Let Us Now Praise Giant Men | Hardship Exemptions

Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about the NBA’s health and safety protocols, a tuna melt, and mausoleums of all hope and desire.

Once, on a Metro-North train between New York and New Haven, I watched the Yale undergraduate sitting next to me buy a $600 pen.
I went from peeking out of the corner of my eye at his laptop screen to gawking, filled with questions. Was he buying a $600 pen as a gift? For himself? If he lost it, would he just buy another one? Did he shop around? Was this actually a cheap expensive pen, paling in comparison to a $900 pen, a $1,500 pen, a $4,000 pen? How much does a $600 pen weigh? What kind of things does a nineteen-year-old write with a $600 pen? Poems? Contracts? I didn’t ask, of course—I find contact with the thoughtless exercise of this kind of capital horrifying yet wondrous, like the angelic encounters described by believers, so the questions themselves were vessels for spiritual unanswerability. Honestly, I couldn’t even figure out how the kid got online; Metro-North trains don’t have Wi-Fi.
If you’re into that sort of thing, New Haven is a great place to witness eldritch wealth and power slipping through the natural world. One time on Whalley Avenue, I saw a homeless man in the midst of what appeared to be a schizophrenic break being gracefully sidestepped by a pair of baby-faced Yalies in a friendly but spirited argument about the best place in town to alter a tuxedo with tails. An artist friend had a studio in a terrifying warehouse that appeared to have been otherwise abandoned since the end of the Cold War; entire floors unlit, busted windows, mysterious stains trailing the concrete hallways. I later found the building mentioned in a John McPhee book as a site where enriched uranium was converted to fissionable material for the H-bomb. The buildings on campus are stone structures with spires and crenellations, and are filled with oak furniture adorned with small lamps, the hallways watched over by bas-relief gargoyles and demons. Beneath those buildings lies a mysterious tangle of miles of underground tunnels. If you’ve ever wondered who the “they” are in conspiracy theories, well, in New Haven, they’re all around you, and you’re as invisible to them as a servant.
This makes it a good place to eavesdrop on the stories that power tells itself, about itself.
I lived in New Haven for three years. I wasn’t a Yale student, but attended a ton of colloquia, lectures, and screenings that were open to the public. One night, an undergraduate film class screened Double Indemnity, preceded by a short lecture. The professor mostly focused on the process by which Raymond Chandler translated James M. Cain’s serialized novel to a screenplay, a telling in which the genius of Chandler so dwarfed Cain’s meager abilities that Chandler’s letters to Cain requesting advice, and even the compliments in those letters, were self-evidently disingenuous. “He was clearly buttering him up,” the professor said. “Why would Raymond Chandler” (here he intoned the name with unironic reverence) “ever, ever ask James M. Cain for writing advice?”
I think about this lecture a lot. First of all, while I’m no expert in the history of crime fiction, a lot of the facts seem just plain wrong: Double Indemnity’s director and co-screenwriter Billy Wilder (oddly absent in this version of the film’s creation) claimed that Chandler had no idea how to write a screenplay and called Chandler’s early drafts of the film “absolute bullshit,” while Cain, coming off the success of The Postman Only Rings Twice, was at his commercial peak. What’s left is a self-serving tautology of power, complete with an almost-Presbyterian belief in predestination. Raymond Chandler was born [dramatic intonation] Raymond Chandler, and would therefore have known his (yet-unwritten) works were always meant to be celebrated. This means his interactions with mortals like James M. Cain would be untinged by envy, even when the latter was having the success, however transitory, that Chandler deserved more. There was never any doubt that Cain would wind up fading to the dark and airless ether, serving only as the background that lets the real stars shine a little brighter.
Double Indemnity is a lot of things, but man is it a stretch to make it a movie that argues in favor of the reinforcement of quantifiable social hierarchies! And can you think of a sadder and more spiritually confining interpretation of art? May I tell you how much I do not want to hear this professor’s opinions on Dorothy Hughes or Elliott Chaze?

A year ago, the NBA isolated itself in response to Covid, walling its players off into fake arenas to play in front of simulated fans. Now, with large portions of their rosters in quarantine, teams are simulating themselves, putting new dudes in old uniforms and hoping you won’t notice. These ersatz players have ten-day contracts, often signed under what’s called a “hardship exemption,” which makes it sound like they’re being paid in EBT.
They have names like D. J. Wilson and Tremont Waters, these hazy ghosts from Summer Leagues past, from early-round NCAA tournament games, from the ends of 2018’s benches. They’re called up from the G League or pulled from retirement or they receive phone calls in those mythical gyms where they get up their mythical thousand shots a day, just to stay ready. As the camera focuses on one of them about to shoot a free throw, the color commentator will say something like “He was drafted in the second round by Phoenix, then went to Orlando and spent half a season with Charlotte,” a short life told with the names of bad cities.
None of these players are revelations, but for the most part, they’re surprisingly competent. The NBA has room for about 500 players, but, listen, if you’re the 501^st best in the world at something, you’re still really good at it. A guy named Theo Pinson has seven points and four steals in a Dallas win. Daniel Oturu has two blocks in six minutes of a Raptors-Sixers game. They take part in small moments—convulsive overhustling that causes a deflection; a surprising, old-school give-and-go sequence on a fast break—that seem out of place, moving out of rhythm, off-key with the game’s usual music. It’s nice, strangely startling.
Some players enter and leave games without doing much of anything, passing over the court as unfamiliar as drifters and leaving just as small a trace, but this is good, too, their presence fittingly alien, a reminder that this strange world is only getting stranger.

Not long before the pandemic began, I sat at the counter of one of my old favorite lunch spots, B&H Dairy in New York’s East Village and ordered a tuna melt. I used to eat there a couple times a week in the early aughts when I worked at a coffee shop a few blocks away, getting the tuna melt (one of the more expensive options) when I felt flush. B&H has been on 2^nd Avenue forever, the cheaper meatless counterpart to the since-shuttered Stage Deli across the street, serving bowls of soup and thick slices of homemade challah to burnouts for decades. My wife has a fond memory of helping a hungover friend puke in the B&H bathroom, just like the Frank O’Hara poem in which he pukes in the B&H bathroom.
The tuna melt came hastily assembled and was somehow dry and soggy simultaneously. It crumbled under its own tasteless weight. It was lousy in a way that made me question whether it had always been that bad, if the place had gone downhill, or if my standards had changed. At the same time, I loved it; the East Village has predictably but still depressingly gentrified into something like a heroin-themed airport terminal, but the sandwich was a fishy madeleine, connecting me to trips to Kim’s Video to rent VHS bootlegs of Ray Dennis Steckler movies, to buying packs of Old Golds from Gem Spa, to meeting friends for cheap beers at Grassroots, to getting catcalled by the leather-pants’d chickenhawk Jimmy (RIP) who sold pre-torn fishnet stockings at Trash and Vaudeville.
And I know that people twenty years older than me hated what the East Village had become twenty years ago, but that’s okay too. If they ordered a tuna melt at B&H, it’d remind them of seeing Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore East or whatever. That bad tuna melt connects me to them, too.
It’s hard to relate to a story, any story, without giving it a note of self-congratulation.
And ultimately, that’s what gets me about the Double Indemnity lecture. It’s not what it says about the movie itself (pretty little, honestly) or that it mystifyingly takes for granted the superiority of art like it’s still the 1950s (at which time, of course, those who believed in the superiority of canonical art would have considered Double Indemnity, and films like it, to be irredeemable trash). It’s that it gilds Chandler until he’s not human anymore, making him unplagued by self-doubt, certain that the absolute bullshit he was churning out was great, and it believes that this, if it were true, would be a good thing. What this professor was telling the twenty or so kids in that oaky screening room, among whom was probably at least one future billionaire and at least two future “Forty Under Forty” selections, is that some people are born in the firmament, with all the celebrated achievements of their lives already inside them. Some people write with $600 pens. As for the rest of us, well, James M. Cain did fine for himself, I guess, for a little while.

If a team doesn’t renew a hardship exemption’s ten-day contract when it ends, the player will often simply sign another contract with another team. Tyler Johnson plays for the 76ers, then signs with the Spurs, his first game against the same 76ers he played for a couple days ago. Figures from basketball’s past reemerge like septuagenarian rock-and-rollers on a casino stage trotting out their hits—here’s tiny Isaiah Thomas skating below a giant’s arms in the lane like it’s the 2017 playoffs, first for the Lakers, and then a few days later for Detroit. Here’s Lance Stephenson hitting a three and breaking out his old pre-pandemic air guitar celebration. I love Lance Stephenson’s air guitar celebration. I don’t think Lance Stephenson has ever actually held a guitar. It’s an imitation of an imitation, like he’s pretending to be an eleven-year-old pretending to play guitar on a tennis racket. It makes me imagine Lance Stephenson at eleven years old, jumping on the bed, without an inkling that his destiny was to be on a ten-day contract after bouncing out of the league, a replacement for someone in what the announcers euphemistically refer to as “health and safety protocols.”
At any given time, a couple players in the league will have clearly achieved a mastery of the game that no one—not even other stars—possesses. You can tell from watching them for a couple minutes. It’s in the surety of their movements: the slithery grace of Kevin Durant’s jumper, say, or Lebron James’s Lovecraftian perception of impossible angles. Their games are perfect, meticulous craft combined with innate talent in bodies at their athletic peaks. But perfection requires certainty, and in this moment, while half the league is sidelined for the second year of a pandemic, while I’m again making calculations of necessity-versus-safety of bringing my toddler to daycare, perfection and certainty don’t ring true. What does is the anonymous, the amateur, the eminently replaceable, the frisson of uncanny connection I get from the imperfect and the uncertain. Give me Theo Pinson rattling in a twelve-foot jumper. Give me Tremont Waters missing a defensive rotation. Give me Lance Stephenson’s arrhythmically flailing hand like an empty glove in the wind as he runs back downcourt, playing imaginary and probably terrible music for the rest of us.

Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia.

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