26. Black Socks

When I got to Junior High and they started having school sports teams, I just assumed I would be on one. I was too skinny for football, and baseball didn’t start until High School, and I wasn’t fast enough for track, so I went out for basketball. Basketball wasn’t my best sport, but I’d played a lot around the block, in someone’s backyard afterschool with “Spiders and Snakes” and “Seasons in the Sun” blasting in the background on a portable radio. I had a decent outside shot, but I wasn’t much of a ball handler. I tended to make wild passes out of bounds whenever there was any pressure on me at all.

Still, I made the team in both seventh and eighth grades, mostly because I’d hit my growth spurt early and was taller than almost everyone else. The extra inch or two helped me out on defense.

I didn’t play much in games, usually just a few minutes at the end whenever we were winning or losing by a large amount. But I liked being on the team, liked the routine of the drills and the way I could feel myself getting better through repetition. I even scored a few points, all on outside shots: I never did get any good at dribbling or driving in for layups. I liked the ride home at night on the late bus, bone-tired, looking out the window into the dark and cold still steamy warm from my after-practice shower.

***

I wasn’t going to bother to go out for the ninth grade team. By then, everyone had caught up with me height-wise, and I knew even if I made it I’d be looking at four months of practice every night just to sit on the bench during games. It seemed like a waste of time, and I thought I’d be better off concentrating on school.

My father persuaded me to give it a try. He said if I did manage to get on the team it would be good for my college applications. Colleges, he insisted, looked for well-rounded kids, who had something going on besides just academics.

My father had been a basketball player himself, and a pretty good one. He’d been a starter on the Varsity team during the two years of college he’d had after getting out of the Navy, and he could still beat me in the games of H-O-R-S-E we played in the backyard. There was a ratty old black and white photo he had from when he played in college, even skinnier than I was, going up for a rebound against a bunch of guys who were much bigger and taller but he was the one who had the gray-ish ball gripped in his hands. He looked, I had to admit, like a pro in that picture.

***

I’m not sure why I made that ninth grade team. Part of it must have been how hard I played during tryouts, throwing myself after every loose ball, running tirelessly up and down the court. Any coach would have been impressed. And it probably didn’t hurt that the ninth grade coach happened to be Mr. Masten, my teacher that year for Math Advanced Placement. Maybe he liked the idea of being able to keep one of his smart kids on the team.

Making the team made me happy, and my father happier, but it turned out pretty much the way I’d expected. I didn’t have the skills to back up my hustle, and even in the scrimmages at the end of practice I didn’t play much, and not at all in the real games. Mr. Masten was the type of coach who put his best five players out there and let them play the whole time unless someone got hurt.

I didn’t care. I liked the uniforms, the cheerleaders. I liked thinking of myself as one of the 15 best basketball players in the whole ninth grade, even as I doubted it was really true. I liked the occasional times in practice when I’d swish a shot from the right corner, my favorite spot even from back during those around-the-block games.

***

The first time Randy Vite whipped me with is towel, I shrugged it off, let it go. It was after practice. I was coming out of showers, crossing over to my locker, and Randy flicked the end of his towel at me. It must have been purely an impulse thing. Randy and I had no history, had never even spoken.

It hurt, but not so much I cried out or anything. I ignored it, walked over to my locker and started getting my clothes on. Randy and his sidekick, a short, crew-cutted kid named Dave Miseak, giggled and high-fived.
Randy was a starter on the team, our best scorer. He was the opposite of me as a player: totally in control even when the defense was all over him, always able to get off a shot that more often than not went in. He had a terrible attitude, though: he never hustled, never ran back to get on defense. Mr. Masten would scream at him, but he didn’t pay any attention. Randy knew he was too important to the team for Masten to bench him.

Off the court, Randy was sort of a burn-out: everyone knew he cut classes, and we’d occasionally seen him sneaking a cigarette out near the edge of the playground during lunch. Later, I’d wonder if that was the issue he had with me, that I was good at school and he wasn’t—but I didn’t think it was. I don’t think he cared enough about school to dislike me because I was better at it.

***

A few days later, I happened to be walking across the locker room at the same time Randy was sitting on the bench, and he did the towel whipping again. Randy always waited as long as he could to get dressed after taking his after-practice shower. He’d sit on the bench with a towel wrapped around his waist making jokes with Dave Miseak or telling the team all the things wrong with Mr. Masten and how his bad coaching was the reason we lost most of our games. Randy was usually the last one on the team out of the locker room, and a few times we’d had to wait the late bus for him.

Like last time, it stung when he whipped me. It wasn’t like overpowering pain, but it did stung.

By reflex, I grabbed at the towel. “Stop,” I said, and in my voice I heard a little bit of a whine I wished wasn’t there. “Knock it off.”

“Stop,” Randy mimicked, and then Dave Miseak mimicked “Knock it off.” Then they stood up and high-fived, Randy totally naked, Miseak fully clothed.

***

It became a regular thing. “Time for your whips,” Randy would say every day after practice as I walked out of the shower, and then he’d flick his towel at me, two times, three times. I was usually walking fast to get to my locker, so only one of the whips would actually land, and that one not very hard.

Two or three whips were all he ever did. Then he and Miseak would giggle and do their high fives.

I thought it would stop by itself. I thought it was a kind of hazing, something Randy was doing to make me earn my place on the team. I thought if I didn’t show any reaction, didn’t let him get a rise out of me, he’d lose interest.

But he didn’t lose interest. I actually think it became his favorite part of practice, the one thing he looked forward to.

“Why don’t you just hit him?” Joey Licata asked me one day. Joey was another starter, not as good as Randy. We weren’t friends, but we’d sat at the same homeroom table for the last few years, and had talked a few times.

“You think I should?” I asked.

“He’s not going to stop unless you do,” Joey said. “We’d break it up before you got too beat up.”
“What good would it do, though?” I asked Joey, because of course I’d thought about this, thought about it over and over as I lay in bed trying to get to sleep. “Wouldn’t he just come at me harder if I hit him? You don’t think he’d just stop, do you?”

“No,” Joey admitted. “Probably not.”

During those nights in lying in bed, I’d wonder if it was just that I was afraid of getting hit. Coward, I’d think to myself, wimp. Asshole. Maybe you deserve to get whipped if you won’t fight back. I knew this was what my father would have thought, if I’d had enough courage to tell him about what was happening.

***

I’d never had any real friends on the team, but now no one wanted anything to do with me at all. It was as though watching me be humiliated by Randy embarrassed them, too, made them feel uncomfortable to speak to me. I went through the practices in a kind of trance, the dread of what was going to happen afterward preoccupying me. “Newsome,” Coach Masten would yell during scrimmages, “for Christ’s sake get your head in the game!”

I thought about going to Coach Masten and telling him what was happening. But what was he going to do about it? Tell Randy he had to stop? Randy wouldn’t listen, and Masten couldn’t be in the locker room with us all the time. And it seemed like such a baby-ish thing to do, to go behind Randy’s back and talk to the coach. I didn’t want to be someone who would do that.

I also thought about just quitting. It wasn’t like my being there or not made a bit of difference to the team.
But no, I wasn’t going to give that to Randy and Miseak. I wasn’t a quitter, either.

I stopped taking showers. As soon as practice ended, I’d walk fast to the locker room, pull my street clothes on over my sweaty body, get out of there fast. Some nights this worked, and I’d be out of the locker room before Randy made his way in. I’d sit by myself in the dark hallway, waiting for everyone else to come out and the late bus to arrive. Other times, my timing would be off and Randy would get a flick or two in through my clothes. I could barely feel them, but it had never been about the pain of the whips anyway.

***

It stopped as mysteriously as it had begun, on a day I wore black socks to practice. I couldn’t find any white socks in my gym bag. I’d thought for sure I had put them in that morning, but even after I’d frantically looked and looked again they weren’t there. So I had to leave on the black socks I’d worn to school. I rolled them down as low as I could, but you could still see.

It felt like just a matter of time, and sure enough about midway through practice Dave Miseak got behind me in line as we were doing a layup drill and whispered, “Randy is going to whip you good for wearing those socks. I can’t wait to see you get whipped.”

I looked at him. I didn’t want to be wearing black socks. But without socks my feet would have ended up torn and bloodied. I didn’t know if I’d even be able to walk home. No one else on the team liked me well enough to lend me a pair of socks even if I’d tried to ask, which I never would have done. I had to use what I had, I had no choice.

All this went through my mind, and I wondered if I said any of it how Dave Miseak would have reacted. I had a feeling it only would have made him hate me more, and I wouldn’t have blamed him.

All right, then. If Randy was going to whip me harder for wearing black socks, he was going to do it. I couldn’t worry about it anymore. There was a road I’d put myself on, and maybe I could have changed it at some point but with three weeks left in the season I couldn’t change it now, any more than I could change having to wear black socks.

I nodded at Dave Miseak. I may have even smiled. It was just this peaceful feeling, of sinking into a kind of blackness myself, of everything being decided and having no option but to go along with it.

Randy got held after practice that night to talk to Mr. Masten—he’d been dogging it during line drills, not running when Masten turned his back, and he’d gotten caught—and I was out of the locker room before he arrived. And then the next day there was a snowstorm, and practice got cancelled. The day after that was an away game against Goshen that we won by twenty points, and then that Friday we finally had practice and I did my usual thing of getting into the locker room quickly and putting on my regular clothes even though the shirt clung to my clammy back but Randy didn’t even look at me when he got into the locker room. And it was the same way the next few practices the next week: like I wasn’t there, like he’d forgotten all about the whippings, the way I’d hoped he would weeks ago.

The damage was done, though, for me on the team. I endured the last few weeks of the season in almost total silence, like I was invisible. I skipped the last game, told Coach Masten I had a cold. There was an end-of-season pizza party at Joey Licata’s house, but I didn’t go.

**

I never played basketball again, not even at home in the backyard, which upset my father since he still liked to get out on the court sometimes. I played a year of Junior Varsity baseball and then two years of Varsity soccer, where I turned out to be pretty good goalie, and no one bothered me because the real jocks played football in the fall.

Randy went on to have a great season of Junior Varsity basketball, but then he broke his hand during a practice when he was one of the only three Juniors on the Varsity team and was out the entire season. The story going around was that it happened when he punched the wall after missing an easy layup, during a practice, not even in a game.

When I heard, I almost felt sorry for Randy. What a stupid thing to do. I knew the basketball team would lose a lot more games without him playing.

The next year, though, when I heard Dave Miseak had been killed in a car accident, I was ashamed of how happy it made me. Someone else was driving, a kid named Chrismy Bloodgood. He’d taken the hairpin turn at Dunderberg Road too fast and they went right over the guard rail. Bloodgood had only had his license for six weeks.

I wanted to find Randy, high-five him the way he and Miseak had high-fived after the whippings. Would he understand? Almost better if he didn’t. I never did that high five, but I carried the image around in my head for weeks, always ashamed, always enjoying it.