"It's All In the Game"
Chicago Reader
September 11, 1998

"It's All in the Game" was recognized in The Best American Sportswriting 1999 (Houghton Mifflin)

There were three Latino guys I saw around sometimes at Eckhardt Park, this court I used to play at in my neighborhood on the near west side. Two were brothers and one was their roommate. The first time I saw them, one of the guys was wearing a T-shirt that said I like my husband, but I love my snowmobile.

He didn't speak English too well, and my theory was he bought that T-shirt at a thrift store because he liked the color, which was, actually, an appealing purple. Somebody must have told him what "husband" meant, because he had taken white shoe polish and marked out the word. You could still see what it said, but I guess the shoe polish effort let everyone know, yo soy heterosexual.

They were new to the game, and they played hard, running after loose balls and hustling for rebounds and playing good defense. The most experienced player, who was also the tallest and the best English speaker, was the one who asked me if I wanted to play with them. I'd been at the other end of the court shooting baskets, making furtive glances at them, knowing they were checking me out. Most of the people in the park were Latino, and all the players were men and boys, so I stood out.

That's the way it worked. I would shoot around, make a point to have them notice me noticing them, act slightly tough and a bit boyish, as if to say, "I got skills. I play all the time. I know what you're thinking, but what you better be thinking is, are you good enough to play with me?"

Eckhardt Park was the kind of place I was always looking for, not too serious, where every player filtered crazy differences in size, skill, or experience through his brain to come up with an approach to how hard he'd play, how hard he'd expect his teammates to play, how much he'd get in the lane and how much trash he'd talk. I've played with groups that made room for a kid with Down's Syndrome, a guy with only one good hand, and people so hopelessly uncoordinated they could barely run, much less shoot a jump shot. And I've played with dunking studs, too. There was a little bit of everything on the courts I liked.

When a court was competitive, with everyone playing balls to the wall, that was OK, too. Sometimes I'd play serious, and sometimes I'd just walk on to look for ragtag situations where everyone played hard, but they let the guy with one hand catch his pass, and they let the kid with Down's Syndrome's get his shot off.

When I played, I never said too many cocky things like "I got skills," or "get that weak shit outta here," or "not in my house, baby," or much of anything else, really. Words can get squirrelly sometimes, and if you think your game might be stinking up the place any minute, it pays to minimize the smack. I didn't even wear that great of shoes or flashy sports clothes, because I never wanted what I was wearing to be better than I was, I mean, I didn't want to look like I didn't know how good I wasn't.

What I did on that first day at Eckhart Park, and most any time I tried to get in a game, was the furtive checking-out routine. When the tall, good-English-speaking guy asked me to play two-on-two, I did, and my team won two games in a row. I played some more after that, with another group of guys. The teams kept melding and interchanging with new groups of people coming to play.

The sun baked the concrete, and there was a slightly sickening smell of sweetness and chocolate in the air from a nearby candy factory. An ice cream vendor came by from time to time, his bell tinkling pleasantly. Everyone on the court was speaking Spanish, and while Snowmobile and his crew were there, they would interpret for me when I gave them a look that asked what was happening. After they left, the only words I could make out were choc-oh-lah-tay, seemingly directed at the only black kid on the court, and nina, me.

I stayed for hours, forcing my body to keep moving long after I was too tired to be there. My legs shook as I pedaled west up Chicago Avenue toward home. It was typical of my routine.

**

One day I went to Eckhart Park and Snowmobile #1 wasn't there, but his two compadres were. The court was so crowded I couldn't get out there. The two guys were having the same problem, so I sat down on the ground next to them.

I chatted in English with Snowmobile #2 and Snowmobile #3 for a while. They told me they were both taking an English class four times a week. They kept apologizing because they couldn't speak English. I told them yes they could.

I had three semesters of Spanish in college, but I can barely speak a word of it. And I made As all three times, for God's sake. That makes me so mad. I kept wishing I could say things in Spanish to those guys and to all the Spanish-speaking people around my neighborhood.

I couldn't understand why the guys weren't getting in the game. I mean, for me, being a woman, sometimes you just get the sense that a court is not exactly an equal opportunity situation. But it seemed like any guy should be able to play.

They said they weren't good enough. I told them yes they were.

A young black kid was bouncing his ball around on the side of the court, pacing, screaming at the players in the game, "I'm gonna kick ya'lls tired asses when I get in there!"

Snowmobile #2 was telling me I could join them next weekend at this park they played at sometimes where there was always plenty of room. "They have sodas," he said.

Back in college, when I was taking those Spanish classes, I sometimes had dreams that I could really speak Spanish. In my dreams the words would fly out in whole sentences with a perfect accent, and I didn't have to struggle or even think about it. Now that I was playing outside again, I had that same kind of dream about basketball, where I'm making every shot, flying toward the basket, never tired, no one can stop me.

Waking up, I felt a little like those dogs too old to run anymore. You can see them chasing rabbits in their sleep, their legs twitching.

**

I took this racquetball class one time. My partner was a slightly plump, likable girl with a blonde, swingy ponytail, and what I remember most about her was how the instructor lit up when she came around. She and I played each other every class, and one time, after I'd won a few games in a row, she said to me, smiling and as nice as ever, "You should let me win sometimes."

She would have fit in well at the women's open gym I went to for a while. The women there stuck together like that, the athletic version of girls who can't go to a public bathroom by themselves.

The open gym met every Monday night at Horner Park, a Park District gym on the North Side. Most of us were white professionals in our late twenties and early thirties, with the exception of one black chick, Tori, who was from the West Side and often made remarks about all the white faces. She seemed to like everyone, but I noticed how often she pointed out that she was different.

The open gym had been started years earlier by a high-ranking Park District employee who was still a regular player. We were all supposed to contribute some money to keep the court reserved, but we never did, because we were in good with Jake, the guy who worked the front desk and controlled the gym like a pot-bellied grizzly bear in tube socks and polyester coaching shorts. Jake liked us, or maybe he just worried that, if he didn't kiss our asses, the old regular, Meredith, would get him fired through some strange and twisted power she wielded from her office job at the Park District.

We weren't exactly "I got next" types. Instead of showing up and looking like we had game, we used Jake as our backup in a weekly coup over the kids who filled the gym until we got there. The minute the clock hit six, Jake lumbered onto the court and roared at them to get out, abruptly ending all the kickball and chase going on and scattering the shorties to the nearest exits.

When we had too few women to play full-court, Jake still kicked the kids off the other end. It would've been easy for one of us to give him the nod that it was OK for the kids to stay, but nobody nodded. We couldn't let up like that, because control over the court was found not in our suck-ass games, but in a commandeered mean-teacher authority assumed when any kid considered sticking one toe across the out of bounds line onto our real estate. It made me feel a little bad, belonging to a group of grown woman kicking kids off a court that that, but I wanted to play, so I came back week after week, and wondered where the kids went on the night we had the gym.

You had to be careful about being a ratebuster at the women's open gym. Seeing a frown on someone's face or feeling an elbow swinging for a rebound or hearing a too-abrupt "Over here! I'm open!" tended to get under some women's skins. They'd get mad at someone who was too intense like that.

And they wouldn't call fouls, but they got mad if they thought you fouled and you didn't call it on yourself. That's just how they were.

Completely acceptable and well-regarded was a woman who called official timeouts two or three times a game to readjust a barrette or take off one of her five necklaces while everyone waited on her. She shot two-handed from the center of her chest, and she traveled so much we finally quit calling it, except when a game was at stake, or it was just too obvious to ignore. Then we'd call the walk and she'd argue with everyone on the court that it wasn't, even though she knew less about basketball than anyone else there. She never listened to anybody, and she never got much better. People could get by with that kind of thing there.

As bad a player as the girl was, she had a natural basketball player's body. She was skinny, but strong, and her crazy-looking shots seemed to go in more often than they had a right to. When she stuck her mile-long arms out on defense, she deflected shots like a windmill. She was an annoying enigma, but sometimes she'd bring her two little boys, who were four and five, and they were so cute and happy and well-behaved, sitting on the sidelines and cheering for their mom, that it made her seem OK.

Several of the open gym players wanted to improve their games, and one time Meredith missed two weeks in a row because she was taking a road trip to a basketball camp at a new age learning center in New York. She didn't want anyone to find out she'd gone, but she told someone and word got around.

Two other women, one a decent enough player and the other truly awful, would work on dribbling drills, the kind we used to do in high school, before everyone arrived at the gym. I was a little snobbish about the drills, I have to admit. I thought it wasn't very street, and I'd shoot around by myself while they practiced dribbling between their legs. It didn't make me very popular.

One night, Tori, the black chick, and Melinda, the decent enough dribble practicer, and I got into a discussion about whether or not the large, fluffy-looking person we all saw as we were walking into the gym was a teenage boy or a woman in her twenties. Tori had just gotten there, and she changed into her basketball clothes standing on the sidelines in the gym. It was a little brazen, but people hadn't started arriving yet.

"It's a guy," Tori said, standing there in her bra.

"She has breasts," Melinda argued.

"Well he's not wearing a bra, then."

"So?"

John, an inexplicable and regular exception to the no kids / no men rule, was present. It was just the four of us because there was no air conditioning, it was too hot to play, and hardly anyone had shown up.

John had this thin, very basketball-looking frame that reminded me of a poster a guy I used to date had hanging on his wall. The poster was called Skins and Shirts, and it was a drawing of a bunch of black men going up for a rebound at the same time, stretched out all long-limbed and elegantly gangly toward the sky, everyone on both teams moving in what looked from a distance to be a synchronized unit, like a flock of geese making instinctual in-flight formations. John looked like those guys in that poster.

John was listening to the conversation about the androgynous employee, but, as usual, he wasn't saying much. He was a spooky kind of guy, with wild-looking eyes that were a little crossed. When we were shooting around and a ball bounced off the rim toward him, he would duck dramatically and cover his head with both his arms, like we were in a war zone. When you tried to talk to him, he answered by abruptly nodding or shaking his head or answering with one word at the most. I was kind of afraid of him when I first met him, but I figured out after a while that John was all right. I suspect, thinking back on it now, he was a little afraid of us.

John hadn't contributed to the she-male discussion, and neither had I. He was shooting around, looking like he was in own world, but not really, and I said, "John, do you think that person working the front desk is a man or a woman?"

"Boy," he blurted, looking at me from the corner of one eye as he shot a basket.

"This guy walked by me once," Melinda said, taking a shot. "It was really cold. I was bundled up and waiting for the bus, and he walked by and he goes ‘hey dude.' I told him I said ‘Hey, I'm a woman.'"

Then Tori said she was in a car wreck once, and while she was waiting for the ambulance to arrive, she was laid out on the floor of a convenience store in layers of Chicago winter clothes. People kept coming up and looking over her and saying, "What's up with dude? What's up with dude?" She said she kept going in and out of consciousness saying, "Hey, I'm a woman."

Regardless, we never did come to any conclusions about the person at the front desk.

Perhaps it was that old, painful memory of being mistaken for a man that made Melinda especially sensitive to the gay invasion, comprised of two openly lesbian players who came to play for a while.

One of the gay hoopsters always wore a baby blue North Carolina mesh basketball set with a matching do-rag wrapped around her head all tight and smooth and tied in the back. The girl was pretty intimidating on the floor, and she was good, but she was mostly intimidating, with her authentic basketball garb and her swagger, and her tendency to grab her crotch when she laughed and give her teammates chest bumps when they did something good. She certainly had court presence.

She had a habit of telling everybody it wasn't that serious, while she played her ass off. When she did something she was proud of, she'd break out in a current hip hop dance move that most of us wished we could do.

Possibly she showed off so much for her girlfriend, who always sat on the sidelines and watched, looking like somebody's mom in her regular jeans and glasses. The girlfriend kept score for us, and she laughed at her wild and hilarious lover.

It was a real luxury to have someone keeping score, because it's hard to play and remember the score at the same time. We sure as hell needed lesbians to have a scorekeeper on hand. Nobody's boyfriend would have sat on the sidelines and kept score. I never once saw a boyfriend even come to watch. The girlfriend never was wrong on the score, either. She always got it right, and everyone knew it and never argued with her. And she never acted bored or told her girlfriend to hurry up and get through playing, either.

One night, not long after the lesbians had started coming, Melinda and Tori and I were shooting around again before everyone got there. Melinda said the lesbians touched her in inappropriate ways, and she didn't care if someone was gay, but why did they have to be so obvious about it?

That was crap, of course. Melinda cared all right. Those lesbians were just playing defense.

There was a television commercial around that time that showed Sheryl Swoopes from the WNBA talking about what she liked to buy on her Discover card. "I'm very prissy," she would say, and the camera would go to another scene showing her playing ball outside with a bunch of guys, screaming like a crazed warrior "Put up or shut-up!" as she drove the basket.

"I love to get my hair done, get manicures, pedicures, but my greatest weakness is shoes," she would say, and then we were back to her discussing what she bought with her credit card as she walked through a mall in a trendy outfit.

The WNBA was just getting started then, and all the commercials seemed hell bent on proving that the league was full of nice, tall girls who did all the things nice girls were supposed to do. It made me wonder why women had to try so hard, why loving shoes or slobbering over chocolate or going to romantic comedies starring Meg Ryan seemed to be the requirement for getting in the girl club. The way we women talked with such pride about our greatest weakness had the charged feel of a political statement, and it seemed like many of our safe, psuedo-edgy personalities were lifted directly from sitcoms and greeting cards.

I was still playing years later, when there was a new WNBA commercial for Reebok showing a bunch of guy cheerleaders doing the exact same moves their female counterparts do, but instead of looking sexy, they seemed ridiculous. The camera showed the male cheerleaders shaking their butts with scared, desperate-to-please looks on their faces, and then we saw the female players huddled in a timeout, casually slouched and grinning, having an authentic time, ignoring the stripper-like cheerleaders like athletes always do. The commercial seemed like an improvement, an evolution, from Discover's pledge of allegiance to the shopping mall. The players didn't have to vow their dedication to manicures in order to be acceptable. They just had to play their game.

Playing at the open gym, and anywhere else, I wanted to win. But sometimes, when I would be going for rebounds, screaming like a Karate master, ringing wet with sweat, making faces I probably wouldn't want to see, it felt kind of weird. Sometimes it would occur to me, "Damn, I'm intense. I'm aggressive." Not assertive – aggressive.

Tori said to me once, after one of my high, loud rebounds, "Girl, you're like a Reebok commercial. This is your world… you go." She could say stuff like that and manage not to sound like her words had quotes around them, because she meant it.

I didn't feel pretty and I didn't feel nice and I didn't feel prissy. I wasn't being distracted by food or shiny trinkets or my own toenails. I did feel like myself, and it felt good.

Looking for a Game

Wicker Park the neighborhood was well past its urban pioneering days, but there were still reminders, most clearly visible in Wicker Park the park, full of hipsters and folks who had been killing time there since the days when it really was part of a gritty urban neighborhood. The park was loosely self-segregated, with the old faction sticking to the Damen Street side and the new people on the back end, with their Frisbees and their bandana-wearing dogs. All over, there were savvy little independent kids running around.

Once, I saw a young couple with a large parrot. They were sitting on a blanket with a picnic basket, and a big group of kids had flocked around them. I was bouncing a ball around on the basketball court, and I could see the couple and the parrot and the kids way across the park. From time to time the bird would raise its wings and squawk and try to fly, and the kids would shriek and fall back, and then surge in to get a closer look. I was pretty amazed, thinking about the life of a city kid, seeing so much every day, and about how free-spirited or kind the couple might think they were for treating a crippled bird to a visit to the park.

There was a sign in Wicker Park that said WARNING YOU ARE IN A SAFETY ZONE. PENALTIES FOR SELLING DRUGS OR OTHER CRIMINAL ACTIVITY IN THIS PARK ARE SEVERELY INCREASED. I saw guys walk past each other making subtle handoffs, or drive up in separate cars, walk off together, then come back a few minutes later and take off again their separate ways.

One day I rode over to Wicker Park on my bike, and I got stuck in the rain under an awning. After the rain, three guys came over, and we played two-on-two. It was casual; they were so without egos.

As they should have been, because they really sucked. They were fouling the hell out of each other, running around on the wet concrete, laughing and having a good time. One of them was wearing sandals, another was barefoot, and I think they were all three a little drunk. I was playing with a guy named Vince, who had been the first one to come over and shoot around with me.

There are four hoops at Wicker Park on the same slab of concrete. In most places, if you're playing two-on-two or even three-on-three, you play half court, but at Wicker Park, things go to full-court more readily because the courts are so short.

A dirt field beside the basketball courts was used for 16-inch softball, which I'd never seen until I moved to Chicago. It's popular in the city because you don't need much room to play it. You can't hit that big-ass ball very far.

The three sucky-player guys and I played full-court two-on-two, and on one particularly good play, Vince stuck both hands behind his back, palms up, while he was running backwards down the court, for me to give him ten. It was silly, and fun.

Vince wrote his phone number on my arm with a felt tip pen after we finished playing. I wrote the number down somewhere when I got home, but later on I couldn't find what I did with it.

**

"What's up, Kittycat?" That's what this old park dude at Wicker Park was saying to me as I sat on my bike scanning the court, seeing if I wanted to play.

"What's up Kittycat you gonna shoot some hoops you gonna play me some one-on-one can you dunk it?"

Aw damn. I almost turned around and rode off, because I knew this guy was gonna stick to me the whole time I was there, but there was an empty hoop and I suddenly felt irritated about having to leave a court because of this old park dude, especially after I'd ridden all the way over there on my bike.

The guy I told about earlier, the one with the skins and shirts poster, always said I should stay away from unsavory elements. He thought I was reckless. He wouldn't ride the El, and he never gave money to homeless people on the street. But he volunteered at shelters around the holidays and was on the boards of several charitable organizations.

Park Dude went walking off somewhere, so I shot for a while, and then he came back and started shooting around with me.

There's a certain etiquette when people shoot around. That's what it's called: "shooting around." Sometimes someone just comes up and starts getting your rebounds, sort of deferring until you pass the ball to him and trot under the hoop to get his rebounds. Or sometimes people come up to you if you're shooting and just say, "Can I shoot around?" and you say sure.

Usually, when two people shoot around, one person shoots from the outside, and the other stands under the hoop and rebounds until the shooter misses. Then the shooter comes in for a lay-up and starts rebounding for the other person. Everybody knows that.

Park Dude wasn't so great to shoot around with. He kept throwing the ball back to me too hard, or slinging it clear over my head or off to the side so that I had to jump or make a quick move to catch it or else it would get past me. Every once in a while the ball did get past me and I would have to run after it, trying to catch it before it flew onto another court or rolled into the middle of a softball game.

It was really pissing me off. If I were male, younger, urban, I would have said something like "Man, would you watch that shit? What's the matter with you? Damn." But I'm not.

I have to admit, though, Park Dude could really shoot a hook shot. He barely even looked at the goal but just threw it in the general direction and made it, nothing but net.

After a while, I found myself in a game with Park Dude and kids of all shapes and sizes. A little girl asked me how old I was. She nearly fell over when I told her I was thirty.

"How old are you?" I asked her.

"Ten."

Park Dude jumped after his own shot after missing the entire hoop. The little girl looked after him, crinkling her face.

"He's weird," the girl said. "He smells like beer."

He was, and he did, but as far as I could tell there was nothing wrong with his hearing. He ran off to get his rebound then trotted back, laughing at something. He said it was getting hot, and he took his shirt off. There was a long, vertical scar running down his rib cage and stomach.

Suddenly, I began to worry. I began to think about what happens to a harmless park dude's brain when he's treated like dirt by arrogant little white girls. And then I actually did begin to feel like I was a little reckless, understanding for real that I was the one who had brought Park Dude and the little girl together. She would have never come over had she not seen me there, and I didn't know how safe it was for me, much less for her.

We played for a while longer, and the little girl relentlessly dissed everyone, including the two boys she'd come with. I couldn't tell whether her caustic attitude was genuine badass or plain old fear, and I didn't know if it would get her noticed and in trouble, or help her by making her seem tough. Park Dude laughed and seemed to approve. He kept turning his attention on her, as if he wanted her energy directed at him, no matter how disdainful she was. He seemed to be thinking, "you go girl," but I couldn't really tell for sure. I just felt sort of uneasy and responsible.

After the game, I said I had to go. But I hung around a minute or two on my bike, watching the court to make sure everyone had scattered before I road off.

**

One day, I hit the snooze alarm about fifty times before going off to my newest good marketing job. I spent the day implementing, hung around until 5:01 P.M., rushed home, changed into some basketball clothes, hit the door, and went looking for a game.

I ended up at Wicker Park, shooting around with a little kid, another little kid, and his toddler brother, killing time before a game developed.

I kept grinning at the toddler, because he was cute, but his brother didn't grin; he included him. He expected him to play, but he wasn't too rough on him. The toddler just ran around with the ball, grinning, happy as could be.

All of a sudden, a commotion broke out on the other court, and everyone was still, stopping what they were doing to watch.

"Why you testin' me nigga… why don't you test summa these other niggas!?" one of the kids was saying to a shorter kid, pushing him, in his face, itchin' to fight.

Two middle-aged guys were standing on the side of the court. They were Park District employees. I could tell because they were wearing those plastic i.d. holders on their shirts, standing around with their arms crossed and surveying everything, talking to each other.

Everyone watched the escalating fight. After a boy got in the middle of the two fighters, one of the Park District guys walked over and said something.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen," the Park District employee kept saying. "Let's just play ball. Gentlemen." But those two kids didn't care about some middle-aged white guy with a potbelly and an i.d. tag. They just kept on.

"Man, if you ever touch my shit again, I'll kill you! Come on, nigga, swing! Do it!"

The taller kid stalked off, daring the other kid to follow and fight him. The older brother on my court looked over at his brother and said gently, "Boo, wanna go see a fight?" The toddler just laughed, running around in his stiff-legged toddler way, holding on to the ball.

After a while, an older guy asked me would I like to play with him and some other people. I said sure. The guy who asked me to play was an adult; everyone else was a teen. The older guy played like it mattered, and the kids were kind of laughing at him until we started kicking their butts. The older guy refused to scale down his intensity, saying to the scoffing teens, "you know I play hard." The teens got into it in spite of themselves.

We could never remember the score. It's like that when the game is really good.

I was the only woman, and the only white person. I played the best I've ever played, only erring a few times when I misjudged how fast those guys were and how high they could jump. I'm not that great of a shooter, but that night I was. They kept yelling at each other, looking for someone to blame every time I made a shot, yelling "Who's guarding that girl!" and calling me little Larry Bird.

We all have our moments.

When I rode home, I remembered how, before I started going out and playing basketball, I used to sit in the house, waiting for something to happen or for some man to call. It was good not to be doing that.

**

I had just started shooting around one day, waiting for people to wander up, when this boy burst out of the nearby Wicker Park building and came running across the court towards me.

"Hey! You wanna play me one-on-one?!"

We recognized each other because we had played on the same court a few times. I said yeah, let's go, but before we could get started, a woman shouted from her car idling in the street about a hundred yards away, "Orlando!"

He stopped everything to run over to the car, hollering back at me, "Watch my stuff!" meaning his watch and ball, which he'd thrown over on the side of the court.

He talked to the car, which held his mother and instructions for when to come home, and then he ran back over just as fast as he'd left, apparently cleared for some more time at the park. The car sped off.

"Come on! Let's go!"

He was practically yelling, he was so excited.

We shot around for a minute on the nearly empty court.

"Where is everybody?" I asked him.

"My homeys just went to the store," he told me.

So I played him a game of one-on-one. I was two feet taller than he was, so of course I didn't guard him very hard.

His three homeys rode up on two bicycles. The Gap could only wish to get at the urban slouch of these kids' baggy t-shirts and shorts, as they sat on two-thirds enough bicycle, watching Orlando and me play. One kid stayed balanced on the handlebars, perilous and confident as a cat.

They kept saying, "Yeah, she going to the WNBA next week. She got a right, she got a left, she got a shot, she got some D…"

They were just messing with me, being friendly, approaching me because Orlando had.

Orlando kept teasing, me, too, pretending that he was shoving me around and laughing and shouting and showing off, saying stuff like "Alright, it's on, now," and "You know I'm mad, now." I was kidding him back, saying thanks for the warning, Orlando.

I liked that kid. I told him he was playing well, and he said, "Some people say I got game."

I tried to tell him about how, when you're playing defense, you need to look at someone's belly. How you don't look at their face, because they can fake you out with their face and eyes, but they can't fake you out with their belly. I think he knew about the belly already, but he liked it that I was telling him something.

He said his coach always told him to keep his eyes on their bootie.

"That'll work," I said.

After a while, a group of teenage guys started playing on the other side of the court. They were playing twenty-one. I hate that game sometimes because it's so heavily rebound oriented. I love to get rebounds, but when it's all guys who are bigger than me, I do better passing and playing defense and shooting from the outside than I do driving the basket and getting rebounds.

"Orlando," I said, "Do you think those guys would let me play with them?" Orlando kind of looked at me.

"I don't think so," he said. "They're kind of rough."

More and more of Orlando's friends started pulling up, getting their own vibe going. I shot around a little longer, but those older guys never asked me to play or even make eye contact with me, even though I know they saw me wanting to get in the game.

I rode home thinking how those sonsofbitches made me sick. They did, too. They didn't know if I could play or not.

**

I walked up to the Wicker Park courts once and saw this young girl out there terrorizing everybody. She was busting the standard this-sister's-seen-it-all-and-ain't-takin'-no-shit-of-yo'-punk-ass moves, that combination hand-head motion that, joined with colorful profanity and threats of hitting someone with a chair or a shoe, never fails to thrill a Jerry Springer audience.

She was badgering Orlando, who was being his usual gregarious self. I was killing a little time, hoping to see a ragtag group of adults looking for exercise, but it was just me and the kids for the moment.

Some people play with quiet intensity. Not Orlando. He never ceased yelling while he played, and he was always having some kind of fit over a good play somebody made, or more likely yelling for everyone to throw him the ball all the time. He took offense if he was left out of a fast break, and as soon as the lay-up was made on the other end of the court, he'd say something like, "Oh yeah, now, see, ya'll just forgot all about poor Orlando, didn't you?" It never seemed to be a factor in his mind that he was standing at half court when the shot was made.

Miss Seen It All, she just honed right in on good-humored Orlando, using him to make a point to everyone else, telling him exactly how things were gonna be.

"I can play," she said, "and I play to win, so don't you even be tellin' me I can't get in this game, cause I'm tellin' you right now, I'm the best."

Then, with one swift move, she threw her ball on the ground behind her and started chasing Orlando around, and he was laughing, but he didn't look exactly unafraid, and I noticed he managed to stay out of arm's reach of her. I could see the whites of his eyes as he looked back over his shoulder, trying to determine if he was playing or fighting, like a dog being chased by a much meaner cat.

She'd made her point, and we began a game. And she actually could play a little, too. After a while, she left, leaving me and Orlando and a few others.

He came over to me, talking quietly for once, his head bent over the basketball he was bouncing two-handed and with great force.

"That girl, she sure talks a lot," he said.

I suggested to Orlando that she seemed to have no lack of confidence.

"Yeah, too much confidence."

"Whaddya call that?" I asked.

"Anger," Orlando said without hesitation.

Damn Cute Story

I met a guy at Eckhart Park. Let's call him Peter.

The way I met him reminded me of something my friend Laurie used to tell me about how she couldn't go to church without about three guys asking her out. It was the biggest pick-up situation you ever saw, evidently, because everyone there had this big dream of meeting somebody at church.

According to Laurie, all the single people at her church were "Datin' for Jesus!" She was pretty funny, for a Christian.

Well, the same thing happens in basketball. I saw Peter looking at me all intense from the other end of the court. He made sure he got in the game I was in, and then he hung around afterwards and asked if I wanted to go have a drink later. I said I did. He was cute, and he was a good player. A guy doesn't have to be that good for me to like him, but he has to play like a winner. He can't be too soft, and Peter wasn't.

The thing about some guys is, the most important thing is where they met you. It's weird, but it's true. For instance, I met a guy at a dog party once. It was a dog party because it was a party that everyone brought their dogs to, and it was supposed to help you mingle and meet other dog owners.

I went to the dog party with this girl I worked with who kind of talked me into it. We didn't even have one dog between us, so we borrowed one. That's how hot she was to go. Single women in their thirties are always latching on to each other to go do damn nice stuff like that. They're not exactly friends or anything, but they need someone to go do these supposedly man-meeting things with. It's incredibly depressing, and usually I smell these situations from a mile away, but this time I went, mostly because I was always telling this girl no and we worked together.

The party dogs kept either fighting or trying to get at each other's butts, which I thought was pretty embarrassing. But all the dog lovers were just looking over that and trying to meet each other as they picked up poop and tried to keep noses out of their crotches.

While we were there I started talking to this guy, and he decided he liked me. He had a look, typical of white guys raised in the city, a look involving goatees, mock turtlenecks, and leather jackets. Those kind of guys – if they like you — usually want to do everything right, and he did. He asked me out for a polite date that week, and I went, and it wasn't too terrible so I said I'd go out with him again. He introduced me to his friends, who were nice like him, and I did well around them, because I didn't care very much if they liked me or not. Then he got even more enthused, and he kept doing everything right, taking me to do pleasant things and asking me for the next date before giving me a reasonable peck on the cheek and leaving my doorway. He was sweatin' me, as they say.

But there was no connection, and I always thought the only reason he thought he liked me so much was that we met at a dog party. The story was even cuter because I didn't even have a dog. Very "That Girl."

Couples don't want to say they met in a bar or through the personals. There's always got to be some damn cute story or you don't have a chance.

That's how it was with Peter, who was all over me, too, because he met me the way he always envisioned meeting "the" woman: on the basketball court. That's what he said, "I always wanted to meet a woman on the basketball court." Me personally, I don't really care how I meet someone, as long as one of us doesn't bore the other half to death.

There have been times when I've gone months without a date, but I must have had pheromones then, because there was this guy at Horner Park who kept asking me out, too. He was part of a co-ed group I played with on Wednesday nights for a while, and he made me mad when he started flirting and trying to be all charming with me because I'd already heard that stupid dumbass say he had a girlfriend. Oh, and guess what: the girlfriend lived in another city. Lucky me! This player preferred my butt to all the Wednesday night butts, so I'd been chosen as the lucky other woman. Maybe I should've written him a damn thank you note.

The thing about some people is, they'll ruin every last thing you like if you let them. So you can't let them.

**

Peter and I went out for a week. We rode our bikes to the lake, played basketball, sat on park benches kissing. All very romantic.

He was funny, but he wasn't the kind of funny where he knew he was funny. One time we were going to ride bikes, and I rode by his house to meet him. He came out of the house carrying a bottle of wine, some plastic cups, a corkscrew, and two bed sheets to sit on. He was carrying all of it in a white plastic garbage bag. That stuff can be kind of funny, but only if the guy is good-looking.

I noticed pretty soon that when he kissed me, he was always pulling the back of my hair. I had short hair, and his hand was always slipping when he tried to pull, and I had a hunch that he was wishing I had longer hair so he could really grab on and give a good yank. I wanted to say hey what the hellareya doin', but I didn't.

One night he asked me to go to his house and watch the Bears game. I was a little late getting there, and when he answered his door, he looked at me kind of sternly and said, "You're late." You could tell he didn't appreciate it.

He seemed drunk, and there were two joints sitting on the kitchen counter. He was talking a mile a minute. In fact, I was starting to notice that Peter didn't let you get a word in edgewise. And, if he didn't think you were listening well enough, he would get right in your face and talk louder.

So we sat down to watch the game, and he lit up a joint. For some reason, I smoked some. I used to smoke in college, but I hadn't in a long time. I'd quit because I used to get too paranoid on it. I'm kind of self-conscious generally, and pot makes it worse.

So I smoked some, and Peter smoked a lot, and boy, did I get messed up. All of a sudden I found myself obsessed with the question of whether Peter was really stupid, or just pretended to be as a joke. And I hadn't really noticed that trait before. I mean, he wasn't by any means the smartest guy I'd ever run into, but I just thought he was really physical, I mean, that he related to the world in a physical way. But now that I was high, there was no getting around the fact that he wasn't the sharpest stick in the bunch.

The thing is, if I think a guy is good looking, and if he entertains me at all, and if he seems to like me, I can make excuses for him and overlook some pretty bad behavior. A lot of women do that. Decent men without girlfriends must really get sickened by it. I know I would.

I should have been having dinner at some damned bistro with the dog guy, but instead I was stoned in Peter's kitchen, trying really hard to sit up straight, because if you've ever smoked pot you probably know that you don't want to realize after about a million hours have gone by that you've been sitting there slouching your ass off. Peter sat down beside me in the chair I was trying to sit up straight in, and he put his arm around me. He started absentmindedly digging his fingers into my arm, hard. It seemed compulsive, like he couldn't help himself, it felt so good to him. And then, and this is really embarrassing, Peter got up and started gyrating around like a Chippendale dancer, saying "So, what should I do… do you want me to dance for you?" I just kept hoping he meant to be cheesy and make me laugh. But I didn't laugh, because I was afraid he was serious.

To make things worse, I was having a lot of trouble concentrating because I was worried about my face. I didn't want anyone to see my facial expressions, because I felt like I had no control over my face.

All I could think of to say was, "Man, I'm stoned."

I was sitting there trying keep it together when Peter all of a sudden picked me up and carried me toward an open window. I never like it when guys physically pick you up. I know it's supposed to be romantic, but I just think it's embarrassing. It's too dramatic unless they're going to laugh and maybe act like you're so heavy they're gonna throw their back out or something.

Then I started to worry that he was going to sort of chuck me out the window. I really did. I started squirming to get down, and then he said, "I wouldn't throw you out the window."

It seemed to me that the idea of throwing someone out a window for no particular reason should have been so preposterous that it wouldn't have occurred to him, and I started getting scared. Peter's face started looking brutish to me, and when he moved anywhere near me, it felt like he was trying to dominate me physically, not just get close. I managed to wriggle myself free of his King-Kong-like grasp, and he tried to pick me up on his back, like we were going to play piggy back. Things were making no sense whatsoever.

His movements were slow and, I don't know, just slow, like a dumb animal's. I got the distinct impression he wanted to hurt me. That even if I said I would have sex with him he would still want to hurt me. I kept thinking about the scene with the racquetball girl in Cape Fear, the new version, with Robert De Niro. If you saw the movie, you know what I'm talking about.

Peter was lumbering around like an obtuse gorilla, saying "Why're you so afraid of me, try to have a little confidence why don't cha… I know I can make you feel good," and other creepy stuff like that. I got the hell out of there, brushing past him, walking at a near trot to my car, sitting down in the driver's seat and locking the doors, fast. It was only a few minutes' drive to my house, but it seemed like hours, and I thought the whole time that I would truly go mad if I had to maneuver that car one more inch.

But like I said, I quit smoking pot because it makes me paranoid.

Mama!

These three girls I'd seen before at Wicker Park came running over saying, "There's that girl again!"

They looked like the female version of the Fat Albert gang. I asked them if they wanted to shoot around, and the youngest one, who had about 25 different colored barrettes in her hair and jeans at least three sizes too big, took the ball.

"I can't do it," she'd say, every time she missed a shot.

"Yes you can, you just need to practice some. Nobody makes it every time."

"Why aren't you shootin'?" she asked me.

"I'm alright. Go ahead."

These girls, you had to draw them in. I've never seen any boy worry about if he was keeping you from playing.

One girl wouldn't play at all. We tried to play two-on-two, but she just wouldn't play. She kept saying she didn't know how, and she couldn't make it, and all that stuff. She stood out on the court, though, right in the middle of everything. We'd pass her the ball, and she'd move out of the way and let it go past her.

The youngest one's younger brother came up and tried to play. He was running all over the court, never dribbling, a big grin on his face, saying "almost!" every time he shot and missed.

Those girls didn't play very long, but they didn't leave, either. They hung around the edge of the court, watching. You could see them kind of whispering together and looking at different boys.

"Where's you girls' boyfriends?" I asked them, just to see what they'd say.

"Twanisha got her a man," the little one said, pointing to the girl who wouldn't play.

"Where's Twanisha's boyfriend?"

"He over there with his boys."

"That why you won't play basketball, Twanisha?"

She shrugged her shoulders in reply.

They were doing it already, waiting around for something to happen. Damn, it made me sad. It reminded me of this story I saw on TV, on 20-20 maybe, about whether or not little girl kids could learn as well when they had boys in their class. They couldn't, some researchers had decided, because the boys just got in there first, talking faster and talking louder. I wanted to shake Twanisha and say, "Listen here, young lady, you're gonna spend your life falling for arrogant men and sitting around a dirty apartment waiting on the phone to ring if you don't start taking an interest in some things!"

If I ever have a daughter, she'll have to learn how to be smart and daring. I don't know how I'll teach her, because I don't even know how myself, but somehow she's got to know early on that it's OK to miss some shots on your own, that you can't let other people always do your shooting for you.

I started playing with some adults, so I told a bunch of adolescent boys who had walked up they could play with my ball if they took care of it. They had a big game going before I knew it.

One of the kids had defected from his group to play with us. His name was Leon, and he was on my team. He was a foot shorter than everyone else out there, but he could play. He was smart and serious about it. A kid on the other court was mad at Leon for his disloyalty. He was screaming at Leon, "Oh, yeah, I see how it is! You wanna play over there with them. Man, I hate people like you!"

He was joined by a fellow glaring malcontent who ran up and said "Can I play?" really sarcastic to us. The tension was random and racial, because most of the adults were white, and all of the kids were black.

Once our ball flew over onto their court, and the loud kid shot it into their hoop like he thought it was their ball from their game, or I should say my ball. He looked over at us and said, all mock innocent, "Oh, is that your ball?"

Leon wouldn't even look at them, and we just kept playing. I kept glancing over to make sure my ball was over there, and once when I looked up, all the kids, and my ball, were gone.

One of our games was ending. I asked Leon, "Hey, do you know those kids who were over there?"

"Which ones?"

"Those ones that were playing with my ball over there."

"Your ball? What's it look like?"

"Orange. Rubber."

"Man, I think they took off with it," Leon said, kind of laughing.

Lewis, another kid about Leon's size who was playing with us, said, "There they are. Hey Thomas, you got that girl's ball!"

There was the group, standing about a hundred yards away with my ball. I wondered if Leon had known.

"Come on man, you got that girl's ball!" Lewis yelled. "Bring it back! Bring it back now!"

Thomas threw the ball across the playground at us, and we kept playing.

**

Oh my God, David. That child is pure love. He came to Wicker Park with his mom on Saturdays. She was a good player, and you could tell she had been really good in high school. She coached a bunch of girls in the gym at Wicker Park and always brought David along.

I played with his mom in a pick-up game once. Because we were the only two women, we'd been put on different teams for a match-up. It can be uncomfortable when two women who are used to playing with guys are matched up against each other. It draws a lot of sudden attention, two novelties taking each other on like that, and it makes me a little less intense. I still play hard, but it's awkward, wanting to win, but feeling a loyalty to the kindred spirit on the other team.

David's mom was an overall better player than I was, but I was faster and got my share of shots in. She was talking trash, having fun, treating me like any worthy adversary. But I don't really talk trash, and pretty soon, she stopped, too.

After the game was over, I shot around, and David came over to talk to me.

"Where's your friend?" he asked me.

"What friend?"

"Your friend. She wears black shoes, too."

David thought he remembered me from somewhere, I guess. So I told him I didn't know who he meant and asked was he sure it was me he had seen before and he said yes, he was sure.

I asked him how old he was, and he said five.

"I play with my mama."

"You do? Was she the one who was playing with me a little earlier? She's pretty good."

She came over to shoot around with us.

"She made me in her stomach," David informed me. I said really, how ‘bout that.

He said something quietly to his mom. "Well, she's pretty good, too," his mom said.

A few months later I was playing two-on-two, and I saw David's mom again. She gave a friendly wave and told all of us who were playing that we could come inside the gym if we wanted to. After my outside game, I went in, and David came running over to me, shouting "Hi Melissa!"

I couldn't remember his name, and, thinking about what an ass I was, I talked to him for a while and said it looked like his front teeth were growing back from the last time I saw him and asked him what he had been doing. Then he ran around all over the gym with kids his age while his mom and I and a bunch of teens played a game.

In the middle of the game David came over and stood on the sidelines, yelling.

"Maaama!…. maaama!….maaaaaaama!

His mom, the point guard, picked up her dribble.

"What?!"

David hesitated, caught off guard by her attention.

"Do you want me?" he asked, looking at her expectantly.

"Do I want you?" she asked. "Yes, I want you, but not right this minute."

Satisfied, David continued with his running around, and we went on with our game.