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.

Salsa

The salsa was too spicy.

Tortilla chips melted inches before even having been dipped in its red gooey-ness. No one knew who made it, it just appeared one day in a Tupperware jar with a posted note attached to its lid which said, "For the one who knows little and seeks much." Pat assumed it was an odd neighborly gift left as an awkward exchange of amicability from the apartment adjacent to his. He brought it inside and placed it in his brand new General Electric half freezer half fridge with the intention of buying some chips for later on that day. He shuffled on about his day, purchasing goods and making transactions as all the while the salsa radiated next to a jar of blackberry jam in its chilly new abode. It was far too hot.

Pat took his mom's pant suit to the dry cleaners, watered his cactus, cleaned his fish tank and last of all headed off to the Grocer's Garage for a few much needed supplies. In the check out isle his eyes searched the surroundings for something which might make his expression more interesting, when all the sudden his mind was flooded with thoughts of rivers of thick, blood red salsa. He had to have corn chips. He informed the next customer in line of this fact as he dashed towards isle number nine and all its crispy bounty. Uncharacteristically, Pat turned off the too loud stylings of the Beastie Boys as he made the first right turn on the long journey from the G's G to his quiet apartment.

The car was still in drive when the driver's side door flung open, it's occupant holding a bag of Tostitos with all the luminescent brightness of God's personal sitting cloud in his hazelnut eyes. Mindless and drunk with a passion for flavor he forsake the welcoming door frame in favor of a James Bond like barrel role through a large window leading to the living room. With the grace of a drunken peg leg he arose from a pile of shattered glass and hobbled wide eyed into the moon lit kitchenette. His eyes saw a normal refrigerator, but his mind's eye was glowing in a transcendent vision of bubbling salsa concocted with every enticing and tongue fucking pepper our earth has ever produced. Halfway to the fridge his tongue jutted unconsciously from his foaming mouth led by a team of inbred and rabies ridden taste buds with a blood lust for spice. They cooled themselves against the white metallic surface of the fridge door as Pat unbuckled his pants and shucked off his undergarments as if they were aflame. The yellow light basked all about his body like the relieving light of heaven's gates when he pulled open the door to what was sure to be the ultimate taste experience of his pathetic existence. He located the jar and crushed the posted note roosting coolly on its top. The top hit the wall. Hands hit salsa and scooped, giving the glory to his heaving tongue. Lights erupted from the earth around his feet and above his head, cutting him like the blades of a pair of laser beam scissors snipping off a serpents head. Pat felt his body ascending towards some fantastic upside down caramel waterfall which spilled into a tributary of a far off world's waste management facility. Though his body had been obliterated by the fall up the sugary sweet water spout , Pat felt as if he were spinning and rotating at an enormous speed which only seemed to increase exponentially as time's arrow shot ominously towards its target. At his conscious mind's breaking point a searing pain emanating from his mouth snapped him back into reality.

A reality where he lay naked from the waste down, dick first in a small dirt and salsa filled hole in the middle of his freshly sodded lawn.

The salsa was too spicey.

Blurred Vision

I clicked the T.V. off and lay in the darkness. All was still. The street light illuminated hardly anything and I stared at the time staring back at me from the now dead cable box. Bad genes and years of squinting rendered the digital numbers a blur. I tugged on the part of my temple next to my one good eye to pull the numbers 3:49 into focus. I released, splattering the numbers an unrecognizable amber across a dark blue canvas. I tugged again. A minute had passed. Again and again I physically focused my ocular lens until whatever point I was trying to make made sense. Time is unraveling my senses. Where this very room may have been crystal clear, silent and haunting five years before, it was now a hazy streak of unknown. The thought occurred to me that this unraveling may not be isolated to just sight, but touch, smell, hearing, taste and most terrifying of all, true feeling. A mere tug on my temple sent me spinning back through time when both the lens of my eye and of my heart weren't wrecked by experience. An inevitable sadness washed over me as I brought my hand from my face, sinking back into the blur. At that moment I decided I needed a contact, both for my eye and my heart. I have been perceiving the world with blurred vision and blurred feeling for far too long and I know only of a remedy for my eye. Corrective vision for the heart can not be bought in stores, it has to be home made, whittled day by day with tedious care. One slip and the the glass shatters, the heart breaks and with it the body and conscious mind. All these things rushed through my mind as I looked lazily at my streaking surroundings in the dark of my living room.