Ball Pressure

There was silence in his classroom, then, as Jimmy allowed the enormity of what Kay-Kay was suggesting engulf him like a mid-summer Sahara sandstorm. 

            Was there a way back? She had suggested as much.

            Jimmy didn’t believe in time travel or parallel universes. He also didn’t believe in the physics theory that he had heard from one of the Barton School’s science teachers that all situational possibilities happen simultaneously, but only one actually plays out in our world.

            That would mean there was a universe where Jimmy had never met Trina at a townie bar in Prestonville, Illinois, in January 2007, taken her back to his apartment and indulged in a night of brazen and repercussive sin.

            A universe where the boy, who had been named Ben, had never been born.

            Where he didn’t exist.

            That wasn’t reality, though, and Jimmy shook that notion out of his hair.

            Ben did exist. Or had anyway, before he decided this life wasn’t worth living.

            But he still existed in Jimmy’s mind.

            The question begged, though: Had he wronged Trina so many years ago? She had been a willing participant and had begged for his love at the height of passion. Lifetimes exist in a moment.

            According to Pops’ fundamental beliefs, sex was a consequence of biology. An action that should only be consummated within the confines of marriage, and only as a means to bring God’s children into this world. It was corporate, nothing more than an exchange of bodily fluids that was best left behind closed doors and obviously outside of polite conversation. He didn’t watch any TV or go to movies that might suggest otherwise, instead diving headlong into his Bible after supper.

            Gimme that Word, he’d say.

            Jimmy had been a rebel back in January ’07. He had been liberated from home and Pops for a year and a half, free to indulge in what then had been the finer things in life: Leveraging a fake ID at a Prestonville bar called the Brass Rail, downing two Alabama Slammers before his eyes lilted in her direction.

            She was attractive in a country-wholesome way that Pops might have approved, as long as she was rooted strongly in her Biblical beliefs.

            Their intimacy had happened as if the irresistible force of the winds had met a mountain, an immovable object.

            The next morning they exchanged numbers and swore they’d call each other.

            Didn’t happen, at least not right away.

JIMMY: I wasn’t busy with schoolwork or a part-time job or anything like that. It was all about basketball for me at Southern Illini Junior College in tiny Prestonville. It was January, the conference games were ramping up and even at the JUCO level, winning mattered. But more importantly for a guy like me who had aspirations of transferring to a high-major school as soon as I could after the season ended, stats mattered. So did status, and the only kind of on-court performances that built and maintained status were those that could be talked about within the confines of Internet chat rooms, or this new site college kids used called The Facebook.

            Get ’em talking, one high-major coach had told me. You don’t think we coaches are watching those message boards? Every single one of us want the next big thing. 

            You play well, we’ll come running. Every high-tier coach’s job is on the line, I don’t give a shit what they say. Alumni, donors, boosters…they all demand a winner. It’s a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world. Cynical.

            But one more thing, Jimmy: You’re the next big thing.

            I was averaging north of twenty-five points per game against glorified high school competition, the kind of kids who would either be teaching phy ed at one of Preston County’s six high schools after graduation, or working at the Aldi on the edge of Prestonville in a store management position. 

            But I was different. I was the next big thing.

            Then I met Trina. 

            That night was frigid, below zero, with wisps of snow in the air that I could see under the unmoving street lights. We had just beaten our conference rival by twenty or so, and I had poured in forty-one points, so everybody in town was celebrating, it seemed. This awkward seven-footer from the team nicknamed Bunko and I stepped from the cold into the searing body heat of the Brass Rail and immediately the hoots and hollers went up.

            Hey—it’s Big Man On Campus.

            Jim-my! Jim-my! Jim-my!

            You’re the next big thing, bay-bay!

            Where are you going after you get out of this rural hell-hole? Kansas? North Carolina? Maybe even Duke?

            One of them, for sure. Then after that, it would be onto the NBA, like Pops had prophesied, so I could use my notoriety to spread God’s word.

            “You’re destined to be one of the greats, glory to God,” he had said when I was in high school. “The Lord will use you for his gain, to save many souls from the wrath to come.”

            I had flushed a couple of Alabama Slammers—sloe gin, amaretto, Southern Comfort and orange juice—and surveyed my people like a king would his subjects. I realized I would never see them again come spring, when I would transfer to the next stop on my prophesied journey to the NBA. Instead, it would be a different bar, in Durham, North Carolina, maybe, or down the road in Chapel Hill, with more people I’d never interact with once I moved on to the League. Pops was hoping I’d be back in Chicago with the Bulls, or even Milwaukee, which was a poor man’s Chicago but at least reasonably close by.

            Bunko said, “Look…at…her.” 

            Even above the din I could hear him.

            Now, I can’t say Trina was smokin’ beautiful, Playboy beautiful. She wasn’t one of the models I couldn’t wait to meet in the League. She stood maybe five-foot-six, straight brown hair done up with a hair clip, and dressed in blue-collar blue Southern Illini JUCO sweatshirt. I say blue-collar because she didn’t strike me as a farmer’s daughter; I’m guessing her dad worked at one of the three factories in town, one of which manufactured firearms, of all things. She had long fingers, shapely nails and there was something about her dark-rimmed glasses that emphasized her cheekbones and dimples. 

            In other words, a rural girl, probably looking to get out.

            Trina turned, took one look at me, and raised her arms high in the air, as if I was the conquering hero returning from battle. An empty pitcher indicated she had had a few beers with a trio of friends at a tall round-top.

            Keep in mind, I’ve never met this girl.

            But I was interested.

            “You were awesome tonight!” she said, looping her right arm through my left arm, as a waitress, a girl I knew from one of my classes, brought another pitcher to the table. Somewhere, there was the acrid, telltale sign of somebody smoking. This was about a year before Illinois banned smoking in bars.

            “Here,” Trina said, handing me a beer glass with the Brass Rail logo in black lettering. She poured me one out and the weak foam of Milwaukee’s Best spilled over the side. 

            I drank it while she told me she didn’t attend Southern Illini, but was thinking about taking classes in something, maybe communications. That night was a blur. I remember later they played some slow country song and we drifted onto the dance floor, both hammered. 

            “Let’s go,” I said after the song concluded.

            The next thing I know it’s the morning and we’re both naked in my bed back at the apartment, Kobe Bryant looking down sternly at me from a poster on the wall from home that Pops never really did approve. You shall not worship others above the Lord your God, he had said in a way he thought was tongue in cheek.

            “Hey babe,” she spoke, emerging from a blissful slumber.

            It’s inane now, but I looked at her and said, “S’up?” Then my gaze turned to the clock, which blared the news that I had practice in forty-five minutes, and I had a helluva lot to do, including showering, eating something, getting dressed and, of course, catching the prior night’s college hoops highlights on SportsCenter.

            I’m ashamed to say this now, but she had to go. To my coach, early was on time and on time was late. He had gotten on me about showing up on time. And I wasn’t about to let her lay around the apartment while I was at practice, even if she seemed to be a straight-arrow country bumpkin.

            “Wait, what?” she said, now fully awake.

            “I’ve got practice,” I said.

            “Skip it,” she replied with a come-hither look.

            No way. Coach would have been hotter than the pistols they made at that factory in town so I told her I’d call her later, with questionable intention of doing so. But that set in motion everything that led up to that day in the classroom with Kay-Kay, my closest confidant at the Barton School—the girls basketball coach.

KAY-KAY: I had known a little about Trina after Jimmy had found out that their son had ended his life. At first, Jimmy didn’t buy it; he thought it was some ploy to get him to pay child support after all these years. But there it was, on the website of Preston County’s newspaper…”Cyberbullying a factor in boy’s suicide.” 

            At first, Jimmy put up a front, saying it didn’t matter, that was in his past. He had never wanted kids anyway, that he had told Trina that he wanted nothing to do with the boy’s upbringing, that he couldn’t jeopardize his own future. And he shut her out and ultimately the boy, Ben.

            But I asked Jimmy: How is it that you didn’t end up at Duke or Kansas? Why East Beach State in Lester, Florida, a town about as big as Prestonville, Illinois?

            Turns out, that was his quickest way out of town. He didn’t have time to wait for an offer from one of the blue bloods, or watch them get into a bidding war for his services, a process that could take weeks or even months. In an ideal world, there would have a been a press conference with multiple baseball caps on a covered table in the University Center, cameras rolling, and Jimmy putting on the one of the school he had chosen.

            Instead, he took the first bus as far away as he could, almost literally. His dad hated it, and it ultimately caused their estrangement. His dad had him pegged for the NBA.

            I often think if I would have known Jimmy back then, I would have really disliked him.

            But present day, he was vulnerable, and I could see that the blood was flowing from the eternal needle that Trina had used to prick him. It was as if the boy’s suicide had unleashed him into Jimmy’s brain and he was pounding its walls to get out and tell his story. Jimmy was making mistakes on the sidelines, bonehead, first-year-coach mistakes, including a couple of crucial decisions that led to Barton’s ouster in the state playoffs. That created problems with the school’s administration and regents, who demanded the status of state championships to maintain the constant flow of enrollments. Getting to state was the minimum cut for Jimmy. Me too.

            “I don’t know what to do,” Jimmy murmured that day in his classroom, the hallway quiet outside his closed door. Usually at least a couple of his players hung out in his room during his prep period, there to do homework but ultimately talking hoops. Jimmy had put an end to that practice after everything went down with Trina. He needed time to process, whether he realized it or not.

            “I really don’t,” he said, staring at an X’s and O’s diagram on his whiteboard drawn in red ink, as if basketball strategy might suggest a way out of his predicament.

            I’ve learned in life it’s better to let people come to their own conclusions about a specific course of action. 

            “You could do nothing,” I said quietly. “That is a choice.”

            “Mm-hmm,” he replied staring into space. “But you don’t agree with that.”

            Our words devolved into silence. It was nearly 12:15 p.m. The end-of-period buzzer was about to ring.

            “What do you feel about Trina?” I said. “I mean, if she walked into this room right now, how would you react?”

            Jimmy thought about this for a moment, and said, “I’d ask her about our kid, what happened. What was he like.” I noticed he didn’t use the boy’s given name.

            “That’s not what I asked you,” I replied. “I asked you how you felt about her.”

            “I don’t know her. I never really did.”

            “Exactly.”

            More silence.

            “What are you saying?” he said.

            “What do you think I’m saying?”

            The being inside Jimmy’s head was calmer now, I could tell, due to an injection of non-emotional logic. He took a deep breath and he furrowed his eyebrows.

            “She’s not answering her phone or my texts.”

            The buzzer sounded, ending the period. The first students began to move about outside the door’s window.

            “It’s important to be face to face with some people,” I said, standing up, grabbing my keys off of his desk. I had a class of my own to get to, and it’s always clear that letting students mill around outside of a locked classroom is just inviting shenanigans, even at the buttoned-down Barton School where ties and sport coats were the rule for boys, even Jimmy’s players.

            “Are you saying to actually go back there, to Prestonville? And find her?”

            He paused, and then added, “For what reason?”

            Initially I said nothing, but instead elected to let him work out the strategy while I stepped to the door. He stared at his red dry-erase-board marker.

            “Isn’t what you’ll learn there be more valuable than your perceptions here?” was my parting comment.

            Then I left.

Jimmy’s students—twelve girls, eight boys, including three of his players—entered his classroom with the small talk and chortles and clucking you’d expect from high school juniors and seniors. But those noises gradually ceased as they took their seats, not because it was time for class to commence, but because Jimmy had his back to them, drawing on the white board.

            The dry-erase marker made a squeaking noise as he reached high above his head to fashion a rough map of the state of Illinois, a vertically constructed state first discovered by the explorers Marquette and Joliet. In the northeast corner of his rudimentary map, he wrote “Chicago” and crossed an X. At the bottom of the map he wrote “Prestonville” and circled an O.

            X’s and O’s. The basis of basketball strategy.

            As he drew a forceful ray from the X to the O, a perfectly straight arrow, he spoke to his students without turning.

            “Anyone know,” he said, “what the distance is between Chicago and Preston County, Illinois?”

            Jimmy could sense his students looking at each other.

            This was American history class, not geography.

            “I know,” came a voice to Jimmy’s right and a fair distance out, likely the back of the room. It was Kelso, that pint-sized nerd who was his team manager, responsible for handing out cups of water and gathering towels during games. 

            “And?”

            “It’s about three hundred miles, give or take, according to Google.”

            “That’s good, Kelso. Now, how long would it take to drive there?”

            Jimmy heard tap-tap-tapping before Kelso responded, “Five hours and twenty-nine minutes, taking I-57.”

            Now Jimmy wrote the distance on his map, turned to his class and exhaled deeply.

            “Anybody here believe in time travel?”

            His students looked at each other with stares as blank as clean sheets.

            Nobody replied, so Jimmy turned back to the white board and wrote three letters above the O at the south end of the state.

            They spelled, B-E-N.