Frank Ntilikina’s time to lead the Knicks and Knicks fans out of the desert is nigh
Jon Schulman takes you to Ntilikina Mesa, with a challenge for the region’s namesake to take the reins and lead the huddled masses that inhabit it to prosperity.
Free agency always glowers over the city’s horizon. Everyone is coming. Even those you can’t see on the deepest squint of the plains. There where the hunt is a spongey flat stone pulsing from your stomach. Temperatures shifting across the basketball globe have formed the lot of us into a huddle of climate refugees, either on or off Ntilikina Mesa. A vast desolation spread across the dusty fabric like a saddle blanket. Dotted sporadically with happy pueblos, sharing frybread. Up from the gulch, a scourge of nationalist invaders patrol the recesses with chapped faces, marauding the village’s serenity. The relaxed amber clay stamped to a hardened cherry pit. Isolated, westerly, the game’s blood-piss saturates the gloaming at the campsite.
Unless’n you go wrestle it down, time here is directionless. Marching orders won’t carry you to the brook. Burnt recollections of the cool, sanctified thirst. Your throat sticks and pulls. Frank is the highest paid and longest tenured gaucho in the group, looking for a contract too. Take the reins, friend. Drive this herd. Ain’t a ranch hand worth a damn to keep yuh from it. Setting up beneath these cosmos I don’t rightly believe the dealings on this here mesa even consider your liveliness. Hell, son! Feller by name of Jerome James put together a fantastical series, you might got bout 65 good cracks at that. If’n you damn sure crack it. You press that blade into the calf of any bristly character, saying he’s from the Vuelta. There won’t likely come a time if you don’t know what you’re searchin’ fer.
Times for making it look good’s long since passed. Don’t recall a devil full of details that could make it otherwise. Brother Obadiah won’t be around forever, best to make the most of your togetherness. That old snake bit fool done chopped off his leg at the knee to keep the poison from reaching his contemptuous heart. His brother was set there to cauterize it. Put the money in his back pocket while the boy was hollering for reprieve. Never could trust them boys.
May well be Obadiah brings up the rear if’n you can navigate by the stars ‘fore them nationalists go on and snatch the map from yuh. Heard tell of the man knowing’is way around a colt. Might could slip a bullet through the pocket if you play your cards right.
Well, it’s best you git on, son. Put in more than a hard day’s work or some stragglers’ll be manning your hacienda and there won’t be shit to say. Best you do more than dress the part. Or it’s on to them greener pastures. Adios, compadre.
