One slow buzzing thread
What the low-high stakes of late summer's rhythms instill in basketball, and us.
“Did you mean funghi?” The server asks, pointing to something on the menu. The sky’s blurred a soft apricot, casting warm across Seerat’s face, tensed in consideration, and Ashley’s sherbet pink nails, clicking idly against the tabletop.
“No, fettuccini. I was checking out your Yelp,” Seerat shrugs. A few feet away, as the evening’s come on, the street has been a constant parade of loud, low and expensive cars, crawling by in Saturday night’s gridlock for no real reason than to circle the block in the ostentatious order of the neighbourhood.
We haven’t stopped laughing since we got here, which is saying something considering how hard and fast things tend to spiral when you set all the stories we’ve accumulated — women taking space in this industry, women plain taking space — side by side, which is never the point of being together, but is the sort of thing proximity draws out. The compulsion of it an absolution as much as a means to tilt the perspective for yourself, so it’s no longer just something that’s happened to you, you can take steps back for scope, sideways for shape, decide to leave something lying entirely where it is for good, no longer just yours to carry. It’s easier to laugh when you’ve deconstructed something to the point that, like saying a word over and over, it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Another guttural engine revving as it idles.
The server apologizes, says there’s nothing like that on the menu. Seerat shrugs again, smiles with an inside joke about to be let out, “Shooters shoot, you know?”
The easy brutality of memory. Feeling the world work quickly, coldly forward as it will and stubbornly deciding for yourself, No.
Not smart, not actually possible, probably not good for you but absolutely no help for it.
Since I got home from the desert I don’t think the cicadas have stopped. Morning to past dark, up with me after midnight. I’m resisting the last pull back, afraid of losing something I’m not sure I can name, and they’re sawing the night with a drone that hangs heavy as the air does, starts with one buzzing thread and rises to a violent, persistent chorus. August’s white noise, its death knell.
In the hotel’s enclosed patio, like a big glass barn, that the team used for Ujiri’s presser we all got so hot that I watched, as we waited, everyone drift, squirm, come collectively back to the present so that the room went suddenly silent, only for nothing to happen and everyone to take another mental lap. All kinds of people were in there, some with championship rings slipping down their fingers, but the understanding that at some point all of them felt their focus go with urgency to a wide bead of sweat running down their backs, gaining momentum as it grew. The great equalizer.
I feel my moods broil and shift with the weather. Air so swollen with water and suffused with heat that to pass through it brings an out of body awareness not all that far off from swimming. An easy submersion into dulled-out pleasure. The temperature and the pressure builds and builds over slow buzzing days until storm clouds start to brood at the edges of the city, blotting the sun, teasing release but nothing breaks. Even night, with its swollen full moons knocking around the roofs of row houses and barely clearing the shaggy, scorched trees, brings no change to how overbearing August can get.
Mood like a shrugging, half-lidded smirk that says, You wanted summer.
And I did, I do. Meals that are halved peaches scarfed over the kitchen sink, warm tomatoes with clumps of coarse salt, most sticking to the pads of my fingers. Dragging myself to the public pool to read and sweat and, undiscerning, step off the concrete deck into the cool, bright tang of highly chlorinated water wherever there’s a gap between the last body launched off the diving board and the one on the way. I want it all year and then once in the dazed slick of it I go glutted, coil around it, gorged on light and my own pleasure, forgetting to treat it lightly or like something to be enjoyed and not consumed in one fevered go. A gross little demon in shorts.
The best thing about basketball at this point of summer is that the pacing, the nearly year-long schedule, slackens. For a few weeks summer, even in the NBA, does what it’s supposed to — blurs out time, eases the edges and heft of the days. Guys go on vacation but more than that, the compulsion to distill every move or metric quits, the incessant dialogue goes quiet.
Anything that tries to tighten attention, like the NBA releasing its regular season schedule this week, seems so severely out of context in this rare and quiet stretch that it gets derided. Some people do care, I guess, about what game they might watch in January of next year but mostly the schedule can be taken as easy surrender, a white flag of face value, because basketball now is nothing yet.
Whatever happened at Summer League doesn’t stay there, but it hasn’t alchemized on home court, or with the rest of the roster. In the teams that went through overhauls, even the ones that stayed familiar, what they will look like, the actual thing underneath any speculation — whether gut feeling or assessment drawn from the numbers of last season — is hope.
That’s all basketball is right now. Hope for a team, a player, an outcome. Hope for its rhythm, return, hope to be able to sit and stare at it, reduced to a baseline of sight and response in its sway. Hope for the year basketball will provide the backdrop to. The flimsy confidence of promise.
That such a bare emotion happens at the height of summer, when we are inclined to live loosely and at a minimum (of sleep, plans, work, clothing, trying to care too much beyond the grip of what’s fleeting) makes it all the more exposed, happily caught out, less considered, true.
In every photo Seerat looks furious. Her typically coy, easy smile vanishing in the phone’s recorded photos, like when spectral forms show up on film once it’s developed. The sun slanting slow for the last three hours we’ve been out back on the bar’s patio puts perfect stamps of light over her eyes, her cheeks, that looks as definitive as stage makeup. To me, she brightens, effervescent if annoyed. To the phone, she is like that demon in Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, hunkering down on somebody’s chest.
What we talk about, when we end up talking about trust, is how little there is. When you recognize in the perception, sometimes just the eyes, of the men you are talking to in this industry that you are a body to be moved through — as satisfaction, conquest or recompense. A cycle that staying out of can be as bad as getting into when the alternative is not being seen at all.
Things come out of nowhere, little pulses in the dark. Cigarette smoke supercharged in air conditioning, the way somebody’s body pitches forward surrendering to a laugh. You forget right until your brain makes you remember, set your own thresholds, run those over and then set them again.
You say pace, pace, go slow, you’ll get back to it. You lean hard on the pedals and feel your limbs loose in the heat and dark and dirt of the city, and the last thing you want is to slow down. You want to go fast enough to go backward. Velocity as promise, escape. You picture hands, you shudder and sweat.
The city’s dark quiet doesn’t match your rhythms.
Coming up from the train two guys loiter in front on the escalator, pick a close step, glance back too often to be coincidence. Outside the moon’s hanging like a metronome nobody’s started, bright and full of promise. I cross, I check the empty spaces like a driver does with blindspots, this is all such easy routine even if it’s been a while. I dig into my purse and slip my keys between my fingers.
Before I left them, Seerat and Ashley both joked as a soft cover but meant it serious, to text when I got home. My phone dies while I’m waiting for the light. I stretch theatrically on the curb like a UFC fighter, as if to show my body in how ready to render some small and precise flights of pain. The men wait opposite, still watching. The light changes. I cross and curve a close corner down my street, eyes still on the moon, ears out behind me.
Some rhythms would’ve been nice not to go back to.
How many more weeks do you think it’s safe to slip into crippling nostalgia for something that’s just happened before it becomes a problem, I asked.
Infinity, he said.
A single word spitting with so much hope, promise and dread that it coiled and sparked like a downed live wire.
Summer, whether sweating, longing, forcing, pushing, laying idle, is a menace, and we throw open every way in we have to it.