“On Not Writing into Child Boss”
by Andrew Felsher
November 25, 2025
By December 2024, I decided to not write. I decided to not write or engage critically in literature at all.
For years, I’d been organizing my existence—and all my funny ambitions—around literature and had just finished a revision of countless revisions of a writing that began in 2019. It was titled Commodity 128, which became Notes from F., from which Notes from a Prison Cell was amputated and placed on the body of Portuguese (Notas de uma cela de prisão) before it existed in English. Then in 2022 the memory of “128” climbed into a magazine, 128 LIT, before it became A Reliable Staircase and before it became The Sundial Beneath Our Feet and before it became Child Boss and before it became Improbable Baller and before it settled into Would You like to Work for Me? for half a year until it traversed and submitted to Child Boss. In other words, this writing has moved in all sorts of odd directions—from prose to Portuguese, an international platform, and even the realization that I had reduced my writing by an average of at least twelve words a day for six years.
Our stories are not our stories. They collide. They submit. They depend on the stories of others.
Without MJ, there wouldn’t have been a Kobe, and so on.
I knew my refusal to write for a while would give birth to a hole inside which something needed to be placed. I wasn’t worried about losing the ability to write, to feel the necessity for socio-emotional-artistic expression, and to recognize how literature has seeped into, altered, and reconfigured my organs.
With any new phase that makes a hole, there must be a begging somewhere to plant and harvest, a begging for the hole to be plugged, flooded, drained, nourished or widened, so I plugged, flooded, drained, nourished or widened the hole of my “not writing” by signing up for an adult basketball league in New York City.
It was comprised of much younger and much taller human beings, all fixated on stuffing the hole of the rim with a basketball.
From December 2024 through March 2025, the hole of my “not” translated into my being in the best shape I had been in since moving to NYC back in 2015. That’s why in early January, after playing in an intense exhibition for free agents, I wasn’t tired, sore, or discouraged by any semblance of pain.
Most teams in the league were already formed, some of which had even played together for years. For the free agents, we were starting from scratch and could request to play with each other if we wanted, after the scrimmage. There was one guy, PJ, who I noticed had exquisite basketball instincts and could clearly play at a high level. He got into the paint and dished me the ball for a game-winning three. We requested to play together on a paper form, penciling in “Shoot First” as a team name. Days later, a full roster was assembled by the higher power of league administrators. Neither of us had played in a competitive league in two decades. Moreover, PJ and I were the only ones on the roster who were over twenty-five-years-old: I was turning thirty-four and he was turning thirty-eight. So, we were the OGs, though he was the real OG, once a real baller who had earned a scholarship to play in college that was later rescinded due to a knee injury.
*
In the first game of the season, PJ strained his hamstring and immediately took himself out. After that, the team struggled. With each loss, the temperament gradually depleted, a potential threat to my “not”. Some players stopped showing up. There was no cohesion, no flow, and definitely no team-first mentality.
By the third game—PJ still nursing his hamstring and not playing—I was starting at point guard. Before tip off, I felt a bit sick, a minor sore throat. Still, I had enough adrenaline to push through a full game without resting (We only had four guys and the other team gifted us one of their eight at halftime). I ended up playing well by my standards. At some point, I telegraphed a pass intended to fly over my head, leapt, caught it in the air, landed, and darted ahead for a fast break. A lengthy defender hustled and chased me down, probably hoping to pin the ball against the backboard like LeBron James on Andre Iguodala in Game 7 of the NBA Finals back in 2016. Intuitively, I gathered the ball, elevated, tucked it in, and spun it cleanly off the glass with my right hand, eluding his outstretched hand.
It felt so good.
To look back over my shoulder and watch the ball fall into the net—with refs, players on both teams, and those at the flimsy scorer’s table, all gasping before saying “Damn!”–made my season, stuffing the writing hole with the wet cement of a mid-air adjustment.
Not bad for someone 5’6” and approaching his thirty-fourth birthday who had spent most of the past decade working and organizing his life around a hunger to participate in literature’s many modes.
Despite the loss, I was in my living room that night re-enacting the shot for Y.
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT AN UP-AND-UNDER IS?!! LET ME SHOW YOU!! IF I WERE SIX FEET TALL, I WOULD HAVE THROWN IT DOWN WITH TWO HANDS LIKE PRIME D. ROSE. IT WAS SO GREAT!
Once I settled down, my sore throat worsened into sickness, negotiated with the wet cement of the up-and-under, and then gave me a week-long fever, a horrible case of the flu.
Completely derailed, I was forced to miss a couple games. Soon, the team was 0-4. Then PJ returned.
We won our first game.
By early March, we were 2-4. My body—still recovering from the flu—had no stamina.
For my first game back, we won again even though my conditioning was far from where it was before the flu arrived at my doorstep.
We were now 3-4; 3-0 since PJ’s return.
After the game, I asked PJ for a ride to the subway at Barclays Center, since we both live in Brooklyn and my car was not drivable because a few days before, while double-parked and waiting for a spot on my block, a school bus misjudged its dimensions and smashed up my left rear quarter panel. During the ride, it was natural to talk about life outside basketball. I learned he had an eight-year-old son, a fiancée, and was a music manager on the side. He threw some names around and asked if I heard of any, to which I said I think I recognize one of the rappers. I mentioned that my partner was a filmmaker and that a few years ago I had founded, and have since edited, an international literature and art platform, 128 LIT, and that I’ve been in a “not literature” mode.
At some point, the conversation returned to basketball. PJ confessed that he has become so frustrated with our team that he wished he could demand a trade (just like Jimmy Butler), that he’s on the verge of giving up on us, and that he’s thinking of intentionally skipping the next game just to see if we can win without him.
If you’ve played enough basketball—pickup and otherwise—you know that you can tell a lot about someone’s character by how they ball. It’s revealing: how they handle a collapsing defense under pressure, and whether they box out for rebounds, chase after loose balls, whether they prioritize their own delusions of stardom, or if they actually want to sacrifice and be part of the flow of a collective, a mode escaping the border of self.
PJ calmed down and explained that he knows what’s wrong, that a lot of the guys are shooting terrible shots just to stuff the stat sheet with as many points as possible.
In disbelief, I said something like: “No? People really pay attention to their stats in a rec league? That’s ridiculous!”
In fact, he revealed that the league keeps track of the stats for everyone (I had no idea!) and that a couple of our teammates–K and S–were taking twenty-plus shots in some games while missing two-thirds of them.
“Numbers don’t lie,” PJ said. “K went zero for twelve from three in one game.”
When I was young, my father would sit on the corner of the bleachers and scribble some stats on a notepad. After all, he once arrived at MIT’s doorstep at 16 years old ready to situate himself in an ocean of numbers, ready to fill every conceivable hole with a reliable calculation. If I played poorly, he would try to gloss over what might have appeared bad on the surface to extract some obscure angle, an unconventional equation that simultaneously established himself as a mathematician and his child as a valuable asset to the team. He would have said something like, “Even though you missed all five shots you took, your team was up by three when you were on the court. The pace was better. You impacted the game.”
PJ revealed that I could access the stats on the league website and directed me to the link. I was shocked by the extent to which this casual architecture resembled the analytics and extractive betting culture that has been tormenting the NBA over the last decade. Not only were there rankings for players (at some point, I was ranked #2 of #117 in steals!), but they even had odds and a spread for each game based on the data. It was ridiculous that so many willful participants were incapable of finding joy in the game without folding themselves into the malleable coffin of data.
Regardless, I persuaded PJ not to use his absence from the lineup to prove anything. In other words, I told him not to give up on the team and that we need him to win, which was one way of saying don’t give up on me, on this “not writing” hole that I’ve been trying to justify.
My request that PJ “not” give up on the team worked. He showed up for the next game. We won by twenty, though we should have won by thirty or forty. The win wasn’t a sign that we couldn’t lose, a bursting through the atmosphere into the frictionless cosmos of a great team. We still lacked cohesion, ball movement, off-ball movement, communication, help defense, and consistent effort. If our ambitions were to make the playoffs and make a run at the championship, we needed to improve. We needed an intervention.
We were 3-4 with two games left in the season and were one win away from a guaranteed playoff spot. PJ and I were texting back and forth, dissecting the team and strategizing this and that. On the morning of the next game, I decided to speak up in the team group chat:
For those coming tonight, let’s get there a few minutes early and discuss roles, lineups, teamwork, and ways to improve and play to everyone’s strengths. Let’s close out the season with 2 more wins!
I was hardly aware that my text message might have been a betrayal of my “not writing”, until my teammate K responded, “I just called off work. I’m coming. Fuck that.” Before my text, K had RSVP’d on the league app, indicating he was a “No.”
If a thoughtfully written text message motivates someone to call out of work, then I am convinced that I must have been writing and therefore betraying the “not”!
It was the first game where everyone arrived early. General roles were assigned. S told me not to look to pass on fast breaks as much and that he’ll clean it up if I miss. I encouraged J to take more three pointers. We formed layup lines and warmed up, resembling a team for the first time in the season.
We won the game and made the playoffs as the No. 6 seed, lost in the first round in overtime.
When the season ended, I checked the wet cement that I had poured with my up-and-under layup before the flu. It had dried enough for me to plant my feet, reorient. I knew there was nothing more for me to give that made sense. I decided to retire from organized basketball.
I still ball. I love NYC’s public parks, the pickup culture, how after one team wins with ease, players know to reorganize and adjust, balancing the talent.
One day, back in April 2024, when I was entrenched in re-writing Child Boss, which opens with “By eleven I wanted to ball. I wanted to ball badly,” I was up early in the morning and alone and shooting around on the empty court in Sunset Park. A photographer approached me and said that my shot is beautiful, that I don’t look like an amateur, and that he played shooting guard in high school.
He asked permission to photograph me.
This is what an up-and-under layup looks like mid-air:
Photo by @kuronekochari