Summer - 1997

It was a nowhere place.

The kind you could drive past without giving a second glance. Nothing about it to stick in your memory. Nothing you would remember later. Nothing but asphalt and concrete basketball courts two blocks from the Atlantic City Boardwalk.

The courts were nestled between the neon lights of the casino hotels and the desolate, burned-out buildings of the past, ringed by trash-strewn lots. The asphalt was cracked and the fence around the perimeter bent, the metal twisted in spots and broken in others. Sand from the beach blew in with each gust of wind, swirling around your ankles when you dribbled. The baskets were rusted steel hoops with heavy chain nets that shook after every shot. In some spots you couldn’t even make out the faded paint lines anymore.

But it felt like home and it never changed.

Probably the only thing in the city that stayed the same.

It was another hot, dirty summer morning. The excursion buses from New York’s five boroughs and the North Jersey and Pennsylvania suburbs dropped their passengers at the casinos and circled the block until they angled into nearby parking lots. The air was heavy with diesel and exhaust fumes, and the smell stuck to your skin. The ocean breeze cooled the sweat on your skin but didn’t make it any easier to breathe, even when you were used to it. The college players and semi-pros from out of town never knew what to expect. They saw the courts and thought they had game. Talking trash, running and gunning like it was ESPN’s Game of the Week, working their own personal highlight reels, but after twenty minutes the heat and humidity caught up to them. They would wilt and die while their game disappeared.

It could be hell.

And it crept up fast without warning.

I liked the feel of sand and asphalt under my high tops as I cut across the court or pushed hard towards the basket. Sometimes you came down with a rebound and slid ten feet on the sand that had blown across the courts. My first time back I tried cutting to the basket and skidded into the steel support beam instead, splitting open my bottom lip and ripping skin off both knees.

There was something familiar in that.

Like I never left.

The courts were busy with a dozen half-court games. One on ones. Two against twos. Seven guys playing Fives and others playing In and Out. Pickup games and shoot-arounds where nobody kept score but everybody knew who had the hot hand. You knew when the guy three courts away nailed a baseline jumper, the same way you knew when that community college kid two courts down was throwing up bricks every time he touched the ball. Others on the sidelines bounced balls and acted cool, slapping palms, sharing joints, and talking shit until they could get court time. It could have been any other summer morning.

Except for the dead body.

That was different. And a little bit weird.

Two cops had roped off a section beneath one of the baskets while another uniform straddled the corpse. A plain clothes detective in a suit and tie nudged a foot into the body, his expression stoic as the head rolled to its side. The body was a white guy, maybe thirty years old, with dark hair and sharp features in a navy Armani suit. Bullets had blown out chunks of flesh and bone from the back of his head. His face was pale and bloated, the eyes fixated in a wide-open stare, with a wad of fifties stuffed in his mouth. A thin piece of skin flapped across the gaping hole in his skull, and the guys who got close enough swore they could see bits and pieces of brain oozing from his head. The asphalt was dark red from blood that had streamed across the court, dotted with red sneaker prints from players who didn’t let the dead body slow their games. At least a half dozen sets of tracks trailed across the courts.

No one knew him or when the body had been dumped. Every question the cops tried got only quiet responses from guys acting like there was nothing out of the ordinary about the morning and nothing to talk about. Like dead bodies popped up all the time.

After a while the cops stopped wasting their time.

“Could use a couple of those fifties,” a guy on the sidelines said. “Do a lot with that kind of cash, know what I mean?”

“You got balls, you go pull some out of his mouth,” somebody else said, “instead of just talking about it.”

The first guy flicked a cigarette butt to the ground.

“Fucking cops just gonna keep it for themselves,” he said. “They the biggest fucking thieves in town.”

It was then that Bunny slid alongside me, bouncing the basketball, cracking a wad of Juicy Fruit.

“You here to play, white boy,” he sneered, “or stand around and watch?”

He was everything I hated. Attitude, fifty dollar moves and non-stop bullshit, but nothing to back up the words. With a thin, black body barely six feet he was lean and lanky in high top Airs, wearing white socks stretched to his knees, red shorts, with no shirt.

He hadn’t shut up all morning, even after I took him hard to the basket three different times.

“Gonna show you what I got,” he said.

I shot back a stare, wiping the sweat from my face.

“My ball,” I said.

He flipped me the basketball, moving backwards as I bounced in slowly. I had four inches and a couple of pounds on him. Black shorts, a loose, baggy white tee shirt, with socks bunched down at my Nikes. Focused. No nonsense. He was flash and I was all business.

I looked at the hoop, getting used to the feel of the ball against my fingers and the asphalt underfoot.

“You gonna bounce that ball or you gonna do something with it?”

I spit out a glob of phlegm. “Picking my spot.”

“Don’t matter what fucking spot you pick. What you got ain’t good enough to beat me,” Bunny said.

“You don’t know what I got,” I said.

Bunny wiped a hand across his face, leaving only that cocky grin when he was done.

“Man, I ain’t got to know that,” he said. “I know what I got. That all that matters.”

I could feel sweat inching down my face as I leaned forward. I shook my head to the right and took a stutter-step left, dipping my shoulder low enough to set up the fake. It was a move any ten year old knows. Probably one of the first things you try when you pick up a basketball, but Bunny bought it. When I juked left and cut back to the right he was a step behind me, waving his arms, trying to catch up.

It was perfect.

KC Burnett laid down a heavy pick, bumping Bunny out of the play, giving me all the time I needed to set up my shot. I took three long steps, pulled up, and launched an easy jumper towards the basket with “can’t miss” written all over it. I’ve made that shot more times than I could count. Never any doubt about it.

The ball clanged off the rim, bouncing straight into Bunny’s outstretched hands.

The game went downhill from there.

My touch was gone, and nothing I tried went in. I could hang with Bunny on defense, pressuring his shots and keeping my hands in his face while he dribbled, danced, and show-boated for anybody watching from the sidelines. But I couldn’t hit from anywhere, no matter what I put up. In the blink of an eye I went from launching “can’t miss” jump shots to counting out twenties with KC, handing the cash to Bunny and his gap-toothed teammate named Twist.

He leered that grin as he took our money. “Like I said, it don’t matter what you got.”

“It evens out,” I said.

“Don’t matter either way,” Bunny said.

“Some days you got it and some days all you can do is talk.”

Bunny stuffed the twenties in his sock then slapped his teammate’s palm. “Man’s got nothing but excuses for the ass-kicking I just gave him. Big time college player ain’t figured out yet he’s my bitch,” he said. “Don’t know I own him on these courts.”

It was right about then that I tried imagining Bunny laying under the basket, the white chalk lines tracing his corpse, with a wad of twenties stuffed in his mouth. Maybe a couple of cops standing over the corpse with no clues and a crowd of onlookers on the sidelines with no answers.

I liked that image.

SAINTS of the ASPHALT

“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true? Or is it something worse?”

— Bruce Springsteen

CHAPTER ONE