The Whore Of Akron Part 14

I've got foot issues, man. They're swollen.

"In the barbershop, you have to come correct. Look around you: Nikes, Adidas, Jordans. Everyone rocks their fly sneakers at the barbershop-Crocs? Not so much."

Dmitri's quiet. He's pondering what to put on my head. Dmitri's a LeBron hater, so I've left it up to him. With my pale scalp and the whiteness of my hair, Dmitri has a lot of pondering to do.

"You know what?" Jimi says. "I think white Cleveland felt like they fed LeBron, clothed him, and never called him 'n.i.g.g.e.r' in so many words-so the least he could do is wear his body down for another few years carrying a team of glamour boys and flatfoots."

Come on, Jimi. He was treated like royalty here. Everything he wanted was his for the asking. He didn't even have to ask.

"Nah, man. This is Cleveland. All that 'mama' s.h.i.+t-your moms is loud and ghetto, you're a project kid, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d child of a troubled woman of easy virtue-that's some bulls.h.i.+t. Name a white athlete who ever had to put up with that kinda s.h.i.+t."

I thought the local media people went out of their way to avoid that stuff.

"You don't live here, man. That s.h.i.+t was on the air, daily for a minute-'Who's LeBron's Daddy?' I mean, leading the news. In a city leaking jobs and cops, the news is about LeBron's mama! Hate on me, my work-leave my moms out of it. Whenever you talk about a man's mother-a black man's mother-forget it. You've crossed a line. You've cut too deep."

It runs both ways, though, Jimi. Cleveland eats its own, no doubt. But home is home. And the kid wore that like he meant it. Like he wanted to be here.

"Listen: Freedom means something different, maybe something more, to black people. White folks look at LeBron and see a traitor who turned his back on his city. Black folks, even hardcore fans, see a black man making choices that suit him and his family-without hesitation or regret. Just like white folks do."

Jimi, we're talking about pro athletes. Loyalty is always an issue when a guy decides to leave. And this guy was one of us, or so we thought.

"Cleveland owed LeBron better. He owed us his best game, no more, no less. Hard to ask for more than that."

Dmitri did his best, but you couldn't really see QUITNESS shaved around the sides and back of my head until he took a bloodred makeup pencil and filled in the letters.

To the Edelsteins' credit, they don't blink when we meet for a burger before the game. They don't blink when I spend most of the first quarter standing and screaming at James whenever he gets close. There are plenty of fans doing the same, and never does LeBron so much as glance in my direction.

Halfway through the second quarter, my voice is gone, but my heart-my heart, it is singing. There will be no playoff game at the Q this season, but this is better, louder, and more joyful. The Cavaliers play hard-on one drive, James gets knocked on his a.s.s; on another, his headband is torn off his head-and 20,562 Cleveland fans won't let them lose. Even as the Heat climb back into a tie from 23 points down, the Cavs rise up to smite them back down, and win by double digits for the first time all season, 10290.

Thank you, Lord.

The loss drops Miami out of a tie with the Celtics for best record in the conference. For LeBron, it's one more empty triple-double. For the Cavs's players, it's redemption for 12/2. For the Cleveland fans, it's a victory that will glow forever. For me, it's a sweet ending to my last Cleveland trip of the season.

I'm so giddy that I invite my mother out for Thai food before I leave for home the next day.

"Is that stuff going to come out of your hair?"

Eventually. Most of it came off in the shower.

"You don't have any cuts on your scalp, do you?"

None that I'm aware of, no.

"You shouldn't get an infection."

I believe we've exhausted the subject, don't you?

"They're really going to call the book The Wh.o.r.e of Akron?"

Yep.

"Is that all right with Esquire?"

I hope so.

"Did you check with them?"

Don't worry about it. Worst-case scenario, I come back here and move in with you.

Chapter Fifteen.

Endgame In the end, the Heat finish the regular season with a worse record than LeBron's last two Cavs teams-58 wins total, only 11 more than Miami won last season. But they finish strong, winning 7 of their last 8, including their first and only victory against the Celtics in four tries this season. The only b.u.mp on the Heat's season-ending road comes six hours or so after their one loss, when Gloria James staggers out of the Fountainbleau Hotel at 4:45 a.m. and slaps the valet parking attendant for his failure to rustle up her car fast enough. The Miami Beach police book her for battery and disorderly intoxication and release her.

LeBron wasn't at the Fountainbleau.

"Tough game last night," he tells reporters after practice the next day. "I decided to get my rest."

I'm lucky by comparison. Lucille's most embarra.s.sing habit is to claim that it's her birthday at a restaurant, hoping that the waitress will fetch her dessert on the house. I would not want to watch a surveillance video clip of my mother on TMZ, swinging her purse at the waitress when the cupcake fails to arrive, and falling on her a.s.s.

Playoff fever, Miami-style: before each home game, the Heat place white slipcovers over the seats in the hope that TV viewers will say, "Wow, what's up with all those white slipcovers?" rather than, "Where the h.e.l.l are all the so-called Heat fans?"

Far easier to mock the slipcovers than to contemplate the games themselves, and the pain of watching them. In the second round, against the once-mighty Celtics-too old, too slow, too hurt-LeBron is the hammer of doom, pounding Boston at the Garden for 35 points and 14 rebounds in a Game 4 overtime win, then, back in Miami, scoring the Heat's final 10 points in a game-ending 160 run that also closes out the series.

When the game ends, LeBron drops to one knee and bows his head. Then he rises from the floor, wet-eyed, and embraces Wade. I'm dry-eyed, watching on TV. It's May 11, a year to the day after James's last home game as a Cavalier-the worst game of his seven seasons in Cleveland, the worst home playoff loss in franchise history-when he wandered lonely as a cloud through Game 5 against these Celtics, when he cracked and broke and fell apart.

At the postgame press conference, asked what he was feeling as he knelt, LeBron unlocks the wee jewel box of his soul to offer what most of the sports world will hear as a sincere apology for The Decision: "Everything went through my mind at that point-everything I went through this summer, deciding to come down here to be part of this team. I knew how important team is. I knew deep down in my heart, as much as I loved my teammates back in Cleveland, as much as I loved home, I couldn't do it by myself. And all the backlash I got, I went through a lot, the way it panned out with the fans and family and friends back home. I apologize for the way it happened, but I knew that this opportunity was once in a lifetime."

Happy Anniversary! I made something special just for you: a half-a.s.sed apology, swaddled in self-pity and the certainty that I did the right thing. I'm sorry that my Cleveland teammates sucked a.s.s. Sorry I turned seven seasons of your adoration, grat.i.tude, and hope into an hour of public humiliation. My bad.

Golly, LeBron, thanks. In return, might I suggest that you kiss my hairy Jewish a.s.s?

After a Game 1 sh.e.l.lacking, Miami dismantles the Bulls in four straight with a series of second-half comebacks. James shuts down Derrick Rose, the league MVP, leads Miami in points, rebounds, and a.s.sists, saves a child from drowning in the hotel pool in Chicago, performs an emergency tracheotomy on a choking Heat Index reporter, and cures cancer.

That's essentially the ESPN narrative now: All hail King James. Demonized, LeBron stood tall. Last July they burned his jersey in Cleveland; now it's the best-selling jersey in the league. It's The Vindication. The Redemption.

Huzzah.

Don't mind me, boys. I'll get the lights and lock up the joint.

The time has finally come to face the horror at the heart of my quest. I hold no hope of a reprieve nor doubt about the suffering to come. I have known it all along. I've seen it coming since the night of July 8. I've lived my whole life as a Cleveland fan so that I might bear witness to the truth of it.

The greatest athlete in the history of Cleveland sports was born in Akron and grew up to become a world champion.

In Miami.

What's left for a Jew and a Cleveland fan to do? Keep alive the memory and spirit of December 27, 1964. Embrace the wisdom of Viktor Frankl, whose masterwork, Man's Search for Meaning, Arnie Jensky thrust upon me. Frankl was a psychiatrist who'd survived three n.a.z.i concentration camps, and learned to find value in existence under the worst imaginable conditions.

"The salvation of man is through love and in love," Frankl wrote. "I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way-an honorable way-in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment."

What else? Maybe see if Lisa has a spare moment or two.

There is no joy in Cleveland. I can't help that any more than I can help feeling guilty about it. When it comes to the sufferings of Cleveland, I'm just a tourist now. I left a quarter century ago, and I've enjoyed the kind of run I never could've had as a writer in Cleveland, even if I'd lived a sober day there.

But when it comes to the suffering of Cleveland fanhood, I staked my claim twenty years before LeBron James was born, and never for a moment have I relinquished it. On that soil I'll stand until I die.

All I can do now is see the mission through.

When I became a father, in 1999, I found I could no longer tolerate books or movies about young children in peril, so let me make plain that my son, kinehora, is fine. But on Memorial Day, one day before Miami and Dallas met in Game 1 of the Finals, he fell ill. Vomiting, headache, and a higher fever-102.5-than he'd run in years.

We took him to the doctor Tuesday, on the morning of the first game. Nothing to worry about, the doctor said. A bug. It's going around. A day, a day and a half, he'll be fine.

I sat in the rocker as Judah hacked and sweated and slept on the couch, and watched the Heat defense grind the Mavericks to powder in the first game of the series. Miami won, 9284, and though Dallas kept it close, at no point did they look good enough to win. The Heat were quicker, faster, stronger, and playing with zest and confidence-particularly LeBron, who, in the first Finals victory of his career, led Miami in scoring and added 9 rebounds and 5 a.s.sists.

Worse, Dirk Nowitzki, the Mavs' longtime hero, in his thirteenth season with Dallas and still searching for his first t.i.tle-he, too, had been a free agent last July, but chose to stay-tore a tendon in the middle finger of his left, nonshooting hand late in the game.

Judah slept through the night. I couldn't rouse him enough to get him up to bed.

I don't like the cough. I don't like the phlegm. I don't like how hot he feels when I lay my hand on his forehead.

"Go on up," the dog says. "I'll watch him."

Thanks, but I'm not tired. I'm worried.

"I'd say scared."

Judah wakes up, still on the couch, at ten in the morning, Wednesday, 15 hours after he fell asleep. I'm still in the rocker.

How you feel, kid?

"Not so good."

How's the headache?

"Bad."

On a scale of one to ten?

"Seven."

At least his temperature is down-a little under a hundred. He doesn't want to eat; he's queasy, he says. The cough sounds about the same. But he's not himself. I don't know any other way to think about it. He came home sick on Monday afternoon from the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, threw up in the driveway as soon as Lisa pulled in. That was a little more than 36 hours ago, and he's still not himself.

He's tired all day Wednesday, but he can eat-a bagel, some rice and chicken. A constant stream of water. Cough drops. Tylenol for the headache. Not a great day, but better. No doubt about it. Better.

He wakes up Thursday worse. As the day goes on, the fever's back up above 101. The cough is heavier. The headache comes back. Around five p.m., he eats a small bowl of rice and a few bites of chicken and falls asleep on the couch.

I'm thinking meningitis. I've been studying meningitis online for three nights now. Me and the dog, all night long.

The dog thinks viral, which would be much less dire.

I'm thinking bacterial, because of the season. Bacterial is a version of the nightmare that comes home from the hospital with your newborn and never stops recurring even as it becomes the thing on your sixty-year-old baby's nose.

"Don't tell Lisa," says the dog. "She's worried enough as it is."

Game 2 tips off after nine p.m. with the boy wasted on the couch, and now I can feel the sweep coming. The Heat go up 8873 with 7:33 to play when Wade hits a 3 from the sideline near the Dallas bench. Wade feels all sweepy too: He stands there, holding his pose after the shot falls. LeBron runs over to him and rat-a-tats his chest. Together they s.h.i.+mmy while the Mavs glare in disgust.

"There's no way we're going out like this," the Mavs Jason Terry says to Nowitzki. They were both on the 2006 Dallas team that lost to the Heat in the Finals, a series filled with blown calls and controversy.

"I can't watch this," Lisa says. "I can't stand watching that a.s.shole."

She means LeBron, of course. Lisa's on the couch with Judah's feet resting on her legs. We're going back to the doctor in the morning.

Go on up. Get some sleep. The boy's fine. I'll keep an eye on him. This game's over anyway.

Wrong! Wrong! Beautifully, wonderfully wrong! Slow, methodical, relentless, the Mavericks come back. Miami's not even running an offense anymore; they're playing hero ball, with Wade and LeBron firing 3-pointers and missing. They don't even have sense enough to run time off the clock before they bomb away, and Coach Spo seems helpless to stop them.

Nowitzki scores Dallas's last 9 points-he even left-hands a couple of layins-in a 225 run that ends the game and evens the series at a game apiece.

I go upstairs to tell Lisa that Dallas won.

"You're kidding me," she says.

Nope. It was unbelievable.

"How's the boy?"

The same.

When Lisa was pregnant with Judah, we decided we'd wait until she delivered the baby to find out what flavor she was carrying. Fine with me. I was going to be thrilled either way; of that, I had no doubt. But as the weeks and months rolled by, I more and more wanted to know. Just to know-that's what I thought. Just to know.

It got to the point that I decided to check the clipboard one day at the doctor's when she went to get dressed and he was out of the room. And when I saw that we were going to have a boy, I knew why I wanted to know: because I wanted a boy. This boy.

Here he is. On the couch. Sick. The answer to every question I ever had about the meaning of life, about why I'm still around, why I got sober, why even the worst day of my life now is better than any day I ever had before I met him.

I wasn't hoping for someone to play catch with. I wanted a son because I wanted someone to love me the way I loved my old man, and to give me the chance to do right by that love. Which turns out to be nothing more complicated than being there when he needs me.

But what I couldn't possibly have known is what comes to me now as I sit and watch him sleep. More than I need anyone or anything in the world, I need him.

Of all the mirrors in the world, he's the one whose reflection matters most.

No meningitis. Mycoplasma pneumonia-they used to call it "walking pneumonia"-is what the boy has, and a five-day course of antibiotics will knock it out.