The Whore Of Akron Part 8

Now? Now flight attendants look at Jumbo and think about where the defibrillator is stowed. At such moments as this-asking for a seat-belt extension-no one can possibly loathe Jumbo Cashew as much as Jumbo Cashew loathes himself.

Jumbo is not the only pa.s.senger on his way to the Heat game. Adrift on this morning's Vike, Jumbo can't be certain that the entire posse is aboard-but that tall rumpled gent in a track suit a few rows back is certainly Lynn Merritt, LeBron's Nike shadow, the same jamoke who strong-armed the dunk tape last summer. And the handsome young fellow with the fade in the seat in front of Jumbo-could that be Rich Paul, one of James's Akron friends and business partners?

Jumbo hopes so: he would hate to be inflicting this searing flatulence, ripe with last night's burrito and guacamole, on a complete stranger.

At baggage claim, I spot Lynn Merritt and ask if he knows of an extra singleton to the Heat opener tomorrow night. My question is for sport and also serious: I requested credentials from the Heat more than a week ago, but Tim Donovan hasn't yet seen fit to answer yes or no.

Merritt eyes Jumbo with surly amus.e.m.e.nt. Despite our paths crossing last season outside the Cavs locker room before and after a score or more of games, he is either unable to place the silvered land walrus in front of him now, or unwilling to proffer a hint of recognition. His smile is tight, disapproving, as if he finds my presumption that he is in town for a basketball game insulting.

"You can't afford to sit where we sit," Merritt says.

How much?

"Twenty-five thousand dollars. But they're not for sale."

You must be sitting next to LeBron.

"That's right."

Merritt hauls a mammoth Nike duffel off the carousel and wheels it away.

Jumbo's Samsonite is heavy with Luna Bars. A rented Malibu, a bed at the Marriott Biscayne Bay, plenty of pills: Jumbo on the loose, riding high. Maybe too high to drive. He takes refuge in a Starbucks. The face of the barista there carries him back to the tiny village in Ukraine where John Demjanjuk was born, where Jumbo interviewed a one-legged nonagenarian farmer who had been Demjanjuk's boyhood chum and whose granddaughter looked just like Bobby Kennedy's daughter Kerry and the airport barista.

Her feet were dirt-crusted, her thighs firm, her smile sunny. Beaming, she showed him two piglets squealing in the barn, but Jumbo could hear a deeper snuffling close by and beseeched the interpreter to ask Kerry about it. Kerry giggled, and drew with her outstretched hands the shape of the creature hidden by a low door at the side of the barn, then opened the door to reveal the Shaquille O'Neal of hogs.

Something she says makes the interpreter laugh.

"You remind her of the sow," the interpreter says.

Jumbo tells the interpreter to ask where the nearest Jew is buried.

The interpreter shrugs, one hand raised, puzzled.

The guard at the rental-car gate says he knows someone selling tickets to the Heat game, and he writes his phone number on my Thrifty envelope. I can't even remember the drive to the Marriott. I make a mental note not to take the Valium together with the Vicodin.

I can use a nap. I can always use a nap.

I wake up to find two new e-mails. The one from big Z says he has family visiting and won't be able to meet with me while I'm in town. The other one is from Tim Donovan: "We can't do tomorrow. Sorry."

That's each and every word, and it took the d.i.c.k 10 days.

Fine. Good. I'll buy a seat. I'll get the postgame sound files from my pals on the beat. I'll make do. I believe firmly in sports journalism's Second Law: A $40 room-service cheeseburger plate will fix any problem.

I also worship the First Law, of course: Everything that happens is good for the story. It may not be good for the story you're working on-the pig in Ukraine never made it into the Demjanjuk feature-but life is neither a magazine feature nor a book: life itself is the story whole.

In other words, if you wish to truly taste the room-service cheeseburger, you must first savor the smell of Tim Donovan's a.s.s.

What Kerry Kennedy of Dubovi Makharyntsi saw when she looked at me helped teach me what Lynn Merritt saw at baggage claim, what Tim Donovan saw at Media Day. It isn't what my wife and son see-I'm not sure about the dog-and it isn't any insult to my pride or dignity. I have no pride, no dignity-I have a mission.

And I have a cheeseburger.

And a creed: What another sees in you will reveal that person. What you see in another reveals your self. We are-each of us and all of us-mirrors.

In the morning, a fruit plate. With yogurt. And Vicodin. And a large pot of coffee. After I dine, I set up shop at the desk and scan the Heat's website, where hundreds of season-ticket holders are auctioning their seats to tonight's game. I nab one in Section 119, near center court, eleven rows from the floor, mine for a mere $546.25.

I crawl back into bed with the Heat's media guide, 444 pages of arcana. I'm stopped cold by a sentence on page 5, upon which is inscribed the biography of the Heat's owner, Micky Arison: "Although his father, Ted, brought the NBA franchise to South Florida in 1988, it has only been since Micky took control in 1995 that the HEAT has evolved into one of the NBA's top organizations."

A son's sweet tribute to his dear, departed dad. Ted Arison was the founder of Carnival Cruise Lines, a Tel Avivborn gonif who parlayed refurbished ships, slave labor, and tax evasion into an empire worth billions of dollars-so much gelt that in 1990, Ted renounced his American citizenship and moved back to Israel in an effort to avoid taxes on his estate, only to die in 1999, the world's richest Jew but nine months short of the IRS requirement that he live for ten years outside U.S. territory prior to his demise. An unlucky clan, clearly.

Even so, Ted somehow managed to leave Micky in decent enough shape for a billionaire, with Carnival and the basketball team and various other holdings, which is what makes Micky's media guide honesty so refreshing. Rather than brag about his old man, Mick tells you up top that Ted was no good at running the team, and then he never mentions his father again.

When it was time for me to go to college, my mother cosigned a government loan. My father said he was sorry that he couldn't help me out. I don't feel bad for myself; I feel bad for Micky Arison, who never had the chance to fail and find out who he really is, and who'll never forgive his dad for that.

I pick up my ticket at Will Call and watch a thunderstorm roiling above Biscayne Bay. The sky blackens, the wind gusts, the lightning crackles. In a minute or two, a wall of fat raindrops sweeps the street alongside the arena, and then moves along, leaving the air thickened, sticky warm. My shirt is soaked with sweat and rain. Toxic, this weather. Fat men keel over, their lungs full of syrup, their aortas burst, in this sort of sauna. It could happen, Scotty.

Some whiskered lout waves me over as I approach the stairs to the entrance. Jesus, he looks like a version of me that never got sober or grew fat as a pregnant sow. His name is Jack Subwick. He left Cleveland for Florida years ago and settled in Boca Raton. He doesn't have a ticket, says he doesn't care about the game, but he has opening-night programs for the Heat's whole life span, and asks me to pick one up for him and bring it back out.

I tell Jack to give me his number and I'll grab him a program and call to arrange delivery. Jack mulls it over briefly, then scribbles his number on the back of a restaurant coupon he yanks from his pocket.

Two missions.

It turns out the Heat have printed three covers of tonight's program-one with Wade, one with Bosh, one with James. I take one of each.

On his cover, LeBron glares into the camera, head lowered, eyes hooded, tight-lipped, his thick white headband riding ever higher on his forehead as his hairline approaches oblivion. He stands with his hands on his hips, with his shoulders thrust forward, the visual embodiment of his summertime tweet: "Don't think for one minute that I haven't been keeping mental notes of everyone taking shots at me this summer. And I mean everyone."

He's ready to wreak havoc upon the NBA. No prisoners. Blood on the hardwood. Mano a mano. If your name's on Bron-Bron's list, you're going down hard as a motherf.u.c.ker.

That's the pose. I think back to a game his rookie season, against the Indiana Pacers, when NBA tough guy Ron Artest was mugging James as he fought for position to take an inbounds pa.s.s. Artest had an arm across LeBron's upper chest and neck and a leg planted between James's knees bowing him backward. Paul Silas was coaching the Cavs, and Silas came up off the bench screaming-first at the nearest referee for not calling a foul on Artest, and then at LeBron for letting Artest unman him.

James has grown stronger and smarter over his seven seasons in the league, but he still tries to finesse defenders like Artest. His game has never hungered for a battle, much less marked him as the cruel-eyed enforcer who glares out from the program's cover.

G.o.d d.a.m.n, it smells great in here. This has to be the best-smelling sports venue I've ever walked through. Bars everywhere, but the food grilling is what makes my nostrils twitch. Cuban chicken chop-chop. Arepas. Empanadas. It is a heavenly smell, and nearly enough to distract the brain from the women.

Nearly, I say, because G.o.d d.a.m.n, the women are fine. Dark hair, darker eyes, dark skin and plenty of it. Liquid they strut, supple brown legs and heart-shaped a.s.ses, teeth agleam, the peals of their laughter melding into the stew of aroma, wafting high a soft yielding cloud of spice and sizzle and samba and sunshine and everything that Cleveland, Ohio, is not.

This doesn't even feel like a sporting event-it feels like a party to which I have never been invited.

G.o.d d.a.m.n, it is a party: the arena itself is nearly vacant. I find my seat, an excellent seat, and study a two-page spread in the front of the program-"FAN UP, MIAMI!"-devoted to instructing Heat fans how to act like actual fans. Beginning with a Rileyesque us-versus-them taunting-"They say that Heat fans are fickle fans," that "Heat fans don't deserve to have a team like this," and that "It's time to prove the naysayers wrong"-it promises freebies and discounts to fans who get to their seats for tip-off and stick around for the whole game.

Lord. This is where LeBron James wants to play basketball, in front of sun-dried cretins who must be bribed to act like they care about the game and the team. Where another superstar already is the Man in the locker room and on the court; where n.o.body in the media will ever mention his collapse against Boston, his phantom elbow pain, and his steadfast refusal to hold himself accountable for his team's big-game failures.

For as long as I've been a fan, I've rooted hard against certain teams and players, but never have I hoped to see a career-ending injury-until tonight.

My seat has a face value of $150 and is one of four owned by Dr. Jeffrey Rosen, who had been hoping to get $2,500 for it, and then $1,500, and then $1,000. Jeff does a nice job of pretending not to be disappointed, and I restrain myself from embarra.s.sing him by shouting at LeBron during warm-ups. Five minutes before tip-off, the lower bowl is barely half full.

A dreadlocked old man walking with two canes makes his way to a stool at center court. The PA announcer says that this is Clarence Clemons, which I find hard to believe. Only a little while ago-August 8, 1975-I saw Clarence Clemons for the first time, at the Akron Civic Center. I walked around the building afterward, snuck through the stage door, and thanked Bruce Springsteen for the greatest show I'd ever seen. Behind him stood the Big Man holding a fifth of Jack Daniel's, laughing as he drank-lit from within, he seemed like the coolest cat on the planet. I walked over and shook his huge, hot hand.

Twenty-five years later, from Rosen's seat, I watch the shrunken Big Man rest his back against the stool, pluck his sax from its stand, plant wide his feet, and blow a slow, shimmering anthem, each lush, lonely note a requiem.

Then the court is cleared for takeoff. LeBron is introduced first, Wade last. The ch.o.r.eography is painstaking; at one point, each of the three mega-super-duper-stars stands alone in a separate spotlight, hulking at the crowd. It feels like a Friday night opening of a Michael Bay movie, like a roller derby or pro wrestling match, fiction based on a true story, with an all-star cast. ESPN has raised a canopied porch in a section above one of the tunnels. Magic Johnson sits there perched on Magic Johnson's a.s.s, an igloo of flesh.

The game is a 9670 walkover. Orlando played its home opener last night, and Dwight Howard seems to be the sole Magic player with any want-to tonight. By the time he fouls out, the Heat are coasting and half the fans are empty seats.

James plays a swell second-banana's game-15 points, 7 a.s.sists, 6 rebounds-and at no point suffers a career-ending injury. With the game decided, he spends a good chunk of the second half on the bench biting his nails, an old habit he discarded in Cleveland. Only 78 games to go until the playoffs, 40 of them right here in Mojitoville, where the fans need an instructional manual to operate themselves, where the team fired its 30-person ticket sales staff after its season tickets sold out in July, and where the owner's son takes a p.i.s.s on his dead father's pant leg to make himself look like a macher.

Welcome to Pippenhood in the tropics, putz.

My cabbie does not wish to take me to the Marriott Biscayne Bay, because he does not want to fight the arena traffic in that direction-a more rugged trip, it seems, than his recent journey here from Haiti. As we debate without any hope of understanding a word the other says, I get a text from Wright Thompson inviting me to the Mandarin Hotel bar. This suits the driver's mood; he nods when I show him the text and the $20 bill in my hand.

The Mandarin is apparently ESPN's headquarters for tonight's extravaganza. Wright is hunkered down at a long oval table across from John A. Walsh, the eminence blanche of the Worldwide Leader, the near-blind seer sprung from Scranton, Pennsylvania, American capital of coal dust and Catholicism, whose soft genius has helped shape American sports journalism for decades.

It was Walsh during his days at Rolling Stone who sent Hunter S. Thompson to cover Super Bowl VIII in Houston, Walsh who was founding editor of the fabled Inside Sports magazine in 1979, Walsh who gave birth to SportsCenter, Walsh whose encompa.s.sing beneficence has kindly touched hundreds and thousands of careers, including my own.

Walsh introduces me to his wife and son, and asks after my boss, who worked with Walsh many years ago. Couldn't be better, I say, and we sit beaming at each other.

Walsh is seven or eight years older than me and looks worse than I feel-wispy, dwarfish, his white beard spa.r.s.e, his hair all but gone, his eyes rheumy-and G.o.d knows what he can make out of whatever he can see of me. We have always been fond of each other-Walsh because he adores lunatic writers, I because editors who enjoy lunatic writers are somewhat rare-and our acquaintance has never been sullied by having to work together or see each other too often.

Wright Thompson is talking about our meeting in the Cavs' locker room two nights ago, which I began, after he introduced himself, by telling him how much I have grown to despise ESPN. Hearty laughs all around.

Wright is a burly young man from Mississippi, a born storyteller. He's not trying to embarra.s.s me-impossible in any event-or get a serious conversation started. The Heat game is over; ESPN's work here is finished; it's time to kick back, relax with a few drinks, and tell stories.

July 8 was one of the worst days in the history of Cleveland sports, I say. And that's no mean achievement.

More laughs.

At that moment, Michael Wilbon stops by to pay his respects. Wilbon's one of the many newspaper writers Walsh has helped groom into a television personality. I can't hear what Wilbon's saying as he leans over Walsh, but he's red-eyed and unsteady on his feet.

Wilbon goes, replaced by Dan Le Batard, the colossus of the Miami media market. Dan writes a column for the Miami Herald, does four hours of afternoon radio five days a week on the local ESPN affiliate, and pops up frequently these days as guest host on a couple of ESPN-TV shows. Dan's a good guy. He put me on his show one day last week, and he also put in a good word for me, way back when, with Tim Donovan. Given my chemistry, or lack thereof, with Tim, I probably owe Dan an apology, just for tainting him by a.s.sociation. I get up and walk his way, waiting for a quiet moment to take him aside.

I'm sorry, Dan. I know you vouched for me with Donovan, and I hope I haven't given you cause to regret it.

"That's fine," he says, but he sounds disappointed, even miffed. Dan cuts a fine figure in his black suit and white shirt, a man about town on opening night. I'm wearing a bright red Marvel Comics T-shirt with the Flash stretched tight across my ap.r.o.n of fat.

"Take it easy," Dan says. "You need to think about preserving access. Keep your ammunition dry for the book."

Walsh waves Dan back to the table, and they take a short walk together. Dan bends close to Walsh, who has one hand on Le Batard's biceps: the old master and another protege are talking business.

I like these people, but I loathe ESPN, yes. I don't know if Walsh played any role at all in The Decision, but he is an executive VP, executive editor, and chairman of ESPN's editorial board.

When a young ESPN writer on the West Coast posted a story in late July about LeBron cavorting with his Akron crew and Lynn Merritt at a Vegas nightclub-carefully noting James's six-figure appearance fee and his taste for tequila and women without underwear-ESPN yanked it off its website in a matter of hours, explaining later that it never should have run because the reporter had failed to properly identify himself as such, and denying that James or anyone a.s.sociated with him had anything to do with the story's disappearance.

Now ESPN is throwing money and bandwidth at a new brainchild: the "Heat Index," a full-court phalanx of reporters and columnists paying daily homage to the primacy of a single NBA team even as the vast bulk of news coverage of the entire league is dominated and driven by ESPN, which pays the NBA a billion dollars a year for broadcast rights and in turn derives huge profits from the ad time it sells to Nike and all the other companies who are themselves paying hundreds of millions of dollars in endors.e.m.e.nt fees to the athletes ESPN's newshounds are paid to cover. Which obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with ESPN pulling a story about LeBron James acting the fool at a Vegas nightclub. Obviously.

Whatever John Walsh might choose to call it, this isn't credible journalism. It's a daisy chain.

No one with any sense will ever again consider ESPN an honest source of NBA coverage-but if anyone in charge at ESPN or the NBA cared about that, The Decision would never have aired. One ESPN executive said after July 8 that the network expected to have a one-on-one with LeBron as the season approached. The World Wide Leader got what everyone in Cleveland got the past seven years: bupkes.

Chapter Ten.

This Way Lies Madness Hating is a full-time job. Home from Miami, I sit in the rocker with two TV trays in front of me, one for my laptop, the other for my dinner. When Cavs and Heat games conflict, I watch Miami on the television, with my laptop tuned in to the Cleveland game on NBA.com's LeaguePa.s.s. The boy and I used to watch The Simpsons and The Office from seven to eight o'clock before he'd start his homework; now I'm watching a game or the pregame show on NBA TV. Google Alerts for James and the Heat arrive hourly, around the clock. I'm phoning sources in Cleveland, in Akron, in Miami, Los Angeles, New York City-I am building a one-man bureau: the Hate Index.

Twitter is now my drug of choice, a wormhole to a digital zoo where two hundred million animals fling feces at the wall and each other in 140-character chunks. Here I find players, among them @KingJames, and fans and journalists and even a few NBA team owners, such as @CavsDan, wandering in and out of a fractured gabfest that never ends.

On November 2, the Heat clock the Timberwolves, the Cavs lose to the Hawks, the Republicans kick the c.r.a.p out of the Democrats, and I'm hard at work on Twitter lambasting the #Wh.o.r.eOfAkron, taunting an Orlando Sentinel writer-a very nice man-for making fun of New Jersey, and dreaming out loud of a threesome with the Pope and Peggy Noonan, Twitter-drunk.

I get on the bike every day. I pull on my sweatpants by leaning against the bedroom wall, dangling them low because I'm too fat to lift a leg more than a few inches. To get my socks and shoes on, I have to use my arms to pull my foot up and rest it on my knee, and then I have to get the shoe on quick or the force of my belly pressing on my thigh will push my foot right off.

I stay on the bike five minutes, then ten minutes, then twenty minutes. I bought the bike in Iowa City, in the 1980s, as part of that decade's weight crusade. Now it's here in New Jersey, up on the third floor, in my office.

No more sandwiches. No more swiping the kid's pizza crust. No more this, no more that. I go to physical therapy three times a week. The back is feeling better. I've stopped taking the Vicodin, although I've saved a few. Insurance. For the road. Just in case.

When Lisa rubs and wraps my legs, I look down and see what has become of me-what I've done to myself. I'm not sure that I would rub and wrap her legs under these circ.u.mstances. I am sure that this is what love is-not a feeling, not an o.r.g.a.s.m, not an anniversary gift. Love is doing what has to be done to keep body and soul together when your beloved is falling apart.

Home from school, my son hugs me, steps back, and formally proclaims, with a sardonic edge all too familiar, that he can now touch his fingertips together when encircling my girth.

"Thanks, Oedipus," I say. "Don't pluck out your eyes on my account."

This boy. This miracle. To become a father at the age of forty-seven is to know how close I came to missing out altogether, to never knowing how much I could love and how much I could be loved.

How much more redemption and grace could a sane man possibly seek than this?

When I left Cleveland in 1984 for Iowa City, after the Iowa's Workshop let me in. I was thirty-two, without money or prospects. I never dreamed I would be gone so long. I thought I'd tear back home like Elvis, with a gold-plated Cadillac and a wad of hundreds in my pocket.

My first wife was turned down by Iowa's graduate biology program because her GRE scores made her look like a moron and her grades from CSU seemed like a joke without a punch line. It wasn't her fault: she was a Cleveland girl who went to city schools and chose the voc-tech track and went to work as a bank secretary while she was still in high school.

Then she realized that she was smarter than her bosses at the bank, and that being a secretary meant that she'd never be looked at as anything more than that, so she bulled through a year of remedial coursework at Cleveland State, which is where we met. She graduated with a 4.0, but the test scores and the Cleveland State University imprimatur killed her chances of getting a shot at a good doctoral program.

Didn't faze her. She was pure West Side, a funny, foul-mouthed Cleveland girl with a white trash mother from Snow Shoe, Pennsylvania, and a moon-faced pop who grew up in an orphanage on a Northern Cheyenne reservation in Whitefish, Montana. All you truly need to know of her-and of the steel in Cleveland's spine-is that she's a specialist at the Mayo Clinic now.

We were married for ten years and never really talked about having kids. I was always loaded, so maybe we did and I just don't remember. But it wasn't an issue, especially after she got into medical school. The amount of work was staggering, she was already past thirty, and the academic road ahead stretched for seven years or more. When she did her first ob-gyn rotation during her third year, she talked about how relieved she was that she wouldn't have to endure the act of giving birth.

What the h.e.l.l did I care? When she got into medical school-after three years of lab work with the school's star research scientist, and six months of prepping for the MCATs-I was the drunken douche bag who'd just hit the lottery. Now I could stay loaded forever and write, which is all I ever wanted to do. I didn't buy her a Hummer with her future earnings; I bought myself a lifetime's free pa.s.s.

I can't sleep. It's Monday, an off night for the Cavs and for the Heat, and it's past midnight and I'm up on the third floor but all I can hear is the whispering inside the refrigerator down in the kitchen. The boy's turkey bologna is in there, conniving with the sliced American cheese. The mayo's in there, too. Lisa just went shopping yesterday, so there's plenty. The kid won't miss it. n.o.body has to know. The bread isn't going to talk: I'll take a couple of slices from the middle of the loaf.

It's not a good plan. It's not even a plan; it's a craving. Give it up. There's fresh fruit down there. Yogurt. Granola. Salad fixings. All the things Lisa eats. You can't fall asleep on an empty stomach? Okay: put some healthy food in there.

Feh. I want the sandwich. I want two or three of them. It is the alcoholic's credo: one is too many and one thousand is never enough.

I come up with a compromise: I'll take a Valium. It's past two a.m.; I'm not taking it to get high. I just want to get to sleep.