The Game Nobody Wanted

ACT I — THE LOT

The community sports center on West 105th Street was a building that had been a gymnasium in the seventies and a warehouse in the nineties and something else entirely in the aughts. By 2019, it was a community center in the technical sense — the city called it one on paper. The roof leaked. The heating system worked in November and February and stopped working in March. The parking lot had more potholes than basketballs.

Sal arrived at nine on a Monday in September. Her job was to manage the equipment room — a space the size of a closet that held six basketballs (three with holes), two footballs (one with tape on the laces), a set of weights that belonged to a different century, and a stack of mats that smelled like a locker room from a bad movie. She counted everything. Six basketballs. Two footballs. Fourteen dumbbells from five to fifty pounds. Eight mats. She counted like a woman counting her remaining years, because that is what counting is — a way of convincing yourself that things add up.

She was thirty-eight. She had been a graduate student in psychology at Case Western Reserve until the funding dried up in 2014. She had taught as a TA for two years and then not at all. She dropped out of the program because dropping out is what you do when you are from Cleveland and the money runs out and the person you were going to marry leaves because Cleveland. She now worked at the community center because the community center was the only place that would hire someone whose most recent employer was a university that no longer existed in the form it had taken when she was there.

Danny came in first, at ten in the morning on a weekday. He had been up since six, drinking coffee from a dented thermos and staring at the ceiling of his apartment. He was twenty-two, six-foot-one, two hundred and thirty pounds, and felt like a building that was never finished — raised with a framework and never given walls or a roof or a reason to exist. He played quarterback in high school until a knee injury ended his career at eighteen. Now he worked at a parts warehouse and drank beer on his porch at four in the afternoon because the silence in his apartment was worse than the noise in his head.

He asked Sal if they had a football that was not afraid of being used. She handed him the taped one. He took it outside and threw it against the wall of the building until it came loose and rolled into the parking lot. He retrieved it. He threw it again.

Jake found him there, walking from the bus stop on his lunch hour. Jake was twenty-one, a line driver for the city who spent his days filling potholes on Euclid Avenue and his nights watching football on a television that had only three channels. He was twenty-one and felt seventy. He had never been anywhere outside of Ohio and did not want to be.

He stopped at the edge of the lot and watched Danny throw the ball against the wall, one hand, two hands, over and over. Jake did not say anything. He stood there for twenty minutes, eating a sandwich from a brown bag, watching the ball bounce back every time.

ACT II — THE THINGS

Mace arrived three days later, because a friend of a friend had told him there was a guy throwing a football against a wall on West 105th and if you wanted to see someone do something pointless, you should go watch.

Mace was twenty, a former college running back whose scholarship was revoked after his father died and he missed three games to attend the funeral. The coach said it was a "budgetary matter." Mace worked at a grocery store in Collinwood and carried resentment like a brick in his pocket — heavy, cold, and always there.

He stood at the edge of the lot and watched Danny throw the ball against the wall for an hour. Then he asked, "You ever play?"

Danny said, "I used to."

Mace said, "I used to."

They did not say what they used to before they stopped.

Sal started noticing things. Danny was always there, at the same time, throwing the same ball against the same wall. Jake was always there too, eating his sandwich, watching. Mace came and went, sometimes staying, sometimes leaving after five minutes. They never spoke to each other. They never needed to.

The first clue appeared on a Thursday in October. Sal found a budget document in the city hall basement — the same document that showed the winter sports program would be defunded in January, replaced with a "recreational storage initiative" that meant nothing to anyone. She read it three times. Then she folded it and put it in her pocket, next to a cigarette she did not want.

She went to the equipment room and wrote something on a piece of paper and tucked it into Danny's work bag at the parts warehouse, where she knew he would find it because she had watched him go there every day for three weeks and learned the route. The card said, on one side: "You don't need to be good. You just need to be here." On the other side, a number: 100. It was the number of days until the program was defunded.

Jake found a flyer tucked into his bus pass — a picture of a football field, green and perfect, with the words "Ohio Community League — First Saturday in January" printed in cheerful letters he knew were a lie. There were no leagues in January in Cleveland. There would be snow and cold and a field covered in ice. But he kept the flyer in his wallet for three weeks.

Mace found a letter in his grocery store locker, addressed to him in handwriting he recognized as his father's. His father had been dead for two years, but the letter had been written months before — a letter Mace's mother had never given him. It read: "I am sorry I made you choose between your funeral and your game. You should not have had to choose. I will never forgive myself for asking."

ACT III — THE MEETING

Sal sat in the equipment room on a Friday night in November and thought about the three men who threw a ball against a wall every day and the woman who had given them something to think about and the budget document in her pocket and the cigarette she did not want.

She thought about the one hundred things you could do — not take, like the other women had written in their lists. Do. You do a ball. You do a conversation. You do a truth. You do a hope. You do a game that nobody wants and has no championship and will end in January with snow on the field and cold in the bleachers and no one watching.

She went outside. Danny was there, throwing the ball against the wall. Jake was there, eating a sandwich. Mace was there, standing at the edge of the lot with his hands in his pockets.

"I have something to tell you," she said.

They stopped and looked at her.

"The winter sports program is being defunded," she said. "In January. They are replacing it with storage."

Danny threw the ball against the wall. It bounced back. He did not retrieve it.

"So what?" Jake said.

"So nothing," Sal said. "That is so what."

Mace took his hands out of his pockets. "You going to do something about it?" he asked.

Sal looked at him. She looked at Danny, who was staring at the wall like it had hurt him. She looked at Jake, who was eating his sandwich with the methodical precision of a man who had run out of things to think about. She looked at Mace, who was standing in a parking lot full of potholes with his hands out of his pockets for the first time in however long he had been carrying them there.

"No," she said. "I am not going to do something about it."

They looked at her.

"But I am going to do something," she said.

ACT IV — THE GAME

They played a game on the first Saturday in January. There was no league. There was no championship. There was no one watching, except for Sal, standing at the edge of a field that was half frozen and half mud, holding a thermos of coffee that had gone cold three hours ago.

Danny played. Jake played. Mace played. Three men in their early twenties, wearing clothes that were not uniforms and shoes that were not cleats, playing a game on a field that the city had forgotten existed.

They scored no points. The concept of points does not apply to a game that is not official. They ran. They threw. They caught. They fell in the mud and got up and fell again.

Sal stood at the edge of the field and watched them and thought about the card she had written and the number 100 and the idea that you do not need to be good, you just need to be here.

They had been here.

When the game was over — and it was over because the light failed, which is how games end in places like this — they stood on the field in the dark and did not say anything. They did not need to.

Sal went back to the equipment room and counted the footballs. One with tape on the laces. One that was rounder than the other. She put them on the shelf. She locked the door. She went home.

The next day, she came back at nine. The next day, she came back at nine. The next day, she came back at nine. And so did they.

Not because it meant anything. Because it was something.

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OTMES-v2 Objective Tensor Codes:
TI: 22.0, θ: 270°, Style: Dirty Realism, Setting: Cleveland 2019
M₁: 3.5, M₂: 0.5, M₃: 2.5, M₄: 1.5, M₅: 1.5, M₆: 2.5, M₇: 1.0, M₈: 0.0, M₉: 3.0, M₁₀: 2.0
N₁: active, N₂: passive
K₁: sensual, K₂: rational
I: low, R: none, V: persistence, C: worn, S: very small
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Author Note & Copyright: