When Kobe Died

Slim had his back to the basket and Beans was on him tight like a thermal. One fake to the right with his bony elbows and then Slim lifted off with his wiry frame, turned in the air, shot over Beans. 

“Kobe!” he shouted. The ball caught back rim, hit the hardwood, rolled. The game stopped. Beans just stared at him and Loafer at the top of the key put his foot on the ball to stop it from rolling to the other side of the court. Ched studied his laces like he studied most things, Diego leaned against the basket to stretch out his back, which was always hurting. K-Pop used the toe of his shoe to rub out a sweat spot that had fallen from his forehead. All this was normal, and yet nothing was the same. 

“What, too soon?” Slim said.
“Yeah motherfucker, too soon.” Beans gave him a light shove and Slim stumbled backwards, mimed blowing a whistle for the foul call.
“Specially if you’re gonna shoot it like that,” said K-Pop. “Man’s rolling over in his grave right now.”
“Bro even six feet under Kobe got a better shot than Slim,” Loafer kicked the ball up to himself and flipped it at the basket. 
“Yo they should put him eight feet under, you feel me,” Diego said, pointing one finger up at the sky. 
“I don’t think they even buried him yet, honestly. Might not be a body.” Ched was their white boy, white like cheddar, always cheesin’. He was smart, not because he was white, just because he was. 
“Ah Ched c’mon man, ain’t nobody wanna think about that,” Slim said.  
“I feel you.”
“Somebody wanna check ball?” Loafer was still standing at the top of the key. Diego picked the ball up and spun it once high in the air, let it bounce a couple times as if making sure gravity still applied. How could they be sure, when someone who had always resided in the clouds could come crashing down like that?

Ched and Slim joined Loafer behind the three-point line. Diego and K-Pop matched up but Beans hesitated, slow to return to the top of the key. They couldn’t go on without him, needed their sixth, and like with most things they waited to see what Beans would do, if only to follow his lead. They watched him reach down to touch his toes, watched him bounce on his heels, stretch back his quads before Beans finally signaled for the ball and checked it to Slim, low to the ground so Slim had to bend to pick it up.

“Try that shit again and see what happens,” Beans said, and the game continued. 

When Kobe died they all met at the Y like usual. It was Sunday, and this was their church, even though K-Pop’s grandma made him really go to church and Ched’s family said Grace before dinner. But that wasn’t religion. Not really. Man-to-man defense was religion and perspiration was two fingers-worth of Holy Water to the forehead and admitting you were getting burned down low by Loafer in the post was confession and you were always praying, of course, every time the ball left your fingertips the only thing you had left was prayer. 

Nobody brought a ball that night, just an unspoken thing, this wasn’t about playing. It was about something else that nobody, not even Ched, was going to mention. They figured Beans would have it the worst of them. He was the last one to get there, and Diego wondered aloud if he would even show up at all, but when he did they were whole again, and each of them dapped up Beans because LA was where he grew up, because Kobe’s game-winner against the Nugs was the first and last game he saw live with his pop. Kobe’s Lakers were Beans’ first love, and sometimes they thought he might never love again. 

Beans was the best of them, and it wasn’t really close, the only way any of them could ever hope to guard him was when his restructured knee was aching mad and he was two or three or four steps slower than normal, and even then he could shoot over Loafer, who had a good six inches and 60 pounds on him, and he could snake his way through Slim’s unnatural wingspan and Ched, well Ched was Ched and didn’t do much in the way of defense. When Beans moved to Brooklyn in middle school to live with his grandma, after his pop got locked up for good, he already had his nickname and nobody ever questioned it, he was that talented, so talented they had to pluralize Kobe’s middle name, just Bean wouldn’t have been enough. His junior year at Lincoln when the scouts from Kentucky and Duke and Mich State started showing up he shredded the ACL in his right knee and that was it, the scouts forgot about him, he was consigned to a future of crossing up clowns at the Y and nobody believed it when they said Beans was supposed to be going places, like the NBA kind of places, not that he ever told anybody that, they had to do it for him, Loafer and K-Pop and Slim and all of them, like cheerleaders. Nah, the clowns at the Y said. There’s a reason he working at Modell’s. He nice, but he ain’t Kobe nice.

When Kobe died they just sat around the hoop, lounging. Beans was quiet, but he was always quiet. Slim asked how he was feeling.

“What you mean? I look sick to you.”
“I’m just asking,” Slim said. “Like if you good.”
“Man it’s not like I knew him. I sell his jersey for a cool 75, that’s the closest I’ll ever be to Kobe.”
Nobody was sure what to say, because Beans was right, like usual. 
“I saw on Twitter people bringing up the rape stuff,” Ched said. 
“Why they gotta bring that up now?” Diego said. “Let the man’s family grieve in peace.”
Loafer looked at Beans, as if gauging the distance between them before he spoke. “It’s all part of his legacy. The good shit and the bad.”
“Ain’t nobody perfect,” Beans said. “Y’all find somebody who is y’all let me know.”
“Man Ched, look what you done started. You be following too many white people,” Slim said. They laughed, even Ched. 
“His daughter man, that’s what gets me,” K-Pop leaned back on his elbows. “You seen her clips? She was nice. Like biting the neck of her jersey, tongue wagging and shit just like dad. You seen that? That shit hit me.”
“It hit everybody, you ain’t different,” Diego said. 
“Smush Parker probably the only one who ain’t mourning. Homie dancing around like it’s pay day right now,” Slim said.
“Bruh. Chill,” Beans said. 
“Yo it’s just a joke.”
“It’s disrespectful.”
“My bad Beans, you right.”

They went on like this for a while, swapping stories about watching Kobe’s 81, where they were for it, how Loafer had once saved up enough to buy Kobe 9s by skipping lunch every day for three weeks and pocketing the 2.50 his mom gave him for it, and none of them believed him because it didn’t look like Loafer ever missed a meal in his life; how Diego’s girlfriend finally dumped him on the day Kobe dropped 61 at MSG, he only remembered because he was excitedly explaining to her the significance and with this excruciatingly bored look on her face she said I can give you 61 reasons why I want to break up with you; how Slim lost his virginity in a No. 8 jersey he refused to take off; how Ched still thought Bron was better (he took whacks upside the head for that one); how K-Pop helped his dad learn English by watching Lakers games, Mr. Kim’s grasp of the language to this day still very much married to the language of basketball, which they all spoke, like gospel.
But Beans said nothing, he just listened to their bull shit, even though he was the only one they really wanted to hear from. Finally he got up, went to the water fountain and they watched him lean over and purse his lips as the stream hit them. He stood there for a while, hunched over, so long they weren’t sure he was really drinking at all, like maybe the water was bouncing off his lips, a bank shot from the block. 

When he came back he started talking like they’d been in the middle of a conversation.

“You know what fucks me up?” They saw his face but no they would not ask, no they would never ask if those were tears or just the remnants of drinking water splashed into his eyes. “This shit people say about him being larger than life. Fuck does that mean? He God?”
“Nah man, you know what it mean. He’s larger than life, like, you know…” Slim trailed off.
“I don’t. No I don’t fucking know and neither do you,” Beans said. “If he larger than life how come that copter crashed out the air and burned quick like a match? How come he dead? Someone wanna tell me how come?

Beans grabbed one of the tattered YMCA balls that was lying around and punted it. It arced high in the air, and six pairs of eyes watched its ascent until it reached the ceiling, where it got stuck between the beams. 

“I think there’s something wrong with us that we looked up to him, that we look up to anyone,” he said. “But I know damn sure there’s something wrong with me. That motherfucker was my hero, I didn’t have nobody else to call that.”
“Come on bro,” Ched said. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“There ain’t? Then how come when my pop went to jail I didn’t shed one single fucking tear, and today I can’t stop crying.”

Loafer stood up, his knees creaking, and put one giant hand on Beans’ shoulder. 

None of them said anything, although they all wanted to, they really did this time, but there were certain things that could not be said, not today. Maybe down the road, maybe in a couple weeks, maybe when it became OK for Slim to start yelling “Kobe” again, maybe when they were older and slower and their post moves were weaker and the jump hook was their go-to move and they couldn’t touch backboard anymore and they lived outside the paint, maybe they’d talk about it then. But not today. 

When Kobe died, Loafer and Diego and Ched and K-Pop and Slim walked out of the Y together into the night. Loafer who would graduate college and teach biology over at Midwood; Diego who would open a donut truck called Double D’s that he would take on the road, across the country, settle down in LA; Ched who would be dead from lung cancer before he saw his daughter graduate high school; K-Pop who would work on Wall Street and marry his high school sweetheart and have four beautiful kids; Slim who would do time and then bounce around and then do time again before finally turning his life around and coaching AAU, where he taught only the most talented kids to play like his homie Beans. 

When Kobe died, the five of them left Beans behind. Nobody knew what was next for him, what lay waiting at the other end of the court, what tomorrow might bring. Beans sat there in the Y for a while, alone, his back against the basket, looking up, waiting for that ball to drop from the heavens. 

SCOTT CHIUSANO is a writer/editor, currently at MLB.com and formerly at the New York Daily News, with fiction published in Toasted Cheese Literary Journal and The Twin Bill. He is a fan of slow rollers and Jacob deGrom sliders.