David Roth's Weak in Review: About That Life

During what would have been my prime as a professional athlete, provided I had been born with an entirely different set of genetic material and the opposite personality, I twice went down onto the subway tracks. This is a very stupid and dangerous and illegal thing to do even once, which is the sort of thing that I know now and also knew then but was somehow able to forget.

It is not difficult to get up off the tracks, really, or not any more difficult than climbing out of the deep end of a swimming pool. It's the getting down there that stands out as the troubling part, and which troubles me still sometimes. The first time I went down there, after a long day and night of drinking disinfectant-grade whiskey not wisely but entirely too well, I came up with an empty box of Kennedy Fried Chicken. The friend who'd bet me a dollar that I wouldn't go down onto the tracks to get that empty box of chicken gave me my dollar; smart boy that I was, I thought to clean my jeans in my girlfriend's bathtub before getting into bed, and so woke up the next day to a pair of still-quite-wet jeans smeared with soot. They paired well with a metastatic headache and a mouth that tasted like Jerry Jones had been farting into it all night. There are dumber ways to die than that, maybe, and probably even some dumber ways to live. Anyway, that was my prime.

I'm lucky, and not in interesting ways. I made terrible, stupid, careless mistakes, one after another for years, and I came out the other side more or less without a scratch. This can be explained by the combination of a package of privilege, good fortune that I did nothing to earn, another layer of communal good luck—friends and family and patient employers and therapy and that girlfriend, who eventually married the sodden dip that left his jeans dripping subway particulate into her tub overnight—and, last among these, the late arrival of some responsibility and self-respect. This is how people get through, and also how they don't. Things do not need to fit together perfectly, which is a relief because they mostly won't. If you are lucky, a few breaks get you through. I am not wealthy or fully adult in like a dozen different vital ways, but I am not going to be on the subway tracks again.

I'm lucky, too, that all this idiocy happened more or less in secret—there is no document of it but this and the staticky memories of my friends. No one was watching and no one really cared much one way or another. I was lucky that I could fall apart, and fall for some time, without ever suffering the sort of hard landing that breaks backs; nothing I did kept me out of traction, really, but I was at least allowed to fall in anonymity. The shame of it is my own and mine alone; no one but me has to watch my highlight reel of vivid selfish young person cock-ups. Anyway, no one would want to. They're dull. So was I.

I don't know any more than you do about where Delonte West was before he stumbled, ghostly and shoeless and in an outfit that included both a hospital gown and a motorcycle vest, into the parking lot of a Jack In The Box earlier this week. What's common knowledge, in this story, is the only knowledge I have: that West has a bipolar diagnosis that he disagrees with, that his life seemed to spin out of control during his last years in the NBA and in the years since, that he has always seemed vulnerable and raw in a way that admitted the possibility of just this sort of disappearance and just this sort of bleak reappearance. There is nothing to know here. Someone saw West and recognized him; he asked if he was Delonte West, and West said, "I used to be, but I'm not about that life anymore."

This was on Instagram, and then various media venues spun stories out of it, and that is all there is. That is all anyone knows, and it is not much. The Daily Mail found a video of West looking scraggly and unwell at a mall near his home in Maryland, and a story about him acting erratically at a youth basketball game. They put that online, too. It's from last month, but that doesn't matter. That's not how this works. West's struggles are in the public domain now. He is falling—despite the attempts of a family that loves him, through the contingent and tissue-thin comforts that millions of dollars can buy, and right where everyone can see it happen. He's 32.

As a player, West was alert and modest and idiosyncratic; his career feels longer ago than it was, and his play and collection of skills seem better suited to today's NBA than the one in which he played. There's no compelling basketball reason why West shouldn't have played a NBA game since 2012. His illness got away from him, and he drifted farther and farther out. The Dallas Mavericks were the last team willing to bet on him, and then they were no longer willing. He played in the D-League and in China; he signed in Venezuela but never played there. Last March, he surfaced in the D-League again and played well. The vagabond side of professional sports is atomizing under the best of circumstances, which these were not. A lot of careers end this way.

We do not know what comes after the fading away, mostly. It's startling when players we half-remember rush up out of that fade to reveal themselves as truly desperate—think of Robert Swift, a willowy washout as a player who resurfaced as a heroin addict squatting in a mini-mansion he used to own, pumping rounds of semiautomatic ammunition into the foundation in a basement he'd made into an impromptu shooting range. What's jarring about this is not just recognizing someone in this new unrecognizability but seeing a struggling human where previously we had seen something else.

Athletes are human, of course, and you don't need me to tell you that. They struggle and break like humans do, and we watch them do what they do because, when they are aloft and alight, we see in them a singular human promise. They're blessed, but they're not only their blessings; you don't need me to tell you that, either. We all already know this: that this is a tightrope walk, that the winds are cold and constant, that all of us will fall but that only some of us will fall onto a net that can support us. We forget it again and again, because remembering it is hard and because of a certain broad cultural coldness toward caring about this sort of thing, and because it is a difficult thing to admit how much of life depends on dumb luck and grace.

That's the tension of it, and the tragedy in it. We're given to believe that people get what they deserve; there is a distinct American cruelty built on that belief. This is what haunts about Delonte West, and what is so painful about watching him thrash in the drowning confluence of his blessings and his bad luck. He is not so far away at all, but somehow not so close that anyone can help.