Angels in Heaven

aubergine.
    “This is the guy I told you about,”
Happy said.
    “It sure ain’t Sammy Davis, Jr.,”
Peanuts said. We slapped palms a couple of times. “Hey, babe. I’m Peanuts and
this holy terror here is Snowy. Sorry to hear about your trouble.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Peanuts,” I said.
“Mr. Snowy, nice to meet you.”
    “Love the lid,” Snowy said.
    I’ll get you for this, Benny, I
vowed.
    “OK, OK,” Happy said agitatedly.
“Let’s get this show on the road, what d’you say? We’re late already.”
    We trouped out into the store where
Happy rounded up the others.
    “Stay cool, Pops,” I said to Jorge as
I passed him. He seemed to be choking on something; perhaps he hated goodbyes.
    Thanks, Benny. I felt as invisible as
the Empire State Building on a clear day. I shuffled outside and we clambered
onto the bus to a smattering of applause from the onlookers.
    I slunk into the first unoccupied
seat I came to—as chance would have it, beside an extremely pretty black girl
who took one look at me and burst into an uncontrollable fit of giggles.
    “If that ain’t the creature from the
Black Lagoon, I don’t know what is,” a wiseacre from the back called out. I
slunk even lower in my seat. The bus took off. After a minute the girl next to
me quieted down enough to say her name was Joy and don’t mind her and she was
sure sorry to hear about the trouble I was in; then she started giggling again.
I began to wonder just what kind of trouble I was supposed to be in.
    “I didn’t know they let girls play
now,” I said after a while.
    “Sure,” she said proudly. “There’s
two of us but I was the first.”
    I took a close look at her, which
wasn’t hard.
    “I know you,” I said. “I saw you play
on television. A couple of times. You were terrific. I saw you win the college
championship.”
    “You got it,” she said. “That was us.
Now I’m broadening my horizons, I think they call it, seeing new countries,
meeting new people, but mostly keeping my door locked.” She took out a compact
and began to inspect her makeup.
    “Maybe I better do the same,” I said.
“My nose feels shiny.”
    She giggled again.
    All of which, aside from a lot more
catcalls, one-liners, and jibes from the cheap seats at the back, which I won’t
bother to report here, pretty much brings us up to “Sweet Georgia Brown” and me
sitting on the bench getting splinters beside Happy, watching the boys and
girls warm up.
    When the game started, it proceeded
along the well-worn and well-loved Globetrotter lines, and although most of the
faces were new to me, the gags weren’t. We were treated to the lopsided ball,
the ball on a long elastic, the piggyback dunk, the forty-yarder thrown from
the hip, the smallest Globetrotter dribbling through the entire other team
before scoring, the player rummaging through a lady’s handbag and holding up
various items for the world to see while taking a breather in the audience, and
all the other old favorites. And all the while their straight men (some of
whom, I may say, Benny, looked almost as old as me) were careful not to score
too many baskets or do anything remotely flashy. The Meridians lapped it up,
and quite rightly too.
    I wondered vaguely, a-sittin’ there,
what kind of life it was for those involved healthwise, travelwise, hotelwise,
diseasewise, foodwise, and girlwise. Could be worse, I decided. I once knew a
young lady, Mary Lou Kempsky—this was back east in my younger days—who spent
half the year touring with the Ice Capades and the other half in Florida with a
water ballet and acrobatics show. She said she loved the life, but after a few
years, who knew? Who knows anything about a few years from now? I say. Mary Lou
Kempsky. If you so much as touched the back of her neck, she fell down on the
floor and purred, and that is all I have to say about Mary Lou, not being a
kiss-and-tell, except she had a twin brother in Tahoe who gave snow skiing
lessons in the winter and water-skiing lessons in Sarasota in the summer. I
sometimes wished my life was arranged as neatly. I wonder if water ballets hire
people my age. Maybe I could black up again, all over, to hide the wrinkles and
saggy bits.
    To the enormous surprise of no one,
the Globetrotters hung on to win, despite a late rally by the Generals. Then as
the mariachi band struck up again, we trotted off into the wings and straight
onto the bus and then straight back to the Holiday Inn, where we stopped just
long