He glanced over his shoulder. He was looking for only one thing, Congers's chest level. Now he had it. He pump faked, as if he were about to try a jump shot. Instead he rammed his elbow straight back, throwing all 250 pounds of himself into the thrust.
“Ooooooooof,”
went Congers. Jojo pushed off, wheeled around him, drove straight to the basket and slam-dunked the ball as hard as he had ever slam-dunked a ball in his lifeâand held on to the rim of the basket with both hands and swung on it in a triumphant rimbo, as it was called. Bull's-eye! He had elbowed the bastard right in the solar plexus! He had . .
. kicked ⦠his
â¦
fucking ⦠ass.
A roar rose up from the crowd. That coup de grace they couldn't resist.
Play had stopped. Treyshawn and André were standing over Congers,
who was bent double, both hands to his solar plexus, taking jerky little steps toward the sideline and going,
“Uh uh uh uh.”
Every time he went
uh
, the dreadlocks down the back of his neck lurched. He was only eighteen or nineteen, but he looked like an old man with a stroke, the disrespectful sonofabitch.
Jojo walked up and stood over him, too, and said, “Hey, man, you okay? Whyn'tchoo go over there and stretch out, man. Take a break.”
Congers looked up and gave Jojo a stare of pure old-fashioned hate, but he was speechless. He was still struggling to get his breath and his locomotion back.
Dis me? Fuck you!
thought Jojo. The roar of the crowd! The rush of euphoria!
Mike came over with an expression appropriate in the wake of a teammate's injury. Jojo put on a long face, too.
“Yo, blood,” said Mike, who considered himself adept at imitating the black players' fraternal lingo. “I take it all back. You're one cool motherfucker, motherfucker. That was off the fucking chain.”
Jojo felt so exultant he could barely keep his voice down. “That dickhead ⦔ He nodded in the general direction of the black players who were standing around. “Any'm say anything?”
“Nah. Coupl'm gave you a funny look when you slammed it in his fucking face, but whatta they gonna say? The kid was asking for it, and you did it coo-oo-ool, dude.” That was another piece of protocol. The slam with the swing on the rim was the black players' thing, too. It was a way of saying, “I didn't just get the better of you, I
kicked your ass and shoved your fucking face up it.
”
The two white boys cut their eyes over toward the bench, where Congers was sitting with his head down between his knees. Treyshawn and André were still leaning over him.
“Don't turn around,” said Mike, “but Coach's standing up and looking down here. I bet if it wouldn't look so fucking bad, he'd be running down the stairs to see what's happened to his baby.”
Jojo was dying to look, but he didn't. The three tennis balls, Coach Buster Roth and two assistant coaches, had to stay up there in the cheap seats, far removed from the players, because it was a violation of NCAA regulations to start basketball practice before October 15, and this was only August. That was also why the boys were playing in shirts and skins. Uniforms,
or even the gray practice T-shirts with nothing but DUPONT ATHLETICS on them, would be an indication that what was taking place was ⦠what in fact it
was
: basketball practice seven weeks before the permissible starting date. Of course there was nothing to prohibit somebody from coming to the campus in August, before school started, and playing a little pickup ball and working out in the weight roomâand any player who didn't make that completely voluntary decision was going to be in deep trouble with Coach Buster Roth.
“Hey, look what they're doing,” said Mike. “You'll like this. They're bringing in one of the swimmies to take his place.”
Jojo glanced over. Sure enough, one of the three lanky white boys was up off the bench and hustling out onto the court to play for the Shirts. Charles had dreamed up “swimmies,” too, and now all the real players, black and white alike, called them that. All three swimmies had been excellent prep school players, but they didn't measure up to Division I standards. On the other hand, they were awesome in the classroom. Under Conference regulations, each teamânot each player but the team as a wholeâwas required to maintain a grade point average of 2.5, which was a C. The three prep school boys' grade point averages were practically off the chart. They were like those inflated orange flotation devices parents put on young children before they let them go in the water: Swimmies. They were lifesavers, the three prep school boys were. They kept the whole team from drowning academically.
Charles came walking over to Jojo and Mike and said, “Hey, Jojo, what the fuck'd you do to my man Vernon?” But he was smiling.
Jojo kept a straight face. “Nothing. I guess he sorta lunged into my elbow.”
Charles let out a whoop, then turned his back to Congers and lowered his voice. “Sorta lunged into my elbow. I like that, Jojo. Sorta lunged into my elbow. Who says you white boys don't know how to kick butt? Not me! You won't catch me lunging into your elbow, man.”
He went away smiling, but Jojo kept his straight face on tight. He didn't dare gloat. Inside, he was elated. Approval and perhaps admiration by a black player who was as cool as they come!
Play resumed, and Jojo breathed easier. The Shirts had switched Cantrell over to guard him, and Charles was sent over to guard the Skins' other forward, Curtis Jones, who liked to slash through the big guys inside
and go to the hole. They let the swimmie guard André Walker. Cantrell gave Jojo a battle, but he was respectful about it, and so Jojo was content to stick to Coach's game plan, which was for him to set up picks, block shots, rebound, and feed the ball to Treyshawn and the other scoring machines.
As the game wore on, Jojo began to hear more bursts of cheering and applause. It was as if his TKO of Congers had turned the crowd on. He'd hear people singing out names: “Treyshawn!” ⦠“André!” ⦠“You the man, Curtis!” ⦠Somebody yelled, “Go go, Jojo!”âa familiar cry here at the Buster Bowl when the season was on. During a break in the game, Jojo checked out the stands. Thousands! Part of the charade of the “pickup game” was to leave the doors to the arena open and let anybody wander in. But who
were
these people? University employees? People from town? Where did they come from? How did they know? They were like those gawkers who seem toâ
bango!
ârise up from out of the concrete and asphalt wherever there's a car wreck or a street brawl. Now they had materialized by the thousands in the Buster Bowl to watch a game of Shirts and Skins in the middle of the afternoon. The young gods of basketball. Ranked first in the country last season, the fifth Buster Roth Dupont team to reach the Title Two in his fourteen years here ⦠three national championships â¦
nine
teams in the Final Four. What an extraordinary elevation Jojo Johanssen dwelled upon! How far above the great mass of humanity his talent and fighting spirit had already taken him! Oh, he knew who some of the people in the stands were, the usual, inevitable, freelance groupies, for example. But sometimes scouts from ⦠the League ⦠would materialize, scouts and agents ⦠looking for a piece of those who might reach the League and make millions ⦠tens of millions ⦠But then Vernon Congers popped into his head, and he lost heart. Congers hadn't vanished from his life, he was merely off the court â¦
During the breaks, Mike kept drifting over to the stands and chatting up this girl with a storm of blond hair sitting in the first row. You couldn't miss her. Her hair was very curly but very long. It gave her a wild look.
Jojo said, “Like what you see over there, Mike?”
“You know me. I'm always friendly with the fans.”
“Who is she?”
“She's a senior. She's doing something with freshman orientation. All the freshmen come in tomorrow for orientation.”
“You know her?”
“No.”
“You know her name?”
“No. I know what she
looks
like.”
Freshman orientation. Jojo had never gone through freshman orientation, because basketball recruits were exempt from things like that. They barely saw nonathlete students except in the form of groupies, fawning admirers or students who happened to be in the same classes they were. If you played basketball for Buster Roth, you got your freshman orientation on the court. Well â¦
one
freshman got his orientation just now. That was the last time Vernon Congers was going to
Yo! Tree!
Jojo Johanssen ⦠He lost heart again. Maybe it was only going to get the kid more fired up.
Finally Coach signaled from way up there in the stands that practice was over, and the Shirts and Skins left the court. The fans descended from the stands in a pell-mell rush and thronged the players. So easy! No security guards to impede their worship! They could
touch
them! Jojo was surrounded. He was mainly aware of the crop of ballpoint pens and notebooks, notepads, cards, pieces of paperâone hoople held up the ripped-off corner of a cardboard NO SMOKING signâthrust up toward him ⦠by the little people way down there. Nearby, a fan kept yelling, “Great give-and-go, Cantrell! Great give-and-go, Cantrell!” As if Cantrell Gwathmey had the faintest interest in some hoople's learned analysis of his play. Jojo kept walking slowly toward the locker room as he signed autographs, carrying a great buzzing hive of fans with him. There were a couple of obvious groupies, their bosoms jacked up by trick bras, who kept smiling and saying “Jojo! Jojo!” and searching his eyes for a look
deeper
than the ones he gave to ordinary fans. Over there was Mike. Being a second-stringer, he didn't attract a real hive, but he sure had attracted the blonde with all the wild curly hair. She was giving him that same groupie grin, searching his eyes for a look loaded with meaning profound. As usual Treyshawn had the biggest hive of all. Jojo could hear him saying, “No problem, Sugar,” his slacker-cool way of saying “You're welcome” to girls who thanked him for his autograph. To Treyshawn, all females, any age, any color, were named Sugar. Consciously, the players regarded this hiving as a tedious fate that befell them as part of their duty as public eminences. Unconsciously, however, it had become an addiction. If the day should come when the hives disappeared and they were just a group of boys walking off a basketball court, they would feel empty, deflated, thirsty, and threatened. By the same token, bored and irked by it all as
they were, somehow they never failed to notice which player attracted the biggest hive. In fact, any of them could have ranked hive sizes, player by player, with startling accuracy.
“Vernon!”
“Yo! Vernon!”
“Vernonâover here!”
With a chilling realization Jojo looked ⦠over there. Theyâfansâgroupiesâuniversity groundskeepersâwere all over Vernon Congers, and he had yet to play in a single game for Dupont or anyone else at the Division I level! Congers probably struck them as a good-looking guy, assuming they could stomach the cornrows and dreads. That was it, nothing more than looks. Of course, he
had
gotten a lot of pub due to speculation last spring that, as one of the hottest high school prospects in the country, he might skip college and go straight to the pros. That was it, nothing more than pub. That was it ⦠and yet there it was. The young shit-talking hot dog already had one hell of a hive.
Finally the young gods reached the locker room.
“Know'm saying?
Fucking gray boy say, âYo, you a beast.'
I take my piece, yo, stick it up yo' face.
Yo li'l dickie shaking, it won't cease
Faking you got heart. You ain't got shit, yo.
Know'm saying?”
Rap music by Doctor Dis was kicking and screaming from one end of the room to the other. Rap of some sort was
always
kicking and screaming from one end of the room to the other. Thanks to a nonaphonic wraparound sound system, there was no getting away from it, not in this locker room, where black giants ruled. The team captain always got to choose the CDs on the loop. Charles, who was a senior, was the captain this year, even though he was no longer a starter. Nobody was cooler than Charles. No one commanded more respect. In Jojo's opinion, Charles was totally cynical about the music. If most of the boys wanted rap, he'd give them rap ⦠the most rebellious, offensive, vile, obnoxious rap available on CDs. Curtis swore he had seen Charles coming out of Phipps one night after a Duke Ellington and George Gershwin concert by some white symphony orchestra from Cleveland. He said he knew for a fact that was the kind of shit Charles
really liked. Nevertheless, Doctor Dis was who Charles had chosen for the locker room. Doctor Dis was so sociopathic and generally disgusting, Jojo had the suspicion that Doctor Dis himself was a cynic who created this stuff as a parody of the genre. He'd stick in words like “beast” and “cease,” words more than half the Dupont national basketball champions had never uttered in their lives. At this very moment, in fact, the Doctor was singing?âsaying?â
“Know'm saying?
Call yo'self a cop? Swap yo' dick and yo'ass,
Ev'ry time you shit, yo' balls go plop plop.
Wipe yo' dick, and it bleeds choc'late.
You needs to fuck with yo' butt, cocksucking cop cop.
Know'm saying?”