Liveblog: NBA Eastern Conference Finals Game 1 (MIA at BOS)
Photo by Makwan Barzan
Jimmy Butler, rumored to be the illegitimate son of Michael Jordan, breathes heavily on the bench during a brief respite, swigs from a bottle of clear liquid which I pretend is vodka (to add to his mythology, his legend).
A Boston police officer sits one row back staring at the jumbotron, abandoning his duty to observe the crowd for potential threats.
I go take a piss and think about how twenty years ago, a secretary on my floor used to stop at my desk to make small talk. We graduated to visiting a nearby dive for lunchtime drinks; it all culminated one afternoon in a darkened hallway by the restrooms, when I slid my hand over her breast and she stuck her tongue in my mouth. We stood apart a couple of feet and she told me she was engaged. Couldn’t tell if she was saying it to stop me or encourage more. I guess I’ll never know. I last saw her on a sweltering Sunday nine years later; she and her kid were shopping for back-to-school clothes at Macy’s in Parkchester.
There is a problem with the scoreboard and the players are all standing around patiently.
I think about the probability I’ll never have children and wonder what myths or legends will live on when I’m gone. ‘Hey, did you know a guy once barfed all over that booth?’ or ‘The only guy I’ve ever seen eat a whole Sicilian pizza at once is dead now’ just don't have the grandeur I’d hope for.
Don’t we have enough lemon-lime sodas for one lifetime? Oh, what do I know?
I wish I had two taps in my living room, to supply unlimited quantities of ice-cold tea and lemonade. And a small door in the wall that, when opened, always revealed piping-hot garlic bread. If I get rich enough to make this happen one day, I’ll never tell any of my guests.
I’m a vegan, because I care about animals and they deserve rights. All life is precious and beautiful. I’d be down with killing everyone involved in these Corona advertisements, up to and including Snoop Dogg. I’d sign the required forms and everything. See you in hell, Mr. Dogg.
I called the secretary from New Zealand in a drunken stupor one morning, a few months before I got canned. I was on a two-week vacation but it poured rain every day and I’d gone off the rails. It was three in the afternoon back in Manhattan. She sounded distracted but caring and it reminded me of when I’d call my mom at work as a kid, to nag her about picking up pizza on the way home. It didn’t give me the arousal or self-esteem boost I’d hoped for.
One trillion Bam Adebayos slam dunking in succession, strobe effect in the vacuum of space. Maybe that’s what I’ll see when I’m dead. Maybe that’s all there is. Maybe that’s all there needs to be.
The play-by-play announcer sounds uncannily like Marv Albert, who sexually assaulted a woman in a hotel room in February of 1997. Bam Adebayo had not been born yet. Jimmy Butler was a frightened seven-year-old in Texas watching his mother argue with a stranger. I was a teenager worrying about my mother dying of cancer. The secretary was doing the same with her father who had a brain tumor. We were all on an intertwined path, in a shared galaxy, we just didn’t know it yet. I ate a lot more Wendy’s back then.
A television commercial reassures me that I am a unique individual who never gives up and that success is on the way. Happily ever after will happen for me. “There are many sides to you, and they all deserve the best,” a man says. I realize the commercial is just trying to sell me a subscription to a streaming platform.
One of these players has a tattoo that looks like a birthmark. Or maybe the other way around.
I wonder if I’ll remember watching this game twenty years from now. I think about what I used to watch in a world before constant distractions, before I always had a screen in front of me. I think about pacifiers. I think about that tongue in my mouth, in a time before multitasking, when we had each other’s mutual attention, when a moment slowed down, when everything else seemed distant and irrelevant.
“Lucky guy,” the waitress had said to me, tearing the check from her pad as the secretary walked off to the restroom. “She really likes you.”
A buzzer sounds and the crowd roars. I don’t know, I wasn’t looking.