Exits: The last stand of bossiness
On the Suns, Chris Paul's overbearing engine, and how to reap loss.
The last stand of bossiness, that’s what I think of when I start in on the Suns falling out. Chris Paul, standing square on the floor, hands planted on his hips, scowling. Watching the game while at the same time seeing all the ways it went wrong. Erudite and bound there by mistakes as much as the hope of turning things right. If you picture the Roman wing of a museum, ancient to Byzantine, the marbled busts of Augustus, Antonius, weary leaders chiseled at the halfway point between hope and plain, painful realization, it’s not hard to picture one of Paul set there on a plinth between them, his eyes half rolled back in dutiful dismay.
Bossiness gets a bad rap, made diminutive in its assignment to women in control or to little girls, also in control, but it’s a working, calculating, hard-edged thing. A blistering bright light the truth can’t scuttle out of, a stubborn motor, and Paul is the last of its tortured, clairvoyant heroes.
There’s a swim I do every day in summer when I’m up here in the woods. Out to a skinny birch that’s slowly tilting, season after season, closer to the water. Once I come up from the deep shelf I drop into jumping off the dock I settle into a steady front crawl (practical) and make a diagonal line toward the tree at the narrowing point where one lake opens up into another. With distance swims in open water a certain bossiness is required. Some people probably call it discipline, a mind over matter physical mastery, but the things I mentally bark out to myself when I’m swimming are quick, direct, matter-of-fact, so, bossy.
My mind drifts, settles into not quite an exact rhythm with my body but something hinged on the hitch of air in and out, my arms reaching forward and looping wide, slipping back up and out again. It feels good to just focus on each stroke, not glance to any shore for proof of progress, only the act of keeping my body moving, myself afloat.
There are days the water is so still that the bubbles I leave in my wake on the way out stay intact on the surface for me to retrace, days it’s misting down rain, and days where the chop of the lake rushes high against my face, water turned more wild than it knows itself to be. Sometimes there’s a cold spot where the depth underneath must plummet, and I think about all that dark space under the soft of my stomach, the decent and reliable strength of my arms and legs. Bodies are such a wonder and we often don’t have the time or capacity to consider them, but submerged, gravity pulled easily away, you can trace all the surfaces of your body as the water touches it and think oh, I’m this entire thing, moving.
It makes sense in those moments that the brain might revert back to bossy, a sharp and sturdy anchor when faced with the vastness of your life bound up in a form that for the most part works and exists without your even thinking about it. In other words, when faced with the vastness of your life.
There’s something that happens to people’s brains in the desert. There’s a frequency, something with altitude, the blown open expanse of the landscape and the mind’s tendency to wander, slip its lead. One of those things I’m sure I read somewhere and one of those things is true because of the desert’s tendency to draw people — a certain kind of people — in. Not to say the whole of the Suns fanbase seemed so affected, some people probably don’t set foot outside the tidy lines of the city, but in that extremely high definition during cuts to the crowd during Finals broadcasts there was a glint you could catch in some of those wide and little bit wild eyes.
The only Suns players that ever fit the character quota for the desert was Kelly Oubre, going back a little farther, Steve Nash. Devin Booker and Deandre Ayton don’t, maybe Cam Payne does, certainly not Paul. Most players at the NBA level are too regimented as a point of practice, too long in a tenure of fine control, to unspool so readily in the heat and sky and range. I wouldn’t be surprised if it unsettled something in them, all except for Paul, who most likely glowers back out at the mountains ringing the valley and, a little haughtily, dismisses it as impractical.
All that space, and for what?
One of the dogs has been restless for the past two nights, woke me whining every few hours, the only change in the dark quiet outside was how far the moon had rose and tacked from one dip in the hills to out over the water.
The first time we went out, the first night, the other dog nervously trailing, I didn’t bring a light. But the half moon was hanging heavy and bright through the scruff of the pines that I could make out my feet as well as I could Captain’s teeth, the pale blue of his eyes. The second time I took a light and we went farther up the road, heard something moving in the bush, held my breath in a hurried walk back and caught the spill of stars overhead where the canopy broke. The last time, pale daylight starting to seep around everything, sketching familiar outlines, Captain pulled me down to the lake so he could wade in and drink between water lilies and the fog hung like a curtain over it, a shroud of mist lifting from the trees across the water.
In that quiet, once the worry and impatience in me eased and I resigned myself to being tired, probably for days, was a gift. Easy quiet plus a looming understanding, if you’re able to wade into it, that all this stands indifferent to you.
Knowing with the sky lightening quick that I should stay awake, watch the morning brighten, but succumbing to the bossy voice that said climb back into bed. A measure of dull safety, maybe, at potentially being caught out in the truth of yourself, alone.
Bossiness is a good ejector seat. When you start to hold too close the trajectory of other people over your own less like landmarks on a map of an entirely different country and more like tracing paper, bossiness can be the quick finger snap in your face, the universal signal for eyes up here.
Paul has stood on the precipice so many times that he must have, by now, smoothed grooves in the shape of his feet right there at the edge, but there’s never a sense from him that he should’ve gone about things any differently. That he didn’t end up exactly at the limits of his own control, that the rest was the profusion of intangibles that included timing, luck, and this year, a pandemic.
You don’t suffer as many unique and personal disappointments as Paul has and compare yourself to other people, or else you’d, he’d, quit. But that’s not right, entirely, because Paul doesn’t suffer defeat so much as he reaps it. Treats it as the boon that the end of another season has produced. Considers it for as long as it takes to be clear of it and then stows it away, alamanaic. Starting the next season unburdened by the last one’s heaps and tangles. You don’t feel that kind of loss and growth unless you are as implicit about the failure as you are the gains. Less than demanding or domineering, bossy, the way Paul wears is, is only asking for what’s already there. Buried by doubt or weighed down with hesitation, but there, deep down inside yourself, banal as blood.
This is fantastic.