Flying Lessons & Other Stories

For the past three years you ve spent every free minute balling at an outdoor court down the street from your building. After school. After games. Weekends. You name it.

 

Most nights you re still out there putting up shots, alone, when the sun falls behind the ocean and the automatic park lights come flickering on, spilling that strange yellow half-light across the cracked concrete.

 

Ball is like anything else.

 

Put in enough hours, your game s gonna blast off.

 

Your jumper s now pure out to twenty-five feet, give or take. You ve developed a little floater in the lane that leaves slow-footed big men flailing. But it s your handle that sets you apart. Your quicks. The way you can get into the paint at will and finish with either hand.

 

This past season you scored more points than any other eighth grader in the county.

 

You were second in assists.

 

So what.

 

It ain t good enough, and you know it.

 

Not if you want to be even more dominant next year, in high school.

 

That s why your ears perk up when you overhear a couple newcomers talking about Muni Gym in Balboa Park. When you overhear the dude with love handles sitting on the stairs say to his boy, It s the best run in the entire city, B. I put that on everything.

 

You ranked em out? the other guy asks.

 

Nah, I used to ball there all the time before I tweaked my back. If you can hang with them big boys at Muni . . . shoot, you can hang with just about anybody.

 

Shelf the extra jumpers that night.

 

Proceed instead to the local library and look up Muni Gym online. Type the address into Google Earth and you ll discover it s right next to the Air and Space Museum your moms took you and your sis to ba