The Portable Promised Land Read online

  Mr. Killion went off with all the adults to check on weather reports and road availabilities, leaving us alone in the cavernous blue-tiled locker room.

  Kwame stripped off his wet shirt and spiked it on the floor. We stood around him, not knowing what to say. He took his face in his hands and squoze his skin. We all knew how he felt. How the pain of a tough loss sat in the pit of your stomach. How it washed over you, burning like winter-icy hands heating up too fast. How your mind struggled to comprehend, replayed critical moments in slow-motion, raised the questions, Why didn’t I...? Why did I...? One thought led to another.

  Paul was in the shower. It’d been just a week since our class at Malcolm X on the old South after slavery, the Nadir, the lynchings. It was what we were supposed to do. Paul struggled the whole time. Especially when we slipped the noose over his neck. We held him up the way people hold people in victory. Then we dropped him.

  His feet never touched the ground.

  HOW BABE RUTH SAVED MY LIFE

  I love the Yankees. Ruth and Reggie, Gehrig and Jeter, The Mick and El Duque. The team with pinstripes, the team with twenty-six world titles and two candy bars, the team that’s scored with Marilyn and Mariah. Now my Yankee love won’t seem interesting until you know one thing: I was born and raised in Boston. I fed the swans on Boston Common, hung out in Faneuil Hall, raised hell in Kenmore Square, visited JFK’s boyhood home, partied with girls from Harvard, shoveled snow, avoided picking up that hideous accent with the same conscientiousness I now take in avoiding VD, and, of course, I paid the tax that all New Englanders shoulder: I rooted for the Red Sox. For a Bostonian to become a Yankee fan is for a Kennedy to become a Republican, an Irish Catholic to become a Jew. The Sox and the Yanks are more than sports teams — they’re extensions of the local ego. Yankeeness is gigantic, an embodiment of the big city, big star, gotta-win-and-win-big thang that is the Big Apple. The Sox, like Beantown, are the perpetually humbled, the ones who know winning is the privilege of NY or LA, or even Atlanta, but never Boston. Some believe the constant losing is thanks to the Curse of the Bambino. In 1919 George Herman Ruth, a fairly good Red Sox pitcher, was sold to the New York Yankees for a few thousand dollars so the owners of the Sox could have the cash to put on a play called “No, No, Nanette.” George became The Babe, the first peerless athlete of the century. No one remembers the play. Before the swap Boston won five World Series, including the first. Since then, zilch. But I think it’s something about the city of Boston itself that makes losing baseball so persistent. Perhaps God knows Bostonians can bear the pain of heartbreaking losses year after year because of the hard-nosed pluck and stiff upper lip they employ to endure each harsh New England winter. But one day something miraculous happened to me. I died and went to Hell and came back a new man. Baseball speaking, of course.

  Our story begins in the spring just before the start of the 1986 season in the rare book stacks, up on the sixth floor of the Cricket Academy library. I was doing a term paper on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and looking for a book that he’d taken out when he was a student at Cricket. I found the book, and next to it, a short, stout book shaped like the Bible with a spine that said The Fate of Baseball. It was kinda wedged in there, pushed way back as if someone had hidden it. When I opened it there was that crisp crack you get when you open a book for the first time. The pages were yellowed, thin, and fragile. It seemed they would crumble to dust if you touched them. On each page there was nothing but a list of years and baseball teams, starting with the 1903 Boston Pilgrims. I turned a few more pages. It said 1927 New York Yankees, 1928 New York Yankees. It was a list of World Series winners. The list continued on through the decades. Though the pages said the book was very old, the list went into the 80s: 1984 Detroit Tigers, 1985 Kansas City Royals, and then it said, 1986 New York Mets. On the next page it said, 1987 Baltimore Orioles, 1988 Chicago Cubs, all the way through to the end of the century.

  What? Was I looking into the future? Was fate a cold master, unflappable and indestructible, preordained long in advance? Were there other books in other places, perhaps left behind by forgetful angels or mischievous helpers of Satan, books that listed the winner of every presidential election, every stock-market turn, every birth, marriage, and death certificate for every person on earth? But really, I was less astonished at the existence of such a book than at its assertion that the Mets would be champs. The Sox had Wade Boggs and Roger Clemens. Who could stop us? I stuffed the little book into my pocket and raced back to the dorm.

  In my room, in the bright light of cold logic, I realized the truth: my ship had come in. I’d been given the gift of a glimpse of the future. Other men had visions of a political or religious destiny. I’d seen the future of baseball. And so I did what anyone in my shoes would do. I became the school bookie.

  I was already a gambler, wagering dollars on pro and college football and sometimes basketball with a bunch of guys on campus, but now I would take my operation to the edge of the envelope. But I couldn’t just start taking bets on who would win the World Series out of nowhere. Cricket people were so cynical they’d think something was fishy. I had to make it look good. So I went out and bought every sports-betting manual I could find. I read all the magazines and memorized all the statistics. That shit was way easier than studying. I spent a whole week setting up my dorm room. I turned it into a mini Las Vegas with odds and lines for every conceivable sport posted on chalkboards around the room. You could bet on a certain team to win a certain game, you could bet on a certain player to score over or under a certain number of points, you could bet on big-time high-school lacrosse in Chicago, obscure cricket matches in London, bantamweight kickboxing in Malaysia.

  People started coming in and betting $3 on their favorite team to beat Michael Jordan and the Bulls or $4 on their favorite player to score more than his average on the third night of a road trip in a town where one of his favorite mistresses lived. The depth of my information made me very tough to beat. In no time I had six shoeboxes under my bed filled with crumpled ones and fives won from those little Fauntleroys.

  But no matter what I had to say or do, I got everyone to put a dollar on their favorite team to win the World Series. This was guaranteed money, better than betting on IBM. Whenever people wanted to bet on the Mets I made some lame excuse and weaseled out of it. I made the Sox seventy-five-to-one longshots, meaning if they won the title I’d have to pay $75 for every dollar someone put down. Fifty-one people put a dollar on the Sox, meaning if they won I’d have to pay out $3,825, which, seeing as I had no source of income beyond the bookmaking thing, would leave me pretty much dead. But I had no fear.

  Fast forward to October. World Series: Sox versus Mets. Every day people waved $75 promissary notes in my face, saying that when the Sox win I’d better pay or they’ll beat me up, or they’ll get their lawyer father to sue me and my whole family, or they’ll come into my room in the middle of the night and pour hot jelly all over me. I was totally not worried. I’d seen the future.

  Even when the Sox won game five and were one game from the title I still had this supernatural calm. A real bookie would’ve been hiding out and shitting bricks, but not me. The night of game six I went up to my room to watch the game by myself. Just before it started, Figuerora Slim and his homeboys knocked on my door.

  Figuerora Slim was a senior. His parents knew him as Jim Figuerora. I’d taken a lot of money from him during football season a year back. He was a big blond kid who played quarterback and had his life’s path mapped out at birth — Cricket, Yale, then a cushy job in the D.C. newspaper his family owned. That’s why he walked around with this nonchalant arrogance you can get only when nothing about the future scares you. I had that feeling until he came by.

  “Yo, dickhead,” he said. “Wanna make a bet?”

  His cronies laughed.

  “You still think the Mets are gonna win?” he said.

  “What?”

  He turned to his dudes. “Will ya look at
this room? He thinks he’s Jimmy the fucking Greek! Who ever thought the little shit would fall for that book so completely?”

  He didn’t have to say anything else. Figuerora Slim had made that book and somehow gotten me to find it, an elaborate practical joke that’d ended up doing far more damage than anyone could’ve imagined. I’d based my entire life on some supposedly magic book I found in the library and now I was one game away from losing everything. Can you say nervous breakdown? As soon as he left I was on my hands and knees unraveling crumpled bills, counting out all the money I’d made. It came out to $263, which was a lot considering the only thing I ever bought was a six-pack of Bud, a little bag of weed, and a package of Suzie Qs at the snack bar. But faced with a potential debt of $3,562, I felt like Godzilla’s foot was on my chest and he was just waiting for an excuse to squish the life out of me. I mean, if you’ve never been to prep school you don’t know the sadistic sorts of shit people are capable of. I saw myself being forced onto the hook of the school flagpole, hanging from the back strap of my undershorts in the most horrendously painful wedgie in the history of mankind. So, you see, the quality of the rest of my life at Cricket hinged on the outcome of that game.

  Yes, I was scared as hell.

  The whole game I just sat in my room, watching on my little black-and-white television, shaking like a kid with Parkinson’s on a roller coaster, and praying for the Mets to win. Every time they did something I could hear the cheers and boos of the guys in the TV room downstairs. But those fuckers didn’t really want the Sox to win. They wanted to bang down my door and wedgie my lights out.

  Going into the ninth inning the game was tied at three. In the top of the tenth, Dave Henderson hit a home run and Wade Boggs scored, giving the Sox a two-run lead. I broke into a cold sweat. In the bottom of the tenth the Mets first two batters were put out and the Shea Stadium scoreboard said, “Congratulations Boston Red Sox, 1986 World Champions.” My nightmare was pulling into the station. The Boston Red Sox were a single out away from the title. I thought maybe I could jump out the dorm window and end it. For a moment suicide seemed dignified. Then I realized it wasn’t far enough to die, only far enough to have me end up even more embarrassed. Could things get any worse?

  Of course. A bunch of guys started banging on my door. My nightmare had moved from an abstract thought into a mob held back only by a little wood and a flimsy steel lock. And I knew that at the end of the game this upper-class posse would swell to a force that would easily break the hinges and carry me off to Hell.

  Then a trio of Mets hit singles and scored a run. New York’s Mookie Wilson came to bat with men on second and third and promptly racked up two strikes. The Sox were a strike away from ending my life. The banging got interminably loud. I couldn’t hear the television announcers, the guys downstairs, or the thoughts in my head. All I could hear were the fists that would soon be raining on me.

  Mookie fouled off pitch after pitch, keeping himself alive, but a Met comeback was impossible. I was trapped inside some cosmic joke the universe had set up to turn me into a permanently hazeable minion, my proud soul sold into torturous enslavement, pieces of it bought for a dollar by fifty-one young masters of the universe who now watched with glee as their stock was on the verge of shooting up seventy-five-fold and they were about to gain the thing every prep-school boy dreams of: the moral and permanent right to abuse another boy. I would become their time-share slave. On the other side of this cosmic joke that only I could not enjoy was my hometown team entering a new era. For Boston to win, even once, would be to drastically change something in nature, like planets moving to other solar systems, leaves not falling off the trees in winter, God abdicating the throne. I mean, the Sox were going to win but I would still be a loser — the most Bostonian Bostonian of all.

  Then a small miracle: a pitch got by Boston’s catcher. It rumbled by him and Kevin Mitchell ran home from third. The game was tied! The banging stopped. My rain clouds dispersed.

  Mookie went back to fouling off pitches, ten or twenty in a row, just to keep his at-bat going, just for a look at one more decent pitch. Ray Knight was at second and all he needed was a decent base hit into the outfield to get him home and win the game for the Mets.

  Mookie got this bullshit low pitch and for some insane reason he decided to swing. That ball dropped lamely off his bat and bounced up the first-base line, right toward first baseman Bill Buckner. An exceedingly easy ground ball. All Buckner had to do was bend down, scoop up, and take three steps to first base. There are a few hundred thousand Little Leaguers who can make that play.

  But Buckner was a haggard old guy as flexible as steel with a creaky body as reliable as an old weather-battered Yugo. He seemed like a guy they put on the field to make the regular guy watching at home feel good about himself. Even though you’re white, slow, and fat, with a back as stiff as a board, his presence said, you too could play a little major-league ball.

  The ball took about a week to meander down the first-base line, as if God wanted to make the play as easy as possible on old Buckner. And then there was a second miracle. The ball hopped. A small, almost imperceptible jump. A minuscule millisecond of movement that threw Buckner off. And somehow, as my heart leapt, the ball bounced right through his legs, holyshit, into the outfield, thereisaGod, Ray Knight jogged home to score the winning run, I love you Babe! and the game was over. And I was alive!

  The Mets won game seven in much calmer fashion and right after the game I closed down my bookmaking operation and threw my chalkboards away. I lacked the heart for bookmaking. I don’t mean the courage. I mean that my heart muscle was not strong enough for any more shit like that. Back from the dead, I declared myself a free-agent fan. If you could choose your parents you’d choose the best. If you could choose your team you’d choose the Yanks. Besides, my father grew up in Brooklyn, making me a New Yorker-once removed and giving me a regional tie to the team. Sure it was a tenuous link, but people have ascended to British thrones with less.

  What’d I do with my $263? I did what anyone in my position would’ve done. I put it all toward a good cause and paid tribute to the man who saved my life. I went out and bought an old-school replica Yankee jersey with a big number three on the back. Of course, I got my ass kicked for wearing a Babe Ruth jersey in Boston, but that’s another story.

  WE WORDS

  My Favorite Things

  Yo!!! What it look like? What it is. Whazzzap?!

  My people, my people....Yes, yes, y’all. Eight-ball-black. Brown. Bronze. Beige. Ebony. Mocha. Mahogany. Mulatto. Quadroon. Octaroon. Oreo. Creole. Cocoa. Caramel. Café-aulait. Colored. Passing. Redbone. High-Yella. French vanilla. Butter pecan. Chocolate deluxe. Caramel sundae. Good hair. Tender-headed. Nappy. Peasy. Weave. Afro. Dred. Braid. Corn-row. Cornbraid. Jheri curl. Baldie. Buppie. Bougie. BAP. Boho. Big Baller. Bamma. Sassy. Saddity. Uppity. Gangsta Bitch. Gold-digger. Raggamuffin. House Negro. Field nigga. Hood rat. Rude bwoy. Ghetto Celeb. Big Willie. Homeboy. Homegirl. B-Boy. B-Girl. Brotherman. Sistuhgirl. Soul brother. Soul sister. Negroid. Negro. Nigger. Nigga. Nubian. Negritude. Afro-American. Amazing grace. Nuff respect. Black is beautiful.

  The low-down. The nitty-gritty. A witness.

  Afrikan. Motherland. Middle passage. Amerikkka. Auction block. Bondage. Massa. Cracker. Overseer. The whip. Strange fruit. Sambo. Spade. Spook. Spear chucker. Coon. Darkie. Buck. Buckwheat. Mandingo. Porch Monkey. Uncle Tom. Aunt Jemima. Jezebel. Mammy. Pickaninny. Jungle bunny. Jiggaboo. Slave.

  Lord? Revren. Pray. Preach! Genesis. Well! Deuteronomy. Tell it! Revelations. Hallelujah! Swing low! Amen! Sweet chariot! Good God A’mighty! Testify! Lawd!

  Runaway. Exodus. Underground Railroad. Abolition. Emancipation. Juneteenth. New Jerusalem. The Promised Land. Freedom. Reconstruction. The Nadir. Lynching. Sharecropping. Jim Crow. Stagolee. Stepin Fetchit. Separate but equal. Segregation. Discrimination. Great Migration. Up South. Harlem Renaissance. I am somebody! Civil Rights. Black Nationalist. Black Muslim. Black Panther.
Black Power. Say it loud! We shall overcome. Boycott. Sit-in. The Mountaintop. Free at last.

  Assassination.

  Riot!

  All deliberate speed.

  Any means necessary. Affirmative action.

  Afrocentric.

  African-American.

  Black American.

  Pan African.

  New Afrikan.

  Million Man March.

  Boy. Manchild. The Man.

  Chill. Cool out. Copacetic. Crib. Big Momma. Mom-Dukes. Blackplate. Chitlins. Soul food. Greens. Grits. Gravy.

  Threads. Dapper. Dipped. Clean. Sharp. Diva. Playa. Fly girl. Fly guy.

  A DJ saved my life! Bluesology. Jazzocracy. Soultronic. Funkenstein. Riddim track. Disco fever. New Jack Swing. Hiphop Nation. Triphop. Drum’n’Bass. Talking drum. Soul clap. Groovin. To the beat. On the one. I feel like bustin loose! Jig. Juba. Jitterbug. Lindyhop. Bunnyhug. Cakewalk. Huckabuck. Headspin. Windmill. Uprock. Poplock. Rocksteady. Rump-shaker. Boogaloo. Campbellock. Breakin. Bogle. The Bump. The Hustle. The Prep. The Wop. The Smurf. The Shimmy. The Freak. The Robocop. The Reebok. The Robot. The Voodoo. The Charleston. The Butterfly. The Popcorn. The Pepperseed. The Bartman. The Moonwalk. The Bus Stop. The Crip Walk. The White Girl. The Biz Mark. The Huckle Buck. The Hully Gully. The Philly Dog. The Patty Duke. The Santa Barbara. The Electric Slide. The Electric Boogaloo. The Running Man. The Doo Doo Brown. The Black Bottom. The Bankhead Bounce. The Roger Rabbit. The Humpty Hump. The Harlem Shake. The Cabbage Patch. The Mashed Potato. The Cosmic Slop. The Funky Chicken. The Nanny Goat Skank. The Pee-Wee Herman.

  Raise the roof!

  Get down! Git busy! Go berserk! Go head! Go head!

  That’s the joint! That’s that shit!