Jodie Meeks woke up to find himself in an unfamiliar place. There was broken asphalt beneath his feet and a steady, chilling rain falling from the night sky. His first thought was that he must have gotten too drunk at a nightclub and stumbled into an alley to sleep it off, but he quickly remembered that he hadn’t been doing any such activity the previous night.
He looked down the alley in both directions. Oddly, he couldn’t see a connection street on either side; the alley seemed to go on forever, dotted periodically by flickering yellow lights which gave off a faint buzz. He randomly chose one of the two directions available to him and began to walk, figuring his eyes were playing tricks on him and he would get to a main road eventually. For minutes, he passed by endless dumpsters and locked rear entrances to buildings, until he realized that he wasn’t really making any progress; the alley stretched on into infinity. What was this place?
As if in response to this desperate thought, a voice from behind him called out, “Hi there!”
Jodie turned around to greet the owner of the voice, however, he couldn’t see anybody. He squinted against the rain and walked towards where he though the voice had come from; eventually, he could make the faint outline of a tall man apparently dressed in some kind of black robe. “Hey! Where am I?” Jodie shouted out in response, not able to wait until he got closer.
The man slowly approached. His face was obscured by the hood of his garment. “I know not who you are, visitor. But that is to be expected, for this is the Cosmic Back-Alley of Forgotten NBA Players.”
“The what?” Jodie repeated dumbly.
“The Cosmic Back-Alley of Forgotten NBA Players,” the man said again. “It is a sad place; the rain never stops and there is never anything to do except walk by the same piles of trash and think about how you’re not too much different from those piles.”
“Oh,” Jodie said, not feeling any less confused than when he had gotten here. “Who are you?”
The man lowered his hood. “Guess.”
Jodie recognized his face and his hair, and knew he was an NBA player, but couldn’t place the name. “Sorry. I’m not placing you.”
Chuckling grimly, the man shrugged. “That is to be expected. We’re all forgotten here. I’m Jordan Hill.”
“Sorry man,” Jodie apologized. “I didn’t recognize you! It’s been so long since I thought about, you know, you. I mean, not like I just think about NBA players all the time, but there’s never any articles about you or anything.”
“That’s why we’re here, you and I. We are on active rosters, but we are forgotten. There are others here, too, but you’ll never meet them, so vast is the Back Alley.”
“Can I leave?” Jodie asked. He didn’t want to be in this depressing place forever, especially since the Magic had another game coming up.
Jordan again shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, eventually. It just sort of happens once this place has decided you’ve been here long enough. Maybe a day or two. And then they bring you back just as suddenly.”
“They?”
“There’s gotta be somebody overseeing this place, right? It’s probably Silver himself or something who set up this alternative dimension for us. Anyway, I gotta get going. You find out pretty quickly that if you talk too much here, your stay gets longer. It’s better to just find somewhere to sit and think about your failing NBA career. That is the point of the Cosmic Back Alley.” With these words, Jordan turned around and began to walk away.
Jodie called after him, but when it became apparent that Jordan wasn’t turning around, Jodie gave it up. Instead, he walked the other direction, hoping that he would be able to go home soon.