After some forty-eight years of deliberation, I am a married man. I have cliff-dived into the Caribbean Sea. Allen Iverson is a Detroit Piston. And Barack Obama is President of the United States.These are ways my life has changed since I last posted here.
Let me get Iverson out of the way first -- we're talking about Basketball. Not life. Basketball. Basketball. (This should obviously be read aloud in the style of Iverson's infamous 2002 rant about practice.) Basketball is a frivolous thing and it should not consume one's spirit. Whether a group of twenty-five year old, mercenary millionaires who can dunk behind their heads from one city can outscore a similar group from some other city over any particular forty-eight minute period of time should really not hold sway over my emotional health. But it does. God help me, it really, really does.
There is a very short list of future-hall-of-fame players whom I would not welcome to my beloved Pistons. AI sits atop that list. Not because of the tattoos. Or the doo-rags. Not because of the posse, or the brushes with the law or the above-mentioned aversion to practice. This isn't Hoosiers. I realize that. This is the National Basketball Association and its players are young, rich celebrities and I'm not their target market anymore. I get it.
It's how he plays. My Pistons have had a unique personality over the past twenty years. They play tough, hard-nosed defense and rely on the concept of team rather than worshiping at the altar of David Stern and his insistence on turning the NBA into a high-priced, pay-per-view, indoor schoolyard league of role players standing around watching one or two superstars per team take turns utterly dominating the action. Stern and the NBA have managed this by eliminating defense entirely from professional basketball. Touch LeBron, it's a foul. Lay a hand on D-Wade, he's shooting free throws. It's absurd. The Pistons of the late eighties, the Bad Boys, as they were known, or the Chicago Bulls of Jordan and Pippen -- two teams that accounted for eight championships between 1989 and 1998, largely due to their suffocating defensive pressure -- wouldn't stand a chance in today's kinder, gentler NBA.
The Pistons won the championship again in 2004, against all odds. They were a team, in the very best sense of the word. No one scored thirty points a game. No one graced multiple covers of Sports Illustrated or made Gatorade commercials. The closest thing they had to a superstar was Ben Wallace, an undersized center who, through hustle, hard work and force of will, made himself into one of the great defensive presences in league history. They surrounded him with intelligent, efficient, ego-free cast-offs from other teams and they proved, perhaps for the last time, that sometimes the sum really is greater than the parts.
Well, Iverson is not a sum kind of guy. He's the ultimate part. He's a wondrous blur of motion, nearly impossible to defend one-on-one. He makes his defenders look like they're standing still. Trouble is, his teammates are standing still as well. Everyone stands around and watches Allen do whatever the hell he's going to do. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Either way, it's usually pretty amazing. But it's not basketball. Not the way I define basketball. And, until this past week, not the way the Pistons defined it, either.
Whew, I feel better. Good to get that out and move on to real life.
Did I mention I got married? Yes, my fiance, Karen, and I tied the knot on October 25th, after just over a year's engagement. Nothing substantive changed, other than the fact that I can stop using the word "fiance," which pleases me to no end. It always sounds to me like a South Hampton debutante introducing her boyfriend at her coming-out party. We've been living together for two years, dated for a year and a half before that. I mean, it's not like we were saving anything for our wedding night, if you know what I mean.
We went to Jamaica for our honeymoon. We stayed in Negril, at the Rockhouse Hotel (pictured above). Now, I'm not a Caribbean vacation kind of guy. When someone comes back from St. Bart's and tells me they laid on a beach for a week and did nothing, my head wants to explode. Lying around and doing nothing is what you do when you're acutely depressed, not celebrating a 'til-death-do-us-part union, I don't care how nice the view. But a croissant and latte costs about twenty bucks, American, on the Boulevard St. Germain these days, so I agreed to spend a few days in the Islands. Truth be told, a little down time sounded pretty good, what with the wedding and the election and all.
Jamaica was wonderful. The hotel was spectacular -- each room is a separate hut, very well-appointed, sitting on the edge of a thirty-foot cliff above the Caribbean. You get up every morning, walk out to your patio, take a sip of the Blue Mountain coffee waiting for you on the table, and jump off the cliff into the warm, placid waters below. I'm just saying, it beats morning drive-time radio. The food is great, especially if you like hot, which I do. They'll put jerk on anything. I'll bet you could get jerk jalapeno peppers if you asked.
And the people are awesome -- warm, laid-back, cheerful. We spent a fair amount of time with Clive Gordon, who owns Clive's Transport Service. Negril is about ninety minutes from the nearest airport at Montego Bay and Clive was our driver, so we had plenty of time to chat. I asked him if Jamaicans were truly this friendly all of the time, or if it was just an act for the tourists. He said, "Well, we're pretty much high on weed most of the time, so, no, it's not an act. Everybody's happy, mon."
Maybe, maybe not. Once you get away from the hotels and the beach, it's a desperately poor country. Most of the houses we passed were shacks with no glass in the windows, no electricity, no running water and tin sheets for roofs. Their slums make our urban projects look like gated communities.
Everyone we met was fascinated with the U.S. election. More specifically, they were enamored of Obama. It was an odd feeling, to be in a foreign country and not feel shame, on some level, for what America has become. The past eight years have run roughshod over our image abroad. I've been in Spain, France, Italy, Ireland -- there's a palpable distance between where we were and how we were viewed before Bush took office and where we have moved since. I'm not saying Western Europeans hate us -- they don't. I think they look at us more with a disappointed bewilderment. How could we have let this happen? Twice.
I didn't feel that in Jamaica this time. Even though we were there the week before the election, there was a sense that a page has been turned. Although the Bush years illustrated just how dangerous America going rogue can be, the nomination and probable election of Barack Obama reminded us all of why so much of the rest of the world looks to America as a symbol of the possibilities of dreams. Every Jamaican I met wanted to talk about Obama and how we got to this point. There was a sort of a feel of kinship, that we could once again start to work together, as a global community, to try and solve the truly terrifying challenges that lie ahead.
One story that drove that home for me. Clive was telling us that, before he opened his taxi service, he was a teacher. For twenty years he taught high school in the town of Lucea. Teachers aren't well-paid in Jamaica. He was driving a cab at night to supplement his income. One evening he dropped off some guests at the Rockhouse Hotel, the same place he was taking us. The registration desk sits separate from the hotel, in a small hut at the end of the entrance driveway. As he unloaded his guests' bags, he recognized the young woman working at the registration desk. She was one of his students from several years before. They got to talking and she told him life was good -- she'd been at the Rockhouse for a couple of years now. She mentioned how much she was getting paid. It was considerably more than Clive was making as a teacher after twenty years.
The story reminded me of my past. I moved to New York after graduating college with my English degree and paucity of job offers and took up bartending. The tips were great, the drinks were free and the girls were pretty. I remained in the bar business for over a decade. I might still be pouring drinks for a living if I could put down a bottle of Absolut before it was empty. I promise you I was making more when I quit than any high school teacher in the city. But working for tips is a hard way to earn a living. It ages you. I looked in the mirror sometime after I turned thirty and was sure of only one thing -- I didn't want to be doing the same thing when I hit forty. So I headed to DC in search of honest work. Which I found, more or less. But that's another story.
My point is, in terms of the way we value our teachers, America is no different than a third world nation like Jamaica. Where's the incentive to mold the minds and spirits of our children when you can make five times the money waiting tables? Or one hundred times the money as a junior broker?
Obama talks about changing that. He reminds us of JFK and the Peace Corps. Of paying back the opportunities we've been given just by the virtue of being American. National service is back in fashion, at least talking about it is.
I think that's part of what I was sensing in Jamaica. For better or worse, less fortunate nations look to America for help, for inspiration, for hope. Those qualities have been in pretty short supply these past eight years. The Obama candidacy is, above all else, a symbol of the promise of what we can be, at home and around the world.
I hope so, anyway. I've lost about half my net worth this fall. If things don't turn around quick, I might call up Clive down in Negril and ask him to FedEx me up about a half-pound of Monkey Skunk. I'll lock the door, fire up a big fat one and put on some Bob Marley:
Don't worry about a thing,
cause every little thing gonna be all right.
I actually believe that, sort of. A good thing, too, because I don't smoke. Maybe it's the impending Obama presidency. He seems a remarkably charismatic and inspirational leader. Good for him -- he'll need all of his powers to lead us out of this mess.
But my guess is, it's not Bob Marley, or the fact that the Pistons have started out 6-2, or the trip to Jamaica, or even Obama's victory. All those are reasons for good cheer but they're not the main thing.
Then main reason I'm in a good mood is Karen.
Everyone was right. Married really is better.
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