Maudlin Boy in a Greek God’s Body
by Brian Birnbaum

Head down, features pinched, Benison crawled along the fluorescent halls of KeyArena’s underbelly. In his ear, JAY-Z flowed over a silky synth arrangement. When alone, he’d sync up to the lyrics, but the locker room’s voices still followed him down the hall.

He passed lighted glass displays set with SuperSonics relics – trophies, jerseys, pennants. Between the show windows were large stills of Seattle’s hardwood legends. Gary Payton, reaching clean to thief a too-high dribble. Shawn Kemp, rattling the rim, hanging on it and grinning something angry.

Benison expected greatness of himself, and he was blessed with its code. Higher powers had whip-cracked his first step, geared sniper scope to shooting eye, bequeathed him length and energy like light itself. He was built to play this game. Impossible to pinpoint what made him this way. His father’s height was elastic and unused. His mother’s contribution? Elusive, outside her complexion. But there he was, a maudlin boy in a Greek god’s body. Surely there was more than element to excellence.

Benison was from the ’burbs, which bred man-children. The type that never wanted, yet were always wanting. The type that sat all sulky in the back of rented cars when forced into a family vacation, headphones strapped tight, slipping into schizoid fantasies of fretting a Fender like John Frusciante, or spitting like Eminem, fifty grand a night to kill it for fifty grand in the stands. The type that removed his shirt when running his hilly neighborhood, showing off Adonis’s abdomen, gleaming and glabrous. Then the shame when the neighbors did look. Just like in high school, when they’d played their rival, Mount Hebron. Each and every time he’d slashed off the dribble, Benison beat the best defender they could put on him, and by the end of the game he couldn’t look at the kid’s face. He’d felt too sorry for him.

Now that things weren’t going his way again – the telegraphed passes, the fighting-over-the-screens – he felt that familiar sorry for himself. Ordain enough in-and-outs and he questioned why why why me. To the bench with you. Then up goes the Gatorade jug, a perfect double-misty off the foldout table, neon-yellow globules spouting out its blowhole. Benison Benchin’im Behrenreich. When things didn’t go his way, it didn’t matter what the score was, only that he received no standing ovations and therefore couldn’t attain the things he really wanted from life: surface crust of success and glory; deeper mantle of capability and humility; and a molten core of mineral love.

But this failure problem plagued him – it kept him from drilling past that crust.

When he fucked up, he thought about fucking up, and so fucked up again, precisely because he was fucking up. This feedback loop tortured him. It drew his conscious back into itself. It made him obsess like a man committed, who etches along the borders of his scrap paper an ominous symbol – as this specter of failure followed Benison now along KeyArena’s mosaic, lost in his loop, when a hand grabbed his shoulder.

Benison regretted his surprised yelp only more for its sole witness.

“Yo chill,” Delmar grimaced. “You left something back at 86.”

It took a moment for Benison’s arterial systems to resume functions, much less remember where he was: leaving KeyArena, or trying to. Then he saw Del was hiding something behind his back.

“Oh word – ” he started, trying to reach behind Del’s back.

“Ah-ah-ah.” Delmar wagged his finger. “First I wanna know why you moved out.”

Benison’s mouth parted maybe a micron. A sound – a sliver of a stutter.

“Yo. I’m fuckin witchu.” 

As was Delmar’s wont.

AJ, Delmar, Gabe Griffin – they became Myriadal’s Big Three after college basketball’s crazy uncle, Dick Vitale, used five minutes on SportsCenter to proclaim them the best set of diaper dandies since Michigan’s Fab Five. Suddenly, basketball heads from Seatown to Spanish Harlem were made aware of Myriadal’s Tres Grandes.

Benison couldn’t watch ESPN for ten minutes without a reference to at least one of the Big Three. Just this past week on E:60, ESPN’s hourlong hand in social consciousness, Jeremy Schaap shadowed AJ as they revisited his house on Hollins Street. They started in a nearby lot, which lay wasting under weeds and works. AJ talked about playing in the lot as a kid, turning up treasures beyond his years – until he grew to better understand them, and therefore his older kin: dope fiends and corner boys; collectors and counters; point women and ladies of the night.

“AJ says his neighbors – medical residents at Johns Hopkins – used to scold his parents for letting their kids loiter around the block late at night,” said E:60’s Schaap, dubbed over B-roll of Baltimore, steaming manholes and sped-up shots of grim-looking locals, before cutting to AJ and Schaap on his house’s stoop.

“All them degrees,” AJ responded, “and they think we got a problem with supervision? They had it all messed up.”

Delmar James – Myriadal’s freshman centerpiece – he was built on Alabama summers. Each Saturday he attended a playground with a clear view of Birmingham’s Vulcan statue, whose ass lay veritably bare. There, he threw himself into the court’s notoriously rugged games of three-on-three that culminated each year in a tournament sponsored by AND1. Through these half-court rumbles Delmar learned to pound in the post – and ignore the older guys who loitered on the sidelines. Dressed dapper and always affable, these rakish cats had made it their economic policy to trap and rinse the block. But Del, he stonewalled the drug game’s headhunters and raked the playground for all its worth, until he was known amongst the known as Delmar ‘va Peninsula’, fleet-footed juggernaut with the size and strength of said topography.

“I’ll tell you man, back when I was just a kid, in certain circles of street-ball?” he said to Schaap in front of his mother’s clapboard house outside Birmingham. “You take it to the rack, you might get hacked the [censored] up.”

Of their physical ilk, Benison should’ve been able to play alongside the Big Three, come off the bench, make a play here and there to help them carry the load. Hell, he could’ve done better than that. He could’ve contributed serious minutes. But he didn’t want it like they did – didn’t need victory to survive like an indelible amino pattern.

Originally assigned to live with the Big Three on campus, he’d spent his first week bumping hip hop classics with his door ajar, hoping his teammates would sidle up to talk tunes. But they weren’t big on ’90s rap, so rather than take to his tack, they waited for him to poke out of his room. Bets were made on when this might happen. By the time he wised to this, he was compromised, too conscious of his body separated from theirs by the wall he hid behind. And when he did come out, they sensed the fake shit he laid down, how he mimicked their meme rather than doing him – and he knew it.

Like that one night during the four days off before focus finals, near the end of each trimester, when Myriadal had a sort of Mardi week. On day two, the residents of compartment 86 assembled in the common area for a spot of doomsday drinking. Fluorescent tubes buzzed above beats banging from speakers perched on the windowsill, the TV tuned to an NBA game, Benison secretly annoyed at the competing volumes.

“Now he catchin wreck though,” Gabe Griffin said, punctuating some point and pulling at his busy Mark Ecko shirt. The rest, including Benison, rocked Rapiers gear, sweats, shirts, zip-up windbreakers. “You gonna pass that?” he said.

A clipped chuckle from AJ, whose hand appreciated his high-top fade. Looking up with blooded eyes, he drawled, “Nahhh.”

But Delmar snatched it up and took a rip. “Ey man you gonna hit this?” he sang, circling the slim cone before Benison’s face, the spliff’s spirit lifting toward the smoke detector rather than the cracked window. “Ah?”

The mechanism responsible for calibrating Benison’s scope of thought was stuck on a 160x lens setting, listening to microbes talk politics. “Ahdunno man. What if we get tested?”

He felt his words grate against the heavy beat from the windowsill. His speech was robbed of colloquial flow, snapping iambics. The second or two before Delmar’s response was long. He saw Del thinking. He heard the voices boiling up from street level, frothing over the music and into their compartment. On the pale wood table, his red Solo filled with Gatorade and vodka was disappearing at inch-per-hour increments. Perhaps he needed to increase the rate.

“Please! It’s October,” Del scowled, ripping another hit.

Gabe Griffin pealed a high laugh, reached to repossess the joint. “Shit’s about to be legal in a minute, cuz.”

“Also never smoked before,” Benison shrugged. His elbows pistoned, his knees joggled. This time, three seconds before any response – then an uproar.

“Hold up,” Delmar sprung to his feet. A broad smile formed wormlike. “This gringo needs to get high.”

“Nah man,” Benison laughed and licked his lips. “I’m good.”

“Might help your game out,” AJ said.

Benison was saved by the buzzer: Russell Westbrook tossed an intercontinental alley-oop to Kevin Durant, drawing oohs and ahs as the first quarter came to a close. Delmar proclaimed he could get up like that. Gabe Griffin concurred but with the caveat that Del couldn’t shoot like K-D. So the big man from Bama picked up a balled paper towel and stood, unsteadily, with the intent to prove otherwise.

“Wet,” Delmar called as he followed through on his fadeaway, which banked high off the wall and missed the trash can, used paper towel stopping near the can’s base.

“Siiiiike,” Benison said.

“Sike?” Delmar scowled, looking at the others. “What’s that some white boy shit?”

Right there: that had been Benison’s chance. A huge one was forming. The punch-line hung by the threads of his tongue. All he needed to do was get up and turn around – “I’ll show you some white boy shit” – and let it rip: pppprrrfffff. Juvenile? Immature? He was a nineteen-year-old kid in serious need of new ways to light his fun-nodes. Alas, his sulfur had slipped silently and, his stretched smile slitting his chapped lip, he said, “Nah…”

“Yo. I’m playin with you,” Delmar said, nudging his shoulder.

That was when Benison, direct from class or practice, had started routing to his room, the door closed behind him. He came out to the common area like a mouse, only when he thought the coast was clear. Better to be a hermit than inveigled into admitting his most embarrassing sexual experience. Or into dropping the n-bomb, whereupon they’d feign outrage before revealing him for the credulous fuck that he was being. They called him Stinky-TO because he always Turned the ball Over, and toes smell bad. Gabe Griffin talked shit while on him at practice – “He don’t want it” – or while watching him cook ramen. Benison grew afraid of Delmar’s volume, in all senses of the word. He resented how the Rapiers’ five-man would guard his eyes against Benison’s blinding white aura. By then, Benison lost the ability to decipher when and whether the big man from Bama was messing with him.

His compmates turned him into someone he hated whenever he was around them. He played different, anxious and tentative. He walked different, as if on stilts. He talked different, no music or cadence. He lost himself in fantasies of decking Delmar then hovering over him to urge, “What up now, bitch?” But that wouldn’t win back the alpha throne he’d so meticulously carved out of milieus past. The truth was, he was the only one with a problem – and the problem begot the problem:

It starts with playing like shit. Then he plays like shit because he’s been playing like shit – a self-generating shit-mechanism, being shat on by his opponents, stinking up and down the floor and throwing the shit he’s covered in, petulantly flinging it everywhere, on everyone. And now the negative capability required of him as an athlete – of forgetting himself – is exposed to assumptions that he will fail. Now he considers his moves on the hardcourt in the way that thinking about thinking can paralyze genius. Then he hesitates. It turns his fluid jump shot into a stilted aim at the basket. His basketball IQ is double-thoughted and therefore dumbed. Failure to play extrapolates unto a more insidious failure to perform in general, worsening his failure to play, a closed loop of provenance of a piece with the cosmos and all things fated. And up goes the Gatorade jug, or the video game console…

“Ey man, you there?”

Benison’s scope throttled back to things tangible and present: Delmar’s outstretched arm offering a static composition book labeled “Barz.”

“Didn’t read it,” Del said. “Swear to God, man.” He crossed himself then went woozy-eyed.

Benison could think of few scenarios more awkward than standing in quiet spaces with Delmar. He took the notebook, which was filled with metered verses and rhyming doodles, and thanked Del, loathing his autonomic deference.

“Game day tomorrow!” Delmar hooted and heaved off toward the locker room, fist held high overhead.

Benison stood frozen before the fear that Del had in fact perused the fruits of his hip hop hobby. He wanted desperately to know the truth, but should anyone have caught him shoegazing out here in the hall, he’d get heckled, so he kept on.

Blue duffel slung over shoulder, he pulled his hood up and butted the boiler room’s door, spun off the latch – and stopped. As if waiting in ambush, a flurry of media types and their gadgets preyed upon his personal space, microphones flittering, fuzzy booms lording, and questions flying at him like a murder of crows, too quick and many to figure:

“What are your thoughts on your father’s arrest earlier today?”

“What do you know about the charges placed against him?”

“Are you upset?”

Not that it stood out in his mind, but Benison wouldn’t have been able to match one of these faces, thrust now into his personal space, to any of those present at today’s post-practice presser. No, the rabble surrounding him now represented a different animal of reporter. The decals on their cameras and mics and booms betrayed big-name media brands – CNN’s parallel red font, NBC’s varicolored peacock, Fox News’s brutalist block lettering. They vied for position like ambulance-chasers navigating a hospital’s waiting area.

Benison had vaguely comprehended what was happening when the door behind him pounded open, bumping him nearer the slavering mob – but Coach took hold of his arm and pulled him through the scrum.

“We have no comments right now,” he grumbled.

Coach plowed ahead, Benison in tow, looking over his shoulder as if being escorted from those he loved. Some-odd strides away from the scrum, Coach asked where his car was. On a dime they turned into a quadrangle of parked vehicles, across a lane, a yaw left, until Benison pointed to a white Audi sedan. Benison fumbled for the right key before the driver-side door. Finally he finagled the car key and, once seated, Coach bent into the descended power-window. He put his elbows on the sill, pausing as if to let the moment settle into the greater solution. Benison looked out his windshield, where a horizon of cars gave way to gray sky. “Fuck,” he breathed.

“Best thing is to get home and don’t talk to the press,” Coach advised. “I’ll tell Jonesy to hunker down with you. Make something to eat. Put in a movie. Do some homework. Just try not to watch the news. Benison,” Coach said.

He looked at Coach, who’d turned to confront the swell of media cretins meandering nearer.

“You better go.” Coach slapped the car’s hardtop.

Benison made a parabola around the parking lot, watching reporters’ faces go blank as if shut down by their central intelligence. New mist dusted the streets. The city’s famously spired UFO hovered in shroud over the Seattle Center. At a red light, Benison opened Barz in his lap, plugged the aux cable into his phone, and, in picking a beat, jammed his mother’s panicked texts in with the backlog of his conscious. Flipping through his notebook, he spat some syncopated scales – a do re mi fa so dope sort of solfege – and finally, hitting play, he slipped into the pocket of the beat.

The light changed. He fell silent. High synths droned on without him. Cars honked as he idled, his gaze caught in reverse. It’d occurred to him how absurd this was, the act of rapping, regardless of the circumstances.

Benison knew exactly what was going on. He just hadn’t thought it would go down like this, with him finding out in real time, like every other asshole watching the 24-hour news cycle. Since adolescence, he’d been a stranger in his own home, the last to know – or never knowing – until it happened to him.

© Brian Birnbaum, 2019

Brian Birnbaum grew up thirty minutes west of Camden Yards in Baltimore, where at four years old he cried because the Yankees were losing. An MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, his work has been published or is forthcoming in The Smart Set, The Collagist, Atticus Review, SLAM Magazine, Lit Hub, Political Animal, and more. A finalist of Bayou Magazine's Knudsen Fiction Contest and scholarship winner for The Work Conference, his first novel, Emerald City, was published by Dead Rabbits in September 2019. Brian is a child of Deaf adults (CODA) and works in development for the family sign language interpreting business. He lives in Harlem with the writer M.K, Rainey and their dog.

Maudlin Boy in a Greek God’s Body was read by Matt Biagini on Wednesday, 5th February 2020 for Intimacy & Isolation