Still, we ended up in a game of two-on-two, against a pudgy teenager and a midget with a rat tail. The midget was literally three feet tall—the top of his head came up to Benny’s belt buckle—and yet he scored on Benny at will. He dribbled around Benny’s knees and blew past him and sank layup after layup. Benny fell down at least twice trying to keep up with him. Before we knew it, we were beaten. The kids high-fived each other and looked at us with something like pity.

Afterward, Benny complained that the lines on the court were askew. He went home and came back with a tape measure and made sure they were parallel, and then he measured the rim’s distance from the ground. He got it in his head that he would ask the Trail Blazers for a grant to fix up the neighborhood court. I doubted he had slept in a week.

Later, I joked with our friends that Benny’s tweaking had finally started to impede on my own lifestyle. The humiliation on the court was the final straw; he needed help. I was only kidding, but the fact was, I hadn’t seen him since then, and I had no idea where to start looking.

My search began in our old neighborhood a few weeks after my talk with his dad. I finally couldn’t put it off any longer. I hated to be the ambassador from a world Benny was trying to escape, but on the other hand I did want to see him. And it was a good excuse for getting out of the house, too. It was easy to get stuck in there once the rain started.

The old neighborhood had changed a fair bit over the years. New houses and condos were popping up in all the vacant lots, sprouting like mushrooms. They were mostly skinny, in-fill buildings—a decent-sized garage with a little living space padding the roof and rear wall. But some of the new places were a little fancier, too, with raw cedar siding, broad, overhanging eaves, and glass doors that opened onto trim, second-floor patios. They were pretty handsome, actually, with young, handsome own ers to match.

The neighborhood still had some of its flavor though, I was glad to see. I was almost run over by a bum on a bicycle dragging a baby carriage, and behind that a rusted lawnmower.

Benny’s old apartment building was a crummy box off Killingsworth called the Cynthia Arms, and the guy living in Benny’s old unit was about my age. He said he had never heard of Benny before. He talked to me through the cracked door, his white eye underlined by the taut golden chain. He told me there had been a few residents in the apartment since Benny’s day. The last people were a Mexican family of eight.