Albert must have heard us drive up. He opened the front door but left the screen on the latch and stood with his face against the mesh looking out. “Do I get a hug from the big guy?” Dad said, but Al only looked at him.
Betsy walked up behind; she had Troy in her arms. “Make eye contact. It’s your grandfather. You remember him.”
“It’s okay,” my dad said. “I need the facilities anyway. Give him a minute,” and he pushed past her to the bathroom down the hall.
I was hauling suitcases on to the porch but stopped and opened the door and picked up Al whether he wanted me to or not. This involved propping the screen against my butt. I turned him upside down and shook him out, like I was looking for loose change.
“I don’t think he likes that,” Betsy said. “Anyway, you’re letting the mosquitoes in.”
The way she stood there, holding her three-year-old boy like a baby for protection, reminded me of that scene in a Western where the cowboy rides up to the log cabin house in the middle of nowhere, and the woman comes out to see what’s going on.
“Well, he better get used to it. Right, Al?”
And when I set him on his feet he said, “Okay, Uncle Brian.”
“In the meantime, you can help me with some of this stuff.”
The screen door clabbered behind us, and when we walked out to the car together, he took my hand.
It’s too hot to stand outside in Austin in August, whatever needs doing you have to do quickly. I gave Al one of the shoe bags to carry. The junk in the car, the empty soda bottles and candy wrappers on the floor and on the seats, all that could wait. 102
When I brought the last load up the steps, Betsy put Troy on the ground. “Let me help you,” she said. And then: “She says, when it’s too late.” And then: “I’m sorry, this is totally meaningless, this is because it’s nice to see you,” because there were tears running down her cheeks. “You forget that your kids have actual feelings about your brother,” she said. “You think it’s just another one of those things you force on them.”
*
The house I grew up in is a small three-bedroom house, which meant that Betsy obviously kept her own room, which had the big double bed in it she didn’t need anymore. But the boys had to move in together, and Dad and I were going to share. At least that was the initial plan. Troy’s room, which was my old room, was also the smallest, and Betsy thought the boys should go in there. But Albert raised a stink and Dad said, “Let him win this one,” and Betsy said, “He wins all of them. I let him win all of them. Eventually he has to stop winning or we’ll all go crazy.”
Then Troy kicked up a fuss, when he saw us moving his bed into Al’s room. In the end we agreed on a compromise arrangement—he could sleep with his mom, which it turned out he was mostly doing already. But in his own bed. So we moved his little Ikea race car into Betsy’s room, where there wasn’t really space. “This is pointless,” she said, sort of supervising and sort of protesting. “He just climbs in with me anyway. I like it.”
“I don’t think that’s a long-term solution,” my dad told her.
“There are no long-term solutions. There are only short- and medium-term solutions. Medium-term is anything over a week at this point.”
My old bedframe was in the garage, and just locating it and making room to carry out the relevant pieces of wood was a two-hour job, which Albert helped me with. Then trying to bang the pieces together again, finding the Allen wrench, twisting the bolts. Dad offered to sleep permanently on the sofa in the living room. “I don’t 103sleep anyway,” he said. “I watch TV. I wake up at five in the morning to use the bathroom. Brian is thirty-five years old. He doesn’t want to sleep with his father.”
But Betsy put her foot down. “I’m not turning the house into a dormitory. If this is going to work it’s because we keep up certain standards.”
Meanwhile, Troy had a playdate with a friend of his from day care, which Betsy had totally forgotten about. “I didn’t know when you were coming, I couldn’t just totally suspend my life …”
“Nobody asked you to,” I said.
“The mom is one of the moms I like. They live out by Deep Eddy. The plan was to take them swimming.”
“I can drive him, if that’s of any assistance.”
“Dad, I don’t think you want to spend the afternoon hanging out with this woman.”
“Why not?”
“Dad, don’t adopt positions that are totally implausible.”
“Those are my favorite positions.”
“Why don’t we all go, why don’t we all go swimming,” I said. But Albert point-blank refused. For some reason, he doesn’t like swimming anymore, Betsy said. The water is cold, it’s too cold. The water at these pools is not cold, it’s like lukewarm, it’s like piss temperature.
Don’t be disgusting, that’s disgusting. And so the long day wore on. In the end Betsy and Dad took Troy, they went in Betsy’s car, and left me and Albert at home to sort out the house. There were still suitcases in the hallway, mattresses leaning against the wall. Dishes in the sink. Dad had to park in the road so that Betsy could back out, so he got out of one car and into the other. All of this took time, but when the Honda disappeared at last through the arches of live oak shadowing the neighborhood street, Al turned to me and said, “Finally, peace and quiet,” and I tried to figure out if this was something his dad said, or if it sounded more like Betsy.
“Let’s get out of here,” I told him. 104
“Where are we going?”
My old basketball was in the garage, along with everything else. It just needed pumping up. “To the park. To shoot hoops.”
“I don’t want to play basketball. It’s too hot.”
“I’ll buy you an ice cream after.” So that’s what we did.
*
This became something of a habit. Albert had recognized what other kids before him had recognized, a way of escaping domestic life. I’m just going out to shoot hoops. Sometimes he just messed around in the driveway, so Betsy had to park her Honda in the street, if she didn’t want to hear the ball bouncing off the windshield. The Rawlings backboard my dad had put up over the garage door almost thirty years ago was mostly eaten away with rot. The rim leaned down at an eighty-degree angle, which made it easy to shoot at. I could lift Albert up over my head and hold him there long enough to dunk. Sometimes while playing these games with him I was aware of my sister watching us from the living-room window.
For complicated reasons, which were partly financial, Betsy had decided to take Al out of the Montessori out past Barton Creek and send him to Lee, the local elementary, where I used to go. Private school is one of the things she argued about with Greg, part of their general disagreement about the life they were living. Anyway, she didn’t want to pay for the Montessori, now that Greg had moved out along with most of his salary, and she didn’t want to sit in traffic all day, driving Albert to and from. So, in addition to all of his other life changes, come Monday morning, he had to face a new school.
So if I, his uncle, could spend an hour with him in the driveway or the public court passing a ball back and forth, saying, well done, when the ball went in, I was happy to do it.
Al’s best friend from kindergarten was a kid who lived three blocks away on 48th Street—just the other side of the park. He was already going to Lee, which is another reason Betsy thought it would be okay. 105His name was Noah and they had a good time together, but Noah also liked to make Al feel like, you’re a little bit worse than me at everything. At least, everything to do with sports, racing, throwing, jumping, biking. Shooting hoops. Anyway, it’s how their friendship worked. I saw enough of these interactions after school to judge what was going on, but you have to tell yourself, they’re just kids, this is what kids do to each other, and maybe in his own way, Al fought back. Who knows.
Noah had an older brother, who started at power forward for Burleson High. This kid’s name was Zach, he was about six five, and Noah probably thought: that’s what I’m going to be when I grow up. If I’m lucky. And because Zach was obsessed with the fact that Austin was getting its own NBA team, Noah couldn’t talk about anything else.
Al had to be able to hold his own in these conversations, which should have been easy for him, because his uncle happened to be writing a book about Marcus Hayes; they were old friends. But Noah refused to believe him. No way your uncle is friends with Marcus Hayes. No way. They were shooting around in the driveway, and Noah was basically pushing Albert around. I stood on the front porch watching, and Al called out, “Is it true? That’s what you said. Aren’t you writing a book about Marcus Hayes?”
“It’s totally true,” I said, feeling like, score one for the nephew but also like, you know, a bit of a schmuck.
“Isn’t he a friend of yours?”
“That’s right. He even lived with us for a while. In this house.”
“No way,” Noah said. “I mean, no way.”
“Absolutely way,” but I could see the kid thought like, whatever.
“Why don’t you invite him over then? To shoot hoops?” Noah said.
“Maybe I will.”
“Come on, then. Call him now.”
And I thought, you twerp.
*
106But the truth is, I was having a hard time getting hold of Marcus Hayes. That was one of my problems. His old coach at Texas, Todd Steuben, he was really the assistant but recruited Marcus out of Burleson … anyway, he left Texas and after a stint in the NBA took the job at UCLA. So Marcus spent his summers working out at Pauley Pavilion. A lot of ex-Bruins were in the League, a couple of All-Stars, the competition was high-level, guys like Taylor Johns and Demme Franklin, plus all the young guns coming up who wanted to prove themselves against NBA talent. So at the end of August I put the wet heat of Austin behind me for a couple of days and flew to LAX, where it was just as bad.
Getting in touch with Marcus involved negotiating with middlemen, a lot of people whose job it was to run obstruction. I called his agent, Sheldon Fitch, and left a message with his assistant. I called Ted Myers, the Nike rep, with whom I’d always had a human relationship. But he was on vacation in Hawaii. And so it went.
The scrimmages at Pauley were closed to the media, but sometimes if you play it like an ordinary civilian, a dad or a janitor, you can just walk in. Coaches aren’t allowed on court with the players until the practice season officially starts at the end of September, so there’s this unofficial quality to the summer workouts that makes them hard to police. I put on shorts and high-tops and my Burleson varsity shirt, which was one thousand washes and twenty years old, and nobody stopped me. A fat, six-three thirty-five-year-old guy is probably just an ex-player, even if he looks like me.
Pauley’s a nice arena, you realize when they’re empty just how spacious these places are. Like airport hangars. There were guys playing on the main court and pockets of guys warming up on some of the side baskets. But people also lined the sidelines, watching.
Marcus Hayes wore compression sleeves on his legs. He had long gray shorts and a gray Longhorns T-shirt that hung over his waist so you couldn’t see his stomach. Also, he’d let his hair grow and looked a bit like one of those dudes you see in the park shaking out the kinks, 107talking trash. Because that’s what he did, pounding the ball, making guys wait while he dribbled up court. I guess he was still getting into shape, and because Marcus was Marcus, they let him play his way in. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t under attack. When you’re Marcus Hayes everybody wants to say they did this or that, especially these college kids, where maybe it’s their first real contact with royalty, where afterward they can brag, I blocked Marcus Hayes.
In fact, that’s what I saw. Marcus came off a screen at the top of the key and drove hard to the hole. But when he planted, something was missing. His leg didn’t buckle exactly, but the thing that’s supposed to happen, where he’s suddenly at the rim, didn’t happen. So when he laid the ball in, some college kid, a light-skinned dude, maybe six nine, pinned it against the glass and started whooping.
Marcus said, “Count it,” and the kid said, “What do you mean,” and Marcus said, “Goal tend,” and because he was Marcus Hayes, the score was now whatever it was, six–five. They were playing by ones and twos.
“Aw, c’mon man,” the kid said and kept talking about it all the way down court. Marcus was guarding him but got stuck on a back screen, which nobody called out. Somebody tossed the ball at the rim and the kid was there to throw it down. He sort of bounced into the air and then kept bouncing after he landed. “That’s how we do,” he said. He was having a good time. “That’s how we do.”
Somebody told him, “Just shut up,” and Marcus said, “Give me the ball.”
I knew the kid; his name was Jabari Moore, he was a prospect, if he filled out. In college you can get by on talent, but he had an NBA body, and if he put in the work, the scouting report said, he might turn himself into a useful energy guy off the bench. If he learned to shoot, he could be something more, maybe a 3 and D guy, a third or fourth option on a good team. That can make a nice career for you, if you put in the work, and you’re willing to accept it, but he was at the stage where he really didn’t understand how severely limited his talents were. 108
So Marcus said, give me the ball, and had to pound and spin his way up court because Jabari kept hounding him. Marcus used his ass to keep the kid at bay, he wasn’t quick enough anymore just to blow by. Just after half-court, he curled off a high screen and took two steps, with the kid on his hip, and fired from twenty-five feet and knocked it down.
“Eight–six,” he said. “Keep talking.”
After that he hit two more three-pointers. I don’t think either of them touched rim. Ten–six, twelve–seven, game over. But it was hard work, and Jabari was just a dumb … I mean, it shouldn’t have been so hard.
Then somebody said, “Excuse me, you can’t film in here. You need to give me your phone.”
“What are you talking about?”
I had my phone out, set on video, holding it out like I was trying to see the screen, in the soft atmospheric light that filters down from the complicated roof of the windowless arena.
“Sir,” he said. The kid was just some college kid, working a summer job. “You need to give me your phone. Don’t make me be like an asshole about it. I don’t want to have to call security.”
“I thought you were security.”
“Come on, man. Look.”
“This is a public university. My tax dollars paid for this building.” Which totally wasn’t true, I never paid taxes in California. Sometimes you say this stuff because it seems like the kind of stuff you should say. It’s stupid, and you feel stupid. You feel like, everything would turn out better if you treated this like a human interaction. So I said, “Marcus Hayes is an old friend of mine. I’m a writer, he wants me to write a book about his comeback. Go ask him.”
But it didn’t matter because by that point security had come. One of those fat-nosed white guys, where his face is like any other muscle, almost expressionless. Suddenly I called out, “Marcus, Marcus, it’s me, Brian Blum. Hey Marcus,” and for a second the ball stopped bouncing 109and from a distance of thirty feet the guys on court stood around to see what was going on. It’s hard to tell but I think Marcus recognized me, he looked at me with a certain detached amusement. These are the things you’re willing to let other people do for you, if you’re in his position.
“Marcus,” I said, “It’s me,” while the guy took my arm and I shook it off but walked out anyway into the corridors, past the weight rooms and the ticket concourse. There was construction going on outside, which was maybe why they let me through in the first place.
*
I was staying at the Marriott in Pasadena—that’s where the magazine always puts me up. Hotel life depresses me, just the time you waste thinking, should I go out and see something, or should I stick around the hotel. It saps your energy, which includes the energy to get the hell out. But there’s nothing to see in Pasadena anyway. The Rose Bowl. Also, my platinum status gave me access to the lounge, free drinks, fruit slices, muffins, bags of popcorn, so that’s where I spent most of the afternoon.
At one point, Fred Rotha stopped by to say hello. He’s another one of those NBA reporters who actually lives in LA but takes pity on out-of-towners.
“Did you make it into Pauley? Did you see anything?”
So I showed him my phone. Even if you magnified the image, Marcus Hayes looked like everybody else. When his jump shots fell, the net seemed to blur and swallow, but it was hard to tell if the ball went in.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” he asked me. Fred had a piece to file on “the comeback” but all he had was a bench guy for the Bruins saying, “He looks sharp. I just can’t believe I’m playing against him.”
I liked Fred. Everybody did. Even in the hotel lounge in Pasadena he wore his dad’s tweed jacket and a totally generic blue tie. Fred got 110paid two hundred thousand a year. Everybody read him, including front office guys. If it wasn’t the NBA he’d be covering the White House for CNN. But when success happens to you, you’ve got to maintain some kind of act that is different from that success. Because you don’t want to be the guy acting like two hundred thousand a year. So Fred played up the old beat reporter thing, which I basically respected him for—the spiral notebook, the chewed-up pencil, cab receipts coming out of his pockets.
“I tried to squirrel my way into Pauley but they wouldn’t let me in.”
“That’s because they recognized you,” I said.
“So what did you see?” He ignored the implication. “How does he look?”
Something told me I should keep my powder dry on all this, because if you’re writing a book about Marcus Hayes, you need every scoop you can get. But I like to talk.
“He looked heavy, he looked old. What you see in that video is after he got blocked by Jabari Moore. He tried to plant on a layup and nothing happened. It’s like he was jumping on sand.”
Fred looked at my phone again, I replayed the clip.
“All those shots went in?” I nodded my head. “At least he can shoot. That takes legs, too.”
“It looks different to me, his release, the whole thing. He used to get up on his jump shot, too. But now it’s more like a quick-trigger. Jabari is long but he doesn’t know how to fight through picks.”
Fred kept tapping the screen, freezing each frame, to see what was going on. Part of what he’s known for is real-time analysis. But he didn’t say anything and eventually passed me the phone again.
“So where are you with Marcus Hayes?” I asked. This is how we talked to each other, this is the language. Like, everybody has this complicated private relation to these people, which we have to digest and eventually make sense of. “What’s the piece about?”
Fred had been looking at all the players under contract, who the 111Sonics were taking to Austin. Last year they finished 36 and 46, which was a big step up on the previous season, mostly because of Jean Mmeremikwu. He had different nicknames because his last name was hard to pronounce, and his first name was French, so Americans either got it wrong or sounded stupid saying it. Fred made a point of calling him Mmeremikwu, like, what’s your problem, it’s not a big deal. But people also called him Mickey. His father was Nigerian but he grew up in Marseille and only started playing basketball when he was fifteen. His real love was soccer, that’s the kind of piece people wrote about him. He was six ten with a seven-five wingspan and could go baseline to baseline in two dribbles.
“What really worries me,” Fred said, “is Marcus going up against that guy in practice every day. Mmeremikwu’s a killer, he’s going to run him off the court. If there’s a power struggle in the team, and there’s going to be a power struggle, I don’t see how Marcus can keep up with him. He just won’t have the energy.”
“Is that what you’re going to write?”
“More or less. But I wanted to see him play first.”
The lounges in these hotels always pipe in soft jazz and easy-listening pop. There are heavy-leaved plants in large pots that have to be watered daily and give off a faint scent of spritz. The upholstery is totally sound-absorbent. That’s the atmosphere in which you conduct these conversations.
Fred said to me, “You look a little beat.”
“I flew in yesterday. I’ve been running around, trying to get people to answer my calls. My publisher needs Marcus to sign one of these access agreements for the authorized biography. Blah blah blah. They’re totally meaningless, but that’s what they want. If he changes his mind, he can change his mind, and there’s nothing anybody can do. But the whole book was Marcus’s idea in the first place, that’s what I told the publishers. So they want proof.”
“Congratulations, by the way. I’ve been meaning to write you.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t know.” 112
Sometimes almost in spite of these collegial relationships, where what you share is a nerd interest in unimportant facts, something human passes or gets communicated. “What’s up?” he said.
“Don’t you ever get sick of playing handmaiden to these people?”
“What do you mean?”
“They put balls in hoops, that’s what they do. But we chase them around the country for eight months a year trying to persuade our readers that it matters.”
“I know what you mean. I miss my kid.”
“How old is he now?”
“Three next month.”
“One of my nephews is three,” I said, but that wasn’t really an equivalent response. “None of this would bother me if we actually got to write what we think about these people, but we’re basically in the PR business.”
“I hate to tell you but I write what I think. This is the dumb stuff I think about. I’d rather cover these guys than Congress. At least these guys are good at what they do.”
“Maybe,” I said.
*
That night I got a call from Joe Hahn, Marcus’s lawyer, who told me to stop by the house on my way to the airport in the morning. My flight was at noon. I’ll give you breakfast, he told me. What do you like? Pancakes, oatmeal, egg-white omelets? I’ve got a personal chef these days, my wife tells me I need to lose twenty pounds, but you can eat what you want. Joe’s accent was still the accent he grew up with, in Saginaw, which is one of those cities where the government is starting to tear stuff down. Just because nobody wants to live there. Anyway, that’s what he sounded like, pure Michigan, so when he talked about egg-white omelets it was hard to tell who he was making fun of. Me or this life he led. I said, toast is fine.
I can do toast myself. 113
He lived on Foothill Road, between Santa Monica and Sunset, in a modest six-thousand-square-foot ten-million-dollar house that looked like a Ramada Inn. The street was lined with palm trees, the grass had been recently crew cut, the hedges were shaped like fresh pears. When I rang the doorbell I could hear the clanging echoing through marble halls—it was nine o’clock in the morning, and the smell of freshly watered lawn rose in the air like mist from a perfume bottle. Already I could feel the heat of the day in my armpits. I felt like the kind of guy who gets turned away by the guy making ten bucks an hour to turn such people away.
Actually, his teenage daughter opened the door. The air tasted filtered and the kid said, “Hello? Can I help you?” She had been well brought up.
“Is your dad around? I think he’s expecting me,” and a voice from the back called out, “Kimmy? Who’s there? Is that Brian? Tell him to come in,” and she said, “Please, follow me.”
“Did you have a good summer?” I asked her.
“Yes, thank you.”
“Shouldn’t you be at school?”
“It’s Saturday!”
“That’s no excuse.”
“It’s not an excuse, it’s a reason.”
There was just a little eye contact, before her hair fell across her face. Then she handed me over and disappeared wherever in a house like that kids go.
Joe’s office was really the kitchen table. He even had a phone on it, and part of it was covered in papers. He said, “We’ve got seventeen rooms in this house, and it doesn’t matter, I always end up here. It drives my wife crazy, she says there’s nowhere to eat, so I said, that’s a fixable problem. Just get a bigger table, so that’s what we did.”
Behind him a wall of glass exposed the swimming pool, which was designed to look like it had been carved out of natural rock. Ferns and ivy overflowed into the water, and to walk dry-footed across the 114lawn a sort of trickle of paving stones had been set irregularly into the grass. You had to look closely through the tropical border to see the high metal fence.
I said, “Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Your wife.”
“On Saturday mornings she sings in this Anglican choir. It’s like a cult, but it makes her happy.” Then he said, “Can I get you something to drink? I make my own coffee. It’s better than the coffee other people make.”
“First you can tell me what the hell is going on,” I said. “Does he want me to write this book or not?”
“Let’s have coffee and we can talk about it.”
“I don’t want coffee, I have a plane to catch. The coffee at the Marriott is fine with me. I want a signature on a piece of paper.”
“I thought your flight was at twelve.”
“It is.”
“So sit down and chill the fuck out and let me make you a cup of coffee.”
And that’s what he did. It was a whole production, I don’t want to go into detail. He made me sit through it because the machine was too loud to permit conversation. After it was over, in the fresh quiet, he handed me a small cup and waited for me to say something about it, so I said, “It tastes like coffee.”
“You’re a real charmer.”
“Yesterday they kicked me out of Pauley when I tried to watch him practice.”
“It’s a closed session.”
“He asked me to write this book. I flew down here, at some personal cost. Every time I go out of town, arrangements have to be made, about who looks after the kids …”
“What kids? You don’t have any kids.”
“I’m living with my sister, she’s going through a divorce … I upend 115my whole life and move to Austin so I can write this book, and the publishers won’t even pay me until I get some kind of assurance that Marcus is going to play along.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your sister,” he said. The madder I got, the quieter he became.
“Marcus saw me at the gym, he let security take me away.”
“Let’s not worry about what Marcus did or didn’t see or do. He’s very focused right now on what he needs to be doing, which is getting himself ready for the season.”
“You forget, I’ve known him a lot longer than you have.”
“I don’t think making this personal like that is going to help anybody.”
“Then why did he ask me to write the book?”
For a second, Joe looked at me, he didn’t say anything. Then he said, “He wants you to do it but he wants to make sure you’re going to do it right.”
“What does that mean?”
Then Kimmy came into the kitchen and opened the fridge, like she was sneaking around.
“What are you eating?” Joe called out.
“I’m not eating, I’m just looking.”
“You just had breakfast. Have a piece of fruit.”
“I’m not hungry for fruit.”
“Have an apple.”
“I can’t eat apples.” And she grinned to show her braces.
“I’ll cut it up for you.”
“Dad,” she said and closed the fridge and walked out.
“How old’s your daughter?” I asked.
“I’m not talking about her.”
So we sat in silence for a minute. He looked at the papers on his desk, he had something to occupy him. I mean, he actually started working or whatever it is that lawyers do. After a while, you think, this is stupid, I’m not going to play these games. So you always lose. 116
“Why’d he ask me to write the book if he didn’t want it to be personal?”
“There’s personal and there’s personal.”
“So what does Marcus want?”
“The right kind.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Yes, you do. And if you don’t …”
“What?”
And he stopped what he was doing and looked up. “Come on, Brian. This is a beautiful story, don’t make it complicated. A kid like Marcus Hayes, who grew up the way Marcus grew up … single mother, there are a lot of different men around, not all of them nice. In the end he gets taken in by another family, a nice white middle-class family, so he can finish high school. I don’t need to tell you any of this. Anyway, he makes it to the NBA, he wins titles, he wins MVPs, he makes a ton of money and retires. And now he wants to come back for one more run, so he can bring NBA basketball to his hometown.”
“I don’t understand why he wants to come back.”
“I just told you.”
“I don’t understand why he quit in the first place.”
“Brian,” Joe said. “Is what I just described not an accurate description of events?”
“It’s fine. So you write the book.”
“He asked you. For what it’s worth, I advised against it. I said, Brian Blum is one of those reporters who thinks the real story is always something unpleasant.”
“You’re talking about the gambling piece again. Pat McConaughey.”
“I’m making a general observation.”
I looked at my watch, I had a plane to catch. But time never passes the way you want it to … there was no great urgency. It was half an hour to the airport from Beverly Hills and only nine o’clock. Joe saw me look and said, “There’s plenty of time.” 117
“So what happens now?”
“Are you going to write something about the workouts at Pauley?”
“I was there for like five minutes before they kicked me out.”
“Are you going to write something?”
“I might.”
“We look forward to reading it,” he said and walked me to the door.