V.

here lies a man who loved basketball, who had transformed his basement by nailing squares of wood to exposed beams and affixing Nerf goals to these squares and then sticking masking tape to the concrete floor to create a miniature court where he could re-enact Jordan’s 1988 leap-from-the-free-throw-line dunk, a boy whose walls in his room shimmered with pages torn from Sports Illustrated: Jordan and Worthy and Magic and Herschel Walker and Tony Dorsett and Jordan again, because what human being could ever be cooler than Jordan, and why did white guys always look so unforgivably  dorky in comparison, and who could possibly give the very least of a shit about the Frankenstein-like Kevin McHale or the bespectacled and spastic Kurt Rambis or the sparsely mustachioed Larry Bird, a guy who was, like the deceased’s father, shockingly—if not shamefully—pale, a player who seemed to have no particular style whatsoever, though of course he could get the job done, could clearly shoot, dribble, pass, knew the game, was fun to watch because you had absolutely no idea how such a klutzy-looking goob could make stuff happen, while Jordan—gleaming, aerodynamic, mischievous, innovative and endlessly improvisational—embodied a glorious and what-appeared-to-be-an-ultra-human superiority, a guy who could make leaping through the air—especially in slow-mo—look like the most amazing display of human athleticism, a phenomenon that was impressively imitated by a kid named Shawn, a black kid the deceased met at the Christian boarding school he attended for four years and who was twice as Jordan-like as the deceased could ever hope to be, since not only did he have some serious hang time but at 5’9 he could grab rim with both hands, a kid who was also an aspiring skateboarder and freestyler, who papered the cinderblock walls of his room with pages from Thrasher magazine, and began calling the deceased “Hoffman” for no other reason than he shared the name “Matt” with Matt Hoffman, the famous vert ramp BMX-er, and these two—Shawn and the deceased—became inseparable, in part because they shared a love of basketball and played it any chance they could get, wolfing down plates of cafeteria spaghetti in record time so as to spend the better part of their lunch hour playing one-on-one on an outdoor court, and so it came to pass people began to refer to the deceased as “Salt” and Shawn as “Pepper,” as the two were practically inseparable, as they ate with each other in the cafeteria, and cleaned busses under the instruction of the vice principal (a squat little man with stubby fingers and a shit-eating grin who reffed intramural basketball games and called technicals if you ever talked back or complained), and gave each other surprise smacks in the sack on the way to class, and listened to N.W.A. on contraband Walkmans, or engaged in impromptu wrestling matches, one of which—for reasons that would later escape the deceased—got out of hand, escalating to the point where Shawn took a swing at the deceased and hit him in the side of the head, and so the deceased—his eyes now watering, his mouth on the verge of blubbering—swung back at Shawn and missed, and did not have another chance to swing again, as bystanders helped to break up the altercation, somebody saying, “Come on, you guys, make up, you’re friends,” which the boys agreed to do, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, nodding solemnly at one other, then performing a handshake that resolved in an authoritative finger-snap, neither of them knowing that this would be Shawn’s only year at the school, and that they would not remain friends or keep in touch, and that they would never see each other again, except—maybe—via cyberspace, the deceased typing the name Shawn and Shawn’s last name into Google and clicking the word “Image” and identifying a mugshot, a photo of a thirty-eight-year-old man who had been arrested for “failure to appear in court,” looking almost the same, except now a thin goatee orbited his closed mouth, though his eyes—in this photo at least—were not the darting playful eyes the deceased remembered, the eyes here were squinting, nearly shut, as if—and it’s possible the deceased was projecting, maybe even making stuff up—the man couldn’t bear to see what the world had become, and though the deceased searched the web for information, for a way to contact this man who had once upon a time been his dear and even cherished friend, the only information he could find was this “failure to appear in court,” a phrase that caused the deceased to remember how, twenty years before, the kid had never not failed to appear in or on  a different kind of court, and that when he did, he often defied the laws of gravity, how he—by his own volition—had risen up and hung, suspended—if only for a moment—above the otherwise merciless Earth, and how the deceased had been jealous, and how he would like very much now to talk again to his friend, to tell him that he missed those days, and wouldn’t it be great, though they were probably too old now, to get everyone together again—the mulletted redhead from North Dakota and the buck-toothed guy with the hook shoot and the entirety of the “Korean Posse” and the Indonesian kid who never really knew what he was doing but sometimes could bank in a prayer and the Black Power guy who sometimes wore a clock around his neck and those Alabaman brothers who sported identical fades and the girl everybody thought was a lesbian who could drain threes, etcetera & etcetera—so they could all meet once more for one of those epic games of Twenty-One, where, even though it was every man or woman for him-or-her-self, a player always got recognized—usually with a congratulatory whoop, sometimes with a high five—whenever the ball, spinning and flickering on its lonely arc through space, swished home



Matthew Vollmer is the author of "Future Missionaries of America" and co-editor of "Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-interviews, Faux Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found Texts"  and Other Fraudulent Artifacts." For more information go to Outpost19.