Iowa City was the best (five domes), Indianapolis had been beautiful (original stained glass in the dome’s ceiling, he thumbed through photos on his phone to show me), Alaska’s and Hawaii’s were office buildings*, so he wasn’t as interested in those. Plus, he liked to travel by train where possible.
In the air between our seats along the old wood bar, two strangers easy in that realm of impersonal but intimate small talk you can only have with strangers, he traced the route of the train he’d taken from Philadelphia: Down through D.C., southwest into Virginia, north in West Virginia, then a cut northwest through the lower edge of Ohio, arriving in Circle City some 21 hours after departure. He was flying back.
Every capitol building he’d visited reminded him of an ex-girlfriend, an architect. She got him to notice details about buildings he’d never thought to look for, never even thought of.
Usually you want to forget about your exes, he said. Usually you think, he lowered his head and said more quietly, a little haltingly, fuck you.
I pictured ionic volutes, those curling flourishes carved into the top of Neoclassic columns, appearing intricate but purely ornamental, or the stolidity of the column itself, and who I might assign their qualities to.
I asked which building had been the most memorable and he paused to think. Austin had been the strangest. At the entrance metal detectors, someone in line complained about the need to pass through them at all if it was their god given right to carry guns in Texas. That’s true, the guard confirmed, but this is to make sure no one is bringing in swords.
A lot of the domes are purely ornamental, he told me. Placed on top once construction was finished, like an imperial cherry. There was less grandeur in the buildings where the domes didn’t connect through. Craning your head back to look up brought none of the inverted vertigo, no welcome sensation of smallness. Some of the capitol buildings had burned down — some more than once — and were built back on the ruins, all were starting to need major structural repairs. Even in states where the governors didn’t care about their capitol buildings, they couldn’t appear indifferent. There was a sense of competition created between governors and what they were going to do about the buildings, their domes.
We finished our shrimp cocktails — they’d been what started us talking, mostly coaching each other through the sizeable dune of horseradish on top — and switched to the Sixers. The parallels between the symbolism of a state capitol building, their grandeur versus function, their painstakingly articulated mosaics, polished marble floors, the back doors where trash still gets taken out, and an NBA franchise, or All-Star Weekend to the NBA, had simmered under the surface for me while we’d been chatting. But I was halfway through my martini, it was my last night in Indianapolis, and it was more interesting to listen to all the ways a person can miss Allen Iverson.
(*Hawaii’s capitol in Honolulu was actually done in a high modern, Bauhaus-borrowed style, but at a glance does look like a very beautiful office building)
The best thing about All-Star, to me, are its anomalies. Even before I started to travel for the weekends, it was the weird one-off details that stuck.
The Dunk Contest alone has had so many. Rashad McCants, up on a ladder and concentrating so closely, clutching the rim with one hand while the other held a BBQ lighter and trembled a little lighting the candle on the cupcake for Gerald Green to blow out (McCants, even before that, carefully taking the cupcake out of the bakery box). John Collins smashing the replica Wright brothers plane the league had approached him to dunk over in, yes, but Collins tossing the flight goggles away and tying and retying the flimsy white aviator scarf so many times. The slow, mesmerizing spin of Stuff on the hoverboard, statuesque in Toronto before Aaron Gordon lifted the ball from its furry green palm. This year, a cluster of LED stars that gathered everywhere Jaylen Brown put his foot down late in the contest that started to pile together and glitch.
I think, for most, the expectation of the All-Star Game itself is to be free of aberration. The idea is 48 minutes of perfect basketball, executed by some of the game’s biggest stars. This is without considering the reality that perfect basketball gets boring to watch as it does to play for those who are the best at it. Who thrive in regular matches when there’s a problem to solve, an issue to contain, something ugly to be forcefully smoothed out; a game to be saved. It’s why anomalies in the All-Star Game are so funny, like Kyle Lowry taking a charge, or Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic volleyball batting the ball back and forth to advance it down the floor (Doncic and Jokic doing anything this year), because there are no technical problems to solve. A full-length basketball game feels like an eternity when nothing is going wrong, when there’s no friction. It speaks to how routine these stars and their athletic capabilities have become, in part because we can watch them anytime we want. It feels the greatest suspension not of disbelief, but reality, that we still expect the All-Star Game to dazzle or distill something inextricable about basketball. I don’t think there’s a fix, because I’m not sure it’s a problem. It’s what we’ve hastened to create.
It’s impossible to force anomalies. All-Star Weekends, in person, are rife with the things it seems like nobody else is noticing. Well, nobody but me, finding myself sandwiched between polished silver tubas in an arena chute with a marching band and Crunch the Wolf doing high knees, or Kelly Dwyer (who I’m miserable I never ran into):
Earlier I’d crouched down, given the LED court a few knocks. It knocked back, like a dashboard made by General Motors. I also looked behind the Dunk Contest’s judges panel as it rested in a hallway, a comfy chair ahead of a screen showing nine voting options: 50, 49, 48, 47, 46, 45, 44, 43, 42.
Anomalies are, in this context, like real life ducking in under a gap in the chainlink around the NBA’s Disney World style weekend. Where the hyper-polished production value takes what turns into a charming scuff.
Funny moments, like angling down a narrow hallway and into Jokic, ushered along between team staff and managers, his head bopping to a soundless beat, and having him bop a nod my way in passing. Or a determined line of team mascots marching through the media workroom (rows of long tables and a skinny podium stage in a converted dry storage cavern of Gainsbridge Fieldhouse) and the collective reaction of every person there either stopping to gaze or scrambling to take a video. Soft moments, like talking to Myles Turner about his foundation and the work he was doing throughout the weekend, well outside the staged bounds of the weekend, since most of the work W.A.R.M. does is assist people experiencing homelessness. Or sitting in a makeshift backstage — really, the risers along the Indiana Fever’s practice court — after his first All-Star media podium with Scottie Barnes, asking him when the reality of the weekend finally hit and him being able to pin-point it to packing, repetitive motions of practicality, the boring but sturdy bridge between future plan and prepped-for present. Personal moments, studying closely the features of my friends’ faces in hotel lobby after 2am/coffee counter morning/subterranean arena/on court/cool blue midwest night -lighting; or how the sun slipped reliably between buildings at the same time each afternoon, while I was writing in my room at a too high desk, to warm my shoulders like a wide and steady hand.
The slogan of All-Star will never be: Come, be brought to tears by the everyday. Feel free to workshop, but appreciate in the meantime where the run of show goes enthusiastically awry. It’s what you’re going to remember most anyway.
Something that struck me as incredibly thoughtful: Tony asking when we first ran into each other whether I planned to write about the city.
You write about cities, don’t you? He followed up quickly, his wide-open face wavering for half a beat.
I guess I do, I said, realizing it was true as I said so. So, I probably will.
He smiled. I can’t wait, he said.
Can you just tell me, which way is north? I asked. There was no water to navigate by, no sense of some distant natural landmark, I explained.
He drew a map in the air in front of us. The monument, he said, tracing a little circle with his finger at the top. That’s north, I confirmed. You got it, he nodded.
I arrived in Indianapolis airport-first, that is, without a glimpse down on it. I’d selected a window seat on the plane but got a wall instead. Despite getting up at 4am I had all my bearings at the airport, only beginning to wonder whether I needed help when the 5th smiling volunteer wearing an All-Star shirt or hat or badge asked me. One older guy seated at an All-Star folding table right before baggage just waved at me, smiling. I waved and smiled back.
My driver into the city laughed when I asked if it took him long to get to the airport. Nothing takes long here, he said. He’d moved from Sudan six years before. Did I know it? I did. He liked the sky here — he lifted his right hand from the wheel and held it in the air to show me, flipping it palm side down, flat — he liked that it was mostly sunny in winter. We were squinting at each other in the rearview through the late-morning’s blazing light and when I pulled the blackout curtains of my hotel windows open, some 20 minutes later, I could barely see the towering obelisk of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument for how much it was snowing.
Some cities expand out as you orient yourself within them, Indianapolis crowded in. It wasn’t an uncomfortable feeling. Streets that seemed long on arrival, stretched further by old Indiana limestone (the state’s own sedimentary make — shipped out to help build the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, 35 out of 50 state capitol buildings, Yankee Stadium, and Hotel Macdonald in Edmonton, Alberta) and brick buildings taking up entire blocks plus walking made slower by the weather, shrunk to easy zips by Sunday. On Monday, I was walking out to Fountain Square in the sun with my jacket open, gawking up at white-bellied hawks wheeling in warm updrafts and sending photos of highway signs on the underpass below declaring for Louisville to Haley. For a city that’s not considered walkable, I felt I could stroll forever, only hindered where the sidewalk ran out or didn’t exist. It’s flat. Steamrolled by retreating glaciers millions of years ago, absent even of deceptive inclines. When I learned it was the hardest hit city in flooding that submerged most of the eastern and central U.S. in 1913 I felt the truth of it in my feet, like my body sensed the till plain underfoot, drew assurance in being so close to the earth. There’s a reason oblate refers to a geometrical flatness and person who believes they’re communing with a higher power. My oblation, in Indiana, was just to walk.
There were complaints about the weather — yes, I felt the blood freeze in my cheeks, my hair get wet and heavy with snow, but the blood was there from laughing in the sharp cold and snow shakes out. The silver lining of it: weather determined to keep everybody in close quarters, snug into the late nights.
There were complaints about the city’s size but it seemed the sweet spot of anonymity if you preferred it, chatty if you didn’t.
Some cities, in their closing in, get claustrophobic. Indy felt bigger to me the longer I stayed by virtue of its opening up.
Trailing Rob into an arena stairwell, his face switching from open and reluctantly charmed with me to determined as he tries to navigate which level it is we need to get to.
(I already knew, had been there each day before, took the freight elevator up and down with Holland and Taylor for the sake of Taylor’s walking cast. Later, I’d think how I could’ve turned us around, but I recognize navigation can be part of the routine in these things. That and it can feel more worthwhile to trail, amiably, the people you trust, feeling fond toward their shoulders slumping under tiredness mirroring your own, or their eyes narrowing in consideration of which sounds and visual cues to pull from the morass of the moment. To turn yourself over, bob happily along in a softness cut from their wake.)
The three-wide staircase narrows to one, single-file, and we take it up. At the top, a small landing and locked doors. As he considers the doors and my eyes drift over to the giant windows running from the ceiling down several levels through the stairwell, fireworks start to shoot up from the roof of the building adjacent.
Jumbo red roman candles, glittering gold fountains, silvery white sprays that snake up into the inky night. The smoke gathers, making a better backdrop for the light, and I can’t tell whether the display is a sanctioned one or just the work of someone enthusiastic about the weekend with rooftop access. I lean on a railing to watch.
Rob resists. In a video I took of the display, his reflection in the window dutifully shoves his jacket into his backpack, getting organized against sporadic bursts of light. He starts to go down the stairs and I don’t budge, can feel my eyes watering for how blithely I’ve let them blur and how potentially illegal this is.
In a lull of booms and crackles, Rob’s voice comes echoing. The view’s really good from here, he says.
I glance to him, looking up at me, and see his determination budge as another barrage of blazing red shoots up outside and the light washes over his half smile and now conciliatory eyes, easing to rolling acquiesce. He points to a pair of windows set between pillars with sight-lines to where the fireworks give up their ascent and explode, where it isn’t necessary to lean over the railing and tilt your head to follow. I start down and he cedes the step to me, goes to the bottom and turns to look out from long windows there.
After a minute, knowing he wants to go, I descend the last few steps to join him but instead we both lean wordlessly on the railing and watch the rest. Smoke hangs thick in the air and catches every stray spark of light, silhouettes the vertical letters of the FIELDHOUSE sign bolted to the outer brick, glowing like a giant lantern in the gloom. Save for two confused looking security guards in front of the building that’s erupting, the streets below are empty and I wonder if anyone but us is seeing this. The last volley shoots up, a couple spears of gold wheel wide and the sky switches off, turns to hazy midnight with a moon that’s been swelling all weekend shyly peering out from under a veil.
The noise from out on the concourse comes back all at once. I feel the moment start to move away, slipping quiet to memory where it will settle and shift into mostly colours and light. The upward trail and hang time of each burst in the closeup viewfinder of eye-level stadium windows exaggerating, Rob’s reflection refracting and distorting. Though, not so much I couldn’t recognize him by his hands clasped around the railing or the reverent dip of his head in profile, considering, maybe, the bloom of metal salts on our behalf, whether the game was going to be any good, the rest of the way to his seat, or the whole of Indiana.
There’s a feeling you have when you first go to a place of how it is you’ll be there. Even if the end result isn’t too drastically different from what you imagined, by the time you leave that version you pictured will seem impossible to you.
Walking back alone to the hotel from Rising Stars on Friday, after hugging Taylor and Holland goodbye in the abruptly clear, crisp night, it seemed a trick of time — a stretching and speeding — that it had been 12 hours since I’d set my first foot. Forced to slow as I went over the day’s carpet of snow freezing into undulating ice on the sidewalks, I thought how it always feels like it takes one day to rev up into these weekends. That my syncing comes through people.
Rob found me blinking around the small hotel bar and brought me back to a hightop table with no room for another chair, but everyone shifted. I felt myself sink farther into my head, fine to listen, part day finally catching up, part comforted. Back into these rhythms, this contained world.
Funny to think of that night and then Sunday, barely 48 hours later, cutting sure down the Circle with Jerome, streets clear and dry. Hopping from one place in search of familiar faces to say our goodbyes and leaving him at another. Part stalling, part sated. Walking, alone again, to the hotel and thinking of the leaps I felt pass under my feet, the forced acceleration. No big fundamental change to this person from the one who’d arrived, no major metamorphosis of the soul, but still — in a collection of moments, split seconds, all amounting to a new pin-pricked constellation, now backlit — a subtle shift, perceptible as a bruise forming you tenderly press down on. Something leaving, arriving, growing, gone.