A fever dream come true
The way the light cuts through the city, cleaving granite in half, chiseling it rose gold. The river refracting it back clear in the morning and hazy, drowsy, when the sun starts to sink into the west side. Giant slabs of ice breaking, bobbing in the wake of tiny boats coming in from Lake Michigan, crowding their hulls like happy hounds looking for hands to lick.
Spitting out first bites of fresh and molten hot fried green tomatoes with Martin and Robby, steam slipping out from our mouths around yelps, idiot grins. Looking at them across a scrum with Lauri Markkanen, Pascal Siakam, how they caught a lot of the words with smiles half-formed and hardly realized on their faces, the same way I do. How the default in those kinds of close quarters, edging for a quote, can shift people so severe that they forget the whys and hows of being there. Martin, later, looking back from the passenger seat to us in the backseat, light coming around the old, tall rectangles of green and grey marble deco buildings, the newer glass towers, and into the windows in Morse, all my muscles finally relaxing into the swells of my sleeping bag parka and spent adrenalin after the first half of a first day in the chaos of it, gone so easy with their talking, the comfort of them close, that I started to nod off.
Trying to work in the subterranean sea of the United Center media room and watching a giant, glossy cake shaped like a basketball get placed, with no preamble, beside me. Trying to work in a mostly empty overflow United Center media room, nearing midnight, and having, inexplicably, the Lizzo album come on full blast from everywhere.
Sitting exhausted on the top of a black leather booth in the dark of a throbbing club, the DJ pointing to the small group of us shoulder to travel-tired but swaying shoulder, saying this was for the Canadians, and putting on ‘No Letting Go’ as I locked eyes with Liz Cambage and tried not to fall backward into the booth behind.
Alone at Cloud Gate. People’s initials drawn lightly into the pocks of snow that hadn’t slid from its surface. Sky finally clearing and the bracing cold pinging from the mirrored surface, liquid mercury. They say when the light’s right you can’t separate the sculpture’s surface from the sky but even with the light going down for the day, it will tug impatient to the pant leg of your reality. Happy and lost as evening settled golden and tangerine across the Orange Line’s overhead tracks, sparks bolting from wheels, light splashing west across the wide streets to settle on lions in front of the Art Institute, blanketed in snow.
Crammed three across a backseat most mornings with Ashley and Kayla, sharing notes on what we were all out to get, nosing past the media busses to always get there slightly first even when leaving a little later, bare minimum of sleep hidden under highlighter, familiarity.
Wandering the arena concourse with Dave, stopping sidelong for all the greetings he’s inevitably got to give to the dozens of people he’ll know in any direction. Eyeballing a steaming, open-faced meatball sandwich big as my two closed fists with a kid across from me at the cruiser table and his small, tidily packaged personal deep dish pizza. “This was not smart,” I admitted to him, looking down at my white shirt. He agreed.
The glee in Kyle Lowry’s face all weekend. Beaming up from the floor he was getting picked up from, fresh from a charge, then another. Hands gathering him up, hoisting him and his toothy smile back to vertical. Turning to shout halfway through his media day podium at Siakam, one booth over, then forward at Jimmy Butler walking back from his, out beyond all the bodies pressed up against the velvet red stanchions.
Light on the river. Buildings crowding the south shore, their clean, geometric shadows cutting dark across the water, turning the oxidized copper colour of it to a shadowy flint. Walking across the DuSable Bridge, then immediately back over on the sunny side, stopping to gape up at the snapping city flags from under sunglasses, my oversized hood pulled tight.
A tumbling, rushing, out-of-body on adrenalin powered skidding from booth to player booth, slipping into any space between bodies honeycombed together to get close, shout the first half of a question racing to untangle itself into existence half a dozen times if you’re lucky, if you can catch a player’s eye looking out into a vibrating mess of bodies with phones, cameras, recorders flung up and sprouting from so many arms straining, trembling to stay steady. You hear your voice in the vacuum of blood up and roaring in your ears, your face, too desperate to be self-conscious, and the second you realize you’ve snagged them, that that’s you, only you, shouting, there’s a shock you need to steady against in order to get the rest, less practiced part out. So many eyes flicked over at you in various states of annoyance, impatience, curiosity, but you bore your own set forward, into the eyes of the guy trying his best to hear you. Amateur hour maybe, but the surge after every answer I got had me grinning up, mouthing thank you thank you, feeling the animal in me rolling all over fresh grass or new kill, resplendent with itself. Because desperation snags when you are shouting too long, unheard. It’s an exercise in bolstering confidence, again and again, before flinging yourself into the void of someone else’s decision to catch you. I came to Rudy Gobert like that, half deranged, shameless in shouting over the quieter guy right in front of me who I was essentially contorting all over like I wanted to be his backpack. “EN FRANCAIS!” I screamed, in my head going What are you about to until Gobert looked over, lips pursed in that half smile he does. Were he and Siakam going to gameplan in French? Part of me going, Listen to yourself, another part slapping its hands over that part’s mouth, leaning forward, curving my arm up and around to press my phone against the speaker where Gobert took what I’d offered and instead gave me a lifeline, beautiful and honest, and what I admitted later felt like the door in that scene in Titanic in the freezing cold Atlantic by virtue of his generosity—something to stay alive on.
Bam Adebayo must have thought I had a tic, the way I continued to motion with my chin over beyond him while asking about Siakam, until finally, perplexed or curious enough to turn, he did. His whole body. Then looked back at me, face wry.
“Ah! I had no idea he was over there!”
I don’t know how you hold reactions back in moments like that. Body wracked with gratitude. Knowing it is the farthest thing from a secret handshake you could ever have but feeling all the same like you’ve at least pulled the moment up from a mess of them, roiling together, to make it your own and somebody else’s, no matter how nominally for them. Reckless and gunning, there is no way to think of what’s spreading across your face as you come back from the brink, climbing over a bemused camera crew from Brazil to get there.
Self-soothing in Trader Joe’s after All-Star media by wandering the aisles, up and down, familiar to me only from being away from home in warmer places, relieved to see it was all laid out more or less the same. Picking up things I couldn’t take, had no means to store or heat or eat. Tuning out and into conversations of the people who worked there, palming a sumo orange, a Greek yogurt, a juice, a shampoo. Chatting with the cashiers. Feeling my muscles loosen. Feeling two separate people, this one and the maniac that was an hour before mentally sharpening their elbows and bracing them out to protect two professional square feet of personal space. Taking my double bagged, whatever would stay stable in a tiny hotel ice bucket or on top of a hotel desk, out into the dusky Chicago streets. Eating a to-go kale and edamame salad with my fingers over the bathroom sink because I had forgotten to grab a fork. Surprised to catch my reflection in the mirror smiling, chest-puffed proud, the lines under my eyes growing new tributaries, but so happy.
Rocketing open a heavy security door into the tunnel that would lead James and Michael and me back down, into the United tunnels, and almost taking out Jon Stewart and every single tooth in his mouth coming at it from the other side. Being told we’d missed the media busses one night, the coldest night, and Joe running out of the parking lot Outbreak style tents to corral waiting media, across the parking lot, two lots, faster than we could trace him in the dark to put his body in front of a coach bus pulling out, hear its airbrakes honk offended in the night, all of us cheering, running, freezing, stumbling up the winding stairs and settling into seats in the back with our hearts racing. Breathless, the tiny luck of it blooming big like the blood coming back into our faces. Convening every night in a hotel basement ballroom for warm wine, cans of light beer you could wedge a pre-cut quarter of a lime into if you really worked at it, everyone come friendly and loose with exhaustion, not as much networking as being unable to move your body out of somebody else’s wobbly orbit in time so colliding in an affectionate pileup. Meeting people in the half-dark like this, with a DJ someone definitely described this party differently to playing mostly for themselves in a corner, the Dime guys impish pit bosses roping people in for blackjack with tater tots for chips, air heavy with pepperoni sticks and waves of voices, your kinship is ragged and weird, but final.
Asking James to take a picture of me in front of a backlit postcard of a glowing Chicago hot dog made to look like an ocean barge being brought in from Lake Michigan after I’d hustled him out of the Bulls team store we’d searched so long to find, around Matthew Broderick holding two handfuls of socks and complaining none of them said Chicago, and away from the Michael Jordan statue, polished to a high shine. Ashley crossing the lobby one morning with Jerome Williams in tow, why not. Ashley in fuchsia from head to toe, curled into a rickety media room folding chair, overhead lighting the blinding fluorescent kind that hangs in wire cages in active construction sites and still, her teeth flashing as we laugh up the energy we have left, the brightest point of light in the room. Crying at the dunk contest, out of breath before it started, letting myself be happily swept along in knowing not a single moment would last or stand out in my head, how could it, the whole thing an escalator to impossible as much as I had been waiting for it, weeks or years, how wrenching and ephemeral it was, like so much else in the weekend knocking me over the head in any moment of pause—climbing into bed, sitting down to stare at the sky melting down in it’s pastel gloaming gradients, looking up from my glowing laptop on the media bus at the faces around me in the dark, zoning out on metrical feet hitting hardwood—that it wouldn’t last, wasn’t meant to, that there is no harm in admitting to yourself how high stakes for how it sets you up to act, to work, to heave yourself around in time spreading fast in front of you.
I slept the afternoon through when I got home Monday, waking and drifting in the dappled light of scudding clouds, then twelve hours straight through until Tuesday morning. Helpless to it but reluctant to put that kind of time between myself and the weekend, of what all happened. But you need days, if not months, to reconcile 72 short hours filled with so much. Hour after hour of hope, proof, strain and stress, ease, talking yourself out and then right back in, moments stashed deep down in back pockets and jackets, pieces you’ll find later, seasons from now, and have it all hit you again sharp as smell, a fever dream come true with friends for lifeboats. When you find what you want, you’ll be amazed at how fast it all goes.