Viet Ham

“Let’s play some bball or something physical around 4pm” was the instant message I received from Duckie, sitting in his Hannibal Lecter office, a mere 15ft from me. Duckie has a new diet scheme. His whole day would subsist of several diet sodas and morsels of food expatriated from home. Since then, there’s been a certain dainty swagger about him. He shuns my invitations to all the usual caloric goodies with a haughty aloofness, the kind reserved for ugly one-night-stands and George Michael posters.

“K, call me when you get home and dressed,” I typed back. I recalled the last time we played basketball with the singular image of Duckie awkwardly dancing about the ball like newly castrated monkey and catapulting it past the backboard. My mind immediately justified my decision as I peered down at my burgeoning belly.

At 530pm, I was hobbling from the pain of wearing borrowed running shoes. Several basketball courts were teeming with young, ghetto-raised Asians and Blacks. The SJ Police Dept readily replenishes these asphalt tokens of municipal generosity, so there was never a worry that we’d lose our audience. And I do say audience because they must have enjoyed watching Duckie and I leap about, playing a solid verbal defense of howling and screeching. What we lacked in physical skill, we made up in emotional harassment. Every time he went up for a shot, I closed the distance between us and squealed unintelligibly while making groping hand gestures towards his tits and ass. After five minutes of intense bball action, my lungs filled with a searing pain that was only exacerbated by the endless laughter.

Our theatrical game of 21 ended just as my sides were about to implode and Duckie’s last ounce of Diet Coke energy expired. I looked to the other courts, and noticed two teenage girls pretending not to notice the ghetto runts and their athletic moves. A thought occurred to me…these guys owe us so much. Without us, they wouldn’t look half as good as they did, and wouldn’t get to insert their penises inside the children of single welfare moms who don’t have the time to instill good moral values to negate the ghetto slut and her sweet baller.

Children aren’t always so simple. They communicate through so many different channels. One such observation is that the closer children get to that threshold of complete exhaustion, the more rowdy and rambunctious they become.

There’s been a similar paradigm in my life recently. I have documented some of the more misguided physical adventures Duckie and I have had, and their frequency and intensity have increased substantially within the last few weeks. We’ve historically harassed each other before, but the other night, we both ended up sprawled all over the floor in the artificial darkness of the office. Having upped the stakes to the point where the usual whooping noises, caricatures, and threats of mutually assured destruction no longer sufficed, Duckie felt compelled to grab my nipple and try to twist it off. It was then I realized I was ill-prepared for this unknown terrain. I didn’t comprehend the escalating physical violence from what had started off as vitriolic verbal heckling.

Last night I had a revelation. Duckie and I were going our separate ways. As much as we hoped to work in business together, there were external forces that sunk this desire. We sensed this chasm growing over the last two months, and were flailing our limbs about trying to avoid the inevitable.