Summer League Forever II
Dispatches from the desert and its fever dream terrarium of tenderness and basketball.
“Your people aren’t here,” a guy in the middle of a group all wearing team lanyards answers when I ask if postgame avails are there, pointing beyond them, down another tunnel snaking off the labyrinth under the arena.
No shit, I want to say, my people are scattered all over the frenzied blocks of this city. My people are feeling any rest, or sense of the sleep cycle they arrived here with, drain fast out of them. My people are probably watching the game ricocheting around over our heads right now, up through 40ft of concrete, and saving me a seat. My people are tired but happy, generous, strangely soothed to be here. The problem with my people, in this place, is there are too many places for them all to be at once, that sunrise, noon, the sharp fingernail of a crescent moon hanging between these behemoth hotels pulsing light at all hours, blurs together so time speeds up and they stretch, even here, to be too far from me. After being away from them for so long I can’t stick close enough, prove that we’re here.
My people would probably also point me in the right direction for postgames but that’s beside the point, which is: Buddy, you have no idea.
Ish Wainwright cried and I did too. He got to the part in his answer about how hard it all was, to play overseas away from his family, to not be sure when he’d be back, or if it would be for good. It was relief that his voice eventually split with. Relief at getting the call to come back and play but much more, being back beside who he made his heart out of.
He apologized, lowered the mic and looked away from the TV monitor beaming his face back to Toronto. I heard him suck in a breath, a sound immediately swallowed up by the echoes of the arena tunnels, watched him rub the tears away with the back of his hand. He laughed and it slipped into another sob. He said he was happy, crying and laughing then all at once. I heard Will murmur, “That’s beautiful” on the call and my throat kicked with pride.
Home and away, and it was all happening in a cold concrete tunnel run suddenly flush with feeling and nothing but promise.
Sitting in the stands, passing the phone back and forth to watch videos of Dennis Schröder skateboarding while the pulse and thuds of the game vibrate up through our feet from the aluminum bleachers.
The way the desert rushes at you stepping out of the arenas after hours of cold recycled air, eager and embracing. A heat that searches, soft and sudden over your body, dense as running into a wall. The shock of it every time notching shivers along your softest parts.
What the desert wants, it takes.
We kicked our legs out on the bench in front of El Cortez, downtown streets gone quiet and its valet ring deserted, in a slumped and happy sprawl. The wood under our sliding backs and bracing palms worn smooth from so many other people stalling, waiting, smoking there.
Look how dirty white shoes get here, Joey said, his foot crossed mirror to mine. I was tensing against goodbyes as we compared the scuffs of this place made plain from where we’d both banged up against it, each other.
There are worse kinds of goodbyes, I’m sure, but having to do it again after not feeling your life held casually close beside anyone else’s for over a year is a particularly keening new cruelty.
On the phone with Becky Hammon, watching out the window as the planes drifting down into McCarran wink to quicksilver in the sun.
"It’s such an energy obviously in Vegas,” she’s saying, just as the poolside DJ starts up, reverb snaking up the hotel’s towers.
Imagine feeling lonesome in a place like this? Sending texts out like dispatches to the dearest departed, the waves of heat off the concrete, out where the eye starts to strain toward the desert, working like convenient mirages to give shape to your heartache.
In the class I taught about storytelling the morning I flew out, one of the questions I got asked was how to take sure steps, either in what you were trying to say or toward where you wanted to go.
Ask for things, I said, ask for what you want, out of people but also yourself. Be urgent and honest and kind, be prepared to not get what you want but maybe something better, or a reason to ask again. You’ll never be sure but it’s the best mode of measurement you can hold your hands up to make and then move between.
Pinned by a dozen pairs of intent and hopeful eyes I realized this was a contract. You, too, the voice way back in my head said.
On the phone with Davion Mitchell, realizing that the question I’m asking him about sleep comes off longingly, like a wish I’m trying to make, or something I can still fondly remember.
There’s an agent I met last time who I find on the first day in the same place we sat for an afternoon watching games in their hypnotic repetitions, one after another, before our conversation eventually drifted from the floor to our lives in the easy curiosity of strangers. This time, after he introduces me down the row, he picks right up on family, life, a little work, still mostly strangers but having gone through a year that’s gouged gaps in each other there’s a sense of wanting to hold up and compare. To say here, this is where it went scattershot but it’s also where the light gets in.
Xavier Tillman carefully angling himself into the stool that’s been set up in front of a neat row of six chairs — three and three — for his postgame, so as not to knock anything with the bulging bags of ice that have been taped to his knees. It’s me and one other guy in them but probably I’m the only one this chokes up.
Heat lightning past the strip, inching closer in long, purple tendrils, clouds lit tangerine in the afterglow. There’s a fitting analogy in there — for what’s repressed, what’s cut loose, for what pressure will force.
To feel your body rouse with proximity to another, even after so long that you softened the lines of their face, smoothed out their edges. A magnet lodged deep in the stomach, the chest, the dumb yearning part of your brain that just responds and longs to be responded to, all of it pulling hard to the promise of the breathy kick behind a voice saying your name up close in your ear again.
We got to the gym with dark clouds spilling in over the mountains, walked inside sun blind and followed the sound of basketballs hitting hardwood down the rec centre hallway, floors polished bright and neon posters for kids activities pinned to all the notice boards. The court, down a stone stairwell, had hoops ringing it like a clock-face and I nearly walked into Blake as we went along the shining baseline for what it was like to be back watching something as banal and rhythmic as shooting drills up close.
Going over the footbridge to Ballys to say goodbye to Martin, Bill, Robby and Brad, too sad to stay in my room alone packing but mostly making mournful passes to the floor to ceiling windows to press my forehead on the still warm glass, hours after the sun sank past the stubborn and baking hills, was when it started to rain. Out in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard, palms whipping in wind that’s still bone dry, somehow, the duelling sounds of someone playing saxophone, someone else singing through a tiny amp cranked to fuzz, and all the slurring shouts lifting and gusted away into the new bruise dark. The air heavy, pressing, dense, permeating. It’s hard not to think how this place is a tiny terrarium, generative of its own weather, urges, softness, sudden pangs.
The thing I end up asking a lot is what does it mean to be here, when last year’s rookies went through their first season without 10 weird days as a starting point and to come back to it now, one hard, scary, rewarding season into things?
It turns out to mean hope. The sense that something is actually starting. It means, a bit, showing off, but mostly it means the recognition of what was lost in faces they figured they’d know better by now. They’d missed it and now they made it, that rotation, a year and change in its ragged loop, closing.
I wish I took more pictures of people’s faces. Only because in the rush of so many I’m not sure my socially starved brain will remember them exactly as-is — under casino lights, in the powder loam wash of the desert going dark, through crowds, with the sun coming up. And all so flush. So right there.
The way Martin’s eyes crinkle hard when he laughs, how he speeds up when he gets excited talking about ideas, the way he’ll angle his body back listening like he’s ceding more space for whatever you’ve got. Blake, whether squinting up at storm clouds, taking steps across the parking lot to get closer to weather that doesn’t seem to belong here, or conspiratorially rolling his eyes at me, watchful. Bill’s wry look, simmering, before it spreads wide across his face, joke about to land.
Dave, kinetic and tough, eating gelato, eyes luculent in the lambent glow of hyperreal clouds drifting across the Caesar’s mall ceiling even under the brim of a big panama hat — well, I did get a picture of that. Jerome, always waving hello, a warm flare out of the roil of the crowd and Noor a bright lift from Vegas’s slugging time melt. Mo for half a minute, instantly familiar; Keith, rangy and kind; Julien, even-keel cool whether choking back whatever it was I asked the bartender to give us as with the sun, full up, at Denny’s.
Joey, body-tired and smiling, toggling between assured small smirk or breaking into full teeth with a flash like a little jackpot each time, our conversations strung by recalibrating pauses, eyes meeting and resting there, tugging. But the image of him facing me and laughing, facing me and softening, the snarl of the casino floor blurring around the steady edges of his body, patient, lulling in its ease, is clearer than anything I’d take on my phone in the hopes of pocketing the feeling of being held so carefully and completely in somebody’s orbit.
What made leaving this year so much harder, beyond double the time passing and forgetting what the regular feeling of saying goodbye to summer camp’s like, was the year and a half that had just happened to everybody. The silent weight of it plain in their eyes, whether they wanted to talk about it, talked around it, or didn’t want to mention it at all. This was relief, a collective held breath coming out at once. Pain and rationed patience, remembering what ease feels like. I couldn’t stop touching everyone.