Panama, Marc Gasol
Every time I read another news story on them, or a broadcast anchor asked me about it in a FaceTime interview, or the new bane of my existence, Holland America, mentioned it in one of their useless press releases — Panama — I couldn’t help it, the song started blasting in my head.
Picturing David Lee Roth swinging in over the cruise ship, his tiger striped sequin pants flashing in the sun, wearing goggles and clutching a boom box and making that stupid “Who me?” face, first guitar chords ringing out over Panama Bay. I guess I owe Van Halen a debt of gratitude because it kept me from crying on live television, but I also had to bite my lip to not laugh as I got asked, again, how scared I was for my parents.
The worst day was last Friday. I was sitting at the desk my dad had helped me make —a piece of solid oak that had been a door that he found and took the hardware off of and varnished, and I’d found two stainless steel sawhorses for legs — listening to a recorded interview I’d done with a UFC fighter the week before, watching condensation run down the thin, storm window pane in front of me. It had got to the point where I’d asked her how she guards herself, protects her body when she’s not fighting, if it’s possible, and she laughed and said it’s not, that she’d fallen down in the rain the week before, when a call from my dad’s cell came jangling in through my headphones. I picked up the call on my laptop and the voice went from hers, rough but clear, to his, faraway and patchy.
One for being very dramatic at the worst times, he started off, “I guess you’ve heard?”
My heart dropped into my stomach and my stomach felt like it got kicked into my lower spine. It could be anything, all the scenarios I’d been creating in my head and too scared to say out loud for fear of putting them out there.
“What?” I managed.
“Four people died,” His voice suddenly crystal clear, connection so strong I could hear his shaky intake of breath, “four people on the boat.” My mom took the phone and started to tell me what had happened, what the Captain had told them, when the call cut. The part in me that had been compartmentalizing, managing each new piece of lousy information as progress suddenly turned, kicked down the shoddy filing system in my brain.
What I felt I’d been waiting on, more sense, dates, times, all the regular things that you put together to predict plans, were missing and going to stay missing and now, suddenly, the floor I’d been operating slowly along had dropped out. I didn’t know what to do any better than before, but there was no reason to wait anymore.
I’ve choked up a lot in these last few weeks, same as anybody, but the response I got out of a moment of sheer desperation asking for help on Twitter to get my parents home had me blubbering every time I checked again and saw it ricocheting farther out, bigger and bigger, into basketball. I don’t doubt that the push from Friday through the weekend that got the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs involved, that had the Prime Minister talking about it on his daily address to the country, and had what I’ve had described by different MP offices across the country as “phones ringing off the hook”, in some part, came from an insular and weird corner of the internet that usually hones its energy on new ways to debase the Celtics. There’s going to be more to do, soon, but holy was that the help up I needed when I’d just been posterized by what felt like time running out. Thank you.
I’d like to talk about the comfort of Marc Gasol.
Before what was the last game of my Raptors feature writer gig I was very tired. February 28th, a Friday, my older brother’s birthday, I’d forget to call him, I’ve never done that. I was running late, missed Nurse’s pre-game outright. Arriving, jogging down the steps from the street into the tunnel, breathless smiling sliding my bag over to be checked, arms up to be wanded, I felt so aware of something ending. I knew I’d be back there in two weeks after that game, back on my own in the kind of lone wolf no club lurking around I’d be free to do when not tied to the team. I’d been chomping, a little, at that bit. Eyeing the grass a few steps away, not greener, maybe just with less of a fence. Now, I kick myself. From here, where we are, and there, where I was, embedded, close enough to hear the jokes that got cracked in the locker room when these guys were at ease, their grins coming up the tunnel after a win, the grim expressions their faces would set into fresh as drying cement after a loss, that I was, any part of me, feeling fatigued by it.
Because February, for me, was halcyon. I got everything I wanted and I got beyond what I even could’ve guessed at the start by its end. Sweet, wrung out stretches of very little to no sleep, the kind of bliss that makes your heart flop around, woozy. Miles and miles, hungry and happy, catching the faces of people I love under stadium lights, against flame spewing up out of a backboard, feeling every minute lock into memory the way it will when something is entirely, throttling new. And so much basketball, from right up beside it. Caught in the slipstream of the Raptors 15 game win streak, every game in it like a dare, every game in it like holding your breath, the glee that caught around it, flooded every corner and crevice of those underground tunnels like a wide-swinging maglite, made the free pizza in the media room taste amazing, the security giddy, made the most circumspect writers break for a minute, burst out with a YES at the buzzer, put the whole franchise in front of a league that couldn’t discount it, bit down and felt it was gold.
But that last home game of the month, coming down with something the way my body always reliably will when it senses a small breather coming, I had just taken a homemade rice krispie square from the media room hospitality table and was eating it, oblivious, heading out to the court. I felt snug. That’s the best I can describe it. The way that when you’re overtired your regular level of self awareness or regulatory self-consciousness will slip loose, unwind from you, and you shrug it off, move easily forward into a warm and slightly removed state of being, sort of purely in the moment but by accident, not by mastery of your mind and its clanking excess.
I took the turn for the player tunnel and floated down it, the light dipping low before I hit the part where it starts to flood in from the stadium, spills off the high shine of the court. A silhouette was drifting toward me, down the middle of the tunnel on the same line as me. It grew as it got closer, then grew bigger still. I took a bite of the square, blinked, kept on. Out of the half-dark Marc Gasol materialized. First, looking forward, then, down toward me. He was in soft sweats, warmup jacket thrown overtop and hanging open, he’d done warmups, was coming right off them. I think I smiled, sort of in the lull of time to mostly myself. I lifted my arm up, my hand following, hand with the rice krispie square in it.
It was dissociative, for sure. When you see a part of your body but your mind isn’t embodying it anymore. You mind has, in fact, rushed back to you to urge you to please do something about whatever it is your body is about to do. I was thinking alright, wait a minute. My hand was still going, up and up, just about at my shoulder.
There was a boom from the court, maybe. Or someone stepped around us, split through the middle. There was an interruption of the bubble I was bopping along in and Marc passed me, went by. I saw my hand hovering there and brought it back around, some bad pantomime of a person pretending to feed a baby via wheeling plane, and took a bite.
Marc Gasol is a generous force field. I had already been feeling in slow motion but Gasol’s got this temporizing quality, time stalls out to meet him. On court we hadn’t seen it near enough this season but I think of it best in the air up around the rim, how Gasol stays there, grabs a ball two-handed, almost gentle, the look on his face anything but. He will hang all over you like a three hour summer sunset at high altitude.
How he seems on another plane when he slips between defenders, sets up a lolling screen. The way he plants, slow motion, when the ball gets flung out to him far out, how he seems to take a breath, have time to let it out easy, before letting go a three that sinks like a stone in still water. Watching him you feel so relaxed, assured, a beautiful comfort. He’s got his big hands around the game and you can sit back for a second, sun on your face.
The arena opened up in front of me, I squinted in the light. There was the pulse and hum of the air before a game, gently shaking me a little more awake, the whole of the floor spreading out in front of me, a month behind me, and Marc Gasol, stretching the moment so I didn’t miss it.
Now they’re out in the Caribbean.
They were told as the sun sunk and they finally made their way toward the snaking shifts and marine locks of the Panama Canal, to close all windows and pull all heavy drapes shut. They’d be through by morning, by the time the sun started lifting over the new tropical water out in front of them Panama and the slinking dread of those days stalled out in the Pacific would be well behind.
Still, my dad snuck several glimpses. Sending me blurry photos overnight of what looked like spotlights pointed down at the boat, the undersides of bridges, and just blackness, out forever.
This morning I still got up with the same low grade headache I’ve had holding snug to my skull for five days but I felt for the first time less urgent. Still without any sense of what now or how soon, but less like I needed to be recalibrating each moment with information I couldn’t quit gathering. They are moving and sometimes movement, even if it’s under plodding engine toward shores that want them even less than the last ones, is enough.