Chapter 8

Charly vs Immaculada

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TOCAYO
Part 1
Prologue
Playa Norte
Charly the American
A Catholic Education
Cold Showers
A Peruvian Name...
Tossing Armando...
Los Shorts de Bob...
Charly vs 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

Immaculada, the first team we would play that season, had an old-fashioned basketball gymnasium with thick wooden beams to hold up the roof. The beams were connected with fat metal bolts, so that it looked like the ceiling of a castle. The bleachers, they were like stairs that you pulled out from the wall. The floors were made of wood, of course, not cement like the floors of our gymnasium, and they were painted with bright red and yellow lines.

When I came to America many lears later, I realized that American basketball courts have lines that go straight up and down from the edge of the free-throw circle. You call it “the lane.” In Peru, and in the rest of the world, the “lane” is thinner near the free-throw circle, but fatter near the basket. This shape, like the cone of an ice cream treat, is the shape I learned to love after playing basketball with Charly.

When Santa Maria advanced in a slow run onto Immaculada’s basketball court, the people who had come to cheer cheered like they were sick with cholera. They were not sick with cholera. They were just not very many. Charly, he noticed. He was already not happy that day, and the skinny cheers of our fans did not help his mood. I had to make him line up to do his layups with the rest of the team. I stood behind him to make sure he did not leave before the game started. When it was Charly’s turn, he dribbled slowly, jumped with no energy, and threw the ball against the backboard without even looking at it. Bah. Here you go, ball. You do the work. Of course, since it was Charly who threw the ball, the ball went into the basket without even hitting the rim. Charly knew that would happen, but he walked to the end of the rebounding line with his head down, and stared at nothing.

My basketball was not as obedient as Charly's. I had to do my layup right after him. I was certain that Charly was judging my form with the eyes that I later learned he had in the back of his head. Naturally, after I shot, the ball bounced around the rim one time, two times, four times, almost all day, and while I waited for it to fall, I did not remember to stop running. So by the time it did fall into the net, I was almost upside down from trying to look at it. To this day, I am sure that if I had fallen down backwards, Charly would have walked out of the Immaculada gym, out of Lima, out of Peru, and off the fantastic continent of South America.