One
time when my sister was on weekend leave from Job Corps where she was
learning to be a painter she brought home her boyfriend, who looked
like a tweaker version of Jesus, and another friend who had dabbled a
bit too deeply in mind altering chemicals and had become what they
call in the business 'permafried'. His name was Rope or Cord or some
other name that pretty much fates a young man to a life of heavy drug
use in one of those rare cases where a person's name can tell you
right away that they received the short end of the entire nature and
nurture debate. All weekend he sat in a chair by the front door until
he had allowed his body sufficient time to detoxify a sufficient
amount of nicotine so he would need to go for a quick re-up. On
Saturday my sister asked if I would take her and her two buddies over
to Payson to hang out with their friends and I did. I took them to
the park where a lot of dudes with either Megadeath tee shirts or
skins were playing basketball. Well I say playing basketball but they
were mostly trying to play basketball in between smoke breaks. I had
played Jr. Jazz, church and city basketball for years and was in
great shape so when they asked if I wanted in on a five on five game
I agreed feeling like I would absolutely annihilate this group of pre-emphysemic metal-heads. I was entirely correct in that assessment. I had few
skills they did not have like the ability to run, jump and dribble
with both hands. Every fast break, no matter where I started on the
court, I could outrun everyone down to the other basket and score or
defend with ease. Every couple of plays they would ask to stop for a
minute and have a smoke break. I felt like superman against these
guys who were mostly older and taller than me. They were physically
outclassed not by a outstanding talent, as we can surmise from my
repeated failures at trying to make the high school basketball team,
but by a properly functioning pair of lungs. In the land of the
smokers even a one-lunged man is king. Even through they we
desperately handicapped they still had a very highly developed sense
of competition and kept trying their damnedest to hang in the game
but it just got worse and worse as they ran up and down the court. They started telling my sister that I was the best basketball player they had ever seen and true to type, I disregarded the source and took great pride in that compliment. I
don't know what it says about my athletic career that the most
dominate performance of my life game against some scrawny smoking
stoners. But in the land of the underachievers even a stoner beater
is king.
