YALL HAVE FUN

March Madness, All Americans, and the tarnished gold thrum of the Texas Gulf.

Mar 27, 2023

The water has got to be 30°C (86°F, my stats remind me the majority of you are American) degrees. It’s 7:30am and the sun, though up, is hidden behind low clouds and sinking fog. The streets of Houston down below are quiet, the giant live oaks lining the streets a stark, vivid green against all the grey of the sky and taupe of the pavement. I’m wearing an Adidas tracksuit emblemized with McDonald’s All American Games motifs that I was gifted over my swimsuit and despite myself, feel smugly professional.

The pool is too hot. After one short lap I can already feel the heat gathering under my swim cap, blood flushing gamely to the surface of my skin. Coming up for snatches of air, in temperatures only a couple of degrees cooler, like lying a cold cloth over a fevered forehead. I stubbornly quadruple my lap count to make up for the stubby length of the pool.

At some point another person comes out onto the deck from the fitness centre. I finish a set in time to hear him climb down the ladder and hiss as his feet touch the water. This is hot, German accent flaring in his disdain. It’s too hot for swimming, I say, absently scissoring my arms. He makes a disgusted sound (sorry to be stereotypical, but it’s an “ack”). No pool in Germany is this hot, he says. Some part of me that wants to instantly align in our otherness here on a Sunday morning half submerged in a boiling hot, heated pool in Texas says, In Canada it’s heated indoor, but not like this, and not outdoor. I say it like I’m the pool ambassador of the country. What city in Canada are you from? He asks politely. Toronto, I say. He nods once, decisively. Then it is the same in Toronto as Germany, he declares. Now we both nod and push off into the broiling, brilliant blue.

I’ve been watching a lot of March Madness. Drifting in and out of games and circling back as they get close. The volatility, the sudden bursts of speed and energy, botched shots and hero ball has been a nice departure from the scrabbling end of the NBA season. It feels like my brain, left to loosen and not automatically figure out what it thinks about any given action, is getting an enthusiastic but jerky massage from an all-in-one pedicure chair. I have no loyalties, am the Switzerland of college basketball watching brackets bust and seedings upend.

Here in Houston, covering kids that are in the final months of their high school lives but have declared for their colleges, one foot in the past, the other reaching for September, there’s a rare sense of watching lives align. Being peripheral to it feels at once very special and distinctly rare. Watching them watch and root for, whenever they have downtime to catch up, the teams they’re going to play for next year like seeing conduits flare open. Knowing if we both keep at this I’ll see them go pro and some part of my brain will light up to back here, when I sat down with them in a huge hotel conference room and tried my best to make it feel not weird, cracked bad jokes about “my office”. Hopefully their brains will light back to something better.

Watching as an outsider is easy and not growing up in the States, not having college loom as large as it does here, means I’ll always be a bit pressed up outside the window looking in, but where the door’s been opened for me I find myself getting comfortable. Interviewing Zakiyah Franklin, Holly Kersgieter, and Taiyanna Jackson of Kansas University days before they lost the game that would keep them out of March Madness but now, watching them light up the WNIT, I feel a rooting interest coiling around my heart. What was clear when I talked to each of them, beyond how thoughtful and direct, open and intent they were, was their desire to keep playing because what happens when basketball stops could very well be the end of that life before their next begins. The end of their time together, the end of having a direct impact on a program and seeing it rejuvenated under their efforts, the end of just knowing they have that many days ahead of them to do what they’re intuitively and comfortably good at.

Watching them, watching these kids in Houston, watching the tournament in snatches while falling asleep in my hotel bed this last week, I want them to have that feeling as long as they can. An outsider in the thick of it, I want to be in.

Houston sprawls and I feel my idea of place going with it. Extending south to Galveston Bay and the mouth of the Gulf, the Space Center and wending boardwalks a chef at the sushi counter the night I walk myself to the Nobu in the mall across the street (that also has a skating rink in it) from the hotel tells me I have to go to, but not tomorrow, there’s tornado warning. North, the airport — on the ride in, passing billboard after billboard alternately warning me about and welcoming me to god. East and west in the city, more freeways then I’ve ever seen, even in L.A., every business that would be a storefront somewhere else a warehouse here.

There’s surprise reprieve from being knocked over the head with the otherworldly American-ness of the city in glancing cutaways and side-street places. The gallery I wrote to knowing they had some Dorothy Hood paintings and could I maybe see one? inviting me to visit and then spending two hours pulling over 20 pieces of her work out for me in the cool and clean white caverns of their back storage while I choked up, delusional from being up since 4am, and they let me just stand there staring and repeating, It’s like they vibrate, you know?

Or driving — so much driving — to and from the hotel to museums or events, seeing the old Rockets arena that was repurposed into a megachurch or on another shoulder, a superbloom of white and pastel pink jimson weed in front of the biggest CVS known to man.

You can usually get a sense of a city when you make an effort to get out and around in it, but every time I’ve felt a handle on Houston, it slips. This block I feel no, it isn’t for me, the next one, a construction dumpster with graffiti of Beavis and the note YALL HAVE FUN scrawled underneath a block from the monastic Cy Twombly museum where I stand in front of Say Goodbye, Catullus, To The Shores Of Asia Minor and audibly sigh so loud it echoes I think, okay, maybe it is.

The illusion is that everything is close, but is really ten times as far away as you think and still spreading out. The city is flat, a built-up, hungry swamp; sunrises coming on like a flushing bruise and sunsets tarnished gold coming down on mall after mall after mall. It makes you want more, makes you convinced you can get it, makes you reach and in the reaching forget, stumble heat-dazed onto something new. It feels as noxious as a universe expanding, all the chemical elements it takes to create life colliding; it feels stagnant as the same one, collapsing. The end and the beginning of the West.

I sat down breathless in front of A’ja Wilson, beaming and shaking my head, going, A’ja, this is so wild, but one of my best friends designed this building. She’d barely got her arm back from shaking my hand but, right away game, went, Really?!

After, walking through the massive intersecting atriums with their bold, contemporary and still beautifully rough and just refined enough industrial elements — a hallmark of Yusef’s, and also his dad’s, designs I now know on sight — I felt a shiver, the busy world of a Sunday evening in a public space meant to frame and bolster everyday community slowing around me. This is how our lives overlap now? I thought, grinning and also nearly running into so many people. His work as a beautiful roof over my own, in progress.

Watching all 48 kids who’d been named All Americans coming down the criss-crossing stairs in the atrium the ring ceremony had taken over for the night, laughing to myself because when I’d asked Yusef, the day before, if he’d signed his name somewhere in the building he’d texted: I marked it with an X. His signature, these three-storey teal steel stairs.

If you’d told me in the foggy nights we’d run breathless up and fell down the steep streets of Halifax, lay on the long grass of Citadel Hill huffing the Atlantic hard into our lungs on summer nights that felt they’d drag on forever while freighters lowed mournful in the harbour that in the thick humidity of Houston, Texas, skies clearing to gold from the storm clouds that threatened all day, we’d have each hit our strides like this, far apart but still running together, it’d be beyond whatever I imagined for us. And I’d pictured a lot.

Life is so rich, Yusef texts. I feel so happy knowing we’re both going for broke on it.