The Garden. Not the small plot outside the door tended with care to produce flowers or food. Nor the domain from which Adam and Eve fell. This garden was quite different. Square. Noisy. Situated in the midst of a bustling city. The most famous arena in the world, as hyped by the advertisements that followed us in. On Rangers and Knicks nights, filled with 15,000 screaming and passionate fans. But not this afternoon. This afternoon we could buy $15 tickets and make our way to sit only 10 rows back, with Cody’s coach and his friends in the seats they were holding for us near courtside.
I was uneasy, intimidated even. It’s not that I am unsophisticated; I am a management consultant, after all. I fly to engagements in a dozen cities. But this was New York, with my son, who I’m always too worried about and who was looking to me, for this one afternoon at least, for guidance through the melee of Penn Station, the push of 34th Street, the cacophonous, unfamiliar bombardment of our senses.
We were meeting his coach at the Garden—a man who Cody worked out with once a week and who coached the inner-city upstate team that Cody longed to play for. Coach Lawrence had invited him down to watch a high school basketball tournament, the best prep schools from three different states playing through the afternoon. Cody thought that by going he might have a better chance of making the team. I came because Cody had asked me to come.
But I was uneasy. I never take the train. I kept worrying that we’d take the wrong line, or that I’d lose our tickets or we’d miss our stop. I know this made no sense. I kept telling myself these were trivial, unwarranted fears, but it was the city and I was uncomfortable. I touched my hip pocket for the 10th time in an hour, reassuring myself that my wallet was there. Christ, what if I lost it? What if someone picked my pocket? No money, no credit cards, no ATM. Images of wandering the street asking for help from indifferent strangers and civil servants flitted across my mind. I found myself touching my wallet again, my keys in my front pocket. As if these rituals could protect my son from all the harm that might wander unseen into his life.
It seemed like some distant halcyon era when we had been close. Cody was the tough, funny, athletic boy whose soccer teams I had coached, showing him how to hit passes with his instep and take power shots, all the things I’d learned in my own brief soccer career. I’d watched tapes and read books to teach him strategies and technique and stood in the goal taking shots from him in the fading autumn darkness.
I remembered the times he would ask me to come up to bed with him, to watch TV or just lie down for a few minutes before he went to sleep. “Mi hijo”—my son—I’d called him, from studying his sixth-grade Spanish together, affectionately contracted to Mijo. “Good night, Mijo,” I’d say softly into the darkness as I left the room.
But now he didn’t want to be called Mijo. Now we seemed to fight all the time. He seemed ashamed of me, grimacing with disgust at the same corny jokes that used to amuse him. “Dad. Cut it out.” I had become a cliche. The father character in every teenage rebellion sitcom.
My psychologist friends told me it was healthy. That he needed to individuate. That it was a natural and needed process. But I missed those times in the back yard, kicking the soccer ball back and forth. Or him coming to me for help with some problem at school. The same kinds of talks we’d had when he was younger, those times of teaching, were now met with rolled eyes and averted gaze. “Here comes the lecture series again.”
Now here we were in the Garden. And Cody wanted to play basketball instead of soccer. What could I teach him about basketball? But still, I’d come. To a Saturday afternoon in mid-January with the arena three-quarters empty, the upper decks darkened, the lower bowl only partially filled. The crowd there was a mixture of young couples and older aunt-and-uncle types who looked like they might be related to the players, almost all of them African American. Behind the basket, the stands were filled with a teeming crowd of black teenagers who stood and shouted as baskets were scored, and danced in throngs in the aisles during halftimes, quarters, and timeouts when rap music filled the loudspeakers in the arena.
We were adrift in a sea of black culture. Was this the sport Cody really wanted to play? Even he, who practiced with black players and invited them to sleepovers, whispered to me during the first game in which players of color dominated all ten positions on the floor, “Where’s the white kids?” I didn’t regard myself as racist, but…Where were the white kids? And, looking around the Garden, where were even the white spectators? It made me all the more uneasy. Christ, what if we were mugged on the way out?
Just before the last game, Cody’s coach stood to leave. “We’re going to catch a ride with John Helman, the director of the program,” Lawrence explained. “Save us the train fare back.”
“Okay, Coach,” I muttered as I stood to shake his hand, “Have a good trip upstate.” I wanted to plead instead, “Don’t go. You are our only anchor here. I’ll pay for the train ride back. Don’t leave us here.” But he extended his hand and one last coaching point—“Cody, watch Darren Rhodes, the way he gets low when he goes to the hole”—and then he and the other coaches left. I felt naked and abandoned, deserted in an alien land.
I heard a disturbance behind us and looked to see several angry black teenagers arguing with a security guard who had stopped them at the rail to the lower section. “Fuck that,” I heard from our seats 20 rows below. “Why are you hassling us? Cause we’re Harlem nigger kids? How ’bout those other people? How ’bout that guy and that kid? I saw their tickets, same as ours. You let them go down.”
“Those people aren’t making trouble, sir. You guys move along. You can sit in the front row up there”—the middle-aged white guard pointed to the mezzanine—“and see just fine.” The speaker’s three friends circled nearby, restless, animated, before turning away and retreating with their leader down the mouth of a tunnel on the floor of the mezzanine level.
I turned my attention back to the brightly lit floor where Darren Rhodes, the number-one ranked high school guard in the nation, was lining up with his Chicago-based Simeon Academy opposite Manhattan’s Rice High School, with its strong contingent of Harlem’s developmental-program players, urged on by the frenetic cheering and dancing of the end-zone melee of black teenagers.
The game was exciting, the closest of the afternoon, and Rhodes was, as advertised, spectacular. Lean and graceful, he seemed to glide across the court in some higher realm than the other demonstrably talented players in the game. Cody and I watched together, enthralled by the play. The game went into overtime, with both teams making spectacular plays at the end as the lead changed hands six times in the final four minutes. In the waning seconds, Rice won by two points on a hard drive to basket, defeating the Chicago team and its breathtaking young player. We stood, stretched. I talked with a young man and his wife sitting nearby, loitering as the arena emptied.
Then Cody started impatiently down the arena steps, trailing the exiting crowd. At the bottom of the first of 10 frozen interlocking escalators that led to the ground floor, Cody darted toward a metal doorway labeled “Stairs.” “Let’s go this way,” he called over his shoulder and, before I could protest, he was through the door. I followed him into the deserted stairwell. The walls echoed from our footsteps on the metal and concrete stairs, Cody racing a flight or two ahead.
“Cody, wait!” I shouted, fumbling after him, trying to keep him in sight. In the amphitheater above I had borne the uneasy weight of a cultural minority, but at least there had been safe people milling around to offset the sea of intimidating youth: security guards, workers, respectable middle-aged men and women. Here there was no one.
We came to ground level and pushed through metal doors to a corridor leading out to the street. I could see turnstiles a hundred yards away, and beyond them the signs for the exit. The corridor was also deserted.
“Yo, ain’t that those whiteys that stole our seats?”
I looked back and four slim, young black men were stepping off the last flight of frozen escalator. The tallest one, who had spoken, strode in front and seemed to be the leader.
“Yeah, thass ’em,” chimed in one of the lieutenants. “Old man and that skinny white-nigger kid.”
They glided at an angle to position themselves between us and the path toward the turnstiles and exit. “Ohhh, nice seats, huh? Howja like them seats, 10 rows back? Pretty nice, huh? You see good? You see real good from there?”
The leader stepped forward toward us, and the other three spread out to his right and left, forming a rough semicircle facing us.
“Lots of SPACE down there?” The tall one resumed. “Maybe some empty seats you could give to a couple of nigger kids who don’t have all that money? How much money you got anyway? Think this guy’s got a lot of money, Jamal? Ohh, he looks, like he got some money. How much money you got, sir?
I looked anxiously at the turnstiles and behind us to the doors off the escalator. “Ohhh, we the last ones down, son. Ain’t nobody down here but you and us.”
Decades before, in the Army in Korea, I had earned a black belt in karate studying with two Korean fifth-degrees who had come every day from a nearby village to give lessons to the GIs for a few dollars a week. I had long ago abandoned any practice, unexcited by the militant cultures I found in dojos here, unlike the easy play of my teachers. But here I was, in a deserted corridor with my son, who I wanted, above all else, to protect from harm, and four menacing figures before me. I wondered if I might remember any of those skills. What should I do? Strike a first blow? Make a dash for the exits? Try to free Cody to run for help? I thought of how feeble my strength would be. Could I hurt them? What if they had knives? What if they had guns?
I glanced over at Cody, expecting to see the same fear and intimidation that I felt. But it wasn’t what I found there. Instead, he was looking evenly back at the four young men with a mixture of cool regard and muted defiance. It reminded me of the fearlessness and resolve I saw when he drove the lane into the teeth of bigger, stronger players in his games, the times when I would feel fear for him, and pride.
And I knew then, in that moment, that this was no longer about me protecting him, but that he was moving out now from beneath my sheltering wing. I realized that somehow when I had not been looking, he had changed from being a boy to a young man, from my boy to his own growing young self, finding his way into the world without me.
Suddenly, I remembered those September evenings on the soccer fields when he was 8 or 10, when the late afternoon air was still warm but the light was starting to change in that subtle way that hinted of the autumn coming in. The fields behind the town hall where the teams practiced and the whistle around my neck, devising little drills for the players, how they’d giggle with delight amid the push and cry and excitement of their play. The grass on their uniforms as they laughed and fell and rose again and the mud and the dirt that was caked on the shin guards and the smell of it all—the sweat and grass and mud and joy mixed together that would fill the car on our drive home. I remembered the soft, fading light and standing in the goal, my awkward, aging self in a cheap pair of goalkeeper’s gloves with Cody and maybe a friend or two who stayed after while everyone else drifted toward their cars, playing five shots—“If three go in, you win, and if I stop three, I win,” with never any care for who won those little games. And Cody pleading, “Just five more shots…just 10 more shots,” locked in some enchanted sharing of play until the light finally got too faint for us to see anymore and we drifted to the cars together. I remembered getting home late and shrugging my shoulders at Jess, telling her, “I couldn’t get him to leave…” and her sigh in exasperation at both of us, the sweet conspiratorial happiness because in truth it hadn’t been just him: Neither of us had wanted to leave.
I remembered all this and I realized that I had wanted to stay in the magic fading light, hitting five more shots forever, and that the play had gone out of my life in so many ways and I sometimes thought it might never return.
I felt the sorrow of loss reach up to me, past whatever fear that might have, just a moment earlier, filled my mind. I felt the beauty and the sadness of time in its march away from us. And I looked back at the tough, young black men confronting us and I saw their own sadness, the boys who had once played carefree and how that had changed for them as well. I saw them at play in the streets, stickball or touch football. I saw the brief time their lives had been simpler and joyous, waking each day, as children do, to wonder, before the drugs and the broken homes and the fights and the underfinanced schools and indifferent adults and the patterns of days and nights and years had taken those times away. I saw that, just like Cody and me and all the rest, they had hoped they would never have to leave. I saw their pain and struggle reflected in my own pain and struggle. I saw some common element in us as human beings and the sadness and beauty we shared in our collective passage, all the grief and longing that was life on this planet, in this human realm.
And I saw then that we might find a way through.
“Yo, what you looking at, kid?” the kid on the left growled at Cody as he reached out and grabbed the baseball cap from his head. “Who you think you are, anyway?”
“He’s the best 14-year-old shooter in New York,” I said.
They paused to look at me.
“He plays for the Rack, upstate. You’ve heard of them?”
They looked at one another, unsure.
“They played the Gauchos last spring at the Armory on 158th Street in the Spring Rumble. You know the Gauchos, yeah?”
They nodded in recognition of the famous Harlem club team, the feeder program for talented players who wound up on teams like Rice.
“Maybe you heard about the 14s game. People were saying it was the best of the tournament. Went into overtime. There was a skinny white kid that lit up the Gauchos for four threes in the fourth quarter, including one at the buzzer to put them into overtime.”
“Uhh, yeah,” one of them said slowly. “Think I heard somepin’ ’bout that….”
“That was him.” Cody looked over at me with a question in his eyes as I nodded toward him. “He still needs a lot of work taking it to the hole, so his coach wanted us to come down to watch Darren Rhodes, the way he moves.
They turned toward Cody with a curious, cautious regard, interrupting whatever had been growing before. The one holding the cap tossed it absently between his hands.
“You guys for Rice?”
They nodded briefly. “Yeah, thass us,” the tall one said.
“Your guys showed a lot of heart. That’s one of the top prep schools in the country you were facing. Your guys took it to ’em.”
“Yeah, we did,” one of them started. But he was cut off by a sharp look from the boy with the hat. “Yo, Sean, these are the whiteys that was watching down there in the first row, while we was sitting on our ass up there in the balcony.”
“Listen,” I said haltingly, “about the seats. I saw you guys up there getting hassled. I… Maybe I should have said something. I…I don’t know my way around here.” My uncertainty, my fear, out there now—my wallet, my keys, the train tickets, everything…
And then something shifted. It was as if there had been some translucent barrier between us, some heavy mist that I could see through but that had separated us, but that now I could somehow part. My fears touching theirs, my uncertainty echoing their anger. It was if I could reach out my hand and clear a path through that fog to touch the heart of who we all were together, the sense of our collective loss. “I’m sorry,” I said quietly.
The admission changed something in the air. It became soft and still in the empty corridor. Under my feet, I could feel the distant rumble of trains leaving Penn Station, hear the faint honking of horns from the cabs out on 34th Street.
“Ahhh…it’s okay, man,” the tall one mumbled. “It weren’t your fault.”
The kid holding the cap looked around at his three friends, then threw it back to Cody. “Hey, you really shoot like that, little man?” he asked with a final edge.
I wondered what Cody would say. He smiled, cocked his head. “Come run with us at the Albany Y some Saturday. I’ll show you how I shoot.”
They laughed. “You got some spice to you, huh? Yeah, thass what shooters got. That kind of…confidence. Maybe you do shoot like that.”
At the far end of the corridor, a blue-uniformed Garden security guard appeared. “We’re closing up,” he shouted.
“Yeah,” the tall kid repeated, “we took it to ’em tonight.” He extended an arm, fist closed, to touch his knuckles to Cody’s. “It’s all okay. You keep shooting, little man. We’ll come see you next year at the Armory.” And then they were off, moving away from us in smooth, athletic strides as we traversed the open space, through the turnstiles, and followed them out into the streets, watching as they blended, then disappeared into the push and hustle of the city night.
We descended the wide granite steps that led back down to Penn Station and sat in a little walled-off, ticket-holders-only section waiting for the train. A young Pakistani family sat beside us, the man talking on his cell phone, the woman in a flowered traditional skirt, scarf on her head, two little boys in stylish Gap-for-Kids clothes playing with wind-up cars.
We sat together in silence for a short while, Cody looking down at the boys playing on the floor in front of us, turning something over in his mind. “Dad,” he finally said, softly. “I’m not on that team. I don’t even know if I can make that team.” He paused and went on. “You just heard about them playing at the Armory from Coach Lawrence. There wasn’t any overtime. They got beat by three points in regulation. I wasn’t even there.” He paused again. “It was a lie, Dad. You always tell me not to lie.”
I looked over at him, feeling for aftershocks, seeing the uncertainty of who he was and what had happened emerging, threatening to leave faint, indelible marks. I waited, searching for some way of holding it.
“It was fiction, Code,” I said gently. “You remember when we used to study fiction for your English class last year?” He nodded. “Sometimes,” I continued, “fiction carries something that’s more truthful, at the heart of it, than things that actually happened.”
He looked at me and then away. “You are the best 14-year-old shooter in New York, at least I think so…. We’ve been to a lot of tournaments. I haven’t seen anyone better.” I paused, waiting for him to look back at me again, to catch his eyes. “That could’ve been you, Code” I reached over and straightened the cap on his head. “That will be you. People keep telling me everybody needs shooters. You’re going to make that team. You’re going to be great on that team.”
He blinked rapidly and looked away again. The rumble of an approaching train merged with the call over the loudspeaker for our departure. We rose and moved together toward the gates.
There was a three-quarter moon reflected from the river as we made our way north again. I sat looking at the light on the water from the windows of the darkened train. Croton. The sweep of color off the bridge at Tappan Zee. The dark monoliths rising up on the opposite shore at West Point. Finally, our destination station in Rhinecliff. Cody curled up on the seat opposite me, sleeping through the train ride, and slouched against the passenger door of the car in continued sleep as we spanned the arc of the Rhinecliff Bridge on the drive toward home.
When we reached the house, I guided his sleepy footsteps up onto the porch, through the front door, and pointed him toward the stairway leading up to his room.
“Night, Code,” I said softly.
“Dad,” he answered back as he put his foot on the bottom stair, “would you come up and lie with me for a while, watch TV until I fall asleep?”
I was surprised, humbled. It seemed such a long time ago. “Sure, man.”
I lay beside him on the narrow bed, the TV tuned to a late West Coast game—Suns and San Antonio, Nash and Duncan in a seesaw battle for first place in the division. I looked around the room at the relics of the delicate tipping point of the boy changing into the man: the Beanie Babies—little leopards and dogs and dolphins with their name tags still attached—on shelves next to sports trophies, the MVP shirt from an elite summer camp in the Poconos, the posters of NBA players in flight above the rim. His breathing lengthened and he turned his face toward the wall. I started to leave. But as I moved he turned and gently reached out to pull me back.
“Dad,” he said in a sleepy, distant voice. “Thanks.” And then he turned his face to the wall again, his breath evened, a slight twitch, and stillness.
I gently extricated myself and stood beside the bed watching him sleep, grateful for the brief moment back, the soccer fields in some other guise, the ongoing play in changing form. Marveling at it, wondering whether it would come again, and if so, in what form. Appreciating the sweetness and the aching transience. Wonder—a profound state of mind produced by something unexpected or surprising.
The light from the television softly suffused the room, the figures on the screen running and leaping in beauty in an arena thousands of miles away. “Good night, Mijo,” I spoke softly into the darkness as I turned off the flickering images of muted light and closed the door quietly behind me.
This story was selected by Abigail Thomas as a runner-up in Chronogram’s fiction contest in our fall 2007 Literary Supplement.
This article appears in March 2008.
