Stories from my town

This morning when no one showed for my usual Sunday morning basketball game in Berkeley, I headed over to the court at the end of my street. It would be a lot more convenient for me if I could make this my regular court. It is, how shall I this?, a but rough. I don't really connect with the guys who hang there. We come from and live in different worlds. For half an hour, I just warmed up, shooting around with a couple other guys as a rigorous game of 21 was played on the other end of the court. After that time, when enough people have arrived to play full court, one of the guys I had been shootin with starts picking his team. He shoulda picked me up, but suddenly its like I wasn't even there. I asked him to play and he said, "you're gonna have to wait."

Why? I wanted to know why. I asked him.

"Why?" he scoffed to his buddy, "dude wants to know why"

I looked around and of the 15 or so people now there. I happened to be the the only person there who wasn't black. Pissed off that it looked like I wasn't going to be playing basketball, the activity I love more than any other in the world, I said it. I spoke what I thought to be the truth. "It's because I'm white," I said.

"It's not the color of your skin," a different guy said as I walked away from the court. I felt that leaving at that point would be the smartest thing to do. Getting into a conversation about race relations in that situation is the last thing I wanted to do. In all that time we were shooting around, I was ON. Three pointer after three pointer swooshed through the net. Other basketball players can relate when I talk about getting this feeling in your wrist. You've got distance perfect and it feels like there's this straight line connecting your release of the ball and dead center on the basket. I had that feeling. There was no way the guy didn't want to pick me up because he thought I sucked. In pickup basketball, if you lose, you gotta sit. None of us were there to sit. So stacking your team with the best players is the rational thing to do. I don't know.

Thinking back, what I shoulda done is said, "You don't think I'm good enough?", found the guy who was choosing teams for the other side, and demanded that he pick me up so that I could guard this guy and shut him down. I coulda done it too. If I really really concentrate on defense, even at 36 years old, I can shut anyone down. He wouldn't have scored. I may have fouled him constantly, but I could done it. Life is filled with moments where we later realize what we should of said or should have done.

I'm sure they talked about what I had said right after I left. I've been on courts where a guy stormed off pouting because he couldn't get a game. Each court always has a protocol for how teams get picked, even if 90% of the guys there wouldn't know what "protocol"means. Next time I go down there (it's just too damn convenient not to go there) someone there will know me to be the white guy who stormed off because he couldn't get into the first game and then blamed it on racism. That's not who I want to be known as. I accept that whoever's "next" picks the teams. Even if he didn't want to pick me up because he though I wouldn't;t be good enough, if he thought that, it would only be because his judgments of my basketball talents woulda been solely based on the color of my skin. I showed him otherwise, and I still didn't get picked up.

A couple weeks ago, one of Jasmine's co-workers little brothers was shot in East Oakland not because he was in a gang, but instead because he declined to not join a gang. He is going to be paralyzed for the rest of his life.

Tonight, I walked down to the QuikStop and there were several customers waiting outside a door that was locked. They do this whenever the sole clerk needs to go back and restock the fridge, When the door was unlocked, customers walked out, he let us in, and then relocked the door. While I was waiting, other customers came up, stood at the locked door, and only got let in when the clerk let me and the next guy out. Huh? This wasn't about restocking the cooler. The clerk said it was for security. I pressed him for more info and he told me that the night before, several guys had come in, just grabbed as much stuff as they could, and ran out.

The suburbs are sounding better everyday.