Men from Boys

Points Lawrence Block

The Knicks were hosting a first-year expansion team at the Garden, and when the two men arrived, thirty minutes before game time, half the seats were empty. ‘I’m afraid it’s not going to be much of a game,’ the younger man said, ‘and it looks as though I’m not alone in that opinion. Last time I was here the Lakers were in town and there wasn’t an empty seat.’

‘We’re early,’ the older man said. ‘They won’t sell out tonight, but they’ll come closer than you might guess. Remember, this is New York. A lot of guys don’t even leave their desks until seven-thirty for a game that starts at eight.’

‘That’s me you’re describing. Not tonight, but the Laker game? There were points on the board by the time I got to my seat. And it would have been the same story tonight if I hadn’t put my foot down. Carrigan came into my office at half past six with something that had to be done and would only take me a minute, swear to God. “Not tonight,” I told him. “I’m meeting my Dad.”’

Anyone looking at them would have suspected they were father and son. The resemblance was unmistakable, in their faces and in their easy loose-limbed grace. Both were tall men, standing several inches over six feet. Both had been slim in their youth and both had thickened some around the middle with age, the father more than the son. The son was perhaps an inch taller than the father, a fact which had not gone unremarked at their meeting a few minutes earlier.

‘You’re taller,’ Richard Parmalee had said. ‘I don’t suppose your pituitary gland kicked into overdrive when nobody was looking. Have you been taking growth hormone?’

The son, whose name was Kevin, shook his head and grinned.

‘Then the odds are you’re not taller,’ the father said. ‘So, I guess you’ve got lifts in your shoes...’

‘Just insoles, but they don’t make you any taller.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of. Well, where does logic inexorably lead us? I’m shrinking.’

‘You look the same to me.’

‘Hell, I’m not melting away like the Wicked Witch of the West. Everybody shrinks, starting around forty or forty-five, but it takes fifteen or twenty years before it’s enough to notice. You’re not even forty for another year and a half, so you’ve got a while before your cuffs start scraping the pavement.’

‘That hasn’t happened to you.’

‘No, if I’ve lost half an inch that’s a lot. It’s enough to notice, but only just. And I only just noticed it myself within the past month or so. I knew it was something that happens to everybody, but I figured I was different, it wouldn’t happen to me. Same as right now you’re listening and nodding and telling yourself it won’t happen to you.’

The younger man laughed. ‘Got me. Exactly what I was telling myself.’

‘And who knows? You might be right. You’ve got a few years and by then they may have something to prevent it. I wouldn’t put it past them.’

As Richard Parmalee had predicted, there were a lot of late arrivals and most seats were occupied by game time. The Knicks, eleven-point favorites according to the line in the papers, jumped off to an early lead that opened up to twenty-two points at half-time.

‘Well, it’s not much of a game,’ the son said. ‘I was afraid of that.’

‘No, but it’s still fun to watch them. I remember coming here to see the Harlem Globetrotters when I was still in high school. They were playing an exhibition game against somebody, probably the Knicks. I couldn’t believe the things they did. Now everybody does that, but without the clowning.’

‘They’re still around, the Globetrotters.’

‘And they’re probably as entertaining as ever, but less remarkable, because everybody plays like that. It’s a completely different game than when I played it.’

‘It looks completely different to me,’ the son said, ‘so I can only imagine the difference from your point of view.’

‘In my day we played on our feet. Your generation played the game on your toes. And now it’s a game played in the air.’

‘It’s true.’

‘And I swear the rules are different.’

‘Well, the three-point shot...’

‘Of course, but that’s not what I mean. They routinely commit what would have been a travelling violation, but you never see it called. If a guy’s driving to the basket it doesn’t seem to matter how many steps he takes.’

‘I know. There’s a rule, but I can’t figure out what it is.’

‘And they’ll turn the ball over when they’re dribbling. Double dribble, that used to be, and you lost possession. Not any more.’

‘I like the three-point shot, though,’ Kevin Parmalee said.

‘Improves the game. No question. But only at the pro distance. The college three-pointer is too close.’

‘It’s ridiculous. And yet the college game’s more fun to watch. It’s not as good a game, but it’s more exciting.’

They went on chatting comfortably until play resumed, then fell largely silent and watched the action on the court. The visitors narrowed the gap in the third quarter and with three minutes to play only six points separated the two teams. Then the Knicks surged, and led by fourteen when the buzzer sounded.

On their way out the son said, ‘Well, they made a game of it. It was never close, but you wouldn’t have known that from the fans.’

‘They beat the spread,’ the father said, ‘and that wasn’t a foregone conclusion. It could have gone either way until the final seconds.’

‘You figure that many of the people here had money on the game?’

‘Probably more than you’d think, but that’s not the point. We’re New Yorkers, Kev. When we root for a team, we don’t just want to win the game. We want to beat the spread.’

‘And we did, so hoorah for our side.’

‘Amen. It was a good game.’

‘And God knows the price was right.’

‘You told me who gave you the tickets, but I forget. One of the senior partners?’

‘No, one of Joe Levin’s clients. He gave them to Joe, and Joe thought he could go and then couldn’t, which was why the whole thing was as last-minute as it was.’

‘Terrific seats.’

‘Well, some corporation pays for them, and lists them as a business expense. So they didn’t cost us anything and they didn’t cost anybody else anything, either.’

‘That’s the way it ought to be,’ Richard Parmalee said. ‘I made a reservation at Keen’s, not that I think we’ll need one at this hour on a week night. That sound all right to you?’

‘As long as it’s on me.’

‘Not a chance.’

‘Hey, I asked you out, remember?’

‘You got the tickets, I get the dinner check.’

‘The tickets were free, remember?’

‘So’s the dinner, as far as you’re concerned. You’re not going to win this argument, Kevin, so don’t even try.’

The headwaiter greeted the older man by name and showed them to a table in the grill room. Richard Parmalee ordered a single-malt scotch, neat, with water back. Kevin ordered a Mexican beer.

‘I was reading an article on malt whisky,’ he said, ‘and halfway through I decided I owed it to myself to develop a taste for it. Then I remembered that I never liked hard booze, and I especially don’t like the stuff you drink. Laphroiag?’

‘No one ever mistook it for mother’s milk,’ the older man conceded. He took a small sip and savored it, as if tasting it for the first time. ‘I’m not sure I like the taste myself,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it, but that’s not the same thing, is it? All in all, I’d have to say you’re better off with beer.’

‘I’d probably be better off with orange juice.’

‘Chock full of vitamin C. But you don’t drink much, do you?’

‘No.’

‘I have a drink every day, but it’s an unusual day when I have a second. Which I guess makes this an unusual day, come to think of it, because I had one at my club this afternoon, and here I am having a second. Two drinks in one day and only five or six hours apart at that.’

‘I’ll call AA.’

They ordered the same meal, steak and salad. The restaurant’s ceiling was festooned with white clay pipes, each reserved for a particular patron, and over coffee the father said, ‘I almost asked him to bring my pipe.’

‘That’s right, you have a pipe here, don’t you? I have a faint memory of you smoking it after dinner.’

‘It must have been the first time I brought you here. After a game, I suppose.’

‘St John’s-Iona. St John’s won, and if I worked at it I could probably remember the score. I was fifteen, and I remember deciding that when I grew up I’d have a pipe of my own here.’

‘If you were fifteen then I would have been forty-one. So that may well have been the last time I smoked that pipe, because I was forty-two when I quit. Your grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer, and I threw my cigarettes in the garbage. I had some pipes, although I rarely smoked them.’

‘I don’t think I ever saw you smoke a pipe aside from that one time right here.’

‘As I said, I rarely did. But I threw them out along with the cigarettes. And I gave away all my lighters and cigarette cases, including a silver Ronson that my father had given me. I figured he’d given me plenty of other things, I didn’t have to hang on to it for sentimental reasons. You’ve never smoked, have you?’

‘Not tobacco.’

‘Then what... oh, marijuana. Do you use it?’

‘I did in college, and for a year or two after. I was never into it that much. Mostly just at parties. I haven’t smoked it in years and I haven’t even smelled it, except on the street. I don’t go to that many parties and when I do there’s never anybody lighting up a joint in the corner.’

‘I suppose I assumed you tried it at college, although I can’t remember giving much thought to the subject. It wasn’t around when I was in college. Oh, it must have been, but I wasn’t aware of it and certainly didn’t know anybody who smoked it.’

‘So you never tried it.’

‘I didn’t say that. Your mother and I both tried it a few times in, oh, it must have been ’Sixty-seven or — eight.’

‘I was five years old. Were you and Mom hippies? You should have turned me on while you were at it.’

‘Hippies,’ the father said and shook his head. ‘The first time we smoked nothing happened. Our friends, the people who turned us on, swore we were stoned, but if we were we didn’t know it, so what good was that? The second time we both got high and it was very nice, though I can’t say I remember what exactly was nice about it. But it was. And then we smoked once or twice after that, and one time your mother became very anxious and when it wore off we agreed this wasn’t something we wanted to waste our time on.’

‘Mom got paranoid?’

‘That’s as good a word for it as any, and how did we get on this? Pipes on the ceiling, we’re a long way from pipes on the ceiling. But I had a hell of a time quitting cigarettes, so I don’t think I’ll call for my pipe and my bowl.’

‘Did you smoke when you were playing basketball?’

‘Not while I was out on the court. But that’s not what you meant. Sure, I smoked. I was a kid and kids are stupid. I heard smoking would cut my wind, so I tried it and I didn’t see any difference, so I decided they were full of crap. What did I expect, that the first cigarette I smoked would add three seconds to my time in the hundred-yard dash? Still, I was never that heavy a smoker when I was playing. After I graduated, that’s when the habit took off.’

‘Neither of the girls smoke,’ Kevin Parmalee said.

‘As far as you know.’

‘Well, that goes without saying, doesn’t it? There’s no end of things they don’t do as far as I know, and God only knows what they do that I don’t know, and I don’t want to think about it.’

‘Jennifer’s more the athlete, isn’t she?’

They talked about the girls. Kevin Parmalee’s daughters, Richard’s granddaughters. They agreed that Jennifer, the older of the two, had innate athletic ability, but lacked the desire to do anything with it. She had the height for basketball, the older man pointed out, and they talked about the emergence of that sport.

He said, ‘You know how the college kids play a more interesting game than the pros? Well, I’ll tell you something. The women’s game is better than the men’s.’

‘College or pro?’

‘Either one.’

‘I know what you mean. But...’

‘But it’s impossible to give a damn which team wins.’

‘I was about to say it was hard to get interested in it, but you just nailed it. That’s exactly what it is. It’s like watching golf, I get completely absorbed in it but I don’t give a damn who wins. Why do you figure that is?’

‘One of life’s mysteries,’ Richard Parmalee said. ‘Here’s another. Remember how the fans were cheering earlier, rooting for the Knicks to win by more than twelve points?’

‘To beat the spread. Sure.’

‘It meant something to the fans, whether or not they had bets down. We talked about that earlier. But what did it mean to the players?’

‘I’m not sure I follow you. What did it mean to them?’

‘Why did they knock themselves out? They couldn’t have played any harder if the game was nip and tuck.’

‘You think they had money on the game?’

‘You wouldn’t think they’d bother, the kind of salaries they make. Other hand, I don’t suppose it’s entirely unheard of. But I can’t believe they all bet on the game and they were all playing their hearts out.’

‘They’re pros,’ Kevin Parmalee said. ‘Playing all-out is what they do.’

‘They’ve been known to dog it from time to time. Maybe they were trying to beat the spread so it wouldn’t look as though they were trying not to beat the spread.’

‘In other words, if they dog it somebody might think they’re shaving points. You think that goes on in the NBA?’

‘Shaving points? I don’t know. Again, with their salaries, how could you bribe them? Kev, I think you’re probably right. They weren’t even aware of the spread and they played hard because that’s the way they play.’ He picked up his coffee cup, set it down. ‘When you played,’ he said, ‘were you ever approached?’

‘Approached? Oh.’

‘Were you?’

‘God, why would anyone come to me? I was lucky to be on the team.’

‘Don’t sell yourself short. You were damn good.’

‘I would have been okay somewhere else. I know, Duke was all my idea, but I’ve never been sorry I went. Even if I did ride the bench for four years. I never had more than eight minutes of playing time, so there were never any guys with bent noses trying to get me to dump games.’

‘And your team-mates were too busy trying to get into the NBA.’

‘Trying to get into the Final Tour. They knew they were going to get into the NBA.’

The waiter came and Kevin Parmalee put his hand over his cup. ‘Just a half a cup for me,’ Richard Parmalee said and was silent until the waiter withdrew. Then he said, ‘I was approached.’

‘Really?’

‘Not by a guy with a bent nose. His nose was as straight as yours or mine, and you wouldn’t have marked him as a gangster, not by his appearance or by his manner. Although I suppose that’s exactly what he was.’

‘And he wanted you to dump games?’

‘Not to dump games. “I would never ask you to lose a game,” he said. It was fine with him if we beat the other team. Just so we didn’t beat the spread.’

‘Did you report him?’

‘No,’ Richard Parmalee said. ‘No, I didn’t report him.’

‘Oh.’

‘I took the money,’ he said and raised his eyes to meet his son’s. ‘And did what I could to earn it.’

‘You shaved points.’

‘I shaved points. If we were favored, and if Harold gave me the word, I did my best to see that we didn’t cover the spread.’

‘How did you do it? Miss shots that you could have made?’

‘I missed shots. I don’t know that I could have made them if I hadn’t had a reason not to. Another way, I’d be wide open and I’d pass off instead of taking the shot. There are a million things you can do without being too obvious about it.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘I got five hundred dollars a game. And this was 1957 we’re talking about. That was a lot of money in 1957.’

‘Sure, it must have been a fortune.’

‘When I graduated, my first job was as a management trainee with Kaiser & Ledbetter. Starting salary was five thousand dollars a year. And that wasn’t bad money. That’s what you paid a promising college graduate in a job with a future. So every time we didn’t manage to beat the spread, I was making a tenth of a year’s salary, and that’s not counting taxes.’

‘I guess you didn’t declare the money that... Harold?’

‘Harold. I never knew his last name, and no, I didn’t declare it. He paid me in cash and I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. It’s funny. I was doing it for the money, but I didn’t do anything with the money. I kept it in a cigar box and I kept moving the box around because I was afraid someone would find it.’

‘You couldn’t put it in the bank?’

‘Kev, I didn’t have a bank account. I lived at home with my parents. They gave me a scholarship to play basketball, but all that covered was tuition. I thought the extra money would come in handy, but I didn’t spend a dime of it.’

‘You saved it in a cigar box. What did it add up to, do you remember?’

‘Forty-five hundred dollars, and how could I forget? He always paid me in twenty-dollar bills. Twenty-five of them at a time, so what does that come to? Two hundred twenty-five? Is that right? Well, it’s close enough. Not enough bills to fill the cigar box, but a good-sized handful.’

‘Nine games, that would have been.’

‘Nine games,’ the father said. ‘Nine college basketball games and all I had to do was hold back a little bit, and how hard was that? And who did it hurt? I mean, who gave a damn if we beat St Bonaventure’s by ten points or three points? The fans didn’t care. The only people who got hurt were the ones who bet on us, and they were breaking the law in the first place by gambling on a basketball game. What the hell did I owe them?’

‘It’s not as though your team lost.’

‘We did lose one game. We played Adelphi at home and we were favored, and Harold gave me the word. And I did what I could to keep up from getting too far ahead, and then in the third quarter Adelphi started playing way over their heads, and before I knew it they were out in front, and we never did catch up. Would they have beaten us anyway? The way they were playing I’m tempted to say they would have beaten the Knicks that night, but I don’t know. Maybe yes and maybe no.’

‘It must have been weird, watching the game slip away from you.’

‘It was awful. I never played harder in my life than in the last five minutes of that game. We were all knocking ourselves out. I remember one shot that went around the rim and out, and the look on the face of the kid who put it up. I’d had my suspicions about him, and his expression confirmed it.’

‘You know, I’d been thinking you were the only one doing it, but of course there must have been others.’

‘And I never knew how many, or who they were. That one boy, on the basis of the look on his face, but which of the others? Not that I spent a lot of time thinking about it. And I certainly didn’t let myself think about the consequences.’

‘Of losing the game?’

‘Of doing what I was doing and getting caught at it. It was a crime, you know.’

‘I guess it must have been.’

‘Oh, no question. There’d been some scandals a few years earlier. A fair number of young men had their lives ruined and a few went to prison for it. I didn’t worry about it and it turned out there was nothing to worry about.’

‘What happened to the money?’

‘Nothing for a couple of years. Then when your mother and I got married, we had expenses. Young couples always do. So the money came in handy after all.’

‘Did Mom know where it came from?’

‘All she knew was that the bills got paid. Nobody knew that I shaved points. Until tonight, I never said a word about it to anyone.’

‘It’s hard to believe,’ Kevin Parmalee said, after a moment. ‘Not that you never said anything, but that you did it. It seems...’

‘What?’

‘Out of character, I guess.’

‘It seemed that way to me at the time. I don’t know that I can explain it. Maybe Harold was a persuasive guy, or maybe I was easily persuaded.’

‘How come... no, never mind.’

‘What?’

‘I just wondered how come you decided to tell me.’

‘I hadn’t planned on it.’

‘Really? Because I had the sense there was something.’

‘There was, but it wasn’t worth it.’

‘Oh?’

‘If I’d called for my pipe,’ Richard Parmalee said, ‘I could fuss with it, and tamp the tobacco down and relight it, and kill a surprising amount of time that way. Sometimes I think that was as much of an addiction as the nicotine. I went to the doctor about six weeks ago for my annual physical, which is a misnomer, because I’m doing well if I get around to it every other year. He called me two days later to tell me my PSA was a little high, if you know what that is.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You probably will in a few years. I forget what it stands for, but it’s a prostate test. A slight elevation could be the result of enlargement of the prostate, or a sign of the presence of a low-grade infection. Or it could be an indication of early stage prostate cancer.’

The two men looked at each other. ‘So he sent me to a urologist,’ Richard Parmalee went on, ‘and he did his own examination and his own test, and put me on an antibiotic for a week in case it was an infection that was causing the high reading. And a week later he took blood for another test, and the result was still the same, so he had me come in for a biopsy.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It’s a goddamn undignified procedure,’ he said, ‘but less painful than a sprained ankle, and you don’t need an Ace bandage. You have blood in the urine for a few days afterward, and in the semen for up to a month. All of that’s nothing compared to waiting for the lab results. I had the biopsy on a Tuesday and I didn’t hear until the following Monday. Not to keep you in suspense, it came back negative. I haven’t got cancer.’

‘Thank God.’

‘I suppose I could have said that right off,’ Richard Parmalee said, ‘but instead I let you wait and wonder for what, five minutes? If that. Well, that was to give you an idea. I had a full month to wait and wonder, and maybe you can imagine what that was like.’

‘You never said anything.’

‘There was nothing to say, not until I found out what I had or didn’t have.’

‘Did Mom know?’

‘I told her the morning I went in for the biopsy. If it was just an infection, or a false positive, why put her through it? By the time I was ready to go in for the procedure, I figured she ought to know. And I was worn out keeping it to myself.’

‘But you’re all right?’

‘I have to go in every six months,’ he said, ‘for a PSA, which just means they take some blood and send it to the lab. If there’s no change, all I do is make another appointment. It’s normal for the level to increase gradually with age. If that’s all it does, that’s fine. If there’s a big increase, I get to have another biopsy.’

‘Every six months for how long?’

‘For as long as possible.’

‘For as long as... oh, I get it. In other words, every six months for the rest of your life.’

‘And I hope that’s a long time. That’s one of the things I found out while I was waiting. I didn’t want it to be over. If I have to get a needle in my arm twice a year, well, that’s a pretty small price to pay to stick around.’

‘I’ll say.’

‘But from this point on my life is different. All of a sudden I’m an old man.’

‘The hell you’re an old man.’

‘I was a kid with a basketball, and the next thing I know I’m an old fart with a prostate. Well, what’s the difference? Either way you dribble.’

They laughed, the two of them, a little more heartily than the line warranted, and when the laughter stopped they were silent. Then the older man said, ‘I knew I wanted to tell you. I wasn’t in a rush, but it was something you ought to know. Then you called to say you had Knicks tickets, and while I was making dinner reservations I decided it would be the right time and place for this conversation.’

‘I’ll probably be a while taking it all in.’

‘Oh, I’m sure of that. Intimations of mortality, and your own as well as mine. I’m in damn good shape, I’m happy to say, but in a sense I feel a good deal more vulnerable than I did a couple of months ago. But there’s something I can’t quite figure out. What made me tell you about my little arrangement with Harold?’

‘Maybe you were stalling.’

‘Stalling? Telling you the one thing to delay telling you the other? No, I don’t think so. That would have been a reason for small talk, but I wasn’t making small talk.’

‘No.’

‘And it’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. Would my life had been different if I’d told Harold thanks but no thanks.’

‘How?’

‘That’s what I’ve been wondering. I did something that wasn’t honest, and I kept it a secret. How did that affect the choices I made in life?’

‘Maybe it didn’t.’

‘Maybe not,’ Richard Parmalee said, ‘but I’ll never know, will I? The road not taken. Maybe it’s made a difference, and maybe it hasn’t.’

‘Phil Carrigan called me in two, three weeks ago,’ the son said. ‘I’d knocked myself out for him, and he wanted to let me know how much he appreciated it. “Listen,” he said, “I owe you a big one. And Lisa, I want to make it up to her for the extra hours you put in. Here’s what you do, Kevin. Take the lovely lady to Lutéce. You can bill the client.”’

‘That’s perfect.’

‘Isn’t it? His eyes, he was being magnanimous. Giving me something to show his appreciation of what I did for him. So I had his permission to stick it to the client for a couple of hundred dollars. That’s his idea of a grand gesture and he really thought he was being generous. And maybe he was, because he could just as easily have taken his wife to Lutéce at the client’s expense.’

‘That’s interesting. I’m not sure it fits with what we were talking about, but I’m not sure it doesn’t either. How was the meal?’

‘It was terrific, but I’m just as happy with a steak and salad, to tell you the truth.’

‘You’re like your old man. And it’s time your old man headed home.’

He raised his hand for the check. ‘I wish you’d let me get this,’ the son said.

‘Not a chance. I told you, you got the tickets.’

‘And I told you they didn’t cost me a cent.’

‘And neither will dinner,’ Richard Parmalee said. ‘The hell, I’ll bill it to a client.’

‘Oh, right,’ Kevin Parmalee said. ‘That’s just what you’ll do.’