When I thought about it, I knew it wasn’t so much that I had changed, or even that she had changed, but the situation was different than it had been, and we couldn’t talk about it. When I was younger, I used to tell myself I was going to do this or do that and I believed it. Now I didn’t know. For a long time Moms hung on to that old stuff, about me going to college and making something of myself. When I would lay in bed at the Grant, waiting for the next day to roll around, I was also waiting for something to happen, something to change my life. It was like I was running in a marathon and suddenly forgot where the finish line was. But I knew I still had a place to get to, even if I couldn’t see it, and I knew I was scared to stop running.

* * *

All along, though, I had my game. My game was my fame, and I knew it was together. From the first time I played basketball in grade school I was good. I was good, but I was short then. Some of the older guys used to call me runt. “You got a sweet game for a kid, runt,” they’d say.

I was always on the court practicing, trying to get my game more together. I used to imagine being the shortest guy in the NBA and scoring the winning basket in the championship.

Then, when I got to be fifteen, I started to grow. When my seventeenth birthday came around, I was six three. Now, my game was sweet when I was short, but when I got taller, it was really nice. I played ball just about every day for about three years straight until near the end of my senior year. Then, all of a sudden, I began to go through a whole lot of changes. I was feeling okay, but I just didn’t want to do anything. I’d sit around and try to decide what I wanted to do, and that would take an hour or so, and then, when I decided what I wanted to do, I still might not do it because I just didn’t seem to have the energy. Then, to top things off, sometimes if I did really break out into a hustle and do something, it would get messed up. I wasn’t sure it was me or if things just weren’t going my way. The Scotch is a good example of what I mean.

I had had some words with my moms after I had left a tea bag in the sink.

“What’s the matter?” she said with her hands on her hips. “Your arm so bad off you can’t reach over there and put the tea bag in the garbage?”

I didn’t say nothing.

“You know that tea bag is going to leave a stain and you’re not going to clean it.”

“I’ll put it in the garbage,” I said.