Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories

MIDNIGHT BASKETBALL

During a regular pickup game at St. Jerome University’s outdoor court, Big Ed head-faked once, twice, three times — despite the fact that nobody was guarding him — and wildly missed a three-pointer.

“Come on, Ed,” Joey said. “Stop shooting that crap. You’re O-for-ten tonight.”

“I had a good look,” Big Ed said. That was always his excuse. If he’d driven over a bicycle but missed the bicyclist, Big Ed would have said, “I had a good look.”

“Just move the ball,” Joey said. “And set a damn pick.”

On the next possession, Big Ed intercepted a pass meant for Joey and took a three-on-one fast-break running jump shot that completely missed the rim and backboard. Hell, it missed the earth.

“My bad,” Big Ed said.

Joey howled and spun circles.

Two weeks earlier, at their favorite pub, Ed had confided to Joey that he’d been working on his jump shot.

“How’s that?” Joey asked.

“No big changes,” Ed said. “I don’t need big changes. My shot — my form — is pretty good as it is. I just need to make some minor adjustments.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what you need. Minor adjustments.”

“I’ve been studying Obama—”

“No, not that shit again. Obama can’t play ball—”

“Yes he can, he’s got a first quick step—”

“No he doesn’t. That’s all public relations bullshit.”

“Well, he’s got hops—”

“No, no, no, don’t bring up that damn photo again.”

Ed loved the New York Times front-page photograph of President Obama shooting a running jump over some short and skinny white dude who was probably a Vermont congressman and former ninth man on his high school basketball team.

“It’s photographic evidence,” Ed said. “It could be used in a courtroom—”

“Those aren’t hops. He’s got his legs tucked up and splayed out behind him, like a frog, so it looks like he’s high in the air. But it’s an optical illusion. He’s actually only three inches off the ground.”

“No, man, you can tell. Obama’s got style. He’s got so much style, I’m just going to call him the Big O—”

“You can’t call him O. Oscar Robertson is the Big O.”

“Oh, I forgot.”

“You can’t forget Oscar Robertson. He should be on the NBA logo instead of Jerry West.”

“I just know I want to play ball like Obama.”

“Come on, Ed. I like Obama. I voted for him. I’m a damn commie bastard. But you don’t want to play basketball like him.”

“Have you seen the videos? That one where he dribble-drives through a bunch of guys?”

“Those are Secret Service dudes he’s running with. They’d take a bullet for him. They’re not supposed to stop him; they’re trained to stop other people from getting to him.”

“You see him hit that scoop shot over that North Carolina dude—”

“God, it’s North Carolina, Ed. It’s Division I basketball. Do you have any idea how great those guys are? Shit, in a real game against real players like that, Obama wouldn’t score in ten thousand years.”

“Well, he’s scoring in that video.”

“That guy wasn’t guarding him. Obama is POTUS. He is mother-effing POTUS. And even if he wasn’t POTUS, Obama still had that ball hanging out so far that anybody could have blocked it. You could have blocked it, Ed. That shit was as weak as the public option in health care. If Obama pulled that on me, I’d block it like some racist-ass redneck senator from Alabama.”

Ed didn’t laugh. He was incapable of finding any humor in basketball — not in the game in general and certainly not in his game in particular. The thing is: Ed thought he was good. No, it was worse than that. Ed believed he was underrated.

“You know,” Ed often said. “I’m not great at any one thing, but I feel like I’m a positive force on the court. My teammates are better because of me, you know? I can feel it.”

Joey had always marveled at Ed’s basketball delusions. The guy might have been blind and deaf on the court but he still believed in his talent. No matter how poorly he played — and he always played poorly — he thought he’d been the all-star of the evening.

“No!” Joey screamed as Ed shot and missed another jumper.

“I’ll get the next one,” Ed said.

“No, you won’t get the next one,” Joey said. “You’ll never get the next one. There has never once been a next one for you.”

Ed smiled. Joey was furious. He wanted to punch Big Ed, but they’d been friends for twenty-seven years. They’d met on their first day of college. Big Ed had almost married Joey’s sister and had eventually married and divorced one of Joey’s cousins. Joey was godfather to Big Ed’s middle son. Joey and Big Ed loved each other with the kind of straight-boy-devotion that started wars, terror attacks, and video game companies.

“Why do you shoot that shit?” Joey asked. “You haven’t made a three-pointer in, like — wait, no, you’ve never made a three-pointer. Not ever.”

“I had a good look,” Big Ed said again. He smiled. He was always so damn handsome and genial, even though he was a basketball sociopath. Yep, Big Ed was the Ted Bundy of the Saturday afternoon basketball crowd and murdered the hopes and dreams of his teammates forty-seven times a day.

Of course, one might wonder why people kept throwing the ball to Big Ed. Well, Joey and his fellow hoopsters were good players, so they always threw the correct pass. The open man always got the ball. And since Big Ed’s true shooting percentage was in the single digits, he was always left open by his defender and thus, due to the immutable laws of teamwork, always got the ball. Big Ed didn’t need a cut or pick to get open. He didn’t need to move. He could stand in place — and often did stand in one place for entire possessions — and would still get touches. And after Big Ed missed some horrific bukakke jumper, the man who’d thrown him the ball would think, I had to give it to him because the basketball gods demand that I play with honor and trust.

“Come on, Ed!” Joey screamed at his friend — his best friend. “Move the ball!”

Moments later, Big Ed drove into the key and missed a finger roll — no, it wasn’t a roll; it was a week-old croissant.

Joey didn’t howl. He didn’t make a sound. He just shook his head, walked off the court, grabbed his bag, and began his twelve-block walk home. As he walked, he removed his shirt, shorts, and boxers and tossed them aside. He also removed his knee braces, magnetic back warmer, and mouth guard and threw them into the street. He was forty-five years old and he was walking mostly naked — he was still wearing his socks and shoes — through his Seattle neighborhood. Strangers gawked and giggled; two of his neighbors smiled and waved. Joey ignored all of them. He wasn’t sure why he was doing this. He knew somebody had done the same thing during a hockey movie, and soccer players were always tearing off their clothes. Joey only knew he was engaged in some kind of political protest — perhaps the most minor political protest in human history — but it felt important to him.

At his doorstep, Joey sat on his welcome mat — it was surprisingly comfortable on his bare ass — and removed his shoes and socks. Then, completely naked, Joey walked into his living room, slumped into his recliner, stared at his blank television, and pretended he was watching Stockton-and-Malone run the pick-and-roll on an endless highlight reel.

Twenty minutes later, his wife, Sharon, pulled into the driveway. She walked up to the front porch and stared at her husband’s socks and shoes. She cradled them in her arms, opened the door, and discovered her naked husband still daydreaming about high-percentage basketball.

She regarded him. She certainly knew all of the curves and angles, and the parallel and perpendicular lines, of his body, and she’d memorized his half-damned soul.

“Big Ed again?” she asked.

“He tried a finger roll,” Joey said. “Can you believe that? A finger roll.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s tragic.”

“The thing is, I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I’m old. Truly. How many years of hoops do I have left? And I want it to be good ball, you know? I don’t want to tear my damn ACL or Achilles because I’m trying to chase down some shitty Big Ed jump shot.”

“Why do you keep playing with him?”

“I don’t know, honey. It’s so demoralizing. And I feel trapped. It’s a terrible, destructive, and endless circle.”

“Just like poverty,” she said.

“It’s oppression and slavery,” he said. “Ed is, like, England, circa 1363.”

“Well, Braveheart,” she said. “If there’s a revolution, if you kill him, I’ll help you hide the body.”

They laughed.

“Hey,” she said, and checked her watch. “The boys won’t get home for forty-three minutes.”

Nineteen minutes later, after they’d made love, after he’d kissed her belly and thighs and moved his tongue and hips in the same way he’d moved them for nineteen years, and after she’d chewed on his collarbone and pulled his hair and sucked on his lips in the same way she had for those same nineteen years, and after they’d had the most recent orgasms of a one-thousand-orgasm marriage, they laughed again.

“Damn,” she said. “That was efficient.”

“Teamwork,” Joey said.

Later that night, unable to sleep, Joey tried to sneak out of bed.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“No,” Joey said.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I keep thinking about Ed. I was pretty hard on him today. I want to apologize.”

“It’s three in the morning. You can’t call him this late.”

“I’m not going to call him. I’m going over to see him.”

“You’re crazy,” she said. “He’s crazy. Basketball just makes you guys crazy.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Joey said. But she was right. Ed’s ex-wife, Joey’s cousin, had actually claimed that Ed’s hoops habit — he played at least three times a week — was an irreconcilable difference. And the judge had mockingly agreed.

“Just don’t divorce me because of ball,” Joey said.

“Just don’t wake up the boys,” Sharon said.

She rolled over and went back to sleep. Joey got dressed, warmed up his car, and drove toward Big Ed’s apartment building. Divorced for two years, Ed lived in a studio apartment with his plasma television. It was a much better relationship than the one he’d had with his wife.

“I don’t miss her,” Ed had said more than once. “But I miss seeing my son every day. And I miss seeing us all together, you know?”

Joey knew.

On his way to Ed’s place, Joey noticed a lone figure shooting hoops on the St. Jerome basketball court. It was too dark and far for Joey to be sure, but the night-shift hoopster was approximately the same size and shape as Big Ed.

Joey pulled over, turned off the car, and watched the maybe-Ed shoot and miss jump shot after jump shot. Joey kept score.

Miss. Off the front rim.

Miss. Off the side of the backboard.

Miss. Front rim.

Miss. Off the top of the backboard.

Miss. Front rim.

Air ball.

Joey watched the man, unguarded and alone on the court, miss twenty-one jump shots in a row. In the dark, in such a large but quiet city, it was an eerie display of ineptitude.

Then maybe-Ed dribbled left and right and took a running jump shot and scudded it off the bottom of the rim. Maybe-Ed angrily grabbed the rebound and threw the ball as hard and far as he could. It flew maybe fifty feet through the air, bounced through a parking lot, rolled across the manicured grass, and came to a rest at the base of a pine tree.

“Nice shot,” Joey said to himself.

Maybe-Ed walked to center court, perhaps in initial pursuit of the ball, but he stopped and stood still for an impossibly long time. Joey wondered how a person could stand so motionless for — yes, Joey kept checking his watch — twenty-three damn minutes. Joey wondered if this maybe-Ed needed help but, Jesus, what could he do to help anyway? Maybe this guy was some schizophrenic transient who was stuck in some dreamworld. Maybe this homeless hoopster was dangerous.

Two or three times, Joey told himself to start the car and drive away. What kind of sad bastard, homeless or not, plays basketball in the middle of the night? But worse, what kind of hoopster turns himself into a goddamn statue in the middle of that night?

And then, finally, this maybe-Ed — Screw that, Joey decided, it had to be Ed; yes, it was Ed — walked off the court, away from the basketball, and disappeared into the dark.

“Jesus,” Joey said aloud, and made the Sign of the Cross. He wasn’t Catholic — he wasn’t a Christian at all — but he knew he’d watched something unbeatific happen on a Catholic basketball court.

“Jesus,” Joey said again, just to be sure.

Soon after that, Joey started his car and drove back home. Inside the house, he took off his clothes — he was naked for the fourth time that day — and crawled back into bed with his wife.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“What?”

“With Ed?” she asked. “How is he?”

“Okay, I guess,” Joey said.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

She kissed him and quickly fell back to sleep. Awake for hours more, Joey promised himself that he would never ask Big Ed about his late-night hoops practice. Every man must have his secrets, right? And every man was supposed to ignore every other man’s secrets. That’s how the game was supposed to be played.