ALEX'S BASKETBALL
“He insisted that if I was going to be tall…I should learn to play his favorite sport.”
By sheer luck, I fell into a great group of friends my first week of sixth grade at Portland, Oregon’s Harriet Tubman Middle School. This story is about one of them, Alex.
Alex had bright blue eyes and hair that tweaked out of place and was smarter than he ever let on. He wore Converse high tops before any of the rest of us. He could play any horn in the school band, but officially he played saxophone. He always called me T.J., my initials. Hey T.J., what’s up? On my twelfth birthday, December 30, 1984, he showed up at my house in his Converse carrying a Spalding basketball. It was the beginning of an annual birthday tradition.
He insisted that if I was going to be tall—I was already 5'4", while he wasn’t yet five feet—then I should learn to play his favorite sport. It was hopeless; though I danced ballet, sports terrified me. Alex didn’t care. He was fun and funny and with him I learned to laugh at my own expense. We laughed uncontrollably at my duck-and-cover fear of any ball that came not even close to my head.
Alex was chronically grounded—for breaking his sister’s pencil, or saying “damn” while doing math homework—but he saw the absurdity of this and carried it lightly. He was one of six kids; he knew his parents felt overwhelmed. I was always in trouble too, but for nebulous or vague reasons, and instead of being grounded, I was hit, or smothered with a pillow, or had things thrown at my head. I never told Alex how bad things were at home, but somehow being able to laugh at his parents made it easier to deal with mine. From him I learned how a wry sense of humor can distance you from difficulty. Because of him I felt less alone.
Though we ended up at different high schools, we stayed close, and we continued the birthday basketball tradition. But junior year, on the eve of 1990, Alex had trouble playing. He was tired and had an intense, pounding headache. He kept saying his glasses were the wrong prescription. Of course the real problem was the sudden and aggressive growth of an inoperable tumor on his brainstem.
That spring and summer, Alex looked the same, told the same jokes, and shrugged off his parents the same as always. The fall of senior year, on the phone, he admitted to being more tired, but overall he said he was fine, everything was fine. When my sister threw me a surprise birthday party that year, I was hurt that Alex didn’t come—until she pulled me into the kitchen to tell me that the awkward heavy man in a wheelchair was him. Alex, on steroids. I went back and hugged him tight around the neck, embarrassed for not recognizing my old friend.
He told me that a second tumor had formed, on his spinal cord. I told him I’d come over the next day. But the next day came and I was in trouble at home again, I didn’t know how to make up for the weirdness of my party, and I was angry at him for having said everything was fine when I could now see clearly that it wasn’t. So I stayed away. I never did go to his house until I got the call, on a Saturday night in March, that he was dying. Then I ran. I got there a few minutes too late.
In July 2020 I was diagnosed with my own sudden, aggressive cancer. Sitting in the chemo chair, I thought about Alex a lot. I thought maybe he hadn’t told me how dire things were because he feared I might see him differently or pity him—a fear I now understood. I thought maybe if I’d found the courage to tell him how bad my home life was, he might have felt comfortable telling me how bad his cancer was.
My cancer had a treatment plan and a good prognosis—though in 1990 it would not have. In 1990 I would have died as quickly as Alex. Instead, because of him, I laughed my way through: at the absurdity of receiving a cancer coloring book in chemo, at Sephora sending me free mascara when I had no eyelashes.
I’ve never forgiven myself for failing Alex as he was dying. It is my biggest regret. In my journal after he died, I wrote that I owed him so much and gave him so little, and I still feel this is true. I wish I could say I’m sorry. And thanks: for the basketball my tall 12-year-old son now uses, and for the friendship that saved my life.
—Tara Lindis
Tara Lindis is a writer and freelance editor whose work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Pithead Chapel and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.