The Club

Coach sent the four slowest boys home and told the rest of us if we were late the next day we might as well not bother showing up. He was still making cuts. 

At home, my father asked me how tryouts went before I could make it upstairs.

“Fine,” I said.
“Fine isn’t good.”
“It was good, then.”

He didn’t believe me, so he took me out front to practice my jump shot. He had me lie on my stomach and push myself back up, the gravel from our street cratering my palms. The ball was already on its way toward me when I got to my feet, so I only had a second to catch it, perfect my stance, and shoot. As soon as my feet touched back down, I went prone and waited for the call to do it again. This, I’d long come to accept, was how my father sought to son me. On the ground, hands pocking with welts of blood, waiting to hear his voice.

Now, beyond this, I remember the days he and I spent together at The Club. “The Club” was all he ever called it, and I cherished those words; they meant me and my father, away from my mother and sisters, at a place only men were allowed. Where they sauntered naked into saunas and spas and ice baths, through humid, musk-filled locker rooms. Where old-timers with creaking joints would marvel at my hairless frame, the width and promise of it. 

“It’s football for you, eh?” they’d tell me, having me flex my half-formed biceps. 

“Basketball,” I’d say, and they would laugh for a reason I didn’t understand. So young, I didn’t yet know how to read my body, how to interpret its geometry and probability, and so I didn’t glean that the thickness of my neck, the set of my shoulders, would never beckon me to free throw lines on winter courts, but to the burning turf yard lines of a football field every still-hot California fall. But even though I didn’t understand why, I knew from the hungry glint in these men’s eyes that, at The Club, my boyhood contained limitless possibility, turned every one of my budding muscles into a prophecy. 

I knew, too, that The Club was where my father—tired and heavy, even when I was young—could revert to a younger man. In the impossibly high-ceilinged gymnasium, I witnessed the grace of his muscle memory while his elbows tucked, while his knees bent and sprung and he sent the rust orange ball arcing through the air, both of us waiting for the clean sound of wind in a tunnel as it sliced through net. And I would do my best to imitate. I would soar off one leg practicing layups, brush my fingers against the backboard after releasing the ball. I’d thrust energy into shots well beyond my range, squat low in a defensive stance while he pointed left, then right, sending me crab shuffling across the court until I collapsed. I would stand arms’ distance from the wall while he threw the ball against it, having only a moment before I either caught the rebound or felt its force against me, knocking me back and leaving a welted bruise. And it meant I would see the gleam of pride in his eyes when I caught it, when I sank a three, when I finally soared high enough to finger the rim. And so, at The Club, I wasn’t just a boy. I was the reincarnation of my father’s youth, the proof of his legacy. To be anything greater than that was still beyond me. 

On the driveway, my father drilled me until I hit twenty in a row, starting over every time I missed. In minutes, I don’t know how long it went on. How many times I reached ten or twelve or fifteen before the ball clanged off the rim and we reset to zero. I only know we went until I held up a finger to wait between shots, bent over with my hands on my knees, and spewed bile onto my toes. 

“You done?” he asked. 
“No,” I said. I heaved for breath. “I can go.”  
“We’re done,” he said. “Get inside.” 

Done. How badly I wished it were true. How I knew it never would be. How I saw, right then, that I would one day be my father, that he would be the old men in The Club’s locker room, that there would be a boy with my likeness flexing his muscles before him, me. 

My dad hucked the ball at me and I caught it. There were red dots of blood blended with the pigment. I threw it back at him. 

“I can go,” I said. I lowered myself down, pressed my hands harder into the gravel. 

COLIN BONINI is a writer from San Jose, California. He is a current MFA candidate in fiction at Arizona State University and an associate editor at Hayden's Ferry Review. His fiction and nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in Silver Rose Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Wig-Wag, and elsewhere.