I spent the next few days lying around the house, watching television, hanging out with friends, and trying to think of a direction for my life. One afternoon, my mom came home from work and said that we needed to have a talk.
It turned out there was a plan, but it was something I’d forgotten. My mom said she was going to keep her end of a bargain we made a few years ago. All I remembered about the deal was that when I turned eighteen, I would be free. But there was another piece to it. “I’m not going to pay for you to live under my roof, and come and go as you please, and do nothing with your life,” she lectured. “Like I said, you’re going to find a college.”
With her help, I registered for summer school at Community College of Philadelphia and picked my classes. Then I hastily put together a plan: get my scholastics together, take the SAT again, and go to Temple or another big college to play basketball. It felt like going backward, but it was a life lesson and a chance to start over.
Then she delivered the worst news of all: I’d need to get a job too.
There was only one job I was qualified for: lifeguarding. I went back to visit my swim team coaches, who had a list of the community pools in need of lifeguards. When they handed me the printout, there was only one pool on it: Belfield, which was more like a wet jail cell than a swimming pool.
It wasn’t much of a job, since I was only working two or three days a week, but it was just enough to keep my mom happy. On my first day of work, I saw what looked like half the neighborhood crammed into a tiny pool. It was more people than should reasonably be in a pool, and definitely more than a young, inexperienced lifeguard could control.
On my second day, the pool was even more crowded, and I saw a little boy playing in the middle of everyone. He seemed excited, like he was having a good time in the midst of the chaos. As I sat there watching, one of the senior lifeguards jumped in the water, grabbed him, and brought him out onto the deck.
I jumped off my chair and ran to him as the other lifeguard was turning him over. The boy was on his back now and coughing. I stood there stupidly, trying to figure out if he was breathing or if I needed to give him CPR. Then I realized that if he was coughing, he must be breathing.
“Hart, you didn’t see that?” the senior lifeguard shouted at me.
“Nope. No, I did not. I thought he was playing. I had no idea that he was serious.”
People, before you judge, you need to know that it’s not always possible to tell the difference between someone who’s playing and someone who’s panicking. They’re both usually yelling. They’re both waving their hands. They’re both splashing around. And if they’re surrounded by fifty other kids who are also yelling and waving their hands, it’s like some Where’s Waldo? shit, except harder because everyone’s wearing swimsuits.
My point is: If you’re planning to drown, tell somebody first.
My other point is: There were fifty motherfuckers standing around that kid, and they didn’t notice either.
My real point is: I got fired.
The call the next morning went exactly like this: “No need to come to work. We don’t think it’s safe for you to be here.” By that, they meant safe for me, not for the swimmers. Motherfuckers at that pool were mad.
Fortunately, basketball tryouts were coming up at community college, and that was what I really cared about. Maybe my playing could make up for my poor academics and I could go from here to the Temple Owls to the 76ers or something. That struck me as a good plan. And it would be easy to shine because the community college didn’t have a big team: They probably played like three other schools.
So I showed up at tryouts, feeling overqualified.
And . . . I didn’t make the team. I didn’t make the fucking team. I didn’t make this small-time community college basketball team.
It had never occurred to me that when I stopped growing during school, and everyone else kept growing, my basketball career was no longer on a growth trajectory either. My totally impractical and pretty vague but only plan for my life went up in smoke that day.
Meanwhile, classes were going horribly. In math, the teacher handed out a pop quiz. I was in no way or shape prepared for it. I thought you just had to study for the regular tests. The quiz may have been his way of checking to see how much we already knew, but whatever the case, I failed it. Probably got the lowest score in the class.
After I failed that test, didn’t make the basketball team, and got fired from my first job, the terror really sank in. Up to that moment, I’d just made a mistake by not trying and not having a direction. Now I was putting in effort and planning for the future, and I still failed. This meant the problem wasn’t my thinking: The problem was me. I wasn’t good enough.
And on top of everything, I’d been going through a five-month dry spell.
25
* * *
CROSSING THE DESERT. OR IS IT THE DESSERT? I’LL JUST PUT BOTH IN HERE, SO I’M SAFE.
I applied myself to the one thing I could succeed in that summer: taking advantage of my mom’s more relaxed regime. My friend Spank had been inviting me to a club called Dances, and finally, I was able to go with him.
I’d known Spank since high school, because he used to play basketball in our neighborhood. He was another friend with a plan. He was attending Temple University, but he’d stop by the community college to meet me all the time because he thought the community college had a better male-to-female ratio.
We started going to Dances and trying to meet girls; if nothing worked out, we’d end up at a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s nearby. I spent a lot of nights at McDonald’s. I was on a drought that felt like it would never end. No matter who I talked to in the club, she had no interest in me. It’s one of the worst feelings in the world when you start to believe that the person you see in the mirror every day may not be attractive to anyone except your mama.
I couldn’t afford to buy the designer clothes other guys were wearing, so I didn’t even have a fighting chance. The best I could muster was a baggy food-stained sweater and baggier jeans, with dirt so deeply embedded in the denim that no detergent was strong enough to remove it.
Spank, on the other hand, was a big guy with a booming voice, a colossal personality, and enough money to buy himself a Guess denim jacket and matching jeans. He’d get on the dance floor, and women surrounded him. I’d try to dance my way in there, half swallowed up by my dirty clothes, and the next thing I knew, girls would be asking each other, “Y’all tired?”
I had the desert dick of a lifetime.
Until one night, I met someone who didn’t excuse herself to go to the bathroom or run off to her friends after twenty seconds of talking to me. She was packed into a tight dress that showed off everything, but she was fun and loudmouthed like one of the guys. We laughed and snapped on each other the whole night, until finally she said, “We should hang out.”
I’d been on such a losing streak that if she hadn’t made the first move, I probably wouldn’t have suggested it myself. “Where do you work?” I asked.