There must have been forty of us, maybe fifty, kids of all shapes and sizes, crammed into that stuffy gym after class, the place reeking of sweat and dirty socks and farts, chattering, fidgeting, roughhousing. It was chaos on that Monday afternoon at three-forty-five, the first day of basketball tryouts…

“Everything is dead and gray and frozen,” Sadie says to me as we take a walk, down the street, to that little park at the edge of our neighborhood, the three-quarter-mile track that’s presently buried in slush and ice and snow, the stubborn remains of the winter storm that blew…

I can still remember, as a high school senior after having been accepted into Duke to my utter amazement and absolute joy, while watching a Duke men’s basketball game on the grainy television set in the basement of my buddy’s house and seeing Coach K scowling and prowling along the…

It was the eve of Santa’s annual visit to Birchmont Village, the most anticipated event of the season, and disaster had struck: Santa was laid up and out of commission! Well, not the real Santa, though he certainly was to the children of Birchmont Village who circled this day on…

You sit there and watch, and resist the urge to flinch, as the nurse pierces your skin and slides the slender silver needle in your vein, purplish and puckered after she flicked it to get it to wake, sleepy, like you, at this early hour, but you’re awake now too…

It was the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend, and time for the Birchmont Village City-Wide Yard Sale, an annual opportunity at the unofficial end of summer for the townsfolk to relieve themselves of their clutter — stacks of musty dusty books and piles of outgrown clothing and dented patio…

“Sometimes it’s a struggle just to keep my shit together,” Robert tells me over drinks on the patio, so matter-of-factly that he could be discussing the weather or last night’s scores, those games he watches, always some kind of balls on the TV. …

Billy works in a beige box, surrounded by other beige boxes, in a building full of beige boxes, and before this beige box, Billy worked in a different beige box in a different building full of beige boxes, and a different one before that, and one other one, and yet…

“Our ship will come in soon,” Sadie says as she sips her Bloody Mary through a plastic straw. “Mark my words — I can see it on the horizon.” We are sitting at the sad bar down the street, at a high top table in the back against the rail…