_“M en is motivated by two things,” Asphalt Thomas was wont to say, “reward and fear.” Late afternoons were for basketball practice, and two nights a week for the games. He harangued us unmercifully in the practices. “You’re the puniest excuse I ever seen for ballplayers,” he would shout, after some special miscue. “Start hustlin’ or I’ll put somethin’ on you Moses couldn’t get off. You couldn’t whup the little girls’ team at the Ursiline Convent. Keep your eyes open, dammit. A man can observe a whole lot by just watchin’.” Then, a little further into the scrimmage, morose and growling, his whistle hanging disconsolately from his bullish neck, he would say, “Noggin, what the hell’s wrong with your scrawny ass?”

“Back hurts, Coach.”

“That’s from too much trick-fuckin’. You couldn’t knock a sick whore off a piss pot. I don’t appreciate them black circles under your eyes. What time you get in last night?”

“’Bout eleven, I think.”

“Yeah? Hong Kong time? Get your pitiful tail off the court. I’m gonna play a little with these other turds.” Using his long thorny elbows as he played, he would smack skulls, noses, ears, midriffs, making buffoons of his sullen charges with his deft Southeastern Conference moves and fakes and shots, leaving us prone on the floor in his imperious wake. After his fifth straight basket he would say, “I’m hotter than a depot stove,” and then he would have us circle the arena twenty-five times with his sadistic windsprints, and order Leon the manager to guard the water-fountain in the locker room afterwards.

During the games I sat at the end of the Fisk’s Landing bench and, like a neglected and forgotten sophomore gosling, more or less languished there. Because of the injuries there were only nine boys on the team, almost all of them seniors, but Asphalt Thomas would sometimes look down my way where I crouched numb and fetus-like to avoid his attention. One was not at all unproud in those days of the crimson knee-guards and the heavy crimson warm-up suits with “F.L.” in white over the Number 18 on the back, but what in the world was I doing there? Why did I love the game so much?

Travelling to our away games on the feeble crimson-and-white sports bus with “The Choctaw” emblazoned on its sides, we would watch the nocturnal prospects drift past, the dark expansive flatland with its row after row of seared cotton, and the precipitous piney woods ensnarled in the sleeping kudzu, and the little secluded hamlets of the black prairies with their weak and trembling lights and worn facades and bereft thoroughfares. Asphalt Thomas would be at the wheel, and dead leaves swirled on the highway and insects splattered against the windows in the departing counterfeit spring, and the older players in their mad and boisterous horseplay, which by his bemused demeanor the coach himself seemed vaguely to elicit after a victory:

“Hey, Coach, can’t we go no faster?"

From behind the steering wheel, looking straight ahead: “You don’t deserve to go no faster. We only beat them fairies ten points.”

“Hey, Coach, let’s stop for some beer?"

“The way you played, you’d vomit up Pet milk.”

Their names were Clarence, Thomas, Jerry, Calvin, John Ed, Percy, Verner Ray, their nicknames being “Bouncer,” “Noggin,” “Steak Lips” (for reasons obvious to all), “Termite” (shortened to the more manageable “Term”), “White Boy” (his full name being Clarence White), “Blue” (because he was Syrian, and the others claimed he looked blue) and “Muttonhead” (because his head was shaped like a sheep). Who would forget the crackerbox gymnasia of these poor little towns—the old hissing radiators, the narrow erstwhile locker rooms crawling with water bugs and roaches, the pony-tailed cheerleaders in saddle Oxfords and pleated mid-calf skirts, the white wooden backboards and cheap tack panelling, the abandoned elevated stages where a few dozen spectators sat on portable green bleachers—the benches and scorers’ table right up to the out-of-bounds lines, the ancient round clocks with the swooping second hands, better than the digital ones later, tying you more truly to time because not so stark and precise—a little like life itself in its passing? When Term or Blue churlishly complained of the conditions, Asphalt would rejoin: “Fancier than what I played on at your age. You’re spoiled as a shithouse rat.” The walls stood so close to the floor that “White Boy” made a basket while running fast and sprinted right through a door into an empty classroom and knocked over several chairs and desks.

If Asphalt Thomas vilified us during practices, imagine his conduct with the referees. “They don’t know whether I’m gonna kiss ’em on the mouth or kick their ass,” he would say of his own shifting cajoleries and rages, his sly supplications and venomous ill-tempers. Once during a time out he accosted one of them and whispered: “Ain’t it about time you get your damned cataracts took out, Randy?” and withdrew his big grey pocketknife, and on another tense occasion said to a hairless and vociferous Italian among their number, “You screamin’ dago! You’re bald as a goddam gorilla’s nuts,” which earned him not one but two technical fouls, Asphalt later philosophically explaining: “That’s because a gorilla’s got two nuts, like everybody else.” The partisans in these tough little towns, adults and students in equal fervor, cursed and defiled our team, considering us metropolitans, and an angry echelon in one of them threw rocks and empty bottles at us as we rushed from the gymnasium to the bus, and Asphalt Thomas herded us aboard and then stood briefly at the driver’s door and shook his fist at them and shouted: “You scraggly-ass pointy-head peckerwoods! You don’t know basketball from cuckoo squat!” But even he drove us out of there in a hurry.

My girlfriend Georgia merely tolerated the sport of basketball. She would go to the home games, usually sitting alone, or sometimes with Mrs. Idella King, the English teacher, who was scarcely aware of the rules and regulations but attended out of fealty to her unlikely protege, Asphalt Thomas. The team roster was now depleted to eight, and one day after practice Asphalt Thomas pulled me aside. “I gotta use you a little tomorrow night. Don’t drink no milk or Cokes or water. Don’t drink nuthin’. Get a good night’s rest. Pray to the Lord. My boys are droppin’ like flies.” I tossed and turned in my sleep, and all the next day my stomach churned with a million wavy butterflies. Sure enough, with four minutes to go and a nine-point lead Asphalt Thomas looked down my way. “Get in there for Blue. He looks like he’s ready to throw up.” I felt naked as I entered my first varsity game, and glacial and cold in my joints. It turned out all right. “You just lost your cherry,” the coach said to me afterwards. “Didn’t do much harm at all.” In the next game three nights later I played a few minutes and was as self-satisfied as I had ever been in making six points against the lumbering and unfortunate team from Tuckaho. An athlete? Hardly yet. Moody and distracted as ever, my mother was frantic on the subject. “It’s dangerous,” she said. “You’re going to get hurt, I know it. They’re better than you. Wait and see. You’re going to get hurt!”

That year was Fisk’s Landing’s turn to have the conference high school basketball tournament. These were flatland boroughs more or less the size of our own, summoned from the anxiety and ambiguity of the flatland of those times at our place (a funny league, to tell the truth, and not especially good in basketball, stepchild as this was to the football gridiron, but who would volunteer to admit it?) and the town had sought to embellish itself for its incipient visitors. Why did little American towns come so alive then for outsiders? Was it from fear of seeming paltry before their own eyes? Of assuaging their own day-to-day isolation? Or in this instance had death’s specter itself, the returning Korean dead, spurred the urge of release? There were directional posters on the lightposts—self-flattery indeed to think someone might get lost here—historical signs in front of the old houses, crimson-and-white bunting on the storefronts, and an enormous multi-colored streamer on the courthouse: “Welcome, King Cotton Conference!” The yellow out-of-town school buses were everywhere, and dozens of cars with the license plates bearing the alien county names, and in the afternoons the cheerleaders from the other towns strutted the narrow streets around the school. Asphalt Thomas was at his utmost element, and ubiquitous, offering directions to all comers, talking basketball in agitated little clusters with the rival coaches, one of whom had been his teammate on the land-grant university team, exchanging high-flown felicities with the visiting principals and superintendents—“I’m gonna be one of them principals when I hang up the jock,” he said to me of them—“just as well get used to my future colleagues.” The gymnasium was packed for the competition: Thursday and Friday matches, both boys and girls, then the semi-finals and finals all day Saturday, and the festive containment of organized celebration reminded one a little of Fisk’s Landing Christmas.

Early in our first game, Blue sprained his ankle and had to leave for the season. Then, toward the end of the third quarter it finally happened, as I knew with dire inevitability that it would and must—White Boy crashed to the floor near our bench with two adversaries asprawl him, and his wail of distress rose up and filled the noisy and crowded assembly, suddenly mute now as he grimaced in honest pain, heaving and sputtering on the hardwood like a fallen sparrow, his whole left arm protruding outward from his torso at a grotesque, unholy angle.

Asphalt Thomas chewed his gum as he bent before the stricken warrior. “Can you fix him?” he asked the manager-trainer Leon, who was examining the injury.

“Nossir, Coach. This thing’s broke.”

“Hurts like shit,” Blue said. “Gimme a shot, Leon.”

“I’m jinxed,” the coach said after he comforted the contorted victim as he was led away to the hospital. “What the fuck did I do to deserve this?” Then he dubiously turned to me.“Well....”

This was the big time. I was consumed with the same dry-mouthed giddiness the first day I kissed Georgia. Please, I silently beseeched the entire Anglican hierarchy: No mistakes. The prayer was in its fashion answered. Playing the entire final quarter I committed no blunders, but for that matter did not make a single contribution that to this day I can recall—an invisible entity, more or less. Luckily our squad was leading by several points when the quarter began. The opponents were big and aggressive but slow and cumbersome, and we won.

But the next morning, Friday, when my dog Dusty woke me with a copious lick or two to the nose as usual, my whole lower right foot was a terrible blood blister. From my toes down to the arch was a pool of blood, covered with bursting membranes. I had had two or three before, but nothing ever like this one. I have an almost Quaker distaste of blood, so one can imagine the horror with which I greeted this sight; to my surprise, however, I did not faint, or even retch. I must have hurt it the night before, somewhere late in the game, but I had thought it only a bruise. Now, on this morning as I got out of bed, I could barely walk, the massive blister mocking my efforts, (perhaps even youth itself). I stripped off my pajamas and looked myself over. From a blow I remembered to the thigh, I perceived I even had a charley-horse. Asphalt Thomas once told the team charley-horses were inevitable for ball players, as if ordained by the Old Testament, and he also often surmised that blood blisters were the price you paid for being fast and a little bow-legged, as I was and am—not fast now, but still a little bow-legged. Nonetheless it was humiliating to discover I had both, and this after a scant and obscure and lusterless quarter.

I knew I had to get out of the house quickly, before my mother found me in harm’s way, for her reaction would have been little shy of epileptic in its magnitude. Happily she and her students were leaving that afternoon for a two-day recital in the capital city and would not return until Sunday. Now I put my ear to the door, and was for the first time grateful for the sounds of tap-dancing in front. I was tempted to telephone Georgia to come get me in her car, but decided to make my own way. Ordering Dusty to stay, I limped out the back porch and detoured through Mrs. Griffin’s yard to the boulevard, hitch-hiking a ride with a schoolmate’s father to the schoolhouse. I hobbled toward Mrs. Idella King’s homeroom. Great stabs of pain were shooting around my foot, and then the charley-horse started to throb too; my whole lower body was insufferable, and this made me feel both angry and vulnerable, especially angry. I had never really been hurt before, and this was a new moment in life. My thoughts went out to the official military escorts accompanying the hometown dead from Korea who had converged on Fisk’s Landing with missing ears, fingers, and toes.

Georgia was tarrying inside the main entrance under the Plato statue just before the bell. “I waited for you. Are you hurt?”

In time’s perspective I probably should have been proud of my wounds in front of Georgia, an honorable gladiator representing his school no matter how ineffectually, as in the Baptist preachers’ oft-mentioned tale of the poor crippled lad who ran in the race because he was all his town had. But the thought of the pool of blood in the blister left no room for heroic pretensions.

“Good game,” Mrs. King said. After roll-call she took me to the back of the classroom and got me to take off my shoe and sock. Georgia and three or four others came over to watch. The sight of Mrs. King bending down in her black dress with the Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from her necklace to examine my blister was unflattering, and the way the other students stared down at me as if I were little more than an experimental cadaver in a windowless morgue was discomfiting. “Asphalt should see this,” Mrs. King said.

She wrote me out a hall pass. I went down the corridor to the coach’s office under the gymnasium, but he was not there. “He’s teachin’ Driver’s Ed first period,” Leon told me as he tossed last night’s uniforms into the washing machine. “You hurt, ain’t you? You sure look hurt.” I attended the first class, then went to the gym again. Asphalt Thomas was sitting in the little cubbyhole adjoining our locker room, a dip of snuff lodged in his nether lip. “Let’s see.” Again I removed the shoe and sock.

“Whew! Worst I ever saw,” he said, spitting all the while into a paper cup and gazing philosophically at the foot. “We’ll handle it. We don’t play again til tomorrow anyhow. Besides, we’re down to the bottom of the barrel.” He reached in a drawer of a battered oak desk, rummaged around, and brought out a long needle. He also withdrew a box of Diamond matches and began to heat the end of the needle.

“Do we have to do this?” I remember asking.

“Turn your head, then,” he said. “Prop up the foot.” I closed my eyes. There was a quick sharp pain, accompanied by an audible swoosh. When I opened my eyes again, there were splashes of blood on the dingy walls.

“Have to wash that damned stuff off,” he said. “Now that was a blood blister. Where’s Leon? Leon!” Leon came in with a wet rag and cleaned up the mess.

“It’s okay now,” Asphalt said. “Don’t even need wrappin’. I got twenty against Vandy on the road after a blood blister bad as that.” The blister was indeed subsiding, like a derelict hose after the water had gone through, and it felt better already, the lifting of a weight. From a bottle Asphalt now applied a generous amount of tough-skin, the cure-all of the era. He used half a bottle, and the smell was piquant.

“Got a little charley, Leon said? How come you so beat up? You only played a quarter. Got to protect yourself better. Use the elbows when the zebras ain’t lookin’. And I don’t mean chicken wings, I mean real elbows.” Now he examined my thigh. Then he handed me a tube of analgesic, the hot kind—“Red Hot Kramer” on the tube itself, or known to us colloquially as “Atomic Balm.” I rubbed most of it into the skin. “Just go ahead and empty the fucker,” he suggested. “We got a year’s supply.” After that he and Leon wrapped the thigh in an Ace bandage, then put about five yards of adhesive around it. “Don’t take this off til after the finals,” he said, “if we get to the finals. You can take showers in it. It’s waterproof. Just shake your leg and limber up every little while. Can’t let it get stiff, like a dick. Maybe run some in the back this afternoon. Idella might let you out of class to run some. You’re a rookie and damaged goods, but all I got. Got to play with pain. Pain never hurt a real player. The Lord’s testin’ you. Keep your brain off the foot and on the game. I always played best hurtin’. Sank twenty-four against Auburn with a busted-up nose with blood for snot.”

His admonition rang hollow in my brain when that afternoon during study hall I went out in a sweatsuit behind the gymnasium to loosen up my leg. It was cold and clear, not a cloud in a matchless azure sky, and a flock of wood ducks flew in a V-formation overhead. There was a girls’ game in the gym, and the noises of the crowd drifted out that way. Four or five of the cheerleaders from Monroe City, planters’ daughters, were resting on the lawn; I recognized them from the school dances in the flatland. “What’s wrong with you?” one of them inquired. “You smell like a drug store.” They drew back in mock sympathy, slouching as they had learned from their mothers in the plutocratic flatland manner, hips arched high, hands angular on each side of them. “How’s that Georgia?” And they laughed inanely and chattered in the timeless flatland persiflage like a skittish cluster of parakeets as I circled the field again. 

The ever-present Asphalt Thomas had observed this tableau from the back door of the locker room. I knew he had been there because of the sound of his jangling keys, his keys to every room and closet and alcove and recess in the entire school building. “Showin’ off to the little gals,” he said as I came in, “them silly little spoiled rich gals with tight pussies you can’t get into. Better go home and soak the leg and don’t drink the water and sleep twelve hours.”

The team went into the semi-finals the next afternoon, Saturday, against Monroe City, people overflowing into the balcony and hallways, some propped on boxes and ladders and watching through the high windows outside, and there was a good flavor of bourbon everywhere.

Merely adequate as I was, playing most of the game and scoring a paltry four points, the remaining seniors, Muttonhead, Term, Noggin, Bouncer, performed with such deft and unexpected nobility that Asphalt Thomas called it the best-played game of the season. In the closing minutes one of the opposition’s Notreangelo boys (they had three) whacked me across the back of my neck with his clenched fist when the referees were somewhere else. “Kick the bastard out!” I heard the shout from the grandstand. It was unmistakably Georgia, and I learned later that several of the surrounding on-lookers stared at her coldly for long moments, and a pastor’s wife complained to Idella King, who replied in words that ring down to me now: “Well, they should have kicked him out.” Fisk’s Landing prevailed by six points and would play in that night’s championship.

Dizzied, throbbing, I soaked myself under the water spout of the shower. My thigh under the elastic bandage was burning hot, my foot an enormous palpitation. I asked Asphalt Thomas for a bandage on the foot. Once more he looked it over. It was crimson at the bottom now, with shrivelled skin at the edges, but yellow too from the plenitude of medicine. It looked awful. “Naw,” he said. “The blood has to circulate. It’s healin’ real nice.” Leon gave me three aspirin, then applied more tough-skin, so that I looked like a leper there.

Having defeated Monroe City and the Notreangelos, the last match for the trophy, which Fisk’s Landing had not won in more than a decade, was at nine that evening, four hours away. Our adversary would be the only accomplished team in the conference, Lutherville, with the best and most adept player in that league, the all-state Number 8, averaging twenty points a game. Our game would follow the girls’ finals.

All high school locker rooms have likely smelled the same since time began. The mingling scents of ammonia, analgesic, tough-skin, iodine, and the Chlorox bleach of Leon doing the washing as we waited for Asphalt Thomas on that distant afternoon linger with me now, so that the assembled odor of it is still as real to me as any I have ever known.

When everyone was ready Asphalt Thomas got us together there for a talk. Unlike at school, he dressed up for the games, as if paying a kind of pious sartorial obeisance to the sport itself, and on this day he wore a sleeveless half-buttoned wool sweater over a shirt and tie, the tie so short that it did not even reach to his midriff. “You men sucked it up out there today. I’m proud of you. See what you can do when your mind’s off the snatch?” He told us to go home and relax and not eat too much. “Don’t even think about losin’, for Chrissake. Tell your mammas to cook you a small hamburger steak or somethin’ like that, but no grease." He wanted us back an hour and a half before the game, he added, because he was working on a special defense against Lutherville. “We once tried this against LSU,” he said, “when they had a big ol’ center and damned tricky guard. We got to hold down Number 8 and Number 20. But don’t worry your heads til you get back. Then we’ll worry. Let’s whip their maggot- ridden asses. What are we—men or mice?” As the others filed out, he took me aside. “You’re on Number 8. I ain’t got no choice.” Number 8!

Georgia drove me around town for a while. Fisk’s Landing was striking in this dying afternoon. The out-of-towners were milling about the courthouse and the main street, spilling in and out of the restaurants, cruising the boulevard in their cars admiring the houses. The green-and-white crepe of Lutherville abounded, and near the Elk’s Club the impromptu cheers of their assembled students filled the brisk twilight. On the next corner I even sighted the Notreangelo who whacked me in the back only two hours before. He was standing there with his tough upper-flatland chums, including his snarling, swarthy siblings, and when he saw me he stared in haughty and immured disdain.

We went to Georgia’s parents, who had promised us something to eat. Then she and I sat on the front porch. The air felt good. It was getting on to dark now and the blow on the neck was beginning to hurt for the first time since the game; shooting little stars would appear before my eyes when I turned my head, and the blistered foot was all but numb. I wondered why I had ever voluntarily gotten into this, for in that moment it really did not make good sense. Was there an Anglican prayer against Number 8?

“I’ve thought of you all day. You look funny.” Kneeling before me she took off my shoe—everyone seemed to want to take off my shoe—and gently massaged my foot.

From the school across the street the crowds were congregating for the girls’ game. Georgia’s mother and father came out the door on the way to the gym. At Georgia’s caressing touch I had felt a surprising swell at my thighs, and I hid them quickly with my hands. “Kick a little tail, boy,” her father said. Her mother tentatively assessed us as Georgia rubbed the foot. “Are you going to the midnight show after the game?” she asked. “Yes’m,” Georgia said, and we all departed toward the school.

In the locker room toward the end of the girls’ game, Asphalt Thomas had the big portable blackboard with his X’s and O’s, and he went over them meticulously—a floating zone around the basket against the tall Number 20, man-to-man on Number 8. Then he just stood there for a second summoning his words. He often dropped Scriptural references into his terse pre-game speeches, sometimes claiming a large regard for religion, although I suspected he did not believe any of it to be true—had he lost it on Okinawa? “Get out there and fight, men! Run out on that fuckin’ court with your hand in the hand of the greatest coach of all times—not me, but the head coach from Nazareth.” Just before we went out he approached me again. His eyes were glistening as he sat on his haunches and whispered, “If Number 8 bends down to tie his damned shoelace, you bend down and untie it. If he goes to the commode to take a shit, you follow him and lock him in. If he spits, you spit.” I sat there before him on the locker room bench. “You scared? Nervous? When I was eighteen years old,” he said, “I crawled halfway across every fuckin’ island the damn Pacific had, on my belly scared shitless. Think about that when you get out there.” We put tough-skin on our hands before leaving. As the home team, Asphalt said, we would start off with a fairly old ball. If the zebras brought in a new, slick ball, we had more tough-skin on the bench. In the warm-ups, the tough-skin with the old balls made the shooting easy, as all basketball boys of that time with tough- skin on their hands and old balls to shoot know and remember.

Number 8 was the swiftest I had seen, and smart, and also a gentleman. His fakes left you breathless. “Keep away, keep away!” he would shout nervously as he moved, but he would never have whacked me across the neck while the referees weren’t watching as the Monroe City Notreangelo had done. He was only an inch or so taller than I, but heavier, and two years older, and I was no match for him; nothing I had ever learned had prepared me for this public humiliation. Why had Asphalt Thomas allowed me to play the entire game? Our team was beaten badly.

Right at the final buzzer I ran into the wall after a loose ball and was sitting against it on the floor. The game was done, and the Lutherville people were rushing onto the court to cut down the nets, their cheerleaders performing one somersault after another on the hardwood. Blood was oozing a little from my shoe and my mouth felt full of cotton. Number 8 came over and sat down next to me. “Shit, I’m tired,” he said, and extended his hand. Three years later he would be all-Southeastern Conference at the state university, and honorable mention All-America. And here, too, is the yellowed clipping from the Sentinel in front of me now:

Kent “Lightnin” Boult, all-state standout of Lutherville, scored 28 points Saturday night and wrecked Fisk’s Landing’s defenses as the Bobcats defeated the valiant but injury-riddled Choctaws, 56-33, for the conference crown.

As a man Asphalt Thomas was streaked with raw violence, yet he had a curious begrudging tenderness in him which always surprised me at age sixteen the ferocity and the care existing there in odd and unexpected tandem. In the locker room after the game he cuffed me gently on the head. “Don’t worry, kid,” he said. “You’re young. You learned. Put on some weight. Use the elbows more. Work on the jumper.”

Almost everyone was gone. I was the last to leave, except of course for Leon. Georgia was waiting under a young oak on the campus. In the pungent shadows was the promise of early spring. Across the street from where we met were the two Negro shacks, hushed now except for the woman on the front stoop of one of them tending to a bawling infant.

“Are you all right?” 

I was okay. 

“You played good.” 

“Oh, come on.” 

“Well, you did. I think you did.”

For years, I had an ugly burn on my thigh from the analgesic under the bandage. There is still to this day, as I age, a slight remnant of the burn there, and sometimes I look at it and remember those days. But mostly, really, as the years pass, I do not think much about losing to Lutherville, or the ingenious Number 8, before the packed house at home. I merely recall how I was hurting after that game, and Georgia there, and in the parked sedan how gentle she was with my wounds, her tender touch, and the mingling pleasure and pain.