Chapter 4

Cold Showers

Home

TOCAYO
Part 1
Prologue
Playa Norte
Charly the American
A Catholic Education
Cold Showers
A Peruvian Name...
Tossing Armando...
Bob Cousey's Shorts
Inside Immaculada
Warming the Bench...
A Little Socrates...
Running From Lola
Ping Pong Politics
A Perfect Basketball Day
A Man Needs His Friends
A Pig In a Hole
Condors Over Ticlio
Wrestling in the Plaza
Handcuffs and Curfews
Rochabus
A Hero Hiding
Hitting A Brick Wall
Part 2

Charly looked at the places where I had pointed. "Watch-” he said, hopping to the top of the key and holding up his hand to resist my objections, "I can almost do it." He grabbed the basketball with both of his hands and descended into a crouch, imagining his opponent. I stepped back and leaned against the wall to watch. He concentrated so hard that even I began to imagine the boy who was guarding him. The gringo was holding the ball in front of him with both hands, low, out of the other boy's reach. He estimated the imaginary defender's stance, his preparation. How quick is this opponent of his? Not quick enough. No. And he is favoring the right side of the dangerous Charles McDonald. Ah, he expects him to move in that direction. His opponent is obviously an amateur. It is now time for the amateur to receive an education. A lesson in spectacular speed. Charles McDonald the clever American basketball player leans a little to the left. He shrugs his shoulder very fast, making the amateur lean to one side and become out of balance. Poof! Good bye, amateru. Charles McDonald went the other way.

He makes one dribble. He jumps. Charles McDonald the American basketball player with amazing talents rises gracefully with the ball in his left hand. The fans, they become crazy with elation! Suddenly, out of nowhere, Wilt Chamberlain appears. Oh no! The fans, they faint with terror. But wait! Charles McDonald, the basketball player of many tricks, he is ready. In the middle of the air he brings the ball down to his knees, he changes it to his right hand and, with his legs moving everywhere at once, he smashes the ball against the bottom of the rim. Crash. The disappointed fans, they moan. They are one with his pain. The basketball bounces up and down, up and down beside him, loyal like the echanted hammer of Thor, the God of Thunder.

Charly stood up quietly and recovered his basketball. "It needs a little work," he said to me.

"OK gringo,” I said, pushing myself off the wall, “you show me next week."

"Wait," Charly shouted in Spanish, and walked over to me. "Are you wanting to eat some kind of thing," he asked me.

"Some 'thing,'" I corrected him.

"OK, some thing," he said. "Are you wanting to eat some thing?"

I leaned over to pick up my gym bag. "I am so tired, that-"

He wouldn’t let me finish. "Yes," he said, "but in one hour you will have so much hunger that-"

"-In one hour I'm going to be three feet deep under my sheets, sleeping like a dead rock. A murdered, killed, dead, dead rock."

Charly stared blankly at me, but at least he did not get angry. He shook his head several times to make what I said fall out of his ears, and then proposed to me that if I waited for him, he would give me a ride home. He had a plan, he said. We would get a ride to his house, which was not far, we would eat dinner, and then it would be too late for me to ride the bus home. At that point, Charly would ask his mother if he could drive me home. That way he would get to drive the car.

"Are you sure there is food at your house?"

“There is always food at my house,” Charly said, and without waiting for an answer he hurried into the locker room to change.

"Because after eating dinner at your house," I mused aloud, following him into the locker room and sitting down on a bench, "we could eat dinner again at my house. Then perhaps for the first time in my life I would get enough to eat."