Shooting Stars Read online

  Then the moves started. I guess I could have complained: being uprooted as a very young child is no way to live. Between the ages of five and eight, I moved twelve times. But complaining would do no good. It would only have put more pressure on my mom, who already felt guilty enough. I have never been much of a complainer anyway. So when the time came, I just grabbed my little backpack, which held all the possessions I needed, and said to myself what I always said to myself: It’s time to roll.

  Was there a certain tragedy attached to it? Of course there was a certain tragedy attached to it. Was there a danger attached to it? Of course there was a danger attached to it. Not just the police sirens and the gunfire in the various places we lived but the real danger that, like so many African American boys, I would just get lost in the very hardness of life. In fourth grade I missed close to a hundred days of school because it was across town, and we often didn’t have the transportation to get there. That kind of life builds up a lack of trust, a feeling that what you care about and the friends you have made will disappear because you know, you just know, that you’re going to be on the move, getting that little backpack ready because it’s time to roll again.

  The hardest thing for me was going to new schools and meeting new friends and finally getting comfortable with them and then having to leave and go to another school and getting comfortable again and then leaving again. Over and over, the cycle repeated itself.

  At the same time it made me realize that wherever we were going, I would have to assume responsibility for myself. Like it or not, that’s how my mom treated me. Sometimes I went to bed not knowing if I was going to see her the next morning. I would sometimes go a few nights without seeing her at all. I became afraid that one day I would wake up, and she would be gone forever.

  It’s all I really cared about when I was growing up, waking up and knowing that my mom was still alive and still by my side. I already didn’t have a father, and I didn’t want to be without both parents. All I could do was hope and pray that she was safe, because I knew she was trying to do the best for me that she could. And she always came back to me. She put food on the table for Thanksgiving like everyone else, and everything that I wrote down on the Christmas list always found its way under the tree. I don’t know how she did it, and I never asked her how she did it. So as scary as it was at times, as tough as it was at times, it only made me love her more. Whatever my mom could do or could not do, I also knew that nobody was more important in her life than I was. You have no idea how much that means when you grow up without so many of the basic things you should have. You have no idea of the security it gives you, how it makes you think, Man, I can get through this. I can survive.

  They were still tough times. When I was nine, my mom sat me down and told me that I would be living with a family called the Walkers until she could move her own life into a better situation. I know she hated to do it. But she felt backed into a place of no return and knew this would be the best for her and for me. It was unimaginable at first. I had never met my father, and the idea of losing my mother, even if it was temporary, frightened me. She promised she would visit me as much as she could. She promised that we would be reunited once she found a life that would give both of us stability.

  At the time I played on a peewee football team called the East Dragons. The coaches there knew my situation, in particular that I was missing school. Some of them offered to take me in. But they were single men, trying to make sense of their own lives. There was some discussion that I might move in with relatives in Youngstown, but Frankie and Pam Walker came forward and suggested to my mom that I could stay with them, and she agreed. I had spent part of spring break with the Walkers, but when school resumed, I did not resume with it. The Walkers were also concerned that I was being passed from place to place, a nomad at the age of nine.

  Pam Walker really didn’t know me very well, nor did she know my mother well. She had concerns that because I was a good athlete beginning to get notice in Akron, I might overshadow her own son, Frankie Jr., who was about a year and a half younger than I was and a fine athlete in his own right. She worried that her son would feel like a backup. Frankie Walker knew me a little bit better because he had coached me on the East Dragons. It looked to him like there was little joy in my life, as if I was older than my actual age and had already seen too much and been through too much, as if I was trying to play the role of being a kid but really wasn’t one. He saw someone who needed help, and once he discussed it with his family, the Walkers were willing to take me in.

  I went to live with them for my fifth-grade year, under an arrangement where I spent the week with the Walkers and weekends with my mother. I was pretty sure that Frankie and Pam would accept me—they had agreed to take me in, after all—but I didn’t know how their three children would feel about having a new addition to the family. So I was quiet at first. Chanelle, the oldest, didn’t want anything to do with Frankie Jr. and me. If she had her druthers, we would have moved someplace else. We just got on her nerves. But Tanesha, the youngest sister, got along wonderfully with me and Frankie Jr., and to this day calls me her brother. Frankie Jr. and I also got along well together; we shared a room in a three-bedroom colonial on Hillwood Drive.

  I now believe it was karma that placed me there. It was the year before, in fourth grade, that I had missed so many days of school. My grades had suffered. My life had suffered. I was never one to just hang out. I didn’t like looking for trouble, because I didn’t like trouble. But I was on the edge of falling into an abyss from which I could never escape.

  The Walkers were disciplined, and they plunged me right into that discipline. Pam Walker woke all of us kids up at 6:45 a.m., assuming we had taken a bath the night before. If not, she woke us up at six. She made sure we washed behind the ears. We had chores to do, which is something I never had to contend with before. It could be doing the dishes in the kitchen and sweeping the floor and washing countertops and taking out the trash. It could be cleaning up our bedrooms and moving all of our junk out of the living room before Frankie Walker, or Big Frankie as he was known, came home.

  The Walkers weren’t instilling discipline in us for discipline’s sake. They were teaching us how to behave, not just in their home but in the world. They were teaching us how to be responsible and take pride in that responsibility. The proof of it was in my attendance at school in fifth grade at Portage Path Elementary: I didn’t miss a single day.

  The Walkers laid a foundation for me, a foundation I really had never experienced before. I got the stability I craved. They showed me that living in a house in a family-style environment was the rule, the way most people lived their lives, not the exception. I adapted to it easily, maybe because, having already moved around so much in my life, I was good at dealing with new situations. I loved being there. I loved being part of the flow that is a family. I loved being with other kids. I began to show a sense of humor, and I didn’t even mind when Frankie Jr. and I didn’t go to bed on time and Big Frankie said we better do it before there was trouble; he was, after all, called Big Frankie for a reason. I saw how life was meant to be lived, as part of something essential and valuable and permanent. I appreciated Pam Walker’s focus on education, because it turned out that I liked school once I regularly started going. I appreciated her telling me that keeping my grades up, combined with my athletic ability, could get me in to any college I desired (although it turned out a little differently).

  The Walkers became family to me. Living with them changed my life. I felt wanted, and I felt the blessing of security. But my mom was still my mom. In sixth grade the roles reversed, and I stayed with her during the week and with the Walkers on the weekends. Then she lost the apartment she was living in, and I stayed with the Walkers again for a short time. There was discussion that I might move to Rochester, New York, but I had assimilated into the Walker family so much that Pam felt it would be like taking one of her children away if I moved to a different city. She had a friend who wa
s a manager at the Springhill apartments; that’s when my mom and I moved into a two-bedroom unit under a rental-assistance program. The building had little terraces in front of each apartment. Otherwise it was spare and unadorned, almost Soviet-style, and incongruous with its surroundings as it stood on that little hill. Behind it was a taller high-rise that glowered like a darkened storm cloud, and most in Akron considered Springhill a shabby and undesirable place to live. But I had my own room. I had my mom with me again, and we would stay there until I finished high school. All of it felt good. All of it felt right. But without that time spent at the Walkers, I don’t honestly know what would have become of me.

  II.

  I first started playing basketball when I was about nine with a team called the Hornets at the Summit Lake Community Center on Crosier Street in Southwest Akron. Frankie Walker was one of the coaches, and based upon my performance with the East Dragons in football, he asked me to play, so I did. Football was my first love. I played tailback and liked to think I was Deon Sanders or Eric Metcalf. I even wore the same number they did, 21. Scoring a touchdown was the ultimate. Even as a kid you could do that, whereas the ultimate in basketball was a dunk, and I was nowhere near tall enough to do that yet.

  Even so, I took to the game of basketball instantly. I liked the adventure of putting the ball in the rim. I liked the team concept of basketball. I liked the pace of it, running up and down the court for four or five possessions without a time-out. Since defense is basically an abstract concept when you’re a kid, I liked gambling for steals so you could score on a breakaway layup.

  I played on the Hornets for a year. It was also around that time I placed my basketball life in the hands of a man, maybe the most special man I have ever met, with a heart that was beautiful and bountiful. His name was Dru Joyce II, and that’s where the first seeds of the dream all sprout from.

  As you can probably tell by now, I look for karma. I believe that things happen for a reason or don’t happen for a reason. I believe it was karma that connected me to Coach Dru, which is what we always called him.

  Coach Dru graduated from Ohio University in 1978. He got a job at Hunt-Wesson Foods in Pittsburgh in sales, and after a few years was promoted to the position of senior sales rep, with a territory that included Cleveland and the eastern suburbs. By all rights, Coach Dru and his family, which now included two daughters, should have settled in the Cleveland area. Had he lived there, I never would have met him; without meeting him, who could predict what would have happened to me. A district manager at Hunt-Wesson suggested he settle in Akron, which was a little cheaper than Cleveland, and Coach Dru took his advice. He moved there with his family in March 1984, but it was only supposed to be temporary. After a year or so, he figured he would move to Cleveland. But there was something about Akron he liked—the size of it, the feel of it, even the smell of it, because a few companies were still making rubber products back then, and every afternoon you could catch the sharp aroma. So he stayed, living in an apartment first before moving to a house on Greenwood Avenue in West Akron. Because he stayed, my life changed, just as it had with the Walkers.

  There was something else he wanted beyond being a good provider. He wanted to coach kids, and he was desperate to have a son. After his first two children were girls, I think he was getting a little bit worried, even though he loved those daughters to death. He was just one of those fathers who needed a son. When it finally happened in January 1985, he had a little trouble actually believing it. He and his wife, Carolyn, were in the delivery room in the hospital together when that son was born. Coach Dru was so overcome that he walked away from Carolyn just to stare at him, make sure he was real, had the essential equipment. Finally, his wife had to call him back to make sure he remembered that she was real too and had just gone through the hell of giving birth.

  They named their son Dru Joyce III. I wasn’t there at the birth, of course, but as I got to know Little Dru, because that’s what everybody called him, I am pretty sure he came out kicking and screaming.

  Coach Dru didn’t waste any time getting Little Dru involved in sports. Football had been Coach Dru’s first love, so he slated Little Dru as a wide receiver and had him running pass patterns when he was three. Little Dru didn’t like football, and knowing Little Dru as I do now, I am also pretty sure that he had no problem letting his father know it. So Coach Dru switched his son to tennis, and Little Dru was good. On Saturday mornings his dad played several hours of pickup basketball at the Elizabeth Park Community Center with some men from his church. Little Dru tagged along, and even though he was only four or five, he began picking up the nuances of the game just by watching. For most of the time we played together, he was a puny little pipsqueak (sorry, Little Dru, but you know it’s the truth). He had big ears that stuck out like gigantic stereo speakers, so he was always a little bit goofy looking (sorry, Little Dru, but you know it’s the truth). He was so quiet, sometimes I thought he really wanted to be one of those monks who take a vow of silence.

  He also had that little man complex. It motivated him to be great because there were so many who said he was too small to ever be great in basketball, ever be much of anything, just a little kid coming along for the ride. People sometimes laughed at him and called him “pixie” and “smurf,” which only motivated him more. It also made him emotionally trigger-happy, the kind of kid who would take on anybody, no matter what the size, if he thought he had just been insulted.

  I like poking fun, and I remember crossing the line with Little Dru at a church retreat we both went to one summer. We got into an argument over a pillow, of all things. He was angry, like anybody who has the name “Little” in front of his name is always going to be angry, always has to prove that little in size does not mean little in pride and work ethic and courage. He thought I had stolen his pillow, so he pushed me and I pushed him back. I never thought he would hit me because I was so much taller and stronger, but then he did anyway. I didn’t want to hurt him by retaliating, so I just threw him across the room. Even Little Dru knew there were moments in life when the only option was surrender: “I just grabbed my pillow and went to bed.”

  He was also inexhaustible. In sixth grade, when I was at the Joyces much of the time, I played one-on-one with Little Dru. Eventually I had to quit, because he refused to give up even though I was always beating him: “I’m not going to stop—you got to keep playing.” It was the same with his father. They played in the driveway, where there was a basketball hoop attached to the garage. Coach Dru, trying to toughen his son up a little bit, always won. But Little Dru wouldn’t have it. He sometimes made his father stay out there until midnight, until Coach Dru just gave him a victory so he could go to bed.

  With his combination of combativeness and perfectionism, we eventually started to think of him as “the General.” You know how it is with generals. You mess at your own risk. He didn’t mince words. He didn’t know how to mince words. Whether it was rec-league basketball or traveling team basketball or whatever kind of basketball, there was always one constant—if you screwed up on the court, Little Dru was going to march up to you and let you know. Like I said, the General. And the first piece of the dream, along with his father.

  3.

  East Liverpool

  I.

  It was a moment of impulse, but one day Coach Dru took his son to see his roots. He thought it was important for Little Dru, who then was thirteen or fourteen, to appreciate the difference in how he had been raised. The Joyce family at that point was solidly middle-class, living in the house on Greenwood with three bedrooms and a fully finished attic and a recreation room downstairs. His father, along with his mother, who worked part-time for a nonprofit organization that encouraged middle-schoolers to stay away from sex and drugs and other potentially dangerous vices, had achieved the American dream. But there was a time when that dream had seemed impossible for Coach Dru, a faraway point that would never be reached.

  East Liverpool, Ohio, was a town of ab
out 20,000 in that little pocket where Ohio and West Virginia and Pennsylvania all merge together, classic rust belt. Coach Dru’s dad was a janitor there, working for the First National Bank and a local jewelry store. His mom was a day worker, a fancy way of saying that she cleaned rich people’s homes. To make extra money, his parents sometimes served dinner at the local country club. His house was up on a hillside on a dirt road. It was brown with a cracked concrete slab out front that served as a porch. When it rained, they put buckets all over the upstairs to catch the leaks, and sometimes parts of the ceiling fell in. Until he was in eighth grade, his family had one of those old coal furnaces. The coal company came and dumped the coal on the hillside. The Joyce family built a little barrier with wooden stakes so the coal wouldn’t just roll downhill. Coach Dru came with a little box and carried the coal into the dirt floor of the cellar over and over, until the job was finished. The only organized sport he played was football, but since the family didn’t have a car until seventh grade, he walked with his cousin to practice two miles up and down the hills that dotted the region, and then back again after practice.

  Coach Dru’s mom scrimped and saved and made sure that he got whatever he needed, or at least as much as she could possibly afford. Until he was six, Coach Dru shared a bedroom with his grandmother. She died, and the room still had the same battered furniture. It stayed that way until Coach Dru came home one summer day at the age of nine to a new bedroom set. Without telling him, his mom had quietly purchased it on layaway. It had taken her at least a year, but that’s the type of woman she was, determined to do the best for her son. Coach Dru never thought of himself as poor, in large part because of the way his mom and dad fought to provide for him, and it was only in filling out financial aid applications for college that he realized just how low the family’s income was, about $8,000 a year in the early 1970s.