Lost Ball

There's a small park over on 4th Ave. between 3rd and 4th in Brooklyn near where I live. I found it while riding my bike. It looked like a nice park the first time I passed it in the daytime. Birds perched on the fence, and a couple of people were walking dogs.

I love to play racquetball and hadn't since I moved here. Now I had a great place to go. The asphalt was kind of worn out, and sometimes the ball would hit a groove in the pavement and go flying sideways, but I showed up almost every day.

The only people who play racquetball are white guys. Everybody else plays handball. I'm the most obvious kind of white guy because I use a tennis racket. I'm also usually a good few years older than my fellow gamers. During the day after 3 p.m. when school gets out, a lot of kids come around yelling and screaming. They eat, they smoke, they flirt and play boomboxes. Lots of them want to play doubles with each other, and they stand right behind you if you're a single so you'll finish faster and let them have the court.

There's an unwritten rule that if someone's ball comes over the wall into your court, you stop playing and bat the ball back over, or wait for him to come around looking for it and you throw it back then. Same goes for you if your ball sails over the wall; you walk around and it'll be tossed back to you, sometimes with eye contact, sometimes without. Sometimes the person throwing will make an effort to throw it so you can catch it, and sometimes the ball will just come in your general direction.

If someone's a really lousy player on the other side and his ball comes into my court again and again, I'll stop once, twice, three times, and that's it. Then I just let him come and get it. Maybe it's wrong, but I feel like it's not my responsibility to keep fetching your ball if you can't play.

Sometimes I get scared. Some of the kids are really rough-looking, and there are a lot of projects in the general neighborhood. If someone shows up blasting a loud boombox, I won't say anything. If someone obviously wants my court and is put out that I currently exist, though, I ignore him. I have a stopwatch, and when 45 minutes is up, that's when I leave.

I got there the other day and started batting my ball as usual. I had the park to myself. After about five minutes I saw a group of eight boys and two girls heading toward the court. Average age probably 16. The girls and some of the boys took up positions on the side, where they opened their brown bags full of chips and soda. They ate and drank, dropping their trash to the ground like everyone else does. It's not a conscious, defiant littering that includes crumpling or throwing. It lands where it falls. There's lots of litter in the park. Before I start my game, I usually have to kick trash and broken glass out of my way.

As soon as the kids started to play, their ball came sailing over to my side. About four times I batted it back over. Sometimes you hear "Thanks!" called from the other side. Today no response came after any of the returns.

Then I hit my ball over to their side. I stopped and walked around the cement wall in time to see one of the rougher-looking kids bending down and putting my colored ball in his gym bag. Everyone else saw him do it, too, and everyone knew that I'd seen him. The kid straightened up and turned toward me, looking me in the eye. Looking back was like looking into the eyes of a dull-witted dog. It was that dead Brooklyn energy not quite developed to its maximum potential. That energy that doesn't respond to anything you can possibly say.

Still, it sucked to lose my ball. I didn't have another one. Can't leave without trying, I said to myself.

"Did you see my ball?" I asked him.

Immediately two boys gathered on either side of the kid, crossing their arms, their faces hard as stone. "No, man, we didn't see no ball."

In the movies, I'd rough up the kid and karate-chop his friends, leaving them all groaning on the ground while I went and fetched my ball from his bag. Instead, I just turned and walked, gathered my stuff, and Brooklyn got a little smaller.