Summer League Forever V

Ten days in the desert, and the lengthiest annual dispatch yet.

There were five of us in the Ferraro's parking lot, all trying to take pictures of the moon.

It was my last night in Las Vegas. I’d arrived over a week before and the contours of the city had begun to feel physical. I don’t mean its landmarks. I could close my eyes and trace you a facsimile of the Strip’s skyline as seen from the parking lot of UNLV’s Thomas & Mack, letting my eyes rove over it for five summers now, tired or sated and typically both, after hours in those gyms under the metronome of basketball. I mean its elemental qualities. Its heat, pressing in not just from above but transposed through air, sinking into my lungs and turning circles like an animal settling down to rest, seeking reprieve from even itself. Its light, the immense physical moods of it: mornings as ringing optimism, high noons as scouring ablution, dusk as pliant reverence. Its strange weather, sudden downpours and booming thunder, cloud cover dense enough to drop the temperature by three degrees at mid-day. Its solitude.

The moon, though, retained its mystery. Every night it grew in increments and popped out in a new place — a lucid hangnail as I pulled the curtains shut; an eyelid winking from a flat band of clouds, flashing hot silver and stopping me, dazed, in a tangle of traffic as I crossed the hotel driveway. Then, finally, full.

I watched something about this, Howard said, there’s a way to make it clear if you record a video instead.

Steve, Seth and I continue to hold our phones up to the light, idiot moths thumbing the shutter button. On their screens I see the moon in different phases of being zoomed in upon, pitched cooler or warmer, and none so big and amber as the real thing, lifting away from us with each admission of how horrible these photos are. Every few minutes a plane dives low overhead on its descent to the airport, roar of the engine so familiar by now the noise is white.

We run laughing across Paradise at a break in traffic, Howard still sure his roundabout method would work. Like sneaking up on the moon could yield the same candid results as a friend who believes you’re only taking a photo when you’re really recording. Like for a revealing second the moon would brighten and break for us.

But that was the end.

Summer League started with me trying to find Warren in two arenas full of people also trying to find Warren. Warren, who I felt an easy familiarity with after calls here and there over the eight months leading up to spotting him on the sideline in Cox in the middle of three conversations, whose eyes lit up with instant recognition and who said, sit right here, and placed me in a sideline seat as he bustled off down the floor.

I was there because I knew Mark Jones was going to read the tribute I wrote for Jerry West to open Summer League. I pictured watching it from a tunnel, far from the floor. What happened instead was Warren looped back, said let’s go, and I followed him on a long tail into Thomas & Mack, down to the floor, into a loose knot of people including Mitch Kupchak, Rod Thorne, Mike D’Antoni, West’s family, Rick Carlisle and Jones, who paced the baseline practicing my tribute like a singer running through vocal warmups. I heard him repeating “pummelling swells” as he rocked forward and back on his heels. Warren kept producing printed copies of the piece and handing it to everyone gathered and waiting. They all read it standing with their heads bowed, folding it into neat rectangles and pocketing it politely when they finished. I watched, in an arms-length feeling I still can’t name and have never felt before, a sort of charmed, half awkward, out-of-body disbelief.

Warren showed me the Dairy Queen cup he’d artfully crumpled paper into to look like vanilla soft serve, replete with red plastic spoon, the treat a Summer League intern would get for Jerry every day, sometimes several times a day, while he sat and watched basketball. The cup would sit on Jerry’s usual chair, draped over with a t-shirt of his smiling face and the words ‘The Soul of Summer League’, for the length of the tournament.

Where should I watch this from? I asked Warren. He pointed to a courtside chair two over from where Jones had taken a seat, cameramen beginning to get in position on the floor in front of him. Jones leaned over to hand me his phone and said if he didn’t get a spotlight, could I light up the page for him? I felt delirious, but anchored by a task. Will I get a spotlight? Jones asked a producer. They assured him, I handed his phone back and sat stock still as the lights in the arena went down, like any move might interrupt the whole production.

It was meant to look like Jones was having a conversation with Jerry, turning to the seat with the Dairy Queen cup, he and it the only thing lit up in the arena. It worked, both in the playback I’ve seen since from an ESPN feed I’m not sure I can share without getting a cease and desist, and in the moment, because I felt like a voyeur, eavesdropping on a conversation I’d scripted. Jones’ cadence, where he took his breaths and beats, made the writing move but more than that, I was close enough to see his considerations, hear him reading a split second before it was amplified.

I took a shaky video but it didn’t feel real until days later, when Robby told me he heard it live from the media risers, down at the other end of the floor. A witness to a surreal three minutes in the dark.

---

Standing beside the freight elevator in Cox as the buzzer marking the end of one game sounds and the door to the elevator begins to rattle open. First, dozens of sneakers, then, in ascension, matching long legs wrapped in tension bandages, up to waists with nervous hands hitching shorts and tucking jerseys. A few more seconds and finally, both rosters of the teams about to take the floor, rendered human and whole and starting to shuffle off the elevator in a swell that immediately chokes the staging area. I’m pinned beside someone very tall who is pinned alongside the ebb and flow of four teams attempting to get by each other. I look up, and up, and oh, Udonis Haslem.

---

Clouds spread so far across an unobstructed, ceaseless sky that you can make out where rain is falling, miles away, from the down-drifts of hazed grey smudging from them like a child’s finger painting.

---

Expectation, I think, the thing that first took me out of it. Expectation was for the desert to scour me of routine, grief, a spring of scarcity and an early summer of losses, for the usual pull on me in every direction at once to snap my sense of alignment back into place. Instead, the desert’s usual clarity shifted around me like a mirage, moving away any time I felt I was getting close to the pulse of what time spent here, for this, normally feels like.

It was like I could feel it circling, some mornings out toward the mountains, hills I thought I’d memorized in their contours but all week seemed to creep closer, loom taller, cast sharper against all the clouds galloping over the valley of the city to the point where I asked Jake one day, Howard another, and then a director I met moments prior whether they’d been noticing the same, whether the mountains were bigger. Out there, in those new giant hills, was the regular feeling of this place ready for me to slip into, so that I’d see these new pangs of guilt, isolation, detachment and a furrowing sadness that refused to loosen its bite go sloughing off my clammy skin.

But the desert continued to balk. Its glowing nostrils flaring each time I reached for it, offering up no refuge, no inch of itself, no sun-warm flank to press myself against.

I tried my best to explain it. First to myself, then to people I’ve come to understand as anchors for the way just their proximity slows me, smooths what’s ragged to the point where I lose language — a beautiful feeling until faced with all the articulation I’m suddenly short on.

It’s when I forget all about it that it comes rollicking back in — cracking thunder and sudden downpours, piercing shafts of golden light spearing through doom-dark blankets of cloud — and I stop whatever I’m doing, struck dumb. It’s in those seconds, caught out by the desert, that it catches me by the throat and my body yields, all the tension draining and tears spring hot as the pavement flaring up my bare legs. Here’s the animal I know. I can’t tell which of us is murmuring it but the words come unbidden as prayer.

Subsequently communed, it goes wheeling off again, leaving me to collect myself walking through arena security soaked with rain or sliding into the backseat of an idling car, primed to speed me into the night coming down flushed.

---

One afternoon I pass Doris Burke coming out of our hotel doors as I walk in. I think how I’m on the receiving end of a blast of enveloping cold air the same second she must feel the encompassing heat rush up to prickle her skin, our bodies in separate stages of environmental shock. I think how I was just at the mall, attempting to spend a spare hour and an American-only use gift card when I found out Trump was shot at. I think about the distance between us, shrunk from this time to last by some metric of my own making, a combination of work, achievement, and self-understanding. I think how fast I need to turn myself around and get to the gym. I think all this and I forget to make any response in the moment to the moment, forget, even, to just say hi.

---

Sitting behind Wayne Embry one day and, glancing away from the game, picking out the spots of fresh rain soaked through his shirt at the shoulders and neck. The same rain drying on my own shirt. My heart stutters a little at the softer ways basketball can make the world smaller, immediate.

---

At the bar of Tacos & Beer with Eric, I ping-pong around so many subjects that later I wonder how he managed to keep up, let alone respond, when there was no preamble between, say, our mutual torch carrying for Sergio Scariolo and the funeral I just went to. I begin each as a fully formed conversation.

I forget we haven’t ordered. I’m exhausted, but then he is too, here since the Canada vs. USA exhibition the week before. I used to think our fixed point was our mutual love and defence of Toronto’s east end, but it’s Eric’s kindness. Like summers ago, when he drove us across the city to Raptors practice, or last summer, when he and his wife and I had dinner in the desert and they told me about the avocado farm they were going to visit in California run by a Raptors fan, or this summer, when he presses, gently, into who had died and I realize he is the first person to do this and how badly I needed the prompt. I try not to cry as the bartender comes back to drop our food and cheerfully announces crispy beef and Baja fish, with real flourish.

---

Treat it like a birthday party, Jake tells me, when I admit how strained I’ve been feeling this time around. The two of us are standing in the mouth of a deep arena tunnel where Adam Silver’s presser just let out.

You invite everyone you like to your birthday party, they all come, you still know you’re not going to be able to spend as much or the same amount of time with everyone, he says. You came to mine, and I came to yours. He pauses a beat and his smile softens. Thank you for coming to my birthday party, he says.

A buzzer drones from the direction of the floor, we follow it and the sounds of cheering out of the tunnel.

---

I meet Dane and Kyle briefly on media row and when I walk out into the desert, hours later, there they are again. This happens, with anyone you meet here, often.

They give me the bad news: all the rideshares are cancelling, there are no taxis. Bronny James is almost done his debut game and it’s only going to get worse. Kyle scrambles up the banks of red gravel that demarcate sections of the immense parking lot, looking for our driver. They’ve folded me into their trip, no questions asked. Soon we hear him howl a very long “no”. The car has cancelled.

We’ll walk, we decide, somewhere close but far enough from the chaos of the parking lot. Within seconds of setting out, we are flushed and sweating. We make it to a convenience store and Dane buys us each a Gatorade, hands it to us like holy communion, which, for the way I can feel it glowing lambent yellow all the way to my shrivelled cells, tracks. Our now separate cars come and I realize I might not see these guys from Minnesota I forged a bond with in the fires of heatstroke again all weekend.

In the strobe flashing dark of a party a few nights later, we find each other on mutual laps. They seem almost bashful. Neither wants to be the one to say whatever it is they’re about to. We did that thing, Kyle blurts. That thing that everyone does, Dane lends. We looked you up, they admit. Their teeth flash in grins as I roll my eyes. Women with beaded head pieces that look like lampshades dance on the back of banquettes around us.

---

Phone calls in the dark when I know it must be lightening outside. The chafed pink sky — fresh as a scrape over skin, raw as how I’ve been feeling, unformed as what I keep trying to say — edging up behind the flat-tooth topped range of Frenchman’s Peak. The desert may not hold any pity but the grace, soft assurances, and rushes of tenderness I’ve felt in this city make up for natural law.

---

One driver tells me that when he retired from the army he got sober and started bodybuilding, bought his own spray tanning gun because the pre-show fees are such a racket. The shows are mostly in L.A. but he prefers Atlantic to Pacific. When you drive into an Atlantic beach town, that smell of salt in the air, sunscreen, he trails off and meets my eyes in the rearview. There’s nothing like it, he says, almost sombrely.

On day six, my driver takes the back way into the T&M parking lot. She ducks her head to look at the arena and the giant vinyl banners draped from the roof showing NBA athletes in profile. Is it a bowling league? She asks, sincerely.

---

Exist where you are, Eric (another Eric) tells Howard and I one day, meant as instruction but coming off mantra. We repeat it to each other for the rest of the week.

---

Twice I have dinner with one of my parents oldest friends, in town for a conference. Like my dad, his favourite things to talk about are the best deals he’s ever gotten in Vegas. Once, he tells me, he checked out of his hotel every day for five days and checked back in to receive a $100 Amex gift card through a promotion. At the end of the week, he went to a mall to get a case of water and wound up in a suit store that had a deal on, four-for-one suits. He picked out a $600 suit, put most of it on the gift cards, and went home with three more.

---

Waiting for Rob in a quiet hall of the Encore I let my focus blur on a small bank of empty, adjacent slots and the low lighting washing off the gleaming marble floor. When I blink it back I’m looking at Miles Bridges, walking toward me with a small group of people. I see the same things that first stood out to me about him — wide cheeks, eyebrows that lend to expression, big, almost plaintive eyes — and then I see the jester hat he’s wearing on his head.

He looks at me looking, looks away and then back. That’s what hats like that are for, I think, attention — but there’s a second where the invisible line of mutual awareness jags, turns sharp as a heart monitor beginning to jump. I feel my stomach drop. Some seconds later, Rob will see him too, and we’ll talk about having the same reaction. A trapdoor in the gut, flung open. Comfort, of course, not the right word, but a retrospective acknowledgement in response to echoes of harm and its PR redemption tour in full swing. A desperate camaraderie, at least in this, which is more than you can say for the moral baseline of this industry.

---

I heard basketball. Maybe it was the deep vibrations of balls bouncing on hardwood and sneaker squeaks, the barest sensory signals I could respond to after eight days in the desert. An arena at 9am, no one else in it yet. I wandered out of a tunnel that put me on a landing halfway between court and concourse. Thought, that’s fun, arena security playing a game of pickup.

Someone spoke to my left and I looked over the aisle, where they’d been all along, and slowly clocked the team logo on his shorts. Sixers. He smiled apologetically. They’re kicking people out, he said. I knew what he meant, closed practice. Looking back down to the court I started to pick up the tinges of blue and red on the warmup gear. Coaches shouting direction. No problem, I nodded then disappeared back into the tunnel. Like I lived there, like this happened every day. For a time, both true.

---

One driver I get twice. We marvel at the luck of it, especially when he admits to cancelling two trips before taking mine. I recognize his car for the makeshift vinyl partition hanging between driver and passenger seat, and for his soft cadence. A woman puked on him, he explains, flicking the vinyl. Just water, he assures me.

A taxi driver tells me he isn’t sure if he’s getting old, but he’s tired of the city. He’s been here for 22 years, moved from San Jose and before that, Russia. I used to be crazier, he says. Nothing illegal, nothing bad, he assures me, but crazier. He asks if I’m from here and I say visiting, Toronto. For basketball? He asks, no pre-empt. He tells me about his friends, gymnasts in Russia who left to join Cirque du Soleil.

At the hotel, he comes around to open the door for me. My daughter, he says, she’s playing volleyball in high school. We’ll see how it goes, he shrugs. Traffic is backing up but also won’t inch anywhere past us. There is something very assured about him that radiates on all sides but softens head on. I like this, he says, pointing to the tiger head tattooed on my bicep. I think what I’ve been thinking all along, KGB? Then tell myself not to be so provincial. You have fun, he smiles, almost roguish, and gives a little wave as he walks back around the car.

My driver to the airport tells me his wife’s friend is trying to get her to see Earth, Wind & Fire, that she doesn’t even like them. Or, like them to pay that much to see them. She was hotter than fish grease about it, he laughs. When we pull to the curb he wishes me a safe trip home and shouts, god save the king and queen!

---

On Freemont one night, waiting for Jerome and sure I’m coming down with a fever, the live band behind me play a forlorn rendition of “Wagon Wheel” and get to the chorus as the equal parts awed and regretful participants on the SlotZilla zip-line come flying down the LED ceiling, glowing red with the word FIREWORKS FIREWORKS FIREWORKS repeated over and over, down to the other end. In front of me, a skinny teenage boy emerges from a giant gorilla costume he’s been dancing in and folds it neatly down into a parcel that fits into his backpack.

---

Someone told me that the thing that gets walked off with the most during Summer League are the branded vinyl seat covers that are slipped over the tops of reserved seating. So they can put them on their own chairs at home? I ask. They assume that they’re sold as memorabilia. But then, I press, those people put them on their own chairs?

---

By the end of 10 days it’s hard to narrow down what doesn’t choke me up.

My SBC students, asking whether they’re making the right decisions, when I know they’ve only really begun to make them. The taped up directional printouts for media availability, an arrow pointing forward, paper angled down, followed by an identical sign on every landing of 6+ flights in the Cox stairwell even though there is nowhere to go but down. Being so early to the arena one morning that sprinklers in a UNLV field are on, pulsing so powerful and fast that the water is pure white against grass too green for the desert.

Though our schedules won’t align, texting back and fourth with Charlotte as I walk up to the arena and spill the last of a green juice down my blouse. The blouse is white and silk, I write. I knew, she writes. You didn’t even have to tell me, she writes. That it was white and silk, she writes. Passing Reed Sheppard in the T&M locker room tunnel where he’s waiting with his teammates, most of them bouncing on the spot or sprinting the short length of the tunnel, and noticing, beyond how still he is, how much bigger he’d gotten in the year it’s been since I was beside him last, how young his face still looks.

The look on Rob’s face when I hand him a Long Island iced tea. The whole desert smelling like petrichor. Sam telling me who on every team seemed to him curious, or a sweetheart, who had a good family. A player on the Knicks I’m still trying to place going after a loose ball in a tight 4th quarter against Detroit and vaulting over the people sitting courtside, then continuing to run up an aisle in the stainless steel risers he was so flush with momentum. For some reason: a throw rug of Bronny James’ face, hanging in the concourse. The look on Rob’s face when I hand him a second Long Island iced tea.

Seeing, every day, the Chinese men's national basketball team in the hotel lobby and finally, on the last day, eliciting a nod. Crammed into Julien’s car with Sean, Keith, Rob, and Joey, going north up the Las Vegas Freeway, feeling the perfect mix of feral and cared for and turning “Goodbye Horses” way up as the lights from Downtown grow in the windshield.

---

The problem is never knowing when to leave. On what will be your last day in the arenas, for however long. You tell yourself you’ll go after this game, only to stay in the same seat as that game finishes and two other teams take the floor, run through layup lines, and tip-off. The games can be completely uneventful — New Orleans versus Denver at five in the afternoon, no stakes, when you’ve been in the building since 7 a.m. — and you will find a reason to linger. There is a feeling that someone should release you. Press two fingers to your forehead and say, Enough, now. Rest. When you do leave, checking over your shoulder until you hit the big glass doors radiating heat from the outside and even then, stopping on the steps, or in front of the arena, or down the back road and by a horse chute, a van with a reclining silver cherub ornament fused to the hood, bushes of desert oleander in bloom, it will be in a daze. Everything — the chute, the angel, the relentless sun, a bleached flag with clip art silhouettes of palm trees announcing apartment vacancies — will seem beatific. Packed with higher purpose. You’ve hit saturation and kept on. You realize there is no such thing.

---

When the crowds thin and most of my friends get on their individual planes, their tired bodies sinking low into seats I pretend are looking down on me and the Sphinx baking at the top of the Strip, the sentries left here, when the days get no less blurred but something in me quiets, the desert draws closer.

I feel it waiting on its haunches for me when I crack the exit-only doors of T&M open at the end of each day and look down from tall steps to the parking lot, the airport, Luxor’s obsidian pyramid shimmering, and see it out beyond all of it. When I haul the floor to ceiling blackout curtains open at 6 a.m. most mornings it’s waiting with powder blue skies like it was when I drew them shut, bone tired, stopping to stare up at the moon. The fast hour I have between the days and nights I keep the windows clear to see the sky blur to mauve, lilac and blush, deepening by the minute, the desert urging me back out into it as fast as I can swipe on lipstick.

What does it mean to feel most yourself, alone in the strangest place on earth? All tethers of place, time, familiar ties, cut. The desert, if not obedient, then dutifully, fiercely direct.

Our intimacy returned, I feel it like a hand at my back when I walk the Strip, out to find the Dolly Parton slot machine, or watch the Bellagio fountains, booming like cannonry across Las Vegas Boulevard, while the crowds of my second Friday night in a row move and part around me.