By Melissa King
I don’t know his name. I played basketball with him, his brother, and their roommate today. They were new to the game, but they played hard. The most experienced player (also the tallest and the best English speaker) was the one who asked me to play. I had been at the other end of the court shooting baskets, stealing glances at them, knowing they were returning the favor. When you’re a 30-year-old white woman shooting around by yourself in a park populated largely by Latinos, everybody looks at you.
Tori, Melinda, and I got into a discussion tonight about whether or not the person we’d all seen as we walked into the gym was a teenage boy or a woman in her 20s.
“So?”
John likes us. He’s there almost every Monday, and I always notice him listening to what everybody’s saying, even though he never says anything. So I said, “John, do you think that person out front is a man or a woman?” He was shooting around, looking like he was in his own world (he’s a little cross-eyed). “Boy,” he said.
It’s a good way to feel.
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Another time in this same park I was shooting around with a kid called Orlando. His three friends rode up on two bicycles to watch us. The Gap can only dream of capturing the urban slouch of these kids in their baggy jeans, sitting on two-thirds enough bicycle.
