and I lived in the apartment above it, three rooms and a bathroom whose window looked out over the alley, and from the time I was eleven I had swept the lint traps and mopped the floor every night after close in exchange for the rent we didn't pay. My father had left the summer I turned twelve. He moved to Florida with a woman who sold Amway, and he sent a card every Christmas with a twenty in it and the same message, "Be good, champ," as if he had a stamp made.
Behind the Suds-O-Rama there was an alley that ran down toward the river, and halfway down the alley there was a telephone pole, and nailed to that pole about ten feet up was a plastic milk crate with the bottom cut out. It was an orange Stewart's crate, the kind every convenience store in the Capital District used for gallon jugs, and someone, years ago, had sawed the bottom out with a jigsaw and nailed it up with roofing nails to make a hoop. Dolores said it had been there when she bought the building in 1977. She thought one of the Mahoney boys had done it before the family moved to Cohoes.
Here is what you need to understand about the crate. It was not a hoop. A hoop is a circle, and a circle is fair; a ball that hits it in a certain place goes in a certain direction, and you can learn that direction in a week. A crate is a square, and this one wasn't even a square anymore. One corner had cracked and sagged so the front lip sat lower than the back. The left side had been hit so many times it had bowed outward like a sail. There were two roofing nails sticking out of the top rail, and if the ball caught one of them it spun off sideways like a startled bird. And behind the crate there was no backboard, only the creosote pole, which was round, and the brick wall of the old Hollister Collar Company building six feet behind that, which was not.
The Hollister wall had been laid in 1891, and over a hundred years the bricks had shifted and bellied and been patched with whatever was on hand, so that its face was a kind of rippled map. A ball that hit it high came back flat. A ball that hit the patched place, where somebody had filled a hole with cinderblock, came back dead and dropped. A ball that hit the iron bracket where a fire escape used to be came back screaming.