When the moon comes dancing

Watching the Knicks with a North African state of mind

Asilah, Morocco

For 24 hours in 1994 I thought the Knicks won the NBA Finals. This is a story about fandom and lostness and the beauty of bad decisions. I want to preface this story by saying I am no longer a Knicks fan, but once upon a time I was.

I was a graduate student in Flagstaff, Arizona and I’d conned the English department into paying for me to attend the James Joyce Symposium. Every year the James Joyce Symposium is held the week of June 16^th. This year the symposium was held in Krakow, Poland. In 1994 it was held in Seville, Spain.

Happy Bloomsday, by the way.

My memories of the conference are disjointed but a few things remain clear. Instead of dorm rooms, they put us in tiny trailers that were like hot boxes. The trailers were in a complex called Los Bermejales, which my roommate and I changed to Los Bermehellhole or Lost Holidays.

My roommate was an Australian named Louis who was a scholar and an author. I knew right away he was absolutely brilliant. Today, I have a whole shelf of books with his name on it. Louis had no luggage. He had a plastic bag where he kept his toothbrush and toothpaste, and the paper he presented at the conference. That’s it.

He had a friend who was an Italian named Giovanni who spoke a half-dozen languages, but his English was poor.

I delivered a paper about James Joyce’s influence on Jack Kerouac. Faux academic rubbish that fooled no one. The highlight of the conference was finding an empty lounge at the university that had Sky TV and watching the Knicks play the Rockets in the conference finals. The broadcast was in Spanish but every time someone dunked the ball they’d shout, “Slamma jamma!”

“Patrick Ewing slamma jamma!”
“Hakeem Olojuwan slamma jamma!”

I had very little money. In the nineties, I was broke all the time. Sports were free. Or free enough. They were on TV. You could read about them in the newspaper. They provided a sense of belonging and you always had something to look forward to. But sports put your imagination in a kind of prison because now your hopes and dreams were tied to an enterprise you had no control over.

At some point in my life I figured out that one can be rich in wealth or experience, and I chose—or maybe it was chosen for me—experience. So when Louis asked me if I wanted to go to Morocco, I said, “Of course.”

But first I had to consult with Todd Taylor, my roommate back in Flagstaff. He, too, was traveling in Europe and we’d decided to meet at the University of Seville. When he arrived he would post a note on the message board—an actual handwritten message on an actual board.

I went to the message board, sure enough, there was a note from Todd. It said. “Hi Jim. I’ll be back tomorrow at 1pm.” The message was dated the previous day. I looked at my watch. It was 1:15. I looked around and there was Todd, sitting on the curb, reading a novel. That’s how broke people communicated in 1994 and, I presume, for many centuries before that.

Todd told me about his travels in Eastern Europe. I probably talked about the Knicks. We didn’t have a plan, but a plan to come up with a plan, and our new plan was to meet in Gibraltar after the conference and travel to Tangier with Louis and Giovanni.

Todd busted out his map and we picked a time and a spot on the island of Gibraltar where we’d meet. (I’ll spare you the details but that meet-up worked flawlessly, too.)

After the conference, I took a bus to the seaside town of Alicante where I stayed in a cheap pension. I didn’t have a reservation. Each day I paid for that night’s stay with a small stack of Spanish pesetas like a beggar in a Ingmar Bergman film.

I ate ice cream every day while walking down the esplanade, trying not to ogle the nude sunbathers on the beach. I spent a lot of time in my room reading James Ellroy’s White Jazz. Now whenever I read a novel set in a European seaside town the devastating loneliness of those days and nights returns to me.

One afternoon I caught the second half of a replay of the previous night’s game and was thrilled to discover the Knicks had won again. One more game and they’d be champions, but I had no one to share the victory with.

I went to Gibraltar and reunited with Todd. We went to Algeciras and rented a room in a seedy pension popular with Anglos traveling to Tangier because they would store your luggage for you.

The next day, we met up with Louis and Giovanni at the ferry terminal. Except it wasn’t just the four of us. That morning Todd and I had acquired a Canadian who didn’t want to travel to Tangier alone. Louis and Giovanni had also acquired a pair of Canadians with similar misgivings.

We got on the ferry and crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, as so many heroes and villains had done before us. Here is where our story takes a dark turn, a turn that does not reflect well on me, I’m afraid.

We arrived safely in Tangier, but every time I turned around our party acquired another Canadian. I went to the Beat Hotel, drank a glass of mint tea, felt literary. But when I rejoined our party it had grown again. Now our Canadians were acquiring Canadians.

Have I mentioned they were all women?

On the train to Fez, we conspired to get off at Asilah and abandon the Canadians. Abandon is too strong a word. There were now eight of them. Possibly more but at least twice our number. They’d be fine.

As we made our escape we discovered that the Canadians were also disembarking. They’d been buttonholed by a charming fellow named Mohammed who invited all of us to stay at an art hotel where all of our needs would be taken care of. The Canadians insisted we go with them. Embarrassed by our duplicity, we consented.

This was a mistake.

If you’ve every traveled with a group of people who don’t know each other very well, you’re familiar with the paralysis that take can hold, especially when those people are young and figuring out if they’re attracted to one another, which can make things a little cloudy.

The Moroccans in charge of the art hotel were quick to seize on this. They noticed that some of the men and most of the women in our party looked to me to make decisions because I was a tall American man. (The same thing happened in boot camp, where I was made a squad leader; we talk about white privilege but height privilege is very much a thing.)

I didn’t want to make decisions. I wanted to drink mint tea so sweet you could feel your teeth rotting and smoke hash from the Atlas Mountains, which the Moroccans at the art hotel had in great abundance. How many days did we spend at the art hotel? I couldn’t tell you. It’s all a sweet smoky blur.

One night the owner of the art hotel, who professed to be the son of the minister of culture and was hella gay, told me he wanted to take me to see the belly dancers, and that the men watching football on the television in the next room were police officers assigned to his security detail, and that we’d be leaving just as soon as the moon comes dancing on the table, which I’m pretty sure was code for when the next shipment of hashish arrived from the Atlas Mountains.

It was time to go.

On the ferry back to Spain, I took everything out of my backpack and laid it out on the deck and searched every seam of my clothing, turned each page of every book in case the cops on the son of the minister of culture’s payroll had planted drugs in my luggage for laughs.

We arrived at Algeciras tired and hungry. At the pension we saw two American girls from Texas.

“Do you know who won the NBA Finals?” I asked.
“Who was playing?” they asked.
“The Houston Rockets and the New York Knicks.”
“The Knicks?” one girl said uncertainly.
“Yeah, definitely the Knicks,” said the other.

Todd and I high-fived and went to a place called Don Pollo where we bought a rotisserie chicken and several large bottles of beer and celebrated in our tiny room. We took turns puking in the sink, but I didn’t care because the New York Knicks were champions.

My Aunt Peg, who is no longer with us, picked me up at the airport at JFK. She was one of the toughest ladies I’ve ever met, and also one of the meanest. I was always a little afraid of Aunt Peg.

“So,” I said as we made our way to Bay Ridge, “the Knicks won!”

My Aunt Peg, who was a lifelong smoker of Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes, looked at me with disgust. I can still see it, the way her head slowly turned and fixed her eyes on me. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

In that moment the bubble of joy I’d carried with me across the Atlantic burst. Those Texas bitches had lied to me. The Knicks were not the champions in 1994.

Nor were they champions in 1995 or 1996 or… You get the idea.

In 1999 James Dolan inherited the team from his father and the head coach Jeff Van Gundy quit the Knicks. I didn’t know a head coach could do that. He saw where the franchise was going and said, “Fuck this. I’m out.”

So I quit, too. I said, “Fuck this” and let myself out of Knicks prison. Since I was living in LA, it was surprisingly easy. In retrospect, it’s one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made because I saved myself a quarter century of disappointment and heartbreak.

I don’t regret that decision, but I see you Knicks fans. I used to be one of you, and while I’m not a fan anymore, I’m happy for you.

Miscellaneous Mayhem

This Saturday June 20 I’ll be at Artifact Books from 3-5pm to celebrate the launch of Waves of Burden with Curtis Ippolito. Curtis’s new novel is set in San Diego is a wild romp through America’s Finest City.

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My story about the second Little Steven’s Underground Garage Cruise was published in Premium magazine and is online now.

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