Ex High School Basketball Star
  • You were a pure shooter, a long shot. You were a star.

    Another nobody black boy raised in a fractured home in middle America: a drunk father who worked twenty-five years for Clayton County, and a mother who loved you but was always too passive, it seemed, to truly care.

    Yet you were inherently happy. Your smile exploded across your face like a star shell. Happiness was in your bones, your blood, your ectomorphic body, not tall, but a natural-born athlete from head to toe.

    The college coaches all went crazy for you, but your test scores were poor. You never quite made the grade. So you served instead as an infantry solider in the first desert war: a gunner, a dead-eye.

    When you shook the high school rafters that late-autumn night, scoring seventy-eight points, shooting twenty-for-twenty in the second half, both sides of the bleachers erupting for your grace, the purity of your touch, your form, the achievement of, the mastery of the thing — you were beautiful.

    When you won the 100 meters and then the 200 against all the big-city boys, edging out by fractions two future Olympians — you were beautiful.

    When, at thirty-three, you lied about your age and landed a tryout with the Denver Nuggets and made it down to the final cut, still going strong, still a gunner, a sniper from the three-point line, then busted your ankle in a fall — you were beautiful.

    And are you beautiful still in your oil-stained clothes, turning wrenches at the garage, your thin black fingers spiderlike among the parts? Do you still have that delicate touch?

    Are you beautiful with your scuffed-up knuckles and your immutable smile, your snaggly teeth and skeletal face?

    Are you beautiful in those worn-out hightop sneakers and that jumpsuit mechanic uniform, your chocolate slab of forelock hanging lank across your cheek?

    Are you beautiful in your small hometown, moving into middle-age, still so thin, so graceful-looking, filling in part-time at the cowboy hat store? Is your uncanny coordination fading with disuse? Your unbelievable speed and balance, your infallible sense of direction and time?

    I saw you once, not long ago, drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup on the fire escape of your apartment building. It was the middle of August, peak of the Perseids. You stood at the rail in a white tanktop and pleated gray slacks. You looked elegant — flat-stomached and lean, handsome. The day was dying. The trees beyond stood iron-black against the sky. The staircases along the outer buildings were duplicated in isometric shadows across the orange brick walls. I was visiting a woman who lived across the street, and I watched you from her kitchen window. Soon you sat down. You sat on those metal steps for some time. The sky flared slowly and then emptied out into a draining reef: a reef of green. Darkness came. The first stars appeared. Still, you sat. You sat and sat, and after a while, the stars began to shoot and fall.


    May 3rd, 2017 | journalpulp | 2 Comments |

About The Author

Ray Harvey

I was born and raised in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. I've worked as a short-order cook, construction laborer, crab fisherman, janitor, bartender, pedi-cab driver, copyeditor, and more. I've written and ghostwritten several published books and articles, but no matter where I've gone or what I've done to earn my living, there's always been literature and learning at the core of my life.

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Leslie 05.03.2017

    This is a gorgeous vignette… which I am enjoying reading from above the bar this morning… I wish you would write a whole book of them. Americana sketches of character and place?

  • It’s bound to happen, Leslie!

    Thank you for reading, and thank you for dropping by.

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