Paradise Lost

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There was the world, an amorphous form of fallen humanity traveling a great and wide highway careening toward hell.

           But there were also those who were enlightened, those who had found the truth and built their dwelling on that granite cornerstone. Because of that, disaster would not venture near their tent.

           There was room for all in the kingdom, Pops had drilled into my head with countless pithy sayings and catch phrases, like:

           “Look…the fields, they are already white for harvest!” he fairly shouted late one evening to my twelve-year-old self as the jaundiced street lamps passed one by one in the darkness amidst rain that sounded like piss hitting the side of the bowl. Occasional flashes of lightning allowed squared shadows of the downtown Chicago skyline to show through. But they were gone as soon as they appeared.

           The storm outside, and inside, was growing.

           “There are many who choose not to see the truth,” he went on, “enough to fill hundreds of United Centers across our land. Your destiny is to reach them in His name, glory to God, those who will fill the seats of countless arenas where you will play, perhaps for the Bulls.

           “If you are obedient, your mansion will be assured.”

           Years later, those words echoed in the dark recesses of my mind, in the living room of this shit off-campus apartment in Prestonville I shared with two other guys on the basketball team. This nothing burg is about seventy-five miles east of Evansville, Indiana, and if you go seventy-five miles west, you’ll find yourself in West Bumblefuck, Missouri, a proper noun for Hicksville USA. Prestonville is about as downstate as you can get in Illinois, among the sea of cornfields that make up an area called Little Egypt. It’s where Southern Illini Junior College is located.

           I was there because Pops liked to think the enemy, that is, the guy with red horns and tights, had filled my mind with distractions that resulted in grades that were so-so coming out of high school, certainly nowhere near good enough to get into a college basketball blue blood like Duke or North Carolina. Two years in JUCO, and I would be ready to step into the larger world he prophesied. Southern Illini was a setback, he said, but quickly overcome with obedience to the cause.

           The truth—and I knew it, though Pops refused to see—was that while I was a very good high school basketball player, I wasn’t truly and unequivocally a special player destined for true greatness. I wasn’t Jordan or Bird or Magic or LeBron, guys the casual fan knew by one name.

           At not quite 6-foot-4, I was a tweener. Not really a guard, but not really a forward, either. But I could shoot the lights out on some nights. In other words, I was a commodity. Line ten of us up and take your pick; you’d get twelve points and five boards per game easy. Nice, solid numbers, but not flashy.

           Nowhere near NBA numbers.

           Still, Pops was undeterred.

           “You can still achieve your destiny,” his voice echoed again. “Obedience is the first step.”

           Another catch phrase.

           At that moment, in April 2010, in that crummy apartment with hazy, brown water marks on the taupe ceiling high above, and empty pizza boxes thrown haphazardly on the kitchen table, I realized that I had been obedient to no one, including myself.

           “I’m pregnant,” she said, in a simple lilt.

           Her sienna hair was straight and a little stringy, as if it hadn’t been recently washed. Her glasses were thick-rimmed, implying intelligence, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of her midsection. She wasn’t showing, but she wasn’t thin as a rail, either. I wondered what was growing inside her, not who.

           She wasn’t even a Southern Illini Junior College student.

           She was a Prestonville native.

           A townie.

           Trina was her name, Trina LaValley. I’m ashamed to admit I only knew her last name because of her Twitter handle, @trinalavalley. We had exchanged a few texts and DMs after that night in late January when we hooked up after a long night of partying at Brass Tacks, this townie dive bar in downtown Prestonville, the kind of place where the support posts and brick walls had messages for all time written in Sharpie. Go there now, and I’d bet you’d be able to find what she wrote in big, fat, alcohol-induced cursive letters that night on a part of the wall tucked into a corner near the DJ booth:

           Trina wants Jimmy.

           She did. And for that one moment, maybe, I wanted her, but more as a conquest or maybe just a means to get my rocks off. Real Christian. But I was BMOC back then, big man on campus.

           I was all that.

           I had a few offers on the table, full rides from Wisconsin-Milwaukee and East Beach State in another nothing town, Lester, Florida, on the Atlantic coast. I had a preferred walk-on offer from Northwestern. I also had a bunch of Division III offers.

           Pops: Nope, nope and nope. And Division III? Don’t be silly. Division III players don’t go to the NBA.

           “You’ve got to hold out for bigger, boy, don’t you see?” he said. “Be patient. The Lord is at work. That prime opportunity is coming. Just wait.”

           But I couldn’t wait. Not now.

           Here was Trina LaValley, standing before me with a blitzkrieg of revelation, enough to chink my armor of immortal dreams, to say nothing of my destiny.

           “I think we should talk about this,” she said, with an eagerness veritably pouring out of her eye sockets and dripping onto the worn wine-colored carpet, leaving stains I couldn’t ignore.

           I was going to be a daddy.

           Pops was going to be a granddad.

           If he found out, that is. If he found out.

           “Um, damn,” I said, and immediately, I realized that wasn’t an answer.

           Trina didn’t say anything, but her lips pursed and her eyes went from eager to fairly squinting.

           What are you saying? they said.

           “Look, here’s the thing, the only way out of this…” was my only reply.

           “I am not getting an abortion.”

           “I’m not ready to be a…father.” I almost said dad, but that language seemed too familiar, like that made the situation more real somehow.

           “Well, you’d better think about it more, a lot more. Because my parents are going to expect you to accept your responsibilities.”

           I had never met her father, naturally, but I could imagine him in a spartan kitchen in a house somewhere in town, hands on his hips, tie loosened. Stern. Real Ward Cleaver and Andy Griffith kind of stuff. I figured that because Pops watched only wholesome TV, from the primitive years of the 1960s, and made me watch with him, went we weren’t watching the NBA on TNT.

           “You’ve got responsibilities, too,” I said in a small voice. Wrong thing to say. Shit.

           “You’re going to father a child. Do you not get what this means?”

           “I’m leaving after the semester. I’m going to the NBA.”

           I didn’t believe that, and neither did she.

           There were now rivulets of tears running down her reddened cheeks, leaving white contrails in their wake.

           I was expecting a verbal response, maybe, “You’ll regret this” or “How could you?” Something to build guilt.

           Instead, she said, “I fell for you that night at the bar. Hard.”

           I hadn’t. She went on.

           “I want us to be together, raise our child together, here in Prestonville. We can’t undo what’s happened, but…”

           “But what?”

           “We can make it right by our child. We owe him that much. Or her.”

           Saying “Our child” twice in mere seconds was a double barrel, and I literally recoiled a from those words.

           It pissed me off.

           At that moment, every single alternative to this…situation flashed through my mind as anger swirled, dissipated, then swirled again, followed by a wave of sorrow, then blinding fear.

           Pops was destroyed, sitting in his La-Z-Boy, head in hands, before clasping his hands together in an intercessory prayer for forgiveness on my behalf. I was playing ball at a Division III, living in another shitty apartment on the edge of town, our little boy, or girl, sitting in a high chair with yellow goo around his, or her lips, Trina working as an office admin. I was working in the farm fields near Prestonville, learning how to drive a tractor and hitting Brass Tacks on the weekends for country cover bands.

           I wasn’t at Milwaukee or Northwestern, but I was putting up twelve points and five boards a game at East Beach State. Or maybe more. Maybe a lot more.

           Maybe enough to get me an NBA look.

           Surely that was obedience?

           I looked up, and the apartment door slammed.

           Trina was gone.

           So was I. All I could imagine was getting as far away from Illinois as possible.

           Florida seemed far enough to put my past behind me.

           Somewhere I could get lost, until maybe I got discovered.

           Play well, make the NCAA tournament, shine in front of the people that mattered.

           Maybe after a year or two at East Beach I could transfer to a blue blood.

           And then maybe, just maybe, I’d end up in an NBA camp.

           Or even drafted? Wow.

           Maybe this whole thing was destined to happen, I wondered, to nudge me toward my destiny.

           That had to be it.

           Trina was gone, and my roommates were out, so I hit my knees, put my hands together like Pops had taught me when I was a wee lad, and I whispered into the ether. It was long swaths of recitation from Good Book and every prayer I could think of.

           Our Father, Who art in heaven…

           Glory be, glory be.

           At that moment, I felt as if this was one of those rare times where a person can have one foot in the future with the other in the past. The present, then, is ether, a ghost-like mirage of two overlapping circles, I think they’re called Venn diagrams.

           I would leave.

           Yes.

           She—Trina—would stay in Prestonville, and in my past.

           I would put all this away in a closet in the deep recesses of my mind and lock it for all time.

           I would turn my back on Trina. And him. Or her.

           Real Christian.