Speaking of rap: Lori, the one they were going to shoot hoops with, was a rookie rapper.
His first promo single had started climbing on local radio, a few of the better-known Chicago DJs had pushed it one after another, and word was the reaction had been good.
According to Tony, the debut album was nearly ready.
Alex had never heard any of the promo singles and had met Lil Lori exactly once since he’d woken up in this body, but he — and Aunt Susie, and the rest of the family — broadly approved of Tony running with him.
Most rappers these days were tangled up with gangs one way or another.
It was still an improvement on the gangs themselves.
A track finished and the DJ came straight in over the tail of it.
“That was ‘Express Yourself,’ N.W.A! Now let’s change the flavor a little, ladies and gentlemen. ‘Man in the Mirror,’ from Michael Jackson.”
The intro had barely started before Muffler began working the dial, hunting back and forth, finding nothing he liked, dragging a long scrape of static through the car.
“What’s wrong with MJ?”
Michael Jackson was everywhere right now.
Since the switch Alex had heard his songs by choice and by ambush, and he liked them a great deal; that one especially, with its whole argument about fixing yourself before you change the world, had stuck with him.
“He betrayed us!”
Tony came up out of his seat a little.
“All those years, we backed that man with our whole hearts. And what did we get for it? He’s ashamed of us! Ashamed of being a Black man!” He jabbed a finger out the car window.
“Look! Look at him now!”
Alex looked.
There happened to be an enormous Michael Jackson Pepsi billboard right there beside the road.
That face was, well.
Really very white.
“Traitor.” Muffler produced one word and at last landed on a station he could live with, which was rap again.
“Are you serious?”
A Black man makes white people like him by turning white?
By Alex’s reckoning that only upset Black people and gave white people something to sneer at.
Whatever Tony was saying, the logic wasn’t there.
“That’s what everybody says.”
Tony pressed on.
“White people run the world. They do this to grind down our self-respect, so we keep on being their slaves. You get it? A face can be changed. Bleaching one man out isn’t hard.”
“Area 51,” Muffler contributed.
“Right! White folks caught aliens years ago! And they chose to hide the alien technology — never once for the good of the people, only to fight a world war with it!” Tony was expanding steadily past the horizon.
“And the day they settle who won, they’ll turn straight around and come for us, and put Black people back in chains.”
“Uh. Okay.” Alex was persuaded, and decided to stop talking.
Tony was still chewing on it.
“Ain’t a good time to be named Mike, either. I heard — I heard a whole lot of big men on the South Side want him dead.”
“Jordan?” Alex was genuinely shocked.
Michael Jordan was the Bulls’ franchise player and the sweetheart of the entire city.
“Not Michael. Mike. Mike Tyson,” Tony corrected him.
“Oh — that. That I know about.”
A few days ago the heavyweight champion had been flattened by a forty-two-to-one underdog.
Alex had heard that a lot of neighborhood money went down with him.
Not far from the place they’d agreed on with Lil Lori, the three of them reached the spot: a public basketball court fenced in chain link, next to a small park.
The neighborhood was a long way up from the streets around Alex’s house.
The commercial strip was close, there were high-rise apartments just over there, a squad car rolled through the intersection every so often, and the people playing inside the fence were noticeably better dressed.
Lil Lori was already waiting.
He was about Tony’s age, shorter than Alex and very thin — a build you didn’t see much of around here — with dreadlocks, and he was warming up in an unhurried sort of way with headphones on.
A little way from the hoop, two Black men stood talking.
One looked twenty-five or twenty-six, the other somewhere in his thirties.
Once the car was parked, Tony got out first and called out at volume, “Hey! Bro!”
“Hey!”
Lori pulled off the headphones, grinned, and traded a complicated handshake with Tony and then with Muffler.
When Alex’s turn came, the two of them opened with the first move fine, but on the up-and-down collision Alex ran the sequence backward, and they ended up swinging fists at each other four or five times without once meeting.
Alex pulled his hand back and smiled, awkward and polite.
Lori laughed.
“Forget it, man, don’t worry about all that.” He clapped Alex on the shoulder.
“Come on. Let me introduce everybody.”
The two men by the hoop came over.
The younger one was Lori’s partner in the act.
He said to call him Al.
“Oh, you’re the one—” Tony, catching Al’s warmth, cupped one hand around an imaginary microphone and pulled his mouth in close to it.
“Boom-ts-boom-ts, duh duh duh—” doing his own version of the beatboxing.
“Yeah…” Al laughed, and then gave them a few bars for real.
He was a great deal more professional.
With his eyes shut, Alex could almost have believed somebody had set up a drum kit beside him.
Tony gave him a thumbs-up.
The older one was from the record company, and not as easygoing as Al.
“Everybody calls me AK.” Then he bumped fists with all three of them.
That made six men who all knew each other.
Lori tossed his CD Walkman and his jacket to AK, and the rest of them shed jackets and whatever else they were carrying in a pile under the hoop.
Just a regular three-on-three, half-court.
It was never going to be realistic for a body Lori’s size to bang with Tony and Muffler, two big, strong football players, and Alex understood perfectly well that this was exactly why Tony insisted on dragging him along, so he went over and picked Lori up himself.
Put plainly: apart from Lori, none of the five other men on that court were there to play basketball.
They were there to keep him company, and when you’re keeping somebody company the job is to make him happy, so everyone was working from the same unspoken script.
Whenever Lil Lori had the ball, the others drifted wide and left Alex to deal with him.
Crossover, behind-the-back, spin move into empty air, in-and-out — Lori clearly had real training under him, a whole package of handles, and both his turns and his dribble were quick.
Right after the switch, Alex had been taken apart in this matchup.
Today he was marginally less bad.
That was the extent of it.
Time went by, and the hollering on the court kept pace with the flat buzzing thud of the ball.
Say what you liked, the raw material of this body was excellent.
Alex had been blown past again and again, trailing Lori and eating his dust, and apart from the weariness in his soul his legs were holding up fine.
Maybe my PE credits can still be saved after all?
One moment of that, and he bit hard on a shake, lost his balance, and sat down on the concrete.
When he looked back, Lori had already finished the layup and was busy borrowing Jordan’s celebration.
“Time! Time out, let’s take a break.”
It was AK, guarding Muffler, who cracked first.
Muffler didn’t have Tony’s smoothness, but he was immovable on the inside, and he leaned on people with that running back’s body until they came apart.
AK had been worn straight down.
Al, matched up against Tony, was somehow still fine.
“Come on! AK! I’m just getting warm!” Lori complained, ball on his hip.
He really did enjoy going at Alex.
“Can’t do it. Can’t do it.” AK put both hands up and withdrew to the sideline.
Muffler chuckled where he stood.
“Y’all done? We got next.” Three Black guys who had been waiting for the court came over to ask.
“Sure,” Lori said.
“Alex.” Tony threw Alex a look.
“Go ahead, you all play first.”
Alex followed Tony off the court, leaving Lori, Al, and Muffler out there.
The three of them hadn’t been sitting down ten minutes before it went wrong.
As near as Alex could tell, Lori had been picked clean two or three times in a row, and in his hurry to force his way through he put his head straight into an opponent’s elbow — no telling whether it was on purpose — and went down on the spot.
“Fuck!” He got up and shoved the man.
What he hadn’t reckoned on was that the man wasn’t about to take it.
“Can’t take a loss? Cryin’ like some little bitch.” His mouth was filthy and he shoved right back.
All six players collapsed inward, the fight widened, and AK scrambled up off the sideline and went out to help.
Alex turned his head and saw Tony come up out of his crouch like a startled rabbit — and then not toward the court at all.
He bolted for Muffler’s Toyota at the edge of the lot, and was back maybe thirty seconds later, driving into the middle of the crowd and planting himself in front of Lil Lori.
“Hey!”
He lifted the hem of his T-shirt to show the black pistol grip tucked in his waistband, and his eyes went as flat and mean as Mike Tyson’s.
“How big you wanna play this? Huh? How big you wanna play this, son?”