Knicks essay (revised in progress)
It's Game 7 of the NBA finals. Five seconds left on the clock. Jalen Brunson charges up to the 3 point line with the ball in hand. He stops, collects the ball, and launches it upwards at the basket.
The ball hits the rim and lands in the outstretched arms of Victor Wenbanyama. The Spurs win the title.
Inside a packed sports bar in Manhattan everyone stands in place staring at the massive flatscreen on the wall. Their expressions are frozen like statues or mourners at a funeral. Suddenly, I reach into my pants and withdraw a long hard metal object: a 9 inch ceremonial Japanese Katana. Tearing the scabbard off, I thrust the blade into my stomach and disembowel myself. Everyone turns, gasping in shock. Who is this tragic Oedipus, so overwhelmed by grief and misfortunate?
The door slams open, ripping off it's hinges. Two paramedics scramble inside, one deftly scooping up the loose organs into a large garbage bag, another throwing me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. They quickly waddle through the door-shaped hole in the wall, and into an ambulance waiting outside, where I'm thrown atop a stretcher.
Suddenly, a news crew appears sprinting towards us, and before the doors can be closed they jump inside. The ambulance takes off.
The reporter holds a microphone to my lifeless face. "Son, why did you do it?" My eyes snap open and I sit up abruptly, grabbing the mic in one hand like The Rock at Wrestlemania.
People of New York, hear me. As a young boy I dreamt of consulting. Of walking into a towering glass office each day and helping faceless multinational corporations solve business problems.
After graduating from Rutgers I signed a lease for a luxury studio in LIC. I soon realized that the realtor used a fisheye camera lens to take pictures of the unit, and that none of my furniture fit inside the room. Instead of a bed, I slept on a futon, and instead of a couch, I sat cross legged on a cushion like a Muslim cleric.
The massive floor-to-ceiling windows also magnified the glare of the sun, baking the air inside to a toasty 85 degrees even in February. After waking up each morning, I dragged myself to the window and put my face to the two inch gap (the farthest it opened) and gasped for air like a fish out of water.
My boss at BCG was a large barrel-chested man, a former linebacker at Penn State. Often while walking past me in the hallway, he grabbed my legs and dumped me violently on the ground. He told me he intended to continue until I sent him a video of myself squatting two plates to parallel, and that until then I was easy prey for the many crackheads wandering the subway.
He also sent me late night texts like this: Urgent!! The reports for the Pfizer clients are due in two hours!! If you miss the deadline we will be dragged from our desks down into the basement, and after being stripped naked, tied to a wooden chair with the mesh seating cut out. Then the partners will enter wearing hooded robes and brandishing ropes like medieval monks during the inquisition, and whip the shit out of our balls. The remains of our genetalia will be turned into castnets and sold at the Orvis store on 42nd street. PS: I picked up some of those Marlboro Southern Cuts that you like.
The stress and late nights, paired with the knowledge that I was approximately 40 years from being able to afford a row house in Park Slope or a co-op in Harlem, sent me into a deep spiraling depression.
Then the Knicks made it to the NBA finals. When Jalen Brunson drained the final bucket in game one, the city erupted with fans in blue and orange jerseys, exploding out of bars and into the streets, jeering and chest bumping. I remembered my father hugging me on my graduation day, and telling me he was proud of me. I finally had a retort to my younger brother ribbing my prison-sized apartment at the dinner table during Thanksgiving. New York was a city of winners.
I pause. The reporter looks at me with wide eyes, his mouth agape. "We lost everything today."
On the other side of my stretcher, the paramedic appears, placing a hand on my knee warmly. "Son, I just got off the phone with Mayor Mamdani. He said you're a real New York hero, and that he's proud of you." He holds up a large garbage bag with my organs swimming inside in saline water. "Would you donate your organs to the city treasury to be sold overseas in Zimbabwe in an open air black market? The funds would go towards public housing in the Bronx, and building a new mosque in Times Square."
I hold eye contact for a moment, the light gleaming off my jawline, a dying hero in his final moments. "Fuck that. Throw my kidneys to the fish in the Prospect Park lake."