Pasha Malla - The Withdrawal Method

So Dizzy was the coveted recruit and I was backing up this kid, Raul, who'd come back for grade fourteen — the victory lap, he called it. It pissed me off a bit, because otherwise I would have started, and in practice the guy was a real cock, giving you titty-twisters when he came off screens, bringing his knee up into your balls if you guarded him too close. He had this scraggly little goatee like pubes on his chin and a bald slash through his eyebrow he told everyone was a knife wound but I heard he'd shaved there himself and never grew back.

For our rookie initiations Raul made me and this other kid, a big gangly stringbean of a redhead called Clark, run suicides with a hard-boiled egg between our ass cheeks. If it fell out you had to eat it. Clark got going too fast right away, only made it to half-court before his came plop out of his shorts, bounced once, and rolled right into the tip-off circle. Raul came over shaking his head and watched Clark chew his way through the egg while I waddled up and down the court — foul line, baseline, three-point, baseline, half-court, baseline — until Raul decided I'd had enough.

For his initiation, Dizzy got his head shaved. They buzzed everything right off, starting with that flop of bangs in the front. He sat on a bench in the change room while they did it, almost patient, waiting until the last of it was lying on the floor between his feet. Afterwards he even offered to sweep up, dumped all that hair into the trash by the sinks and came into the gym looking like a Navy SEAL.

First drill of practice he had Raul on him and did some crazy crossover I'd never seen before, and Raul went for it, diving one way and then stumbling back the other, and his one leg buckled and he was over on the ground hollering like he'd been shot. Dizzy didn't say anything, even helped Raul limp off the court, then came right back into the next drill on defence, first senior practice of the year, this scrawny little kid, fifteen years old. While he didn't start a game that season, he was usually off the bench for ten, easy, with a handful of boards and a few dimes and a couple of steals in there too.

BETTIS WANTS MORE. And, shit, I guess I owe it to him. "So he's been back from Cuba for a while?" he asks, and I start to feel like I'm Dizzy's agent doing press or something.

"No, not long at all. My parents flew him back a few days ago, basically right after he called and explained what the doctors in Havana had told him."

"And he's been in hospital ever since?"

"Pretty much, yeah." I pause. "But I haven't seen him yet."

"How come?"

"Well, I've been working," I say, knowing it sounds weak. "I live in Oakville, so I just thought I'd come down today, for the surgery."

"You talked to him since he's been home?"

"Not exactly." Bettis is looking at me funny, trying to figure this out. "He — he doesn't exactly love what I do for a living, to be honest."

"What, sales?"

"No, not the sales part."

"Then?"

I consider this, not really sure I could even answer in specific terms if I wanted to. Instead, I reach into my pocket and pull out the postcard. "You should check this out, actually," I tell Bettis, passing it to him. "It was his."

THE NEXT YEAR, my last year of high school, we both made the starting rotation. And, to be honest, we were magic together — all those years of two-on-two on the driveway at home finally paid off.

We had a system if McGowan's flex offence broke down, which it often did. I'd call for a reset, and while everyone was shifting around I'd drive the lane, go up among the trees, turn in the air all desperate, and there Dizzy'd be like a saviour open on the wing, rolling off a screen, hands up and ready. I'd kick it out and he'd catch and shoot, that jumper like a silk handkerchief pulled loose from a shirt pocket.

If a defender stepped up from the weak side he'd throw one of those killer head-fakes — he'd grown his hair back, so that shock in the front would go flopping up and send whoever sailing by, and he'd put it on the floor and come swooping down the lane, lay it in, his hand on the glass not a slap so much as letting the basket know he'd been there.

"HE USED TO STARE at that thing for hours," I tell Bettis.

"It's great," he says, smiling, handing it back to me.

"I brought it for him. When he comes out. I thought" — What did I think? — "I thought he'd like to see it, for old times."

Bettis's smile widens. "Old times. They are old times, aren't they?"

I look down at the postcard, at that frozen moment in history. I realize for the first time how faded the picture is — the parquet yellowing, Jordan's jersey a washed-out pink. I look up at Bettis. He's still grinning at me, putting on a good show despite whatever's going on with his wife. I drop the postcard into my pocket and do my best to force a smile to match his.

DIZZY LOVED basketball but could never watch it on TV for longer than a few minutes — he'd get all antsy and be up with a little Nerf ball, doing post-moves against the doorframe in the TV room, a drop-step and then baby-hooking into the kitchen. And when he got bored of that he'd just disappear, like when he was a kid. I'd turn around from my spot on the couch and he'd be gone — maybe out in the garage, dribbling away, or taking free throws in the driveway with his mitts on in the snow. I might go out there and we'd play some post-up, slipping around on the ice and Dizzy dropping lazy fadeaways over me with either hand.

But that year things started to change. Right around the start of the season he got this girlfriend, this mousy little thing with dreadlocks and a hoop through her nose, and he'd be out in the garage less — more often she'd swing by in her parents' Golf and pick him up. They'd be off somewhere, and when he'd trudge back in that night, shaking the hair out of eyes red and bleary from weed, Mom'd ask where he'd been and he'd tell her, "Out," showing that little half-smile that was the citizenship card to whatever world he lived in.

Still, the second year of senior ball we played together, our team was magic. Big carrot-top Clark hit the weights and put on about forty pounds, turned into a real force down low. We got a new kid, a transfer named Healey, a comedian, and deadeye from outside. He'd come off screens down low and pop out for threes, and make us howl doing Marv Albert all through practice, with McGowan barking at us to "Shut up and do it right," totally baffled as to what was so funny.

Regardless of whatever else he was getting into, Dizzy was the star. Grade eleven and already one of the most dominant players in the county, maybe the entire region. He was off on weekends with the under-21 rep team — at sixteen! — for tournaments all over the place, down to the States for training camps and clinics, playing against prep-school guys with NBA deals waiting for them like presents wrapped under the tree. But more and more often basketball was taking a back seat to whatever else: the girlfriend, the Grateful Dead, weed. Every chance he got he was reading The Catcher in the Rye or that motorcycle repair guide, whatever it was, and then at Christmas his girl got him the Che Guevara biography, and after that you'd never see him without it.

I remember playing against Bettis and his St. Paul's Panthers that year in the playoffs, how they threw a box-andone at Dizzy. McGowan called a time out right off the tip, took us into the huddle, and rasped at us to run the zone offence, four-on-four, and to take the open shots as we got them. We worked possessions for minutes on end, swinging the ball from one side of the court to the other, watching their box shift left and right, and Dizzy running the odd cut through the key to keep his man moving. We wore them down, let the ball do the work, and ended up pulling away in the second half before taking the game 36–24. We'd never scored less than seventy points all season, and here we were finishing with a combined sixty. Dizzy had eight, a season low, but he didn't seem to care. In the change room Clark stood naked except for his high-tops and tried to get us going on some lame team cheer before Healey came slinking up behind him and dumped the ice bucket over his head.