Naval Support Basketball

It’s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we’ll be publishing a series of dispatches from the gym.

The main problem with Philadelphia, the city where I was born—after the shootings and the homelessness, the racial segregation and social neglect, beyond Roosevelt Boulevard and that SEPTA station at Bridge and Pratt, past all the crack and heroin and percs, the mad-cute pigeons disrespected at every angle, and that ludicrously antihuman attempt to build a new Sixers stadium on top of Chinatown—is the simple fact that, were you a wayward youth in Philly sometime in the dead of winter, you’d be hard-pressed to find a holding place, least of all one where you could participate in that so-called bedrock of black-boy sociality, a simple game of pickup basketball. All summer, every summer, my friends and I would camp out at the courts up and down Northeast Philly but once our fingers started to freeze within the first sixty seconds, it was curtains for the idea that ball is, was, or would ever be life.

That is, until we joined the army. I say “we” because of the few years before and after graduating from high school or dropping out for a GED, during which it felt like everyone I knew had given up on that false promise of attaining the good life by working harder or more often at horrible jobs. You would get shot at or yelled at or beaten up for the crime of going outside, anyway, even if you were minding your own business. And all jobs were the same, would always be the same, but at least this one had a Tricare health plan and $400,000 in life insurance; you could ensure that your whole-ass family had access to nine-minute passive-aggressive meetings with a physician for $201.00 a month with little, if any, co-pay. By comparison, I now pay a $700 monthly insurance premium, and, even when I find a doctor who accepts it, another $4,000 a year in co-pays. The benefits of enlistment were like many other forms of coercion under the guise of choice.

With a military ID, we gained access to the naval base off Tabor Road. That’s what we called it, “the naval base off Tabor Road,” though if you google this location, you’ll find it listed as “Naval Support Activity” at 700 Robbins Street. No one knows who coined the faulty name first, but perhaps we liked the sound of it. It was marked for us by the ShopRite across the street where we’d gather to buy Gatorade and Gushers, Twizzlers and plain Herr’s potato chips, “food” that only a young body could tolerate to such a degree. Even in the dead of winter, rather than, you know, rob liquor stores, we could huddle up in access to each other. Because, let’s be real, where else was there to go with perpetually empty pockets? Especially if you were trying to escape the threat of alcoholism that haunted the bars, or frisking by those nosy-ass cops on South Street, or that young boul who, after witnessing the softest of soft dunks “on me” by a rival, lifted his waistband to flash one of those cute little Glock 42s and insisted he right the wrongdoing against my person immediately.

And while yes, some of us still drowned in the tax-free liquor that comes with access to any military installation, others forgot about this altogether, lusting only after the base’s pristinely maintained full court with glass backboards and breakaway rims. Oh, those sweet, sweet breakaway rims. They were the first I’d ever dunked on as an adult; never would I go back to those nightmare bucket rims at Whitehall, across from Harding Middle School, licking blood from dirty, cut-up fingers.

Everybody had to have some kind of ID to get in, but you only needed one military card per car. We packed busted Grand Prix and Nissan Altimas, beige Crown Vics and black Kias with illegally dark window tint and sky-high car notes full of niggas from around this way and that and sat in line at the front gate, proof of our personhood in hand, always with a little trepidation about the minor encounter with power. Did some dickhead bring their gun again and forget to mention it at the threshold, so instead of missing a game we’d have big-boy problems? Who forgot their ID altogether or decided just now to say they didn’t even have one? Was the car registration even valid? Then we were rolling down the windows and faking smiles, making sure we all had the same logic as to where we were going and why if asked. The gym, where else?

Once, or however many times, who can recall exactly, my registration was expired, and the guard—who, to his credit, didn’t even point his M16 at me for this particular infraction—made us park elsewhere and get out to walk the half mile to the gym. It was brick outside, but we were all just glad they let us in. Trotting through the lot, we whined to each other just a bit about our actual lives, between the gray sky and black asphalt, watching the government plates glide by, and sometimes another homie would scoop us up halfway to the threshold and squeeze us into their Honda Civic, like, “Damn, you niggas look cold.”

Naval Support Activity offered up a series of brief respites for my favorite kind of person, the “domesticated hood nigga,” as my friend Tasia might say, coining the term at a crowded cookout: “I love y’all domesticated hood niggas.” She meant those folks who’ve absorbed and recapitulated the kind of terror too offensive for dinner parties, but who, after some coincidental and laborious breakthrough, can now dwell just within the periphery of our sick society as nearly legible subjects. It’s not that nobody never had beef at the naval base; quite the contrary. But there were no guns, so who gave a fuck? I don’t think it makes sense for a grown man to engage in fist fighting; it’s just bad practice. You look immature, dumb even; exhausted just a few swings in, over there hugging each other and huffing to death with your old ass. But it happened. There were always old heads there to squash most confrontations though: some E-7 like Rome, who could make or break your long-term contracting orders later, fuck with your pockets; someone who we respected as one of the few honest men in our mostly fatherless lives.

The naval base was the last refuge for hooping before nobody’s body could really handle it anymore. Clarence and Chic and Rome and Josh, the Flood brothers, light-skin Dan and them worked up a communion of squeaking sneakers and overconfident alley-oops and missed midrange jumpers and sprained ankles and popped knees and, on occasion, a clean block here and there, a “stop playin and stick that nigga” yelled across the court or a last layup we were all too tired to follow, and all the better for it.

Maybe ten years later, when my old car finally broke down and I decided on a Toyota SUV because supposedly they last a bit longer, I ran into a familiar face at the dealership that I couldn’t place, till she asked outta nowhere, “You know Chic?”

It all came flooding back. “Yeah,” I said. “We used to play ball together back in the day.” I could recall only warmth from him, something about the way I saw him with his girl and kids, and this was back when I could barely speak a kind word to another man that Clarence hadn’t vouched for.

I didn’t get a discount but the exchange eased that trepidation I normally have at a dealership. And when she said, “Oh word, Imma take care of you then,” I actually believed her. And that was enough.

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer who lives in Philadelphia. He is the author of the memoir Sink and the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer.