“I don’t know, but if he paints like that, Chicago must be a weird place!”

“No, man, this Tyrone—what did you say his last name was?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I got a call from some cat named Tyrone something—maybe Tyrone Giddins—wanted to talk to me about the team. He called once or twice and said something about being interested in helping out financially. I just told him to shove off.”

He kept on talking to himself. At first he said a few words out loud, and then I could tell he was still talking to himself in his head because every once in a while he would nod to himself. I asked him what he thought it was all about, and he said he didn’t know, but he was sure going to try to find out.

The day of the game I woke up nervous. Basketball never made me nervous before. Ox called up about fifteen minutes after I woke up, and he told me he was nervous, too. All right. I knew I had all day to kill, so I went over some of the diagrams of the plays, ran them in my mind until I could see them.

Joni called to wish me luck. I asked her if she was going to wish Paul luck, too.

“I just did,” she said. “He’s in the shower now.”

“In the shower?”

“Um-hm,” she whispered into the phone, “I wish it were you, darling. Maybe soon it will be. Good-bye.”

She hung up the phone.

Joni knew the kind of things to say. She knew how to say it, too. Even though I knew it was phony, and she knew it was phony, it still got next to me.

The next team we played was half white, so I figured that they couldn’t be much. They had this one whitey they called Sweet Jesus who was supposed to hold me. He was about six four and had long hair and a beard. The sucker didn’t warm up and spent the whole time before the game with a towel on his head. I told Paul to send out for some soda because I was going to have the sucker’s heart for lunch. It didn’t quite come off that way.

The first time the fool came downcourt he took me inside, got the ball, and dunked backwards. The next time he got the ball he told me he was going left, was going to stop, and throw in a soft jumper that wasn’t going to touch anything but the net and my ego. He did it, too. The fool had me believing he could walk on water by the third quarter. My best game was as good as his, and I think he knew it. I was playing my best game, too, and just wondering whether he was playing his. When I had the ball, he was on my case like a hungry dog on a pork chop. When he had the ball, I was doing everything I knew how to do and the cat was still getting his stuff off.