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bankruptcy.
    He was traded to San Francisco, moved to California, and began anew. After two successful and happy years on the coast, he was dealt to New York. He brought with him his penchant for deals and mental games. He has an odd talent for pulling words apart and rearranging their letters alphabetically. The first day he was in the Knick training camp I drove him to practice. We stopped behind a car and he said in rapid-fire order, “E-E-E-J-N-R-S-W-Y. That’s New Jersey spelled alphabetically.” Another time after one of his early games as a Knick I saw him confound the chess champion, Bobby Fischer, with his memory of the Manhattan phone book. “What is number 34 in the first column on page 146?” Fischer asked. “The number,” Lucas replied, “is 758–4010.” Fischer became so perplexed by the feat that he sat on a stool alone in the kitchen of our host’s apartment for fifty-five minutes trying unsuccessfully to figure it out.
    Armed with a Knick contract, new business opportunities, and no debts, Lucas prospered. He looked for ways to avoid paying taxes. He constantly hunted for bonanza tax shelters. Once, trying to encourage me to join him in an apartment deal guaranteed to yield triple deductions and a 15 percent annual tax-free income, he said, “Those fuckers have stopped auditing me. They used to audit me every year until finally I told ’em it was ridiculous. They didn’t find anything wrong in seven years. To continue was harassment. I don’t pay taxes, period, but I do it legally. I’m not stupid.” With no taxes to pay, he dreams of other jackpots in puzzles and magic seminars. He has even begun to write a book about memory which he thinks will be a bestseller. If it was 1849 and Jerry Lucas was living in New England he would be on a clipper ship bound for California, along with many of the other fortune hunters who helped build America, convinced that he’d find the biggest gold strike in the West on his first day of prospecting.
    We land in Atlanta at 1 A.M . It is 21 degrees outside and the frost makes the runway sparkle as if it were sprinkled with bits of glass. Inside the gate three other groups wait to board planes to Miami, San Antonio, and New York. Two hundred people in such a small space so late at night confirms the strangeness of the travel world. Some of them sleep while others, unable to rest, read with bloodshot eyes. Wiry men with leathery skin stare at our entourage as it passes.
    “Is this the circus?” asks a tiny woman with a bouffant hairdo that adds a foot to her height.
    “No, must be ballplayers.”
    We wait forty minutes for our bags, which delays our arrival at the Atlanta Marriott Hotel until 3 A.M . Even at that hour, a fan with a New York accent approaches me in the lobby. He says he came all the way from Miami and could I spare some time tomorrow to talk basketball. He tells me he knows everything about me. I nod, yes, force a smile and keep walking. This is Atlanta, after all, and tomorrow is another day.
    I put my leather bag in the room and go to the coffee shop, where I eat two eggs over easy with sausage, toast and jam, milk, and grits. The first time we played in Atlanta we also arrived early in the morning and everyone was hungry. Most of us didn’t go to our rooms first but went directly to eat. Barnett, who usually was the first one to the coffee shop late at night, said he was going to his room. All the way in from the airport the black players had been making allusions to “bossman,” “boy,” “sit in the back of the bus,” revealing the abiding wariness many blacks have about parts of the South. Several of us were eating our eggs, ordered from a black headwaitress, when Barnett walked in wearing a Dashiki. He had changed just for the Marriott coffee shop in Atlanta. He claimed he did it only for comfort.

THREE
    T HE NEXT DAY , WEDNESDAY , AFTER BREAKFAST AT NOON WITH the late-night fan, I discover that the week’s convention at the