth flashed wide and his eyes flattened to slits as he checked me the ball. Then he tugged once on each of his pant-legs and squatted into a defensive posture. “Game’s eleven.”

I could describe the game that followed, basket for basket, dribble for dribble. But to do that would be to ascribe too much importance to the outward form of the contest. Because the outcome of a basketball game is determined as much by what remains unseen (tactics and strategy, and the will to impose them on one’s opponent) as by what is visible to the eye. By now Slim and I had played together for a few months, and we were both familiar with each other’s game. Everything would depend on whether he would be able to deny my outside shot, forcing me to beat him off the dribble, or whether I, in turn, would manage to keep him away from the basket, leaving him to live or die by his jump shot. Outside (code for white) versus inside (code for Black).

There on the basketball court, of course, there would be no surprises. I kept it respectable, a two-point margin (the minimum necessary), but Slim was just too good for me. He finished me off with a circus play, tossing the ball off the backboard from about ten feet out, spinning around me to take the rebound out of the air and dunking it. He swung on the rim for a moment, dropped to the ground and turned to me. “I believe that’s game, Izzy.” His grin had never been wider, even if there was no malice behind it.

On the side of the court, Ty could barely contain himself. “Aaaaah! He boofed it on him.” He turned to Lessing, who was shaking his head and grinning sheepishly. “You see that shit? He faced you, Izzy!”

Me and Slim slapped hands good-naturedly, and I shoved him playfully. “You still ain’t got no shot.” He laughed.

Ty saw an opening, though, and wouldn’t let it pass. “He don’t need no shot if he can boof it on you like that.” He held out his hand for Slim to pound.

“Ty, is that all you do?” I countered. “Watch other people play from the bench?” Lipscombe laughed.

“I can’t help it if Oldham don’t start sophs.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you run point and not two-guard, otherwise you’d be keeping that bench warm till I graduate.” I made no effort to hide the edge to my voice.

“Yo, fuck you, Bernstein. You can keep your weak-ass whiteboy game.”

Whatever playfulness there had been between us had by now entirely disappeared. Turning to Ty, younger and smaller than me, I eyed him viciously. “I might be white but I’ll most definitely fuck your ass up.”

“You don’t know me, Izzy,” he said, his voice and body coiled into the posture of a cornered animal. “You don’t know me.” It was true, I didn’t know him. How could I, still so far removed from knowing myself? The others moved in quickly to separate us.

“Hey, slow down, guys,” Lessing said now. “You’re on the same team, remember?” At that point, with so many lines drawn, with so many allegiances formed, it was hard to keep things straight anymore. Ty and I grudgingly shook hands, and calm and order were restored.

But pride being what it is in adolescent boys, based not so much on what we most admire in ourselves as on what we most fear we lack, things continued to simmer below the surface. Later that week, as I walked with Ty and Lessing to the deli, our peace was still an uneasy one. Passing the novelty store, I remembered my exchange with Slim’s boss and told the story to the other two. “Motherfucker thinks he’s all bad, talking shit.”

“We should let him know,” Ty said. Me and Lessing looked at him curiously. “Boost some shit from his store,” he explained.

“You’re nuts,” Lessing laughed.

“Why?” Ty turned to me. “He dissed you, didn’t he?”

I nodded. “Yeah, so?”

“So? That’s how we do it around the way. If he disses, we boost.” Sensing my reluctance, Ty twisted his face into a grin. “Whatsamatter, you scared?”

“If you’re so bad, why don’t you do it?” It was a disingenuous defense, but one I expected would seal the issue. I was wrong.

“Bet,” Ty said. He turned towards the store entrance.

“Ty, don’t be stupid,” Lessing said, but it was too late. He had already disappeared. The two of us shuffled around the sidewalk ten or fifteen feet away, feeling very conspicuous. Lessing kicked a parking meter. “This is ridiculous.”

“Relax,” I reassured him. “He’s all talk. He ain’t gonna do shit.” Ty came back out about five minutes later, looked up and down the avenue, located us and walked over. “Well?” I challenged him. He held out his knapsack. Inside were two walkman cassette players, still in the plastic packaging.

“Your turn,” he leered at me.

“Izzy, don’t be an asshole,” Lessing half-begged me. But between his pained expression and Ty’s leer there was really no contest.

I moved towards the store, my legs suddenly stiff and awkward beneath me, as if they had forgotten how to walk. Once inside, I instinctively moved to the wall furthest from the counter, cursing the mad pulsing in my ears and chest, cursing Ty, cursing myself for every second I didn’t turn around and fly out of the store. Rage and fear darkened my field of vision to a narrow tunnel, but somehow I managed to find my way to the aisle housing the electronics products. Inching along, I passed the children’s toys and electric razors, until at last I was looking up at the walkman cassette players. I picked two off the shelf and pretended to compare them. When I was sure there was no one watching me, I stuffed them into my backpack. Of course, I couldn’t stop there. He had taken two. I would take four. Going through the entire charade again, I stuffed two more into my bag. By now my initial terror had disappeared, like pre-game jitters just after tip-off. Looking over my shoulder on my way back to the door, I grabbed a ‘Talking Tina’ doll off the shelf and tossed it in my bag for good measure.

Back out on the street, I didn’t even look at the others. I headed straight towards Varmont, letting them catch up to me at the corner. Rounding it together, we instinctively broke into a sprint, not stopping until we had all three piled onto the courtyard benches. Me and Ty were giggling like little kids. He held out his hand, and the extra second he held my grip meant all was forgotten. “You guys are pretty lucky for a pair of dumb-asses,” Lessing said.

“Lighten up, Lessing,” I told him, tossing him the ‘Talking Tina’ doll. “Here. See if she says, ‘Izzy’s the mack’.” Ty was just about rolling around on the ground, and even Lessing couldn’t hold back a smile.

The next morning, about 9:30, I lay sprawled out on a bench in a patch of early-morning sunlight, enjoying the last ten minutes of a free period in the courtyard. The place was deserted, the stillness disturbed only by the squirrels and bees scavenging the garbage cans, and some scraps of paper swept back and forth across the asphalt by the wind. I felt a shadow lengthen over my closed eyes and when I looked up, there was Slim, smiling or maybe just squinting down at me.

“Wassup, Slim?” I said, sitting up. He nodded. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

He frowned, stuffed his hands inside his pockets and kicked at the leg of the bench. “That motherfucker fired me.” When I asked him why, he turned his head away, frowned again, and only then looked back. For the first time since I’d known him, the words didn’t come easily. “Said some shit was missing. Said they thought I took it.”

“Did you?” I was ashamed of myself the instant the words left my mouth. But I was covering my tracks. It was my first instinct.

“Hell, no. I’m making good money now. What I want to steal for?” He looked across the courtyard. “They just blame the nigger, that’s all. That’s what they know.” This line, once drawn, I could not cross.

“Well,” I struggled to find some consolation, “you can always find something closer to home, right?”

Slim sucked his teeth and grimaced. “Izzy, it was my parole officer got me that job. I just got out from under some mistakes. That was my second chance.” Slim had always worn his smile so easily, so carelessly. He turned to me then, and for the first time, there around his eyes, I saw what it cost him to carry the weight of that smile. It was the expression of a man showing a stranger to the door. “I saw you sitting here, figured I’d say goodbye. Tell the fellas for me, too.” In an instant, he was around the corner and gone.

I sat there for what seemed like an eternity, alone and with my decency no longer intact, considering what I should do. The walkmen weren’t an issue. The ones I’d taken were tucked away in my closet, untouched and still in their original packaging. I hadn’t even wanted them to begin with, so giving them back wouldn’t make a difference to me. Ty had already opened one of his, but when I spoke to him later that day he said wouldn’t have any trouble coming up with the money for it. But there was still the question of returning them to the store. We couldn’t just march up to the counter and hand them over. Jerkoff that he was, Slim’s boss would probably make a big deal out of it. If Coach Oldham found out, we could both forget about the basketball team, and there was no guarantee that our scholarships wouldn’t be rescinded.

We talked it over until we came up with a plan. The next afternoon, Ty passed by the novelty store and placed a brown paper bag containing the walkmen and the money on the sidewalk just beside the door. When he had made it a safe distance away, I called the store from the payphone down the block. “There’s a brown paper bag in front of your store,” I said into the receiver when Slim’s boss picked up. “The walkmen are inside it.”

“What walkmen? Who is this?” he demanded.

“Slim didn’t take them.” I hung up and watched through the scratched plexiglass of the phonebooth until I saw him come outside, stoop over the bag, and look quickly up and down the sidewalk. By now Ty had made it over to the payphone. We looked at each other solemnly and walked back to Varmont without saying a word.

The next day at lunch, I waited expectantly for Slim to round the corner, black denim pants and t-shirt pressed as usual, black baseball cap perched backwards on his head. I pictured his wide smile at seeing me again, and the knowing glance and triumphant handshake I would greet him with. But lunchtime came and went without any sign of him. Nor did he appear the next day, or the day after that. All that week I waited, and each day it was the same. The following week was no different.

I told myself that we’d done all we could, that Slim’s boss had probably just refused to admit he’d been wrong. Either that, or else Slim had found something closer to home, after all. I wondered where that might be, and that’s when it occurred to me: I really knew very little about Slim. Where he lived. Whether he was married, or had any children. What he had gone to jail for. Even Slim’s boss, who I had regarded up until then with such contempt, knew more of the details that made up Slim’s life than I did.

And Slim, I realized then also, knew as little about me. I heard myself again, telling him that my father was European, but that was only half-true. Suddenly I wished that I’d told him more. That I’d told him the other half. That I was Jewish, the son of a man who had remained unfamiliar with and suspicious of the America he had fled to after the War. That since childhood I’d navigated my way through the color-coded landscape of the melting pot with nothing to guide me but my instinct. That the only way I’d found to break the silence that I’d inherited, that came of years of remaining hidden, was to use a voice and a language that wasn’t my own.

The week thereafter marked the end of the schoolyear. Summer had come, and with it our annual leavetaking of Varmont. The last day of classes, I lingered in the courtyard with the others, my gaze drifting repeatedly to the corner around which Slim used to appear as we exchanged goodbyes and compared summer plans. Vlad, Ty and I would be playing in the same summer league. Addleson would be off to his family’s villa on the French Riviera. Life, it seemed, would go on much the same as before.

The following year, Ty replaced Demitt as our starting point guard. The added boost he gave us in our transition game, along with the strong performances Vlad and I contributed all year long, helped propel Varmont into the finals of the Private School League’s post-season tournament. We came up a few buckets short against a very balanced Hillcrest squad, but it was still Varmont’s best finish since nets had replaced peach baskets under the rim. Coach Oldham said he was proud of us. So did my Dad, even if it was the first time he’d seen me play.

The New York Post ran a column on the game the next day, with our team portrait next to it. ‘Gritty Varmont Goes Down Fighting,’ the title read. For some reason it made me think of Slim. I pictured him coming across the article, and tried to imagine his reaction. Probably he just smiled and nodded his head. Maybe he even turned to whoever he was with and mentioned that he used to play pickup ball with us. And then, for a brief second, I saw us once more, there on the court at Varmont: me beneath the rim, Slim eighteen feet out, his legs bent, back arched, arms coiled. Slowly he straightened, from his planted feet all the way to his long, slender fingers, and arced the ball towards the rim.

‘You got it, Slim,’ I would have told him if I could. ‘Next one’s going through.’