Notes From A Native Son

Loss has been on my mind a lot lately. Family, friends, my mind (though that one is a constant). In a few short weeks over the summer I lost my dog, an Aunt (Helen) that spent most of my life doubling as a grandmother and whom I called almost every day, and a brother (who is very much alive but left Los Angeles for a new job) after one or the other brother had been in LA for the better part of my decade there. It has, clearly consequently, not exactly been the easiest fall (I have had COVID once and salmonella twice, don’t ask) as the incongruity of loss is that it leaves you feeling unmoored in a very acute way because you’ve lost the exact things that otherwise grounded and rooted you to you.

I always thought people that truly grieved the loss of a pet were a little off. Same with people that started Instagrams for their pet (which I’d just like to note here I never did). Then I found my dog abandoned in Griffith Park in May of 2019 and I went full simp pretty quick. He was this neglected, underweight, one-eyed chihuahua with a comically large penis who had lived so meagerly that my comparatively modest living situation was a sort of paradise to him. I named him Garry for reasons I won’t bother mentioning but nicknamed him G Man for reasons that are obvious to a Kings fan.

And those next 5 years, in the best and worst ways, felt literally and figuratively, like dog years.

As some of you know I moved to Los Angeles in the mid-2010s in part to pursue creative ambitions that, for reasons that are a surprise to me as much as anyone, actually started to manifest in the exact window I found Garry. This is where I caveat that those are modest manifestations. I still have my state job (2 years away from lifetime health care baby!), I still avidly pursue Door Dash deals (which may or may not have something to do with the salmonella). But I’m in situations and rooms I never thought I’d be in. I’ve fucking smoked cigarettes with Paul Thomas Anderson. And maybe I’d like to be a dick about it (not really). But whatever capacity there was for me to be a dick about those things were neutered by Garry. Whatever else I thought I was subjectively I was objectively a late middle-aged weirdo in a shitty one bedroom in Little Armenia who dressed his dog in Hawaiian shirts and once got into an argument over the phone while at a bar with Panda Express about the sufficiency of hot mustard sauce they provided as a couple adjacent couldn’t stop laughing. And I loved him for that.

I loved him. More than anything else in my life. More than anything I’d ever loved. He showed me, not in spite of, but because of his eccentricities, reservoirs of compassion and love that I never otherwise knew I was capable of. Reservoirs reserved for him but available to anyone else. Love in its simplest and least contractual and expectational form. The love of presence and constancy. The whole Grinch heart growing bullshit. And yes that’s what kids and spouses are for but I don’t have those. And neither looked as cute in a Hawaiian shirt.

And then he was, painfully, suddenly, gone.

I knew it would hurt some. But you can be objective in that moment. You can understand you found an abandoned, abused, neglected, elderly dog who you always knew you were on borrowed time with and who lived a far better, longer life than they would otherwise have lived. You understand a dog can’t live forever. You get another dog. This wasn’t a tragedy. It wasn’t a parent or sibling or child. He wasn’t hit by a car or dead during emergency surgery. But grief, and yes this is a stolen valor grief, but it’s a grief nonetheless, has a mind of its own, a mind almost as twisted as the one that brought you Terrifier 2, and I have sobbed and physically and emotionally ached more and far longer than I ever expected to and I don’t sense diminishment on the horizon. The last, lingering reservoir of his and my love. A grief so naked and acute I am inclined to writing something like this. Something 30 year old me would have mocked mercilessly (perhaps this is all karmic, but what a cathartic karma).

I have always felt a sort of split personality as a Californian. The Los Angeles side and the Sacramento side forever in a sort of conflict save holidays and Huell Howser reruns and Kings games. But I had historically been able to synergize those, to feel uniquely Sacramentan while in Los Angeles, because I had a sibling in town and an Aunt on the phone and that idiot dog. And now I don’t.

But I do still have the Kings. This summer was a reminder of that. The DeRozan signing was a welcome moment of hope and distraction (like a week after I’d lost Garry and Helen) precisely when it was needed. I made new friendships and strengthened old ones and joined new text and Twitter threads and saw the Mike Brown Coach of the Year tattoo in the flesh and was reminded of that thing I wrote years ago about how only Sacramentans know what it’s like to be from Sacramento and only Sacramento Kings fans know what it’s like to be Sacramento Kings fans. And I thought about The Kings Herald and Tim in Phoenix and Greg in Colorado and Tony in Boston and Greg texting me after Garry died that he was heart broken. I thought about how this, TKH, the broader social media Kings fanbase, any Kings fan save Grant, was and is a family. Petty, obnoxious, territorial, opinionated, but a family. My family.

I have a friend that likes to joke that anytime I write about the Kings it’s always about the Kings in the context of Sacramento. Which, fair. I read Notes from a Native Daughter at an impressionable age and still think about most things in the context of what it means to be from Sacramento. Even (especially?) when I’m in Sacramento. But I think all that’s really saying when you identify so singularly with a place and their team is that it’s ultimately about what it means to be you.

The second time I got sick it was one of those “Wake up in the middle of the night sweating profusely, running to the bathroom, seeing a God that doesn’t care” moments and I told myself that if I was as sick as I felt in that moment for any sustained window I was going back to Sacramento because I’d rather die there than Los Angeles (this is both true and also florid). And relative to death that remains true. Because Sacramento will always be home. Will always be me. But relative to everything else it is helpful to remind myself that a Sacramento Kings season is also a home. Is also me. Is also us.

And hey a pretty nice home this season. I’m sure there’s some Los Angeles real estate affordability joke to make here but I’m too tired and it would be hack. Anyway I am genuinely excited for this Kings season. In a stupid kid that doesn’t know any better and can talk himself into Carl Landry sort of way. Maybe I’m just too tired to be cynical (not really, because there are things I’m already internally dreading if this team is good, you’re never too tired to be a hater). Maybe there are upshots to the vulnerability of loss. Maybe this team is actually really good.  Mostly I’m excited because come late October wherever I am I’m home. A home with Garry and Helen and Billy and DeMar and Rory and Brad and Greta Gerwig and Vivek’s daughter and all of you.

And how lucky am I?