Tremulous to solid, cool to warm
Jet-lagged and sentimental notes from a week in L.A. orbiting NBA All-Star.
These picturings might be memories — unless it was too soon for memories. The moments would not say which of them might be remembered.
— The Transit Of Venus, Shirley Hazzard
The desert went on for hours.
Fiery red, blistering mesas split down ancient seams in the rock that dropped into blackness, heaped hills of baked brown. Stretches of sand lifting into towering, shimmering cyclones. Shapes in the sand, a giant impression of lungs pressed down into the side of a giant dune. Deep rivets hewn by the wind, dwindling rivers — it was like the land below had stretched an extra airborne hour since the last time I flew all the way west.
Who is this going to be, Shanon murmurs, rocking up onto her tip-toes. I follow her gaze across the hotel lobby, neon light from a sculptural cube placed, contextless, in front of the elevator bank reflecting off the marble floors, giving everyone’s faces a lurid glow — including Kawhi Leonard, beelining for the elevators.
I see the small van she’s clocked, its back door sliding open. Nobody cool is showing up in a van, I joke, just in time to see Steph Curry step carefully down from the backseat to the driveway.
The smell of petrichor down in the Lakers tunnel, drifting in from the bus bay. Somewhere up and outside the dark clouds threatening the city all day must’ve finally broke.
Postgame, Victor Wembanyama walks around barefoot with his feet wrapped in tensor bandages, idly chatting. In his presser he’s asked about the All-Star Game, its impending competition, his answers considered but the feeling that it is a long ways off and not just waiting there, across town, at the end of the week.
Up in the media gondola I wander past the broadcast rooms down to the other half, where the lights are off. There’s a whiteboard of the night’s schedule and leftover water bottles from the production meeting that clearly happened there. I stand in the dark while the American anthem is sung, feel a very strong wave of displacement.
It’s why the smell of wet pavement, Wemby’s bare feet, will stick out to me so much. Grounding.
Staying downtown through the week, no sense of the city and its unhurried, extending sprawl. With all the bank towers, the new low-rise condo clusters, the endless light of Los Angeles can’t penetrate this part and drape, thick and golden.
The most visible signs of life are the giant crows circling overhead and robot delivery vehicles, persistently cheerful and wholly out of place. There’s no sense of horizon, either. That out beyond the jagged teeth of the mountains lift, hem it all in.
Only on my last afternoon, evening coming on quick and crossing the wide pan of South Figueroa with Jerome, Will and Alex does a glimpse of one of the peaks come. The sky so startlingly clear, haze lifted, that the patchwork green and gold of the mountain’s face presents like a patchwork quilt, its upper outline stark against powder blue sky. It looms there so large between the rise of towers to either side that it looks like its come down to meet us.
In the backseat of a car going from Inglewood to West Hollywood, idling at a light, not clueing into location until the thwack of a ball drifts in through the windows. The Beverly Hills Tennis Club there under floodlights. Startling, for how quiet the world got. Over the next series of volleys I strain, swear I can hear the whine of racket strings wound tight under the thwap of a ball getting hit, until the light changes and traffic roars forward.
The first person I spot when I get off the elevator at Intuit Dome’s event level is Robin Lopez, and he looks as lost as I am.
The charm of an arena tunnel are glances into its secret or forgotten corners, the piled up scree of games and seasons past. At an All-Star Weekend this is amplified triple, maybe more. There are so many people rushing, idling, hanging around that the normal metrics of high-visibility invert. No one stands out. I’ve found myself stuck behind Jerry West, trapped in a dance line beside Michael B. Jordan, being followed by Rumble the Bison, sharing a tired look with Nikola Jokic, all of us caught in the snarl of democratised chaos. You really never know which legend you’ll trip into or share a freight elevator with.
At Intuit, maybe because it’s so new, tunnels fresh drywall instead of old concrete, the nooks and crannies don’t exist in the same way. There is lambent LED lighting and bland aesthetic patterning on the walls, lots of greenrooms with closed doors instead of locker or storage rooms you catch fragmented voices and snatches of conversations drifting out of.
Everything felt very controlled, to the point where the most hectic thing I witnessed was Chuck the Condor running to catch an elevator, breathless voice of the person inside pleading, WAIT, WAIT, HOLD THE DOOR.
Rob walks with a paper-bagged tiger tail donut in hand, shades perched low on his nose. He’s easy, sun slipping down his shoulders. I think how quickly this climate, its probing light, has staked its claim on him and how well he wears that prospect. He starts to tell me how you’re never very far here from turning a corner and finding a person filming themselves — lighting, mic, a small production. He turns toward me to emphasise a point and finds I’ve got my phone up, ready to take his photo.
We go down the wide sidewalks, turn broad corners, stare up at gleaming sandstone towers carved in blocky Deco, listing lightly into each other at stoplights like the tall, skinny palms planted at random. I take him to the cathedral-like Los Angeles Central Library, a building I stumbled into a few days before while I was out for a walk between teaching classes.
For a few disorienting minutes I can’t get my bearings through its ornate entryways and echoing halls, but we find ourselves tripping into the Grand Rotunda and I feel a swell of pride for finding it, showing it off. What an easy softness, murmuring in the quiet and cranking our heads back to take in the murals, thin wash of light trickling down from the windows high up and the air tufted by the must of old books, old timber, wafts of green from the garden outside.
Roman reliefs, Egyptian hieroglyphs, faraway traffic, our sneakers against the smooth marble floors; very gentle realisation of memory sketching the moment in all its tactile notes, going from tremulous to solid, cool to warm.
I will think in the car later, Rob driving me back to my hotel, what a privileged perspective to be passenger beside the people you love. Especially when you feel covetous, considerably, of the time between you. To turn in your seat and watch them react to the road, the music, to you. To see the seconds slip over their features. Pocketing the pleasure of an unfettered staring problem, stealing time.
I get so into bowling at a PA party that I don’t notice Jaime Jaquez Jr. pop up in the lane beside me until he’s hucked a ball, in a low-slung variation on shot-put, down the narrow length of hardwood. I don’t know if he hits a single pin but he does it with such confidence that I immediately rethink my form.
Back the next night, I mention wanting to bowl about five or six times in the hopeful and desperate way of someone waiting for a person they have a crush on to show up but everyone I’ve stopped in to see is, in fact, working. I’m encouraged, perhaps in consolation, to take what I want from the PA’s hospitality room. I grab single-serve collagen tubes, a Snickers bar, chapstick and a Kit-Kat; put on a brave face and cram it all into my bag.
An honest to god cowboy browsing the short story archive at the 100-year-old library, giant ficus trees perfect and shining green, growing up out of concrete. Crying in the MOCA to a tinny “Nice & Slow” coming from a rigged up old personal radio that’s part of a sculpture. Crying in The Broad to an Ed Ruscha tucked away in their storage, visible from a playful cutout window in a stairwell. Crying when the exact, perverse weight of luck, timing, and effort hit me, huddled under a borrowed golf umbrella with Howard as we weave around flash-flooding puddles.
Emaciated rose bushes stubbornly alive and blooming in sidewalk dirt pockets. “Manhattan” playing as the car coils from one freeway to the next toward downtown L.A. Freshly power-washed, elaborate mosaics outside of abandoned buildings. The security guard at Crypto who ducked out of frame so I could take what turned out to be a very mid photo of the Lakers chute; talking to him for 15 minutes about his double security gig there and at Dodgers Stadium, about the World Series, about his apologetic knack for getting in the background of other people’s photos.
Ron Harper Jr. at his postgame Rising Stars podium, happy and breathless, surrounded by a handful of media in a room meant to hold hundreds. Wembanyama’s form during warmups, his long, tapering hands resting like a swan will coil its head back over its body.
The strangeness of getting home and watching the Dunk Contest via replay, less than 24-hours after doing speed laps through the same building. The pendulous feeling of being away for nearly a week, for All-Star, but not staying through All-Star Weekend; less fomo than frozen in the familiar beats I know to be happening: waiting for players, waiting for pressers, waiting for shuttles, waiting for friends with warm wine at media hospitality.
The only glimpse of the Pacific I got over six days comes through the plane window after taking off. Quicksilver bright around the profile of the person sitting next to me as we banked and turned back east.
Dan across the low table of a hotel lobby bar; outside, pouring buckets. Behind me a knot of drunk men on their work conference tab bragging about women they’ve treated badly. I make a face and Dan wordlessly, expeditiously, picks up our game detritus, laptops and bags, and shifts us over to the next comically low table.
The wind in the five minute walk from Crypto was so strong it staggered us. We leaned into it, laughing. I forget to ask what he and Denzel Washington talked about all through the second half when he came over to sit in media row.
I think Dan’s good at what he does, and at working this professional microcosm we’re in, because his face is a wide-open window. You see the interior world and you want in. His questions perceptive — traceable back to beats in a game, past games, always a scratch below surface level — but exposed enough that a terse response feels bruising. As if the person he’s asking has overstepped. He toggles between reference points of an athlete and their professional outline; traces the boundaries without treating them as rigid. They feel cared for, in confident hands.
Dan’s open happiness at seeing me for the first time in a dim arena tunnel, again out on the floor during warmups, after a game waiting in a media workroom where he knows I’m waiting for him but nevertheless, like it’s a small wonder how everything can line up. Perceived that way it’s no wonder, whether it’s LeBron James or me, we crack ourselves open.
Crying when the exact, delightful weight of syntax, timing, and syllables hit me, huddled on a green couch as I tuck giddy goosebumps away before 1am after watching dunk contest highlights. :,)
So vivid. So beautiful!! Thank you so much!
This is a tremendous post Katie, and really appreciated all of the imagery in your writing. 2 additional, quick thoughts: 1) For those of us not quite as attuned to your rotating cast of characters, noting either full names, or a brief in-parens aside about them would be helpful. For example, Dan, who also chatted with Denzel, who is he, or at least, where's he from? Is this Dan Le Batard? And 2) Your observation about "the smell of wet pavement, Wemby's bare feet, will stick out to me so much. Grounding.", contains a tremendous pun, and it brought both a chuckle to my lips AND a sparkle rpto my eye. WELL DONE!