Exits: Form and function
Giannis Antetokounmpo's no-catch divinity, the caretaking of Khris Middleton, a golden city, natural order.
Giannis Antetokounmpo as monolith. There isn’t another person we’d like to see take up the title, its solemn markers, more, which is why the rejection of it — head scratching confounding, a shrugging heave of a whole body “huh”, unimaginable, perfect.
Giannis instead as affably cold-blooded, his competitive drive only outpaced by his impulse to make the joke and run with it, and he can run. Do we like our superstars, our champions, our contemporary proxies of myth to be smiling? To be forgiving? To love, very much, the sound of their own laugh bouncing off walls in buildings that make cathedrals miniature gone confession quiet? I’m not sure.
All gods are fickle. Gregarious until they’re ruthless, one thing barely a breath from the other. In one hand the chalice, the other the knife. Giannis keeps showing up with both hands behind his back, smiling, daring us to pick. The joke that in both will be the same — nothing, and him laughing for you to pick again. The joke, of course, that talent like his would ever be something to hand off, or offered up for placation. He even has a one-up on the ancients, whose divinities came with a hitch, a heel. His go deeper than bone, then the form of his body, hurtling molten and happy through space, scoundrel to the limits of velocity, past marrow, embedded down in the certainty of cells. It would seem funny then, endlessly in on the joke, to be asked over and over again how, or why, he manages to do something when it might as well be like moving through a room you know in the dark. What you want to know, his wide open smile seems to say, there’s no secret to it. Can I explain flinching, blinking, burping, holding your slowly waking head under the stream of warm water in the morning? These intimate marvels of our bodies we give no additional consideration to.
So instead he once again asks, pick a hand, goofily grinning at our concentration that we’ll finally find it, an answer beyond basic nature.
What is so brooding about the Bucks? Or even especially emotive? What are the holdover passion-points from one season to the next? As a franchise are they the most emotionally intact? That is, without a fervent sway in one direction or another?
Last season, I called them sweatpants, an observation empirically correct when paired with the necessary bluster P.J. Tucker provided. These past playoffs, coming up short against the Celtics, I can’t call them that because there was nothing slovenly, or lacking, in their performance. Their deficits, even, were logical. Brook Lopez, Khris Middleton, out. That was it. Without those two there were no layers on the wing, no backup shooting, no proficiently deployed muscle to the rescue. When Tucker left he took their style, on loan from him to begin with, away, but then the Bucks have never been a team too concerned with how they look when tromping all over people.
Efficiency. How do you dress that up? You can’t. The trappings will always turn it into something else. This isn’t a team interested in accessorizing.
Milwaukee, Cream City, nothing to do with the dairy persistent in its parent state, but clay. Clay dug out of the natural basins around Lake Michigan, between the Milwaukee, Menomonee and Kinnickinnic rivers, loaded with sulphur and lime so when formed into bricks and fired the chemical components turn it a frothy fresh yellow, like what you’d skim from churned milk. At the peak of production, the biggest factories were pumping out 15 million bricks a year and the city climbed, golden, around them.
What a sight in those early years. Wisconsin summers and their high sun baking off sand dollar coloured cathedrals and in the winter, thin light winking off the frozen shallows of the lake, bone white lighthouses dotting its shore and casting the kind of glow a person can close their eyes against in deep, cutting cold to draw diminutive warmth from fantasy.
The problem with the clay, how it bakes to solidity, is that it doesn’t. Much more porous than its ruddy red cousins, the years, their grit and wear, the atmospheric fallout of a city on the upswing, get into it. Snag in that unmarred, creamy surface. Cleaning becomes trickier for the same reason. Traditional methods, like pressurized water or sandblasting, eroding more than decades of grime.
There’s something strangely tender about this. A sensitive brick, the largest singular building component for this city in its height, that its chemical, atomic makeup rendered it so much more susceptible to the human fallout it was mass-produced and stacked up to safeguard. That human intervention would only weaken it further.
Form meant to follow function until the years usurped that purpose. Aesthetics over purpose.
What isn’t tender about Milwaukee has come in the city’s segregation, the impact of red-line cleaving along those white bricks. What the cops did to Jacob Blake, what they tried to do to Sterling Brown. Function corrupted by form, function that was never natural in the first place.
The Bucks, the team, might be the most well-known thing in Milwaukee that have never given up one for the other. Form is function, function, the entire system.
Have you ever scrolled back in Khris Middleton’s Instagram? There was a period when I was convinced I didn’t like him, that he was, to me, some kind of on-court villain. I’m sorry to say it took until last year’s Finals run for me to start scrolling back, which didn’t take long because he’s not such an online guy, and see Middleton, doing a selfie stick with Zaza Pachulia in London, doing his tunnel walks in half-zip sweaters, holding a takeout container in an empty arena, taking pictures of his socked feet on a beach, taking unselfconscious full smile selfies in his car or after he voted.
What is my problem, I whispered in the dark, laptop open a few feet away on the bed with the Mountain Standard Time Suns home game coming back from the half and me falling asleep, probably.
Middleton and Antetokounmpo got to Milwaukee at the same time, one drafted, the other by trade. Though there is always something more prideful made in the plot about an athlete who is drafted by a team and stays, Middleton, to me, is more the instinctive Bucks player. Of course, there would be no writing this without Antetokounmpo, but without Middleton there was no mechanic. NASA needs astrophysicists as much as it needs the people on the ground, poking around the scaffolding for the rockets, tightening the screws.
In the week before I was alone up north, my family was at the same cottage. I had Covid, so news of what they were seeing and doing, updates about weather, came to me in the snatches where I’d wake up with drive enough to reach for my phone on the night table.
One morning, my mom reported that they’d seen a deer swimming across the bottleneck where one lake opens into another, “just past the tippy tree you swim to”. The tree in question, a skinny birch that’s slanted year over year closer to the water, now at a sharp, acute angle to the surface, and roughly 100 meters from the dock. A familiar marker, I think every time I tread water for a few seconds under its almost submerged full and green canopy, that at some point between visits will vanish.
The text jogs that memory as much as the motion of my body through water, which feels impossible, almost exotic, right then, and I close my eyes and sink into some projection of the deer.
On the surface: Not much. Its apostrophe delicate flaring nostrils and scoop-swivel telescopic ears coasting through the light chop of the lake, or surface like glass if its still early morning. A sight, sure, it’s a deer head not a duck. Below: Fury. Four spindly legs tapering into two-pronged hooves churning like the blades on an outboard motor, capable of propelling this body up to 15mph through water, driving for purchase along a bank snarled by deadfall so it can haul its tawny body out, go trotting deep into the cool, low dark of the woods. All together: Body and mind bound by movement, always, in all things. Nature’s subliminal gift of doing what it’s meant to.