The Wonderment of Buddy Benjamin (Part I)

The ball felt like a lopsided boil in Buddy's hands as he took his first few feeling dribbles. For a split second he thought about exchanging it for another, but as he switched his dribble to his even more awkward left hand he realized that the ball wasn't the problem. It had been months since he could think about any game other than school. But, as he strode onto the court he realized that he couldn't remember one tort from his law class or one adage from his philosophy course. He thought it odd, all the hours he'd smashed his brain against the tiny words on expensive texts hoping to extract an imprint, and yet his mind was as vacant as a lonely fish bowl. The dreaded first shot was surprisingly nothing but net. A residual bit of drunkenness before the undertow of hangover, he assured himself.

Games raged on both sides of his head, he set, focused and concentrated on some sort of follow through. He retrieved the ball. Set, focus, follow through. Swish. He worked up the courage to put the ball through his legs. It felt like a dinner bell ringing. He did it again, this time walking backwards, taunting an invisible defender. A lunge to the right, a switch to his left and a hop step back brought forth a majestic example of how a jump shot should be shot. Straight up, shoulders square, elbow in, wrist snap and purity. For the next hour Buddy danced as if he were alone in his room, surrounded by the questioning eyes of weekend warriors and basketball enthusiasts. The ball was a detachable appendage, as commandable by his brain as his fingers or toes. He told it to go round his back and head, through his legs and down his finger with every type of spin known to physics. He taught it to roll off a glass pane into a metal circle. Buddy used to be a gym rat and in true rat fashion he forced himself to hit five three pointers in a row before releasing himself from the pull of the court.

Later, eyes closed and facing the luke warm beams of shower water face first, he thought only of control. Of both how very little he controlled in his life and, with astonishment, how easily he'd controlled his movements and the ball on the court that night. In every day life he couldn't see three feet in front of his face. Buddy was a bumbler. He bumbled through friendships, schoolwork and family dinners. He bumbled through conversations with his own grandmother. Basketball was one of the few things in life which Buddy was transfigured and transformed into a silken confidence machine. Silken because what he did flowed like satin drying in the wind. It made sense because it was a beautiful sight and it was a beautiful sight because it made sense. Buddy used head fakes better than politicians used lies, spin moves better than they dodged questions and finished quicker than Ted Kennedy on top of an over priced hooker.

Dials spun in his deft hands and the flow was constricted. Eyes soggy, he blindly reached for a gigantic white beach towel and stood numb in the tub basin drying his face and chest. He stepped out of the shower into his own reflection in the mirror which was posing the question nipping at his mind all night. "If I'm so damn good at basketball and so shitty at everything else, wouldn't it stand to reason that other people are just as familiar with the same kind of mind blowing minutia of making others feel small, or taking home a woman, or brainwashing a child. Could they feel the same exhilaration as I do when hitting a shot when they cheat, lie, deceive, falsify or hurt?"

His eyes drifted from his growing stubble up and around to the ceiling as he combed his memory for personalities which might remind him of himself on the court. That confidence, that grace. The ability to predict microscopic changes in another player's center of gravity. How his muscle fibers lept like lightning to the ground to exploit a weakness, an opportunity to drive to the hoop, to score.