Basketball Jones (16 page)

The bathroom door swung open. “Who are you talking to?” I turned around and there stood Dray with a towel around his waist and a toothbrush hanging from his mouth.

“Wrong number,” I said, hanging up the phone abruptly, hoping Dray hadn’t overheard the rest of the call.

“Did you order breakfast?”

“Yep.”

“How long will it take?”

“Twenty minutes,” I said, standing up and nervously straightening the room.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said without looking at him, “just eager to start the day. I’m going to call downstairs and see if I can get a car service to take me shopping.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Dray said. He stepped back into the bathroom and pulled the door closed. The phone rang again and I picked it up quickly.

I was in no mood for this. “Hello,” I said confrontationally.

“Yes, sir, this is room service. I wanted to ask if you wanted strawberries or blueberries with your waffles?” a female voice asked. “The ticket has both checked by mistake.”

“Strawberries,” I said.

“Thank you. Your meal is on the way up.”

“Thank you.”

Just as I hung up, my cell phone rang. I looked down anxiously at the caller ID: Unknown. I let it go to voice mail, feeling I’d spoken to enough unknown callers for the day.

Sometimes even a twenty-nine-year-old man needs a hug from his mother. But since I was in New Orleans and my mother lived in North Carolina, I settled for the next best thing: a phone call.

I’d been home from D.C. for a couple of days, but I was still upset by the phone call I received at the hotel. I wasn’t going to tell my mother what had happened, but I knew she’d make me feel better anyway. I dialed her number.

“I was just thinking about you,” Mama said, picking up the phone without a hello.

“I guess we were both thinking the same thing, and how did we ever live without caller ID?” I laughed.

“Ain’t that the truth. How are you doing, baby?”

“Okay,” I said, halfheartedly.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, but why do you ask?”

“ ‘Cause mamas always want to know that their babies are okay, especially when they’re not there in person to see for themselves. When am I going to see you?”

“Very soon. I was thinking about coming up this weekend. First I need to make sure I don’t have any appointments with my clients.” As always, I hated lying to my mother and wished I could have just said I needed to make sure Dray didn’t need me.

“It would be nice to see you, baby.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “Bella will be so excited, but I won’t tell her until you’re sure you can get away.”

“I don’t want to disappoint her. You think I should call her?” I asked.

“She always loves hearing from her big brother.”

“Then I will do that,” I said. A beep indicated an incoming call. The ID flashed “Out of Area.” Fearing the worst, I took a deep breath.

“Well, let me know when you book your flight. I’ll come and pick you up,” my mother said.

“I will. Mama, I got another call coming in. I’ll phone you in a couple of days. I love you.”

“I love you too, baby. We can’t wait to see you.”

I clicked the phone over and paused to try to calm myself before saying hello. My greeting was followed with dead silence.

“Hello,” I repeated, impatience in my voice.

“So I see this is the best number to reach you.” It was the same male voice from the hotel suite.

“Who are you calling?”

“You’ve forgotten my voice already. That’s not good, boo.”

“Who is this?”

“I told you not to worry about who this is. Just wanted to know when you were going to have my money.”

“I don’t have any money for you.”

“I don’t believe that shit. You got plenty of money. Doesn’t
your basketball boyfriend give you ducats for all that good sex you give him?”

“Stop calling me. I’m reporting this call to the police,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he warned very slowly. “But if you should contact them, you leave me with no choice but to release into cyberspace the little film you guys made.”

“What film?” I asked. Dray and I were sometimes a little wild when we got down, but we never filmed anything. I’d used my digital camera to take a couple of pictures of him in his underwear, but that was it.

“The little film that was made when you were at the Ritz-Carlton. You guys really go at it. Y’all make Kim and Ray J seem like it was their first time.”

“I didn’t make any film at the Ritz and you know it. Cut this bullshit out.”

“I didn’t say you did it knowingly. I just said there was one made. If you weren’t so quick to get off this phone and if you listen, then you might learn something. The skin-tight black underwear you had on was quite cute and your boyfriend is really blessed down there. I bet you love that.”

He was right. I was partial to black underwear because Dray liked the way it looked against my skin. Flipped out by how this asshole would know this, I yelled, “Shut the fuck up. You don’t know shit about me.”

“Oh, I know a lot about you, faggot. Fuckin’ slut! What will your mother think when she finds out about Mr. Wilson?”

“Who is this?” I screamed, finally losing my cool. Nobody and I mean no one knew about Eddie Wilson, especially not my mother. Shit, where was Dray when I needed him? What was this maniac talking about? Had I worn black underwear? I
couldn’t concentrate. This person had to be bluffing. My mind raced over the faces of people I’d met since I moved to New Orleans and the people I’d come into contact with at the hotel in D.C. There was the friendly bellman who seemed to linger in the suite as he helped me with my bags. The room service attendant and the maintenance man both had been in my room. Did one of them have a hand in this?

“Think of it this way: I’m your filmmaker and if I don’t get paid, then I’m going to have to release this little gem.”

Now it was my turn to bluff. “You don’t have a film of me.”

“Wanna bet? This little film is going to have more hits than the R. Kelly and Paris Hilton sex tapes combined. With it being a big-time basketball star and his boyfriend, everybody going to be downloading that shit. Don’t you love this cybershit? Maybe I’ll have that old-school jam ‘Basketball Jones’ playing in the background as you two get busy.”

“Yeah, right,” I scoffed. “You don’t have shit.” But he’d said it:
basketball jones.
Did this asshole know about my and Dray’s secret password? How could he?

“You don’t believe me? Give me your e-mail address and I’ll send you a few frames of your first feature film.”

“You got hold of my phone number. If you’re so clever, try getting my e-mail address too.”

“That won’t be a problem. I think after you review your performance with your boyfriend, you’ll change your tune.”

“Fuck off,” I said, and switched off the phone in a huff.

A wave of anxiety washed over me. I wanted to call Dray, but I didn’t. I hadn’t yet mentioned the hotel phone call to him because he’d been so excited after he’d hit thirty-three points, which included six three-point shots in a row. I always got a text after the Hornets won, but after that game I not only got a text
but a phone call as well. Dray was so excited, happier than I’d heard him in weeks, that I didn’t want to bring him down with more bad news. Truthfully, I thought maybe I could take care of this on my own. I just prayed this entire situation would go away.

This phone call meant that either somebody was playing a sick practical joke or that Dray and I were in really big trouble.

I flew to Atlanta for the day for a haircut and to get my
I
teeth cleaned, since I hadn’t found a good barber or dentist in New Orleans yet. Dray was busy worrying about his pregnant wife, so I figured he wouldn’t even notice if I was gone for a day. Frankly, I was relieved to get away for some time of my own. I secretly hoped that when I returned all would be right with the world again.

My intentions were to fly down in the morning and come back on an evening flight, but instead I called Maurice for an early dinner and he convinced me to come to his house for dinner and then spend the night. Since I didn’t have any plans, I gladly accepted.

After eating some delicious down-home Southern food takeout from Justin’s, Maurice and I retired to his den to catch up over a couple of bottles of wine. Dray had been so much on my mind that I’d forgotten to take care of myself. Maurice had been there for me over the years, and I missed these times and our talks more than I realized.

Maurice poured his fourth glass of white wine, chattering away about his party, which he no longer referred to as simply “the party.” In a nod toward grandeur—real or imagined—he had given it the illustrious-sounding name “Glitter and Be Gay Ball.” Whatever he called it, there was much about the whole setup that still puzzled me. Apart from how Mo planned to pay for everything, even with sponsors, there remained the unanswered question of how he and TT had become so tight. Everyone knew that TT was the gossip to end all gossips and that there was no depth so low that he would not dig for dirt. But what I’d heard also was that behind TT’s flashy-trashy persona was a big, snobbish old queen who thought he was royalty; in other words, exactly the kind of “uppity bitch” Mo railed against. Although I enjoy a word of gossip now and then, as a rule I steer clear of this type of gay man. People like him made me grateful to be with Dray, no matter the obstacles and occasional pain involved. Maurice, however, was not altogether outside this world. In fact, I sometimes thought the only thing that separated him from the likes of TT was that he didn’t have his fame or money. But it was more than this that distinguished them. Mo didn’t run in TT’s celebrity circles, and breaking into that group was about as easy as crashing a party by scaling a barbed-wire fence wearing a tuxedo; you could give it your best, but chances were you’d end up getting shredded.

I was mulling all this over my wine when it occurred to me that this might be the perfect moment to do a little digging myself. Up till now he’d purposely kept the details of his sudden connection to TT ambiguous, which for him was like waving a red flag. Maurice had been going at the bottle pretty good, and his tongue by now had to be at its most loose.

Trying my best to sound nonchalant, I asked offhandedly, “Hey, Mo, tell me again how you and TT got so tight? Where did you meet him?”

A smile of superiority flashed across Mo’s face, indicating he was about to share a story that he quite obviously enjoyed but wasn’t entirely sure he should tell. As much as he enjoyed this story, however, he enjoyed his wine even more. I therefore knew it wasn’t a question of whether he would spill the beans but how many he would spill. Given his current state, I wagered it would be the whole pot.

“Like everybody these days, we met online. But not on one of those gay dating sites,” he hastened to add, as if that were something beneath him. “I simply wrote TT an adoring e-mail, saying how much I admired him for what he’d accomplished, how I followed his blog religiously and worshipped at his shrine. He wrote back almost immediately, we exchanged a few friendly notes—including one with a picture attached of me looking particularly stunning—and then just like that he invited me to lunch. The Capital Grille, of course. It was all so simple that I couldn’t believe he fell for it.”

“What do you mean? Fell for what?”

“You know me, child,” he said with a playful slap on my knee. “You have to get up pretty early in the morning to trick a diva like me, but do I ever know how to work these star fuckers. All I had to do was oh-so-casually drop the names of one or two people who knew.”

“Knew what?”

He grinned once more, then looked me in the eye as if to heighten the moment of suspense. Then he added bluntly, “About his sordid little life in Miami before he moved to Atlanta and became the black gay grande dame. How he got
the money to finance his rise to the queen of the gay gossip blogs.”

Leave it to Mo. Yes, he could be low-down and devious, but at times like these, I have to admit, he had me in his corner, fascinated by what new mess he had concocted. I smiled to myself in anticipation, while Maurice finished off his wine glass and poured himself another. I knew that wine was like a truth serum and since I had been drinking, my so-called moral code disappeared along with the wine.