Magic Is Dead, page 16
During this time, Shaquille O’Neal had become the nexus of children and sports. His boisterous personality and off-the-court endeavors appealed to young kids, and I was a poster boy of that influence. My father supported my fascination with Shaq. He played Shaq Fu, the video game, with me at night when he got home from work. He bought me Shaq’s rap albums, his Reebok shoes (no doubt way above budget for our family at the time), and, most important, the kid-sized jersey that I wore when we drove to Boston that brisk morning in March 1996. I was eight years old, at the height of my fandom. He had gotten an inside scoop as to where Shaq and the rest of the Orlando Magic, his team at the time, were staying for their away game against the Boston Celtics, and surprised me the morning of the game.
“You’re not going to school today,” he said, popping his head into my bedroom.
“Why not?” I asked.
He smiled. “The Magic are playing the Celtics today,” he said. “We’re going to go meet Shaq.”
I squealed in delight.
He was bringing me to meet my idol—the dream of any parent.
We parked across the street from the hotel’s entrance in downtown Boston. My father had no idea what time the team was scheduled to leave for the stadium, so we stood out in the sharp, late-winter wind and waited. I wore my Shaq jersey over a T-shirt and my father draped his big coat over my shoulders to keep me warm. It smelled like him: dust and tile mortar and cigarettes. After a few members of the local press showed up with their cameras, we knew the time was getting close.
My father tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a marker. “I think he’s coming,” he said. I looked up at him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” The press had a better line of sight into the hotel’s lobby (we were slightly off to the right), but when they pointed their cameras toward the entrance, we knew he was coming. Shaq ducked under the doorway, sunglasses perched on his nose, wearing a sweatsuit of white and gold. My father grabbed his jacket off my shoulders, slung it over his arm, pushed some photographers out of the way, quickly shuffled me toward the front, and turned me around right in front of him, blocking his path.
“Shaq, please sign my son’s jersey,” my father asked him.
Shaq towered over me. He looked down, took the marker, latched his massive hand onto my shoulder, bent down, and wrote “SHAQ” in a modest cursive just above my shoulder blade, the marker’s felt tip pushing gently into my skin. He handed the marker back to me and kept walking. Before I could turn to face him, my father had already lifted me off the ground and gripped me with his big arms, hugging me furiously, kissing my cheek, his thick mustache brushing against my skin. I could barely breathe. He then pulled away to look at my face. We both just smiled. We ran back over to his truck and made our way to the stadium. I was in such shock that I didn’t realize that I was shivering.
After the game, my father immediately had the jersey and our tickets professionally framed. The jersey hung in the hallway of our home for four years until, in 2000, we moved into our new, much bigger house on the outskirts of town. The jersey came with us, too, and hung on the wall in his office next to the University of Tennessee memorabilia that he had collected over the years. The jersey was a memory for both of us, sitting in plain view, of his efforts to try to be a good father. Shaq’s signature sat just above the jersey’s number, where my tiny shoulder blade had been.
It rained the day he died. Twenty minutes into our drive home (a car pool of our relatives on my mother’s side of the family), the rain stopped and the sky split open revealing a thick, pulsating rainbow. When my mother’s brother Isoac passed away a few years earlier from a brain tumor (a slow, awful decline), a rainbow had also appeared in the hours just after his death. To my mother and her sisters, it represented the soul leaving his body—it was a way of him saying good-bye, and we kept a photograph of the rainbow in our house as a reminder of my uncle.
So, when, just after my father died, the sky opened up and the taut ribbon of color knifed through the clouds, everyone pulled over. The air on the highway, refracting off the hot black pavement and the gray dome of the sky, wrapped around us like a gaseous prism—an intangible cloud of greens and blues and purples and pinks, fractals of light embedding themselves into the tear-soaked whites of my mother’s eyes. The skin on her hands glowed a strange mix of magenta and yellow as she used them to cover her face. I shoved my hands into my pockets, looked up at the sky, and thought, This thing isn’t my father. He was still lying on that bed, bruised fruit, covered in a sheet that had touched perhaps dozens of other dead people as well. This thing in the sky doesn’t mean anything. I walked back to the car and opened the door and sat down. Globs of rainwater coated the windshield. I waited for them to be done.
We came home from the hospital to find people waiting—family and friends who had gotten word that he was dead in the hour it took for us to get back to our house. I entered through the garage and into the basement and everyone’s face was contorted in some strange, subversive way, like they felt guilty for not knowing what to do. And what should you do in that situation? How do you act around a boy who just lost his father?
How do you act when that boy is you?
So, I stood in the center of our half-finished basement, which had been turned into some semblance of a game room, and people came up and touched me in ways they hadn’t before—a gentle hand on my forearm, an arm slung across my back—and I just nodded and said thank you and didn’t cry. I said I wanted something to drink. And although there was a refrigerator right there, fully stocked with sodas and waters and the beers my father hadn’t yet opened, I went upstairs to the kitchen. I opened the fridge but didn’t take anything out. I walked to the small living room where he had the stroke, turned left, past the basement door, and peeked into his office. I knew he wasn’t there, but I opened the door anyway. Papers sat strewn across his desk, invoices and scribbled notes and other random things. And above it, on the back wall, hung the framed and signed jersey of Shaquille O’Neal. I stared at the jersey for a short while, and then closed the door and walked away.
Time went on after his death. The house he built settled with age, and our lives carried on as best they could. I stopped playing football the year after he died, and my passion for team sports largely faded during my high school years. Whereas my mother had tried to recycle a past version of herself into her post-death identity, I did my best to start from scratch, to become someone new and entirely distant from what was originally planned for me: I decided to become a writer. I wanted to be in touch with the world, to try to understand it, to share stories of other people’s lives, especially since I couldn’t make sense of my own.
It was a life my father surely wouldn’t have chosen for me. He was grooming me to become an engineer or an architect, always championing my analytical mind and intuitive people skills. They were the same characteristics that allowed him to escape Ohio and marry my mother and have a son and discover a better life. He must have been relieved that I could also rely on those traits to find my purpose as a man—to end up somewhere better than where I started. And, to him, pursuing an esteemed but still hands-on profession was the best way to apply those skills. He wore a Dartmouth cap while I was still in middle school, the plan already in place that that was where I would attend college.
Bits and pieces of him clung to our home over the years, my mother largely reluctant to wipe clean where memories of him still lingered. But, as time went on, many things were taken off the walls and put into storage, including the Shaq jersey that hung in his office. I remember rummaging through the attic while on a trip home during college. I don’t remember exactly what I was looking for, but, through the course of my searching, I came across the jersey. Dust coated the frame’s glass, but the memory was still vibrant. The two of us parking the truck across the street. Shaq’s hand on my shoulder. Me jumping into my father’s arms. Him doing his best to show his son how much he loved him, how much he wanted him to become a good person.
Ten years later, shortly after I arrived at the office building in New Hampshire, now a struggling writer, I was scrolling through Instagram and came across a post from Shaq. He boasted that he had secured a slot in the upcoming TomorrowWorld Festival in Georgia, a three-day electronic music event—the American offshoot of the famed European circuit TomorrowLand—that every year boasts an attendance of nearly two hundred thousand. My eyes lit up. I knew how passionate Shaq had been about deejaying, especially as a teenager, and, four years into his retirement from professional basketball, it felt like he was trying to find himself again—to hark back to an old flame, a thing he has always adored. Shaq’s turn to music felt ironically familiar; when I saw that post, I thought of my mother and her return to poker—an attempt to regain a piece of her identity that had been buried for a long time.
I immediately ran to my desk and emailed Jorge Arangure, my editor at Vice Sports, and told him about the announcement. I said I wanted to know what kind of man Shaq had become since leaving the NBA. I wanted to go to the festival with him. It was a long shot, though; the type of access I was looking for is rarely granted for such a prominent celebrity, but after I cold-called Shaq’s management team and explained my intentions, they agreed, saying that they thought my take on the event was worthwhile. They’d let me tag along on the trip. I nailed down the logistics and, a month later, hopped on a plane to Atlanta.
Although I hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years, Shaquille O’Neal was still a large man compared to me. He moved slower than his playing days, walking with a timid gait, favoring his left hip. Slivers of gray threaded the scruff on his chin and cheeks. His hands were soft and gentle, nails white and trim, with long fingers that found their way onto the wrists and shoulders of those around him. Deep brown eyes sat above his boyish smile, which he flashed often, tugging his lips slightly to the right. When we first met, he was a young man. When we met again, he was forty-three years old.
We took a limousine bus from downtown Atlanta to the festival grounds. Two of Shaq’s sons, and a few other family members, joined for the festivities. It was dark now, the bus moving under the cover of trees lining the road off the highway. Signs started popping up for the festival entrance. The road turned to dirt as the bus went deeper into the woods. The bus rumbled down the dark path, careening through patches of mud, pushing through potholes and puddles. The road swung to the right, and the festival came into view. Neon lights—pink, blue, purple, green—shot into the sky like jagged streaks of lightning. Tents dotted the patch of grass between two clusters of trees, troves of oak knitted with pine, and, in the far distance, the main stage pulsed in front of a sea of a hundred thousand people—a glowing bubble of glitter, feathers, spandex, and lace.
We offloaded near the stage and piled into three golf carts. I rode in the front with Shaq, and his sons and the rest of the crew split up between the other two. When they arrived at the rear of the stage, he was swarmed by fans, other artists, and members of the media. Despite his lack of clout in the EDM world, everyone wanted a piece of Shaq. When he announced his performance at TomorrowWorld, reactions on social media were mixed. Some users thought it was a joke, a ploy for publicity not only for the festival but also for Shaq himself. Many were skeptical that his performance was just another shallow attempt to stay relevant—a way to not be just another retired athlete, forgotten and mused over as someone who once was.
Shaq stood behind a curtain at the rear of the stage. His sons had made their way to the front, to the left of the DJ booth and waited for their father to emerge. Shaq had taken off his sweatshirt, revealing his Lakers jersey, a team he played for later in his career, matching that of his son Myles. Underneath the jersey, a black shirt tucked into loose-fitting blue jeans. He wore neoprene and rubber rain boots, chunky and thick. They were ugly. He could have easily passed for someone’s father—a very large dad.
He emerged from the rear of the stage and walked up to the turntables. He plugged in his headphones. His long fingers pushed buttons. He grabbed the microphone. “Let’s go, TomorrowWorld!” he yelled, starting the music. He careened through the tracks, dabbling in some dubstep, his heavy frame shaking and bobbing behind the booth, steam rising off his shoulders and head, arms raised in the air. He came alive, looking younger and more mobile than his actual age. Toward the end of the set, Shaq’s sons joined their father at the turntables. They danced and smiled. Fog spewed from the stage. Confetti shot from cannons. They were here and the crowd was cheering and everyone was together.
We made our way back to the golf carts after his set. “That was so amazing, Dad,” his son Myles said as we got on the cart. We made our way to a VIP area for something to eat, and so Shaq could talk to the media. Between interviews, his sons headed back into the festival. Shaq told them to meet at midnight over at the main stage for Tiësto and reminded them to stick together. After we finished eating, a van brought us to the main stage and we walked to the VIP upper deck, overlooking the crowd.
Shaq mingled with fans, posed for pictures, and listened to the music. The main stage boomed in front of the massive crowd, live waterfalls gushing next to the DJ booth, fire blasting from large metal tubes into the air. Spectators hoisted their homeland’s flags: South Korea, Brazil, Spain, Italy, Belgium. Lights funneled from the stage. It was loud. The boys came back and stood next to their father. They watched the crowd together, and Shaq draped his arms around their shoulders. As I stood next to Shaq and his family at the festival, I felt the most overwhelming sense of pride. He was a good father.
A few weeks before our trip to the festival, Shaq invited me over to his house in Orlando, Florida, for a meet-and-greet and a sit-down interview. As I drove onto the property, one of his assistants opened the gate and told me where to park. I waited in the guest living room for him and, a few minutes later, he entered and approached me. He reached out for a handshake. As we locked in greeting, I remembered those hands resting on my shoulder nearly two decades earlier.
Coming into the interview, I had been afraid of this. That, when Shaq and I were together, I would be thrown into a web of memories of my father. Us parking the car on the street adjacent to the hotel in Boston. The brisk wind on my neck as we stood outside waiting for Shaq’s exit. The excitement in my chest as I approached him with a marker in my hand. Shaq bending down, resting that gentle hand on my shoulder, signing the back of my jersey. The smile on my father’s face as I jumped into his arms. And now, twenty years later, I had the opportunity to talk to the man who was at the center of one of the most vivid memories I have of my dad. He led me into the central wing of the home and we sat down in his kitchen.
The two-decade span between our encounters snapped into focus, a piercingly clear realization that I had become a thirty-year-old man who has continually tried to distance himself from the memory—the sheer existence—of his father. I’ve come to comprehend now, fifteen years after his death, that, even after accomplishing all that he did as an entrepreneur and a family man, my father knew deep down that he was still just a lost boy on the run, someone who has spent his whole life sprinting away from a painfully clear starting line but without a strong sense as to where he was actually running. People, I understood, are always trying to find a sense of purpose, or at least an element of control, in a life that has no obligation to take care of them, and I think, more than anything, my father just wanted to be normal, crushingly average—just a person, if nothing else, who had found true happiness. I have, ironically, become very much like him in this regard. But whereas he tried to shed the chains of his upbringing, I’ve struggled to not become just a kid with a dead dad, a tag that can haunt you for your entire life, an asterisk affixed to all that you do, a secret force that determines who you are and what you will become. But I wanted to know—needed to know—that the person I am didn’t manifest because of his death, but rather in spite of it. And although I am someone he had not envisioned—would he be proud of who I’ve become?—he’s still here with me, because the death of a father is not his alone. It transforms into a rock that must be carried in the pocket of his son, a ghastly thing that never seems to go away. And, despite being in my pocket for many years, I have never touched that rock. I do not know its grooves and crevices, its bumps and ridges. I know only its weight and its inability to be removed. To this day, despite this phantom weight constantly knocking at my leg, I rarely speak about him. I’ve come to realize I never knew my father as a man. That’s hard for me. We never had the opportunity to become equals, to share a real and honest relationship. There just wasn’t enough time.
Life does not cradle or catch. It only pushes and pulls—violent and unpredictable, like a storm at sea, the captain always looking over his shoulder, ready for the inevitable rogue wave to come crashing down, sinking the whole goddamn ship. To this day, my greatest fear in life is to never be able to truly understand his identity as a man—to fully grasp how much he sacrificed, how much he cared, how hard he tried—and how much we may share as adults. That I, perhaps, will understand we were both just two men who, at their core, were trying nothing more than to grasp the hard truth that sometimes finding purpose in life—truly finding yourself—is one thing you may never come to accomplish, that time is not a thing with which you can make a deal. The hard truth is that having a plan is worthless, because sometimes plans fall through. Sometimes having a plan is the worst fucking thing to ever have in your entire life. Because, when your life is cut short and your plan ruined, had you really even begun to exist at all?
