High Price

course, but even now I can vividly recall every detail of the final play—the so-called Sea of Hands catch. On his way down, after being hit by a Dolphins defender, Raiders quarterback Kenny Stabler tossed the ball toward the end zone and in the direction of Clarence Davis, who caught it for a touchdown in between three Dolphins. Just thinking about it still crushes me, to this day. And every time they lost, which, fortunately for me, was rather infrequent, I would be completely emotionally drained.
    Sports were also my real introduction to math. I memorized the statistics of the Dolphins team, figuring out what they meant and playing with them in my head. I learned multiplication by working out increments of 7 for football scoring, 2 for basketball. In the games on the street I wasn’t just learning math—I was living it. And it was fun. I only wish my English and history teachers had been able to capture the joy I found in math in football and bring some related type of experience I could connect with into their classrooms.
    But though my English teachers usually weren’t particularly inspiring, sports did help me to some extent in that subject as well. It was responsible for virtually all of the reading I did outside of school. While I eschewed homework, I’d eagerly consume children’s biographies of any sports star I admired. If there was a book about any of the Miami Dolphins, I’d read it and try to apply its lessons to myself. That wasn’t reading, as I saw it; that was sports.
    Although I’d spent years before that playing on the streets and in yards, I began playing organized football when I was nine. I played in the Optimist League, where I was a standout and often one of just a few black guys on the team. We were called the Driftwood Broncos. I loved it—but there was one thing that I found incredibly stressful. It wasn’t on the field. My biggest stress usually came from having to ask my mother for the twenty dollars required to participate. I knew that money was tight and I hated having to push her about it. But while she wouldn’t ever say no, she’d put me off, over and over again. I began to dread both being questioned about it by the coach and having to nag her repeatedly.

    The Driftwood Broncos eighty-pound football team. I’m number 22.
    This conflict made me feel bad both for her and for myself for having to ask, since we had so little. I resented what seemed to me to be her procrastination; the resulting anger between us was just a tiny illustration of the many, many ways that poverty can put stress on relationships. I sometimes blamed her, even though I knew she was working as hard as she could. Children can’t really understand the reasons behind the choices their parents make; they just experience their results. I remember finding this particularly painful. But I’ll say this: my mother never interfered with my athletic pursuits, and since sports were the main reason I stayed in school, that made a big difference.
    And from the start, even though I was one of the youngest boys on the team, I was the fastest runner. Like Mercury, I played running back and I made a lot of touchdowns. I was proud to wear his number: 22. Few experiences in my life have been better than that moment in the huddle when I knew I was going to be running the ball. That anticipation, that moment of exhilarating possibility—well, it was almost as good as the exultation I felt when I made it into the end zone. I lived for those moments.

CHAPTER 4
    Sex Education
    Abandon the urge to simplify everything . . . appreciate the fact that life is complex.
    — M. SCOTT PECK
    I was certain that I’d caught some shameful and disgusting disease; terrified that I’d gotten a girl pregnant. At twelve, I was just beginning to understand the mysteries of sex, just starting to get clued in to what all the drama was really about. It wasn’t like I was inexperienced with girls: in fact, the opposite was true. After all, I had five older sisters, so I had plenty of time to observe up close the behavior and desires of the opposite sex. And where I grew up, the girls started chasing you and claiming you even in first and second grade, so each grade from first through seventh, I’d had a “girlfriend.” It was these girls who, strange as it may sound, played a crucial role in keeping me out of trouble.
    Paulette Brown, a long-haired girl who lived a few doors down, was my first-grade crush. We’d peck and hug, but