James Cain Paradise

James M. Cain has beautifully written an essay with the name "Paradise", in which he tells about his awesome experience in the Los Angeles. You will simply feel as if you are experiencing it yourself, being present in the paradise. In his versatile novels, he has captured different aspects of life, such as hope, depression, love, beauty, etc. Let us see, how he describes his experience in this essay:

I travelled to Westlake a few years back, a dense locality near Los Angeles where poverty prevails. It is a city of Central America, also known for the crimes. Its area attracted me, because it was adventurous to move around. I wanted to know more about the surroundings. For this purpose, I thought that playing games at Lafayette Park located
many times every week for 2 years. Then I left the place. Before I left, in the month of October, I visited the courts. I felt, visiting Los Angeles, but not playing the games in the park is like feeling incomplete over there.

During my stay, I found, it was really a fact that the said place was a center of crimes, since there were 6 robbery cases, 4 thefts of cars, 3 muggings and 1 dishonor near the Lafayette Park. When I came there again, I found it barren and vacant, however, in the nearby field, some people were playing soccer and pick-up game silently in a court. There were floodlights spreading light in the surroundings.

Pop (an old, talkative and a slightly intoxicated man) was watching the game standing aside. He could not run, play or jump, but every night, he would reach the court having beer in his hands and commenting on the game going on. When I came across him, he was surrounded by a group and telling a story related to the
The reason is that it requires a great deal of joint efforts of the players. Playing together would simply help in overcoming the individual deficiencies in order to defend a particular portion of the ground.

But a Korean powerful athlete from the opposite team was unbeatable. We could not defend him separately. So what trick we used was to chuck the area and each one of us slapped him, held him from the shirt and troubled him frustratingly at our level best. If it would not be a basketball game, one could imagine that there is some fight going on. But such trick is allowed in the pick-up basketball for the defense.

Mike Deland who was a Ph.D. Sociology and studied the pick-up basketball extensively, names this as a "micro legal interaction". The practical rules are like "establishing precedence for future calls", negotiating the line between what's acceptable and what's not", etc. The players can defend themselves to a great extent. When we cooperatively applied these rules, no one dishonored us and everyone accepted willingly. Mike says that it is not the matter of playing a simple game only, in all the basketball games at the Lafayette Park, he has never observed such a violent fight before in the