The Hustle (20 page)

Instead of thinking about getting rich, Townsend says, you've just got to live your life and not let yourself get too upset or blown off course when things are tough. You've got to keep your head, which means surviving within the dominant culture. “We teach that doors can be open for us that no man can shut. So I don't go into the workplace as an African American feeling that someone is going to discriminate against me, even though it does happen. But there's a power greater than those on Earth that's going to open doors greater than no man can shut, so then when I'm presenting myself, or when the young African-American men here present themselves to white America, so to speak, it's not with a hostile attitude,” he says. “It's with a spirit of expectation, that this is my job, I'm gonna get it, and if I get the job, I'm gonna do a good job, because what I'm doing is under God and that is unto man, and I don't feel oppressed and I don't feel angry about what happened four hundred years ago, I'm a new creature, all men are brothers, and so let's go for it.”

When someone comes into the church, no matter what their situation, Townsend tries to help. If a new arrival needs a place to stay, a member of the congregation will put him up. If he's broke, people will buy him food. If he just got an apartment but has no furniture, people will donate to him. When the person is ready, Townsend has a variety of contacts he can call to set people up with jobs. The main thing, he says, is to provide an example, give people hope, and show them that there is a way to leave behind some of the turmoil in their lives. “I believe the black man has been suffering for four hundred years, and if it takes God another four hundred years for our deliverance, so be it,” he says. “But I'm not going to take matters into my own hands and then have innocent, well-intentioned African Americans die at the hands of the oppressor just because I'm anxious about getting free. I don't think that's necessary anymore. I don't think it's necessary for dogs to bite us and hoses to be sprayed on our people anymore, because you're dealing with a different generation.

“These young men that we're talking about now—and I know you know because it's your generation—they're hostile brothers, man. You thought my generation, in the 1960s and 1970s, was hostile, no, no, we'd march and then we'd run, but these guys will die. So the last thing they need is a hostile leader. They need a passive leader, to say, ‘No, brother, calm down, I know what you want, let me show you how to get it.'

“So when the little hustlers come into church, they've got money. First of all, I don't allow them to give me anything—Brother Damian will bear witness—I don't allow them to give me anything like the Mafia did the Catholic Church. But what I do is I sit them down and help them put together a business plan. ‘OK, you're through with the game, you want to get your life together, you need to get some education, even if it's no more than a GED. Then what kind of skills do you have?' ‘Well, I wash cars.' ‘Then let's do a detail shop. Let's put together a business plan and do something constructive.' If you can show this kid—especially if he wants out, some of them don't want out, I'm only dealing with those that want out—if you can show this guy where he can make an honest buck and be respected by the rest of the folk in society, he'll do it. He'll do it. But you've got to have some examples. You've got to have a Sam Townsend. You've got to have a Damian.”

At twenty-one, Damian had been kicked off the Seattle University basketball team and was on the verge of completely flunking out. He was clubbing, drinking, smoking weed, and generally unhappy. In his turmoil, he checked out the Nation of Islam but was turned off by the “black man/white man stuff.” He went to the library and read about different religions—Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity. One night, when he was hanging out smoking pot with a friend, he kept thinking that his life was headed for a dead end. Not long after, he was at home at his mom's, on the couch. He started to think about God and said to himself,
Lord Jesus, come into my heart, save me. I believe that you died on the cross, I believe you rose from the dead.

The transformation was instantaneous. “I just became a new person immediately, like stepping out of this glass and looking inside and seeing life totally different,” Damian says. “I was no longer dead.” His desires—to drink and smoke, to watch rap videos, to use profanity—were gone. His craving for things such as Air Jordans vanished. He distanced himself from his old friends, got his grades up enough to stay in college, and began a new life. “It's like this, Doug,” he tells me. “Living in the same city, you still see the same people. But I'm a new person. All they're seeing is what they're doing. I'm seeing in a totally different way.”

It would be impossible to understate how much getting saved changed Damian; his faith and the church became the center of his life. Damian met his wife, Michelle, there shortly after his conversion. Besides Sunday services and Bible study on Tuesday and Friday nights, Damian mentors other members and collects tithes. One Saturday a month, he drives down to Tacoma to the Church of God in Christ's Washington headquarters—a cavernous building in a strip mall—where the leaders of the state's nearly eighty congregations meet.

The church also allowed him to separate himself from the street economy in which so many of friends had gotten caught up. “It's just choices you make,” Damian says frequently, expressing his belief that everyone has control over his own actions, no matter how much external pressure there is. Obstacles such as racism, while they exist, are not an excuse, Damian insists. One day, when we are driving near his house in the South End, a black man wearing baggy jeans and a huge white T-shirt crosses the road in front of Damian's car. The man, who looks to be in his early twenties, glares at us. “He's blaming the white man for all his problems. That's what they do,” Damian remarks, surprising me with the level of scorn I hear in his voice.

“You can be free in the world but bound in your mind and the things that you do,” he says. “That's where a lot of my friends—James [Credit] and all—they were bound, and it ended up sucking them to the end. They weren't free from those things, and I'm free now, to the point where I don't have to be bound to those things that held me captive.

“My happiness and joy come from the inside now and not the outside, so I don't have to have those things. Back then, I just had to be on top, I just had to be seen. It's the pride of life, that's how you get caught up in those things. But now, none of those things mean anything. I'm saved, I'm satisfied.… I love it, man, it's the best life I can have.”

…

Of all the members of our team, Damian is by far the most grounded in the church. With most of the others, religion and spirituality rarely arise in the course of our conversations. Dino mentions in passing that his kids go to Sunday school at the Greek Orthodox Church. Chris attends weekly meditation classes and practices in the mornings.

In 2007, Coach McClain started his own church. He shares space with an older, more established Central Area congregation and preaches to a dedicated flock of about seventy-five people on Sunday afternoons. Every Wednesday evening, he and his wife, Diane, host Bible study at their house. At one session I attend, McClain sits at his kitchen table and leads a group of ten people, including men, women, and teenagers, through a reading of the book of Colossians. For the McClains, the church is a natural extension of what they've done for decades—open their lives to people in the community who need help, guidance, and love.

Willie Jr. occasionally goes to his dad's services. One day, when we go to lunch at a Mongolian barbecue place in the South End, I ask Will if he's religious. “I know all about church, but I don't lead the life of a Christian,” he says. Will is big, boisterous, and quick with a joke. He still loves sports, and tells me he enjoys entering darts competitions at taverns, where he often wins money. “I still drink, go out,” he says. “They say you can't live Christ's life when you do that.”

With Damian, his faith and the church have shifted his life's trajectory, removing him from one path and putting him on another. Though Maitland did not undergo a religious conversion like Damian, he, too, has put a lot of thought into the direction of his life. He's made major adjustments since we were kids.

If Maitland is surprised when I first reach him on the phone, he doesn't show it. I am so taken aback by the lack of inflection in his voice that I ask if his dad, who had given me his number, had told him I was going to call. “No,” he answers, and lets it drop. I wonder if somehow Mait's been expecting an old Lakeside classmate to phone out of nowhere and ask him about basketball.

We chat a few minutes, catching up. Maitland is working at a winery in the Willamette Valley, south of Portland. We set a time for the coming weekend to talk further. When I call on Saturday, he doesn't pick up. I leave a message but don't hear back.

It takes two more years of intermittent phone calls before, one day, Mait calls while I'm in Seattle. I'd left him a few messages letting him know I was planning to drive down to California the next week and would like to see him on the way. When his number comes up on my caller ID, I'm so shocked I do a double take.

We plan to meet the next weekend. When I ask him his address, Maitland says, “An address won't do you much good.”

On the way down, I pass through Portland and continue another thirty miles south. I exit and head west, crawling through what seems to be an unending succession of little towns lined with strip malls and regulated by poorly coordinated traffic lights. Past the town of Newberg, it all thins out as I head toward Yamhill, which has a population of roughly eight hundred people.

The two-lane road is empty of traffic as I speed past a series of wheat, barley, and hops fields. Yamhill itself has one blinking traffic light on the main street. Maitland lives eight miles out of town. The driveway to his place starts where the road turns from pavement to dirt. As Mait has instructed, I turn left when I see a dead oak tree. My car bounces up and down as I drive up a hill along a rutted path toward a white one-bedroom house—almost a shack. I pull up under the sheltering branches of a massive cottonwood tree and look out over the valley below, the yellow leaves of grapevines shimmering on the hill opposite. Stepping out of my car, I see beer- and wine-brewing materials—five-gallon glass jugs, various measures and funnels—arranged under the awning by the door.

Maitland comes out to greet me, followed by his small, mixed-breed dog, Sangi. Mait is big—at more than six feet tall, he has packed some weight onto his frame. He wears black sweatpants and a black sweatshirt, has dark blond hair, and a long, dark beard. My first thought, as he ambles toward the car, is that it looks like I'm the first visitor who's been out here in a while.

“Quite honestly, I really loved basketball, but I could have cared less about games,” Maitland tells me. “I could have taken or left playing basketball on the high school team. It didn't really bother me whether I got playing time or not.”

We're sitting across a table in brewpub in McMinnville, about fifteen miles from Maitland's house. He's been working twelve- to sixteen-hour days over the past few weeks, and he hasn't been able to get out much.

It's the fall wine harvest, the busiest time of the year for winemakers. There are literally tons of grapes to pick, sort, crush, and shift into fermenting vats. The work has left Maitland's hands stained a dark purple, the color deepening to black on the creases around his knuckles and the lines on his palm. While his hands look like those of an old crone who has cooked up too many potions, Maitland's face appears almost totally untouched by time, as if he hadn't aged a day since I'd last seen him. His eyes are soft and blue.

We've come into town so Maitland can wash his clothes, with me following in my car to allow Sangi to ride shotgun in his red pickup. McMinnville, home of about thirty thousand people, is a rough-and-ready rural Oregon town leavened with bed-and-breakfasts and other businesses catering to the tourists who come to sample the area's famous pinot noir. At the laundromat, Maitland—who has shaved and changed into jeans and a flannel shirt—throws a small bundle of clothes into a front loader while kids run around us, shrieking and joking in Spanish.

Maitland first learned to make wine in France, where he worked at a few vineyards after graduating from Western Washington University with a degree in French and chemistry. When he came back to the United States, Mait went to work at his dad's small winery near the Canadian border. In 1999 he moved down to Oregon to start work at a much-lauded boutique winery. He's just gotten a new job as an assistant winemaker at a much larger winery. The work has been demanding—getting up at five in the morning to make the commute in, arriving home at nine or ten—and the weariness shows on his face as we sip on dark beers and talk about basketball.

“I can't speak to my father's motivations,” Maitland says when I ask him about the team. “I have wondered at various times, you know, why did this all really happen? What was going on?”

Maitland had, for me, been an object of envy and sympathy. Randy Finley was a big and charismatic man, and his energy was uplifting and contagious. But he sometimes seemed so dedicated to his own visions that they clouded his perception. One of those things he couldn't quite see clearly was perhaps his own son. Randy, it was obvious, really wanted Maitland to succeed in basketball. To an outsider, it was clear that Mait, while having the size, ability, and temperament to make a decent role player, did not have the athleticism or desire to do more.

“I was probably just as much into sports as other people, but sports have not really remained an integral part of my life in terms of what I do,” Maitland says. “I've heard my dad say many times that ‘I wanted you to experience sports,' that basketball is a great team sport and skiing is a great individual sport. It's all fine and good and it's hard to say what the correct or incorrect thing is. But I was pushed or borderline bullied into doing that stuff.