The animal of this year, with a basketball in its teeth
The places and people basketball brought me to in 2022.
The compulsion as December and the year closes to see friends inside warm spaces, where the windows around us fog and cloud with condensation, our cheeks flush with coming in, with laughing.
The same compulsion that has me out in the arrival of the big east coast winter storm with a literal sack full of presents. When I leave my apartment it’s raining, mild; when I step into the coffee shop to meet Rei I’m swirling in a miniature vortex of snow with me. We watch the wind pick up, the temperature drop for how incrementally the people passing by tuck their chins and faces into their jackets, hoist their scarves up. I duck in to buy a nice bottle of wine for Christmas Eve dinner, spend an hour flipping through racks at an empty consignment shop where the Charlie Brown Christmas song plays six times to an empty store and all five bored and impeccably dressed people working there tell me about the sale. I buy a long sleeve shift in an iridescent champagne pink and Celine boots for a New Year’s Eve party that doesn’t exist yet, but that over dinner a night before Rachel and Richard promised we’d find as we took turns taking photos we all looked unhinged in. Fifteen years of friendship, Rach says, and we still don’t know how to take pictures together. I treat them because I was late, because I accidentally had the dinner down for the next night, because they’re my friends, because it’s been a year, and because the satisfaction of doing it turns my chest molten.
Days earlier, Greg’s hands curling around a white diner mug, splitting latkes before we spent the day holiday shopping. We go everywhere we can think of and still don’t manage to finish. Over a pint at Done Right we try and remember all the places we used to go that aren’t there anymore, like the clubhouse of Oddfellows where you’d have to press up against the front or side windows and use a palm to clear the condensation to see in or out, where someone would inevitably slip into the bathroom with you, or we’d squeeze after service into the tiny kitchen, where nights would start and go back to to end or start again.
Hours later, storm surging, Steph and I stand tucked in an arched brick entryway of a building and watch cars inch by, sidewalks nearly empty, our shoulders creeping steadily up toward our ears. I lose all feeling in my feet and still it feels too soon when we step back out into the street and she walks me to the streetcar stop in front of her place.
I tell Rei I’m still out and she says Omg Katie get home!!! I tell her I’m addicted to storm watch ‘22, and while there is something about watching the city shut down in real time, go quiet as the weather simultaneously muffles out sound, what I’m chasing is not the storm but the vanishing tail of this year that delivered me on its back to so many people I love. Not that I’m under the illusion I can delay it, but that I can better memorize its markings and where, in turn, it’s marked me.
Where basketball brought me this year — New York City, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Napa, Sacramento — directly, and where it still tagged along to — Costa Rica where, dejected for days at the bad swells he couldn’t surf, Ignacio, the lanky property manager we became friends with, gazed up at the eclipsing full moon while sitting out with Jenner and I and sighed, “The moon is a bouncing basketball, reflecting our souls” — indirectly.
The loose connections of it, to have long calls with people in Canberra, Mexico City, Cedar Rapids about it but also not at all. Conversations circling the game, tracing the lives drawing in and out of it, the people pushing it forward. I think how many first conversations I had with people who would go on to turn familiar to me where basketball became the, to regrettably borrow a metaphor from baseball, base to touch for safety, tagging in as a common topic if needed or otherwise easy enough to feel it hovering there.
That I’ve met so many strangers with basketball as our middle, that they’ve then let me move things in another direction. Because as much as I love it I can also recognize where the action of it becomes secondary to the greater and more important thing of the people who palm it, watch it, see it as a lifeline or day’s work. There are worse vehicles, certainly, than this.
Less than the stories I wrote I get struck looking back on this year in the snapshots of sequence in and around writing them.
Escaping the heat of Napa at harvest down to the winery cellar where Joe walked Martin and I past row after stacked row of casks filled with what he’d made aging in the lush, cool dark. Tracing with James the pelicans that swung around the Bay, swallowed up and reemerging from the fog, from our folding chairs pulled over and up against the high windows on the top floor of a carpeted, sprawling half-ballroom in Chase. Keegan sheepish, tentatively stretching his legs down over two rows of velvet theatre seats at the Crest, gently resting his heels on the backs as not to be rude.
Walking uptown at sunset with Yusef and Rich, the sun sinking in Central Park in perfect alignment with 83rd, 84th, 85th as we passed them, gold of it at our heels going into the Flagrant launch, catching them flipping through the issue and looking up smiling to find me in the crowded room.
My skin bright, sweating, body sated by heat, straddled across an ATV with Jenner on the back, driving us through the jungle where the ocean rushes right up over the road at high tide and the air is so heavy with water and salt that it shimmers wherever the sun sifts down through the palms and coiling thick mangroves. Wearing basketball shorts and a bikini top for days, tasting the salt on my lips, little hardback case strapped to the back of the quad rattling with loose cans of Cuba libres and lager. Getting snuck up on by the ocean, rolled, flipped and dragged along the bottom, coming up breathless, scraped and turned around, eyes burning. All my notebooks going waterlogged, pages warping and sentences spreading in spontaneous Rorschach when I got up early to make the coffee and take cold chunks of bright coral papaya from the fridge out to the deck to write as the night dripped off the thatched roof down the birds of paradise growing tall and wild.
Pastel mornings in Vegas, always coming down so cool on the bruising flush of the night before, the absolute isolation of them there in the most fevered place on earth.
It makes sense, I suppose, that my memories come to look like in-game replays. The main action important but everything in the sequence from the bodies in motion to the atmosphere, the crash of light and the catch of breath, turning them from passive recall to startling reproductions. My thumb splitting the skin of an orange out of a net bag from the corner store down the hard-packed dirt road, nicking into the flesh, Jenner laughing from somewhere inside as the juice, still warm, squirts out over what I’ve just written about the Nuggets. Trying to adopt an intimate but still audible voice for interviews over the hammer of a dozen basketballs on hardwood, the sneaker squeaks of the entire Raptors Summer League roster, and an industrial air conditioner trying to cool it all down. Monte Morris, FaceTiming from his car, jet-lagged and smiling as we both reminisce about Tokyo, my older memories stirring awake in his new ones, the act of calling them all to the present, now, like gathering up the reins for three spectral horses and hauling, gently, up.
After all, it’s the secondary, tertiary, quaternary (etc) action I love best of all in a replay. The expressions on the faces of the eight other people outside the main line of events, how their bodies respond or don’t — the flinch of a muscle attempting to preempt a screen, the elegant crane of a neck poking out of a cartoon tangle of bodies under the basket — how it’s possible to go back as many times as you like to pick a new person to watch in the span of a shot clock counting down, now newly made eternal.
I know it’s not a healthy or great or practical habit to tandem work with your personal life, but that my work was able to function so generously in service of my life this year was fulfilling way beyond the professional. It brought me back to the people I love that I hadn’t seen in years, that time and circumstance and a pandemic tore so quickly and completely away, and landed me beside (and frankly right in front of, through this newsletter — thank you), circling giddily like a ball around the rim, new people I wouldn’t have met any other way. The animal of this year, generous and feral and exhausting as it was, ran manic for most of it with a basketball in its teeth. Though I can still feel all the marks it left on me, most of them are tender.
Me, a Nuggets fan, would like to read what you’ve just written about the Nuggets that is now covered in orange juice
Hi! You write so well, with such feeling and generosity. I look forward to every one of these. They have enough about basketball, and enough that’s not about basketball, always in excellent proportion. Thank you so much, and happy holiday to you.