Chris Crutcher - Whale Talk

And in the end I live up to my name. The Tao-the real Tao, that knows and is everything-celebrates irony. Nothing exists without its opposite. I didn’t earn a letter jacket because I could, and all my friends did because they couldn’t. Some things really don’t get any better.

And some things do. Chris taps Simet on the shoulder, and Simet calls me down to the gym floor. I work my way down through the crowd, watching Chris retrieve a paper sack he has hidden behind him. When I reach him, he pulls out a blue-and-gold jacket and hands it to me.

“I don’t get a jacket, Chris. I slowed up at State, remember?”

Simet says, “Take a closer look.”

I unfold the jacket, and my throat closes over. Across the back it says, COUGHLIN, on the front it says, BRIAN.

“My brother would of been glad if I gave you this,” Chris says. “So I did.”

It would be nice to say the year ends on this note, that we walk away feeling bigger and better because we set a goal and met it, that a bunch of obscure guys who never had friends before, now have friends and life looks different. And that’s all true, but that isn’t how it ends.

I talk the guys into switching sports through spring, into getting ready for Hoopfest. If you think we didn’t look like swimmers, you should see how much less we look like basketball players. After our third practice Mott says, “Let’s do this like the Chicago Bulls did when they had Michael Jordan. You find some guys who can play this worthless sport, and we’ll be your entourage.” The other guys are quick to agree.

My dad is a pretty fair ballplayer, particularly under the boards, and Simet is one of those rare animals like me, a good athlete on land or sea. We need a fourth, and I pen in Mott’s name, because though he doesn’t move real well on the court, he can put down three pointers with alarming regularity. After a few practices we discover he can also place the alley-oop pass pretty well, which could come in handy when we want to surprise a team for those last two or three points. We enter ourselves in the open division, knowing that will pit us against some tough teams, but we’ll be competitive.

We call ourselves the Slam-Dunking Mermen, in deference to our entourage, who attend most of our practices over at All Night and give us regular scouting reports on the Bushwhackers, Rich Marshall and Mike Barbour’s team. With any luck, fate will not stack us up against them, but they are in the same division, so it’s not unthinkable. If both teams keep winning (or losing, for that matter), we could run into them. Part of me would like to see that happen, and part of me wants to avoid it like STDs.

Barbour hates our entire team worse than ever, because somewhere a little after Easter break Kristen Sweetwater finally called it quits with him and was able to stay with it. It probably helped that Tay-Roy started putting moves on her on the heels of Barbour humiliating her yet again, and Tay-Roy has far less tolerance for her acceptance of that kind of behavior. He told her no girl he was with would ever be subjected to it, and if she started to go back with Barbour, he’d kick Barbour’s ass. It would be a true battle of the Titans, and I don’t know who’d walk away the victor, but I’ve watched Tay-Roy’s resolve as a swimmer and as a bodybuilder, and if you’re going to take him on, you’d better bring a lunch. Tay-Roy is old school. If something doesn’t look right and it falls within his sphere of influence, he influences it.

The Slam-Dunking Mermen look a little different than the run-of-the-mill four-man teams early on a Saturday morning in late June on the first day of Hoopfest. Of ten thousand players, filling up three full blocks of downtown Spokane, we are the only team with a uniformed entourage. They wear the same T-shirts we wear, with a picture of a carp horizontal to the basket, stuffing the ball. Dan Hole is never three feet away from his clipboard, on which he records our stats with the consistency and accuracy of a computer. Chris Coughlin cheers loudly in his letter jacket, though the temperature will probably top out at eighty-five degrees, and Tay-Roy, whose chest expands the T-shirt so much the carp looks like an eel, holds Kristen’s hand. Simon, whose T-shirt expands the other way so the carp looks like a whale, and Jackie Craig, who wears swim fins, man the Gatorade cooler. Carly is playing on a team of her own, so most of the time we’re playing simultaneously. When we’re not, we find her and bring to bear the full power of our outlandish support. She and her teammates like it better when we’re playing simultaneously. My mother does not come downtown for this. She says she’ll just bring our medical cards to the hospital.

The range of talent in the open division is wide. Most contestants have experience in organized ball, and the majority at least played on a varsity team in high school. A few have played in college. We draw a team that’s way out of its league for our first game, so Simet and I rotate out and let Dad and Mott do most of the scoring, Dad from underneath and Mott from beyond the three-point line. Mott’s in shorts today, his bionic leg exposed to the general public for the first time. He really is deadly from long range. Every time he sinks one, Chris goes out of his mind. During timeouts Mott walks over and rubs Chris’s head for luck. Jackie has gotten down the art of clapping the swim fins, which adds a decidedly strange sound to our successes.

They come toward us like a twister in the distance, the black funnel cloud adjusting its trajectory no matter how you try to dodge it. Each time we finish a game and check the postings, which go up almost immediately on the side of a truck trailer parked at Hoopfest Central, we see the Bushwhackers headed right at us. If we each win our last games today-Saturday-we meet at 8:00 Sunday morning. I imagine they would love that. All bragging aside, I’m the best player on either team, but Marshall has Dad overmatched, and Barbour and Simet are too close to call. Their point guard, Alex Neilson, plays at Spokane Community College, and their fourth man is Thurman Weeks, the sixth man on our high school team. Man for man they outmatch us, and if this were four-on-four, we’d be dust. But one guy is on the sidelines at all times, so we have a fair chance.

Our final game on Saturday is close, but we play tough and win it by four. Barbour and Marshall annihilate the team they play, and we’re set for morning.

Dad invites everyone over for dinner in the evening and to set up our strategy for the game. Icko, who has been working most of the day and missed our heroics, supplies juicy burgers from Burger King and a whole bunch of soft ice cream. He tells us the burgers were left over, but they’re hot and tender and I’m pretty sure he used part of his day’s wages to feed us. Of all the guys likely to lose something when this team breaks up, he stands to lose as much as any. He was living by himself at All Night when I met him, staying out of sight and trying to put his son through college. Now he’s adopted us. I swear the guy would do anything for any one of us.

Sunday breaks cool and clear. By 7:30 players stream toward the courts like lemmings. The air is filled with the sound of bouncing balls, balls careening off front rims and backboards, interspersed with the sweet swish of a thousand shots touching nothing but the bottom of the net. The Bushwhackers are on the court when we arrive. Rich sneers at me and watches my dad as if he were the true enemy in a real war.

Except for Chris Coughlin, we ignore them. Chris paces the sidelines, watching Barbour and Marshall as if they were man-eating tigers, his letter jacket snapped to the top as if he thinks one of them is going to strip it off.