The Hot Shot

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My old man was a bum, and my old lady was a slob, and chances are I’d be a slob and a bum both if it wasn’t for this God-damn crazy game.

Funny thing is, I didn’t intend to play it. The way I got started was just one of those things. I was walking down the hall of the high school past the gym, and to tell the truth, I was thinking about going down to Beegie’s pool room to pick up a few nickels playing rotation, but the door to the gym was open, and I just happened to look in while I was passing, and there was this guy I knew, name of Bugs, running around with all these other guys throwing a ball at a hoop. I gave old Bugs a hoot and a holler, and thumbed my nose at him, and he thumbed back and yelled for me to come on in, so I did, and I don’t know why.

You weren’t supposed to walk on the gym floor in your street shoes, so I went along the edge back to where Bugs was standing, and I asked him what the hell he was doing playing around with sissy stuff like that, and he said it wasn’t so Goddamn sissy when you got into it, and he’d bet two-bits I couldn’t throw the ball through the hoop two times out of ten if I’d stand back where he told me to stand. It didn’t seem to me to make a hell of a lot of difference whether I could throw the ball through the hoop two times out of ten or ten times out of ten, but old Bugs was so snotty about it, putting up his lousy two-bits that way, that I decided I’d take the bet, and besides, it was faster than five games of rotation. I saw how the other guys were sort of pushing the ball up toward the hoop with one hand, sometimes jumping up in the air a little when they did it, so Bugs got a ball and tossed it to me and told me where to stand, and I pushed it up the way I saw the others doing it, and damned if it didn’t go through.

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