The Basketball Game
Those frozen nights we crossed the plow-scoured lot Come back to me now. Converging on the warm gym To watch Aquin, the Catholic school Dad had gone to, Play Dakota. Half-Jewish, we went to the public school But rooted for St. Thomas Aquinas out of a vague allegiance To our Catholic side, which I pictured as being one Half of my body. Despite our blue eyes we weren’t quite Like those blue-eyed Catholic boys we were there To watch – Paul Voigt, John Pohill, or Brian Janacek, My boyhood hero, who played with his mouth closed As if he wasn’t even breathing. But first, concessions Sold by mothers, the glint of crucifixes in their cleavage, Their hair sprayed into firmness so that it trembled As they searched their fanny packs for the change The Butterfingers and KitKats we shyly asked for broke Our dad’s sad dollars into, pulled from pockets filled With rags of Kleenex, chap stick, chaff. This was BC (Before Columbine) and no One imagined a shooter mowing everyone down, except Maybe one boy who’d been dragged there by his dad. We followed ours mutely into the gym. The court Itself was inviolable, to step on it as unthinkable As going behind the altar at Mass. We followed him Up into the stands, chocolate melting in our hands. I thought we were there to watch a basketball game. We were there to witness the rituals of adolescence. The cheerleaders held a paper ring painted crudely With a grouchy bulldog. It was the hymen the fired-up Boys were waiting to be given the signal to burst through. Apologies but come on it was all sexual, from the ring To the grunting effort ten boys made to get something Into something to the embarrassment I felt at breakfast, While dad read about the game in the paper as if We hadn’t been there, at having dreamt not Of the cheerleaders but of that beautiful boy I wanted to be, Brian Janacek.