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When I was in the Sierra foothills, I always asked the weekend guests to update me on NBA action because I had no access to broadcasts of the games. When I would call my parents from property, I had to climb a hill and stand close to a cell-phone antennae bolted to a tree in a field of brambly berry vines. The view was incomprehensible, a hallucination of miles and miles of misty pines, all the way to Gary Snyder’s house. To the delight of my dad, I would always ask about the Pistons first, before I would try to answer their cautious, “How are things going up there?” The answer to that question was, “Well, there are some naked men trying to build a treehouse and this woman was just talking to me about what a motherfucker the president is and this teenager was recounting his young-teen glory days as an Oxycontin addict and then we talked about the apocalypse and how much we hated our parents while smoking out of a vaporizer. I’m pretty good.”
So basketball was safer. My parents have been Detroit Pistons season ticketholders for about 18 years. I have memories of walking the halls of the Pontiac Silverdome, where the team played until the ’80s, hand in hand with my dad. I wonder at which Goodwill all of my foam fingers and replica champsionship rings will be unearthed. I saw Michael Jordan courtside before the Bulls won a championship, I met Dennis Rodman when he was just a plucky, homely sweetheart, I saw the Celtics when they were largely Caucasian, I invited Bill Laimbeer to my pool party and he did not come but instead sent me a glossy photo with one pen mark, like he tried to autograph it but then cramped. I could go on and on, I have lots of stories about chasing players to their cars in the parking lots, about my teenage sisters being invited by the team to be chartered to away games in a private jet, about when all the stadium lights went out during a thunderstorm. But the most unlikely stories are about the Tuesday night games, mid-season, against bottom-of-the-league teams. My sisters and I would go to the games with our dad and the stadium was like our living room. Many of those games were very boring. Unless Minute Bowl, who was a bafflingly tall obsidian-skinned player or Spudd Webb, who was a smiley-faced exceptionally short player, were on the court, it was hard to be interested. I read the entire Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Palace of Auburn Hills and scowled when the cameras caught me and put me on the big screen above the court. When they were losing, my sisters and I were fickle and would complain that we had to go. But when they were winning, we would battle over the occasional courtside opportunity to see Magic and Isiah kiss. Last year, when the Pistons won the championship, I left the tour I was on to go to Detroit and see a Finals game at home. It was magical, the best ballet.
This year, I was tucked into the forest so I could not see the Finals. I was barely updated, I didn’t even know when the games were or what the standing was the day I left Bruinslair in Jackie’s Volvo with a pint of hand-picked strawberries, a snakeskin and a powdery butterfly. I visited John Hoppin in Oakland that night. He lives very near where scenes in “Poetic Justice” were filmed. John hooked me up with medicinal Lighthouse Blend from the California cannabis pharmacy in Berkeley. I walked into his house and they were smoking out of a Barbie-car bong and watching the last minute of game 7 of the Finals. I couldn’t believe my timing. Rasheed had just kicked back a three, but the team was finished. John turned it off soon after because he couldn’t bear to watch them lose. I could wax poetic about the consistent supremacy of Detroit’s winning basketball teams, always so scrappy, always the superstar underdogs, never the grimacing Jordans or Kobes who eclipse the game’s sunny side with their furrowed brows and venereal vibes. By the way, even courtside in 1990, I never was very impressed by Jordan. I much preferred Kareem Abdul Jabar in his kneesocks.
Anyway, what a funny coincidence and a nice feeling because I said, “I know where my mother is right now,” watching the game’s end with one hand over one of her eyes, nursing a Michelob. I talked to her the next day and she said she turned it off at 40 seconds left.