Underhand Butler tossed the ball from the foul line, hitting the pole. "I remember this dream once I had. My old man is tryin' to screw me up the ass. What's with this fuckin' ball? Next mornin' I find out he had to go to Jacobi with a blocked prostate. Served 'im right, the bastard."

Stony tried to drop-kick the basketball into the hoop, almost booting it over the fence. "I was just sittin' there watchin' him sleep. I figure, shit, I'll leave next week when he comes home, make sure he's O.K., you know?"

"You got a passport?"

"A what?" Stony blinked. "Aw, for chrissakes!" He kicked the basketball into the fence again.

"So get one."

"Ah, fuck it." Stony blew down the front of his shirt to cool off, sitting on a low concrete ledge behind the pole. "Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it." Grimacing, scratching his head.

"Albert'll be O.K." Butler took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and sat down next to Stony.

"It ain't just that, it's, I dunno, you can't just ... I dunno, I kept doing these weird numbers in my head all last night. I kept runnin' down all these ... memories. I keep thinkin' about all these crazy things. Like this one time when I had ringworm on my scalp when I was a kid. My mother took me to a skin guy who was gonna use ultraviolet rays on my head, but he said if I moved a half inch or so my brains would turn to Cream of Wheat, so she said no dice, and I had to do this other treatment where they shaved my head. Can you imagine that? I was bald at six. And it was a real motherfucker too. I wore this stocking hat and all the kids called me Baldy. I would come home cryin' everyday. Fistfights, the whole shtick. But the real bitch was when the mothers found out I was bein' treated for ringworm and told their kids they couldn't play with me. I remember comin' upstairs after my best friend, Mitchell, told me his mother said I have a disease in my head and he couldn't go near me. I came home and I was laughing my ass off. I just bopped into the house and said, 'Mitchell's mother says I got a disease in my head'; laughin', laughin' and all of a sudden I just break into tears like I thought I was gonna choke.

"My mother got so damn mad she calls up this kid's mother an' that was the first time I ever heard an adult curse. She was screamin' and wavin' her arms. She called her a no-good lousy pig, told her to drop dead an' get fucked an' God knows what else. When my old man heard about it, he took me right down to this toy store an' he says, 'You don't need those other kids,' an' he bought me forty bucks' worth a cowboy stuff. I mean not just a goddamn gun an' holster either. I mean spurs, chaps, leather cuffs, a shirt with pearl buttons, goddamn bandileers even."