When I Was the Greatest Page 5

  “Punch! Don’t slap him, son,” Malloy said, annoyed.

  The thing is, I knew what to do. I knew how to take cover and wait for the perfect time to throw the uppercut. I mean, Malloy had been training me for a long time, and it’s not like I had never sparred before. I guess the stupid yarn situation was still bugging me—distracting me. I was just glad Doris didn’t flip out about it.

  “Okay, okay, that’s it,” Malloy murmured, saving me while trying to light a cigarette. “We’re through. Good job.” Jamaal backed off and held his gloves out for me to tap them with mine. A sign of sportsmanship and, thank goodness, a sign we were done. Don’t know much more of the big guy I could’ve taken.

  “How your hands?” Malloy wheeled over to me.

  “Sore,” I replied, pulling off the gloves and unwrapping layer after layer of the white tape Malloy always wrapped around my fists. He said it would toughen up my hands, but it didn’t seem to be working.

  Jamaal quickly tossed his equipment in a duffel bag and zipped it shut. He didn’t say nothing. He just looked at me and Malloy, nodded, and headed for the door. He never hung around and helped clean up or talked trash with us. He just showed up, beat up on whoever was there, and rolled out.

  Malloy shook his head, sort of confused, but instead of making some slick comment about how strange Jamaal was, he focused back on my hands.

  “Let me see,” he said, the cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. I held them out. “This one here is swollen.” He pointed at the middle knuckle on my right hand. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you—”

  “I know, I know, keep my fists tight. Squeeze water out of a rock,” I finished his sentence. I had heard it a million times.

  “Your punch has gotten pretty solid over the years, but what you gonna do when you finally get in the ring, not for a spar but for a real match? Break your hands all up?”

  Malloy took a pull on his cigarette and shook his head. Then he tapped the ash on the floor.

  “Come on, man,” I said, sucking my teeth. “I keep telling you I don’t wanna fight nobody.” I bent my fingers back to loosen them up.

  “Hey, hey, don’t get mad. I’m just saying.” Malloy backed off, and rolled back over to the corner. “I ain’t never met a boxer that’s scared to box, that’s all.”

  “It’s not that I’m scared, I just ain’t ready yet,” I muttered, embarrassed. And totally lying. I was scared to death.

  Malloy held up an empty bottle to see if there was anything left in it. Not much. Maybe a swallow. He shook his head like he was more disappointed in the bottle than he was in me.

  “I know, Ali,” he said, taking one more puff on his cigarette, then mashing it out. He blew a smoke stream up to the ceiling that seemed to go on forever, and then he looked over at me. “Aight, we’re done for the day.”

  “But I didn’t clean up yet,” I said, confused. Usually it’s training for an hour, then cleanup for an hour.

  “Ah, it’s Sunday. Don’t worry about it,” he said, twisting the cap off the bottle. “Just come by and do it tomorrow. I got things to do today.” Yeah, like buy another bottle. Malloy took the last swallow and hissed. “Now go home and pray to God for some balls,” he chuckled. I knew he meant it as a joke, but I didn’t think it was funny at all. Low blow.

  4

  On my way back from Malloy’s, I saw Needles and Noodles sitting outside on the stoop. The church up the block was just letting out. All the old ladies with the big hats and mustaches came stepping out like the sidewalk was a runway. The boys our age were all dressed in oversize suits, dingy shirts, and sneakers. The girls, in loose skirts and clunky shoes. There were a few old men in pastel suits, limping, I think, on purpose. They used white rags to wipe sweat from their foreheads and then stuffed them deep into their back pockets. There weren’t many of them coming out of church, but the ones who were looked like they stepped straight out of an old movie. That’s for sure.

  Needles sat on the stoop, where he always sat. Two steps from the top. And he was doing what he was always doing, knitting, if that’s what you want to call it. He held his needles awkwardly and wove in and out, looping the yarn slowly around each needle. Occasionally he would jerk, almost as if he were throwing a punch, and the loops would come loose. Same old thing. The black yarn seemed to be working out for him, though. He didn’t look nowhere near as soft as he did with the purple. I knew my mom would agree once she saw it.

  Noodles was standing, leaning against the railing. He was waiting for Tasha, like he always did every Sunday. Tasha was his girlfriend just because he said so. I don’t know if they ever actually discussed this, or if she even knew she was Noodles’s girl. But she was, let him tell it.

  “Yo,” I said, stepping up on the first step. “What’s good?”

  “The whole hood, understood?” Needles rhymed randomly. I snickered and shook my head while giving him dap.

  “Wassup, man,” Noodles said, looking down the block toward the church. But before I could say anything, he whipped toward me, covering his nose. “What the—damn, Ali, you stink! Where you coming from?”

  “Man, I was down at Malloy’s,” I said, pulling my shirt up over my nose to get a whiff. It wasn’t that bad. Noodles shook his head in disgust and went back to looking down the block.

  “What you lookin’ at anyway?” I asked, taking the attention off my funk. “Oh, let me guess, Tasha.”

  I put a whine in my voice when I said Tasha’s name. Needles laughed.

  Noodles stood on his tippy-toes and stretched his neck as if it would help him see clearer.

  “Yeah, man,” he said with an attitude. “She down there talking to some wack dude.”

  “How you know he wack? You don’t even know that guy,” Needles said.

  “Plus, that’s pretty much what people do after church. Stand around and talk to each other,” I said, half-slick and half trying to make him feel better.

  “Yeah, but not like she talking to him,” Noodles insisted.

  Needles sucked his teeth and went back to his yarn.

  At first I wasn’t going to look, just because I thought it was all so silly. But I couldn’t resist. There Tasha was, standing in front of a man who I was ninety-nine percent sure was the preacher. The only reason I wasn’t a hundred percent sure is because he didn’t have on no gold or diamonds. Had he had on gold or diamonds, I would have been certain. He did have on the white collar, though.

  “Man, you buggin’,” I said to Noodles. “That dude’s the preacher!”

  I snickered to myself.

  “Yeah, whatever. He just better not try nothing with my girl or I’m gonna have to Hulk up on him.”

  Now I had to choke back my laughter. I looked over at Needles, who was sitting behind Noodles. He smirked and rolled his eyes. Even he thought Noodles was acting silly.

  After Tasha finished talking to the preacher, she started coming our way. I won’t lie. Tasha was hot. On fire. She was grown-woman fine. Dark skin, long legs, big eyes, good teeth (she used to have braces), a mean walk, and a battery pack in her back full of attitude. But because of the rest of her, the attitude was easy to overlook most of the time. Plus, whenever she was dealing with Noodles, the smart mouth came in handy. She would fire right back and put him in his place like it was nothing. Tasha was like a flame, pretty to look at, but if you got too close, she’d burn you up.

  “Hey, boys,” she said, looking directly at Needles and me. “Oh, hey, Noodles,” she grunted, and rolled her eyes around the world. It was clear she didn’t count him as one of the “boys.”

  I said wassup.

  Needles started, “Hey, Ta—”

  “Tasha,” Noodles cut him off, his voice already on ten. “Who was that you was talking to?”

  “Oh, Lord,” she said under her breath. “What you talking about?”

  “That lame clown I saw you talking to down there. Who he? Y’all got a thing?”

  Tasha smiled and put one ha
nd on her hip.

  “Do we got a thing? Oh, we got a thing, all right.” I knew she was just teasing him, but Noodles bit like a pitbull on raw meat.

  “Oh yeah? I knew you was cheating on me! Tell him next Sunday, church will be extended a few hours for his funeral,” Noodles barked.

  “Cheat on you?” Tasha bugged out her eyes like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Cheat on you? I can’t cheat on someone I ain’t with! Fool, you crazy!”

  She twisted her mouth and squinted her eyes, making one funny, mean face. “Plus, that was my pastor, dummy. I ain’t got nothing going on with him but trying to figure out how to get to heaven, which is what you need to be worried about too. You so busy chasing me. Better chase Jesus. Probably got a better shot!” Ouch. I was impressed. She really laid it on him with that one. It’s not like he could say he didn’t need Jesus or that he didn’t want to go to heaven. Noodles is a bad dude, but he ain’t that bad.

  Noodles piped down. He knew he had been beaten again.

  “What y’all doing out here anyway?” Tasha asked.

  “Not much,” I said, massaging my sore knuckles. Noodles was still in his feelings and tried to pretend that he didn’t hear her.

  Tasha shifted her weight to her other hip. “Wassup, Needles? Your knitting is getting good.” Needles smiled so wide, you could see all of his teeth.

  “Thanks, Tasha. I been sticking with it. I’m a make you something one day, watch,” Needles said in his own smooth way.

  “I know that’s right, boy,” Tasha flirted.

  Noodles looked back at his brother and shot him a dirty look.

  “What you into today, Tash?” I asked.

  “Man, I gotta help Mo with his thing.”

  I glanced at Noodles. “What, Mo having another party?”

  “You know it,” Tasha said. She rolled her eyes again. I guess she wasn’t too thrilled about helping out.

  Mo, or MoMo as most of us called him, was her twenty-year-old brother. He was, pretty much, the coolest kid in our neighborhood. His claim to fame: secret parties. We had never been to one, but we, and probably every other kid in Bed-Stuy, had heard all about them. He had them in the basement of their parents’ brownstone, and in order to come, you had to get a special invite, and know the secret code, which changed every time, to get in. This kid Matt I used to spar with at Malloy’s went to one and told me all about it. Matt was older than me. I think he was eighteen, but he was built like a streetlamp, just like me. He used to give me the blues in the ring, so bad, but I still liked him. He was a good dude. You just never know if a person’s lying or not, no matter how nice they are, but Matt said he went to one of MoMo’s parties and claimed there were dancers there, and I don’t mean ballerinas. I mean, dancers. Like, stripper dancers. And he said MoMo had arranged for a DJ to be there with the full setup. He said the DJ was playing behind the bar.

  That’s right, there’s a bar at these parties too. With a bartender. I ain’t too into the drinking thing, mainly because, well, I’d hate to come home trashed and Doris is there waiting for me with her mean face on. So I try to stay away from the liquor. But I thought it was cool that MoMo had it at the parties. Matt also told me that MoMo always had red lights, and that the girls that come to these parties ain’t all uptight and stank acting. He even said he almost got some in the back room. That’s right, MoMo has a back room down there too, just in case somebody gets lucky. Now, I didn’t know if all this was true, but if it was, this was big-time, major-player type stuff.

  The funny thing is, MoMo is nothing like the rest of his family. His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Williams, were pretty much good when it came to money. Mr. Williams worked somewhere in the city. I’m not sure where, but I know he wore a suit and carried a briefcase every single day. I didn’t even know people still carried briefcases, but I figured since he still was, there must’ve been some pretty important papers in it. Mrs. Williams is a biology professor at City College. The only reason I know that is because Tasha always talks about how she has to go to college, and how she’s probably going to end up at City just because that’s where her mom works and she can go for free.

  Tasha’s a straight-A student, and even though she always gave Noodles a whole bunch of lip, she was a cool girl. It’s just that Noodles was always acting wild, so she had to put him in his place. That’s all. But I knew she liked him. Sometimes you can just tell. It’s the whole good-girl-likes-bad-boy thing, which I don’t really get. Tasha’s parents owned a whole brownstone that she says has been in her family for like seventy-five years. Kind of like the Brysons. She’s the only person I know around here who still has one, other than Malloy, and it’s cool that she doesn’t try to make the rest of us feel bad about renting floors.

  MoMo, whose real name is Maurice, on the other hand, didn’t go to college. He didn’t even finish high school. He doesn’t have a job or nothing like that. But you would never know any of that if you saw him. He always walks like the sidewalk was put there just for his feet. His shoulders are always back, and he has this bop that I know he must’ve practiced for years to perfect. And to top it all off, the dude’s got clothes straight out of a music video. Not just any kind of clothes. Clothes that looked like they’d cost a year’s worth of morning chores at Malloy’s.

  Some people on our block assumed MoMo sold drugs. I didn’t know if that was true or not, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. Others said Mo’s come-up was throwing those crazy parties that hood celebs and wannabes paid bank to get into. You know that place Studio 54 from back in the seventies? I heard that’s what these parties were like, and the man behind the magic was MoMo. You would think that, with the hood talking as much as it does, it would get back to Mr. and Mrs. Williams. But it never seemed to because he usually only had them in the summer, which for him was prime time because his mother was on summer break, so her and Mr. Williams went on weeklong getaways, leaving the kids home. Party time.

  “Word? Man, I’d love to go to one of Mo’s parties. Everybody’s always whispering about what goes on there,” I said to Tasha. Noodles still had an attitude going, but I knew as soon as MoMo’s party was mentioned, his ears turned on.

  “Yeah, I know. Funny thing is, most of them suckers ain’t even really been in,” Tasha said.

  “How you know?” Noodles asked suddenly. The dead had arisen.

  “How I know?” Tasha’s nostrils flared up. “Who you think works the door? Me, that’s who. I see all the freaks, the hustlers, the crazies, all them. They all gotta come past me.”

  Tasha worked the door? Whoa—a crazy thought came to me. I stared at her, not quite wanting to say what I wanted to say, and she called me on it.

  “What is it, Ali?”

  I didn’t say nothing. Just started looking at everything except her. The cars. The telephone wires. The fire hydrants. The kids running.

  “Ali, what?” she said, louder.

  Nothing.

  “Oh no. Don’t tell me.” Tasha could sense what I was thinking. “Don’t tell me you want to go. Please don’t tell me that,” she said, her voice kind of begging.

  “No, we wanna go,” Noodles chimed in perfectly, for once. He pointed to me, and then pointed back to himself, and grinned what I guess was his most charming grin.

  Tasha looked at Noodles, then shot her eyes over at me.

  “Y’all too young. You know that. I don’t even get to really go in. I just gotta sit in the front part and take money and all that.”

  “Yeah, but you can just wave us in. We’ll tell you all about it.” Noodles, now coming out of his slump, leaned forward excitedly. It was obvious that he thought this was a good idea, and the more he thought it was a good idea, the more it meant it probably wasn’t. But I was still curious.

  And suddenly words were coming out of me. “Come on, Tasha, we been cool all this time, and we’ve never asked you about the parties. We’ll be on our best behavior. We’ll slide in, scope it out, then slide out. We won’t eat nothing, d
rink nothing, we won’t even touch nothing! I swear.” I could hardly believe I said it, but I knew it was the best thing to say to get her to come around.

  Tasha stood there for a second. She looked from Noodles to me, and then she looked at the ground. Then at the sky. Then she turned around so that her back was facing us. Then she whipped back around and slapped both hands on her hips.

  “Under one condition,” she said. Her lips started to turn up to a smirk, and then to a full smile. Whatever she was about to say, she thought it was pretty funny. “You gotta bring Needles.”

  “WHAT?” Noodles shouted.

  Needles smiled. “I’ll go,” he said, soft but loud enough for us to hear.

  “No way!” Noodles snapped at Needles. “Tasha, you crazy?”

  Needles’s smile sank, and he went back to his knitting. I could tell that one stung.

  “Wait, wait,” I started. “So you saying that we can come if Needles is with us?”

  “Yep. He has to be there.”

  “Why?” Noodles whined.

  “Because I like him. And of the three of you, he’s the most responsible,” she joked. Well, she didn’t really joke. She meant that. But she smiled when she said it.

  I knew that this had nothing to do with Tasha liking Needles, or wanting him there. She was banking on us backing down, because she figured there was no way we would show up to a MoMo party with Needles. I wanted to look cool, and Noodles definitely wanted to look cool, and Tasha knew we would think we wouldn’t look as cool showing up with Needles. It’s messed up, but it’s true. This was about her tricking us into not coming. Luckily, Doris taught me to always stay a step ahead.

  “Cool. We’ll be there,” I said, calling her bluff.

  I could feel Noodles on me, glaring at me hard enough to cave in my chest. I could feel Needles as well, wanting to cheese, but trying hard not to.