Body High 21: Bangin' 3s

Now, where were we?

Those after-school elementary kids are taking up less of my bandwidth. I’m down to a dozen times a day of remembering some fantastically pure thing that any number of them did.

About a half dozen of the students over-the-top adored me. One afternoon, a precocious sixth-grade girl cried in my supervisor’s office because she missed one of my library sessions. When you’re poor in a tense time and your last book didn’t sell and you’re questioning your value as a human being, there’s no better remedy than the love of 20 innocent children.

The word “panacea” comes to mind. A balm, like those topical cannabis creams.

The student I may have been closest with was the Ukrainian fifth grader, my hoops buddy. He shot and ran like you would not believe, and when I left the job we were working on his ball-handling skills. I showed him how to dribble two balls at once, for supreme dexterity.

The idea had been to get in as much coaching as I could. It had become obvious that the old Black man with the mohawk’s child development days were numbered on this particular northeast Los Angeles playground. The boy’s father didn’t have much English, so I was simple and direct in communicating to him the value of getting his son into the Junior Lakers program.

“You can get his college paid for,” I told the dad. Dude seemed super grateful.

For sure the kid is going to watch those Steph Curry YouTube videos that I recommended.

I got more from the Ukrainian boy than I gave.

A couple of weeks before I was martyred, the boy and I were shooting around, taking playground three-pointers. The great gift this child provided is an understanding that, at 165 pounds, my body would actually survive the wear and tear of basketball. I’m presently weighing about a buck-eighty-five, after pushing 200 pounds when “Body High” began. As the school gig played out I got skinnier and skinnier and was able to hoop way, way longer than my imagination allowed. Playing against grown-ass men in my 60s is now an idea to be realized.

So, that’s a new narrative right there.

In trying to show the younglings how to balance their jump shots, I corrected my lifelong shooting imbalance. Along with a few other elements of my body-as-art project, that adjustment turned me into a better shooter, at 58. This turn felt more tangible as the schoolyard weeks moved on and was proven to be actual fact on this day that the Ukrainian kid and I were taking those shots. We each had a ball that we were taking jumpers with and chasing them around.

Intermittently, the balls would switch into each other’s possession. In this moment, my ball was not NBA regulation. It was not even the size of a women’s ball. You only see a basketball this size in a space frequented by children. From the elementary school half court, I launched a deep one. Banged it, just fuckin’ hard into the bottom of the net. The actual distance was probably that of the WNBA three-point line, and sinking that shot felt perfectly satisfying, like a right-on-time sex thrust, or delivering the dopest rap lyric well.

You are not likely to understand what doing this playground shit feels like. I wish I could tell you.

Praise the children.

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The international bent of West Coast Sojourn just keeps bending. You might want to tap into talks with the likes of photojournalist Antonio Olmos from London; author Mike Wise and yoga inspiration Ati Sundari (separately) from Mexico; cartoonist Keith Knight from Germany; and authors Alexandra Marshall and Dimitry Léger, from France and Martinique, respectively. Most recently I shared a free podcast episode with graphic novelist Lance Tooks. There is also, of course, the Legend of Black Mexico project.

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Since school is out, I haven’t exercised much. As a lovely parting gift, my group gave me Covid. And for other reasons monetary and geographical, I’ve been uncommonly housebound. My body is somewhat softer than usual, but I haven’t gotten heavy. I go up and down the stairs—in excess—and stretch and keep up on my yoga.

There’s a grotesque satisfaction in leaning into that cement mixer sound your middle-age neck makes when you’ve not stretched it for a while that’s akin to sniffing your own farts. Part of us leans into the unclean. “Daily neck hygiene is so important,” says Adriene Mishler in the session. The concept of “neck hygiene” was completely unfamiliar to me until I heard Mishler say it. Now I think about neck hygiene nearly every day.

The neck is easy to neglect, I suspect because we see it so little. It’s centrality, ought to go without saying, should not be underestimated. My practice keeps me attuned to the neck through this stretching of the musculature. To be dialed into the interconnectedness of muscles that join the neck, shoulders, and arms is to feel one’s uprightness in essence.

I feel my body changing from day to day, in a dozen different ways. It’s the TV on in the background of my existence. Every few hours though, there’s the necessity to pay attention for reals.

While casual screen content is playing on my laptop, I will place that screen at one end of my mat and get into plank pose, switching to forearm plank, then working my way into downward-facing dog. Watch The Diplomat, then repeat. While in down dog, I’ll do the occasional slow, triangular push-up, holding it with my head and shoulders as close to the floor as is manageable.

I am holding off the braying dogs of feeble health, despite my nutrition being beyond suspect. It’s not exciting, but lots of water and this intentional activity are the primary drivers.

My aging body has undeniably weakened. It’s most obvious while on all fours, as I try to spread my weight evenly across all fingers. The life force has been on the wane since my early 30s, there’s no deceiving one’s self. But in my 242-pound 40s I began to resist— argue against weakness and redirect strength—doin’ swashbuckling things against the march toward death.

There is no winning this battle, but I’m giving myself a good show.

Chief among the sensitivities and awareness that conscious aging brings is familiarity with satisfaction that can live inside of pain.

Or maybe this is just me.

I had another huge three-pointer past the age of 45. This time Hollywood was the location. My sons had been living outside Dallas with their mother and I got to have them for a hunk of days. The three of us shared a ratty motel, I think on Vine. It wasn’t a sex motel, but one could see it going that way or having not long ago come out of that.

The visit was exceptionally stressful. I’d taken Amtrak down from Portland to make this connection happen and was stupid broke. My very middle-class kids, 15 and 11, were annoyed at our lodgings’ crappiness and my tight purse strings. We caught the last Christopher Nolan Batman movie, having walked up to the Arclight on Sunset, but other than that we just had a lot of microwaved Ralph’s groceries in our room.

My sons’ noses were pressed up against the window of Fun Hollywood, and they hated the experience. My older boy bolted for a friend’s house a couple of days into his visit. The younger guy was tied to me and, frankly, willing to look past my budgetary limitations. For now. Pockets on ‘E,’ we one day wandered into an enormous and open old building on Vine.

There was a bustle about the place. We couldn’t figure out what was happening at first—there were sneakers everywhere and only clusters of people in the cavernous space. It was half-lit and mysterious. We wandered up a stairway to another room full of shoes and understood that we were in a Nike pop-up event.

As a dad, I was winning.

We climbed to the building’s rooftop. A full-length basketball court lay there with Los Angeles as its backdrop. You don’t get this in suburban Dallas. Two teams of long and sweaty, legit athletes were wandering away. We were amid such an LA thing, ultra secret and cool.

A teen in referee’s gear picked up the game ball.

“Lemme get a shot,” I shouted. Wyatt was standing next to me on the sideline, steps out from the three-point arc. The kid tossed me the regulation NBA basketball.

And, the thing is this:

The art project of redesigning my body had only just begun. Eighteen months back, I was still developing portion-control strategies with my also overweight romantic partner. Walking a couple miles had been a proud feat, as I still weighed 242 pounds. “Just stay in the ballpark of fitness” had been my longtime mantra, but I was not even in the parking lot anymore.

On this Hollywood rooftop, I was physically nowhere near where I am now. My hips had only just stopped chronically hurting. And no team down by two with its best players fouled out and a fraction of a second left on the clock needed a three-pointer more than I needed a three in this moment. Post seasons included. I fuckin’ drained that corner three though. NBA distance. The awed look on my little boy’s face will always be with me.

“Gimme another one!” I shouted. And Teen Ref fired the rock back to me.

I raised up, and shot an air ball—of course—overly cocky and unable to leave well enough alone: Adequate representation of this flawed father for his son.

The look my boy’s face in this exact moment I do choose to forget.

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