The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels

seconds! Three seconds on that guy! Hey—three seconds, come on! Gene? Gene? Did you see that? Three seconds!”
    Stepien’s lament, coming from a floor seat behind the basket, would have cut through even a boisterous crowd, but often there were only a few thousand fans—the masochists and optimists that represent the demographic cornerstones of the Rust Belt—and the owner’s incessant refrain was all the more prominent.
    The play tumbled off to the other end of the court and I was left there with my towels and paper cups and my deluxe dust mop, folding tossed-aside warm-up pants and wondering why it was such an issue with him. I wasn’t completely in the dark. I’d long before calculated that three seconds was three thousand milliseconds and one-twentieth of a minute and therefore one nine-hundred-sixtieth of a game, which is to say that I worked a lot of recreational math to pass the time as I sat blankly staring at the hardwood during another interminable third quarter. It was always the third quarter, always that time that is no time when you’re working a job that holds nothing for you.
    I could even see that dead time on the bench sometimes. I don’t think anyone ever gave up, but when you’re losing and you know too well what it feels like to lose, and you’ve been psychically prepared your entire life to win, you just want that loss to end. The seated players would sometimes gaze emptily as the drudgery continued up and down the court, as though trying to see back into their boyhood selves who dreamed of one day being here, doing this, and the wonder of it all.
    I knew that the phrase three seconds represented some kind of violation because occasionally a whistle would blow and the whine from the floor seat would turn jubilant: “See? See? Three seconds! It’s about time. . . .”
    But what I never came to understand, and to this day still do not understand, is how, with the dizzying number of possible fouls—a hack over here, a push over there, a charge and a goaltend and an over-and-back—the referees could also possibly be running an internal clock measuring how long someone was positioned in the paint. The game moved so fast, I never saw anyone do anything for three seconds. Twenty hands and twenty feet and twenty elbows are on the floor at all times, each in constant motion, plus lines and arcs and planes to account for, such that it would take the mind of Euclid, the emotional resolve of Sgt. Rock, and the physical stamina of Bruce Jenner to keep it all together. Sometimes whole minutes would go by before I realized there’d been a substitution and I hadn’t offered the returning player a towel and the requisite drink menu—“Water or Gatorade?”—to the back of a man who never turned to answer, just reached for what he needed.
    *  *  *
    We had not been paid in more than a month and some of the ball boys were pestering the trainer, who oversaw us, to do something. But what could he do? Rumors were spreading through the locker room and the cavernous back hallways of the Coliseum that no one was getting paid. Even if that wasn’t true, we all understood that this was not an organization with any discernible justice system—or any discernible system at all. Things just sort of happened. Or didn’t. All I knew was that whatever money was on the table was not worth the growing pressure from my colleagues to exert my “head ball boy” authority. Even if I was to make a stand, I didn’t have a clue where to make it, nor to whom, nor how stands were made at all. I’d never been righteous a day in my life.
    One of the other ball boys latched onto me as we went through our pregame duties—hauling buckets of ice to the locker room, helping the trainer set up his cart, distributing towels, folding warm-up suits, avoiding staph infection, etc.
    â€œStepien always hangs around