No One on the Basketball Moms Text Thread Laughed When I Compared Our Winless Season to Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon”

It’s not that I failed to consider that most of us weren’t alive when Billy Joel released it as the fourth track off The Nylon Curtain in 1982. Nor did I neglect to perceive that comparing a group of guileless first graders who have gotten their asses absolutely handed to them in co-ed basketball for ten Saturdays in a row to a platoon of imaginary marines who survived (or did they?) the horrors of the Vietnam War might be considered, by some, to be tasteless. Nor was it lost on me that nothing about any of the other B-Ball Moms screams “Billy Joel aficionado.”

But much like the haunted collective first-person narrator in one of the darkest pop songs ever written, I was so gung-ho to lay down my life for the sake of—what I still maintain, despite the deafening silence of the other B-Ball Moms—was a pretty solid joke about how depressing it is to watch our bewildered and uncoordinated children get dog-walked, week after week, by remarkably better youth basketball teams. In fact, I think it was as sharp as knives (knives knives knives), and I won’t rest until at least one of you scrolls back up in the text chain and agrees. And yes, Mackenzie, I sort of think it should be you.

Because these kids haven’t won a single game. Not one. Not one out of ten. And not only that, but the scorekeeper in every single game has, respectfully and without fanfare, just stopped keeping track of the other team’s total once they hit thirty points. This has happened ten times.

And yet, these brave six- and seven-year-olds keep showing up for each other, weekend after weekend, match after punishing match, with no clue why they’re there instead of at Puppeteering Club, where they belong. Also, no clue how to dribble without staring directly at the ball or which hoop is theirs or what a shot clock is or how to inbound pass or why their opponents even bother to guard them. All they do know is that they won’t win, and that there can be no real winners in a situation as fucky as this.

So, you tell me, how is that any different from meeting as soulmates on Parris Island, and then leaving as inmates from an asylum? Hasn’t this diminutive band of brothers and sisters left their childhood on every acre, either way? The answer, Mackenzie, is yes. Yes, they fucking have.

And if I want to shout loudly from the bleachers at my tiny, gap-toothed son and his adorable, terrified teammates to dig in deep, shoot on sight, learn fast to travel light, and PRAY TO JESUS CHRIST WITH ALL OF THEIR MIGHT, then I will continue to do so, game after eviscerating game, until this brutalizing and hellish season of church rec league basketball is finally over.

And if I want to repeatedly and enthusiastically encourage them all to play like “tameless horses,” whatever the hell those are, then I will keep doing that, too, as many times as my voice, already raw from trying, unsuccessfully, to lead the parents’ section in a chant of “WE WOULD ALL GO DOWN TOGETHER” will allow.

You think me showing up in army fatigues and eye black is scaring the children? I think your inability to grasp how harrowing this season has been for them and how apt and hilarious it is to compare their collective disenchantment to a forty-three-year-old song that Billboard once called “uncompromisingly bleak” is what’s scary. So, unless you want me to pass out old Playboys and Bob Hope records when it’s my turn for snack duty, circle back to our text thread and give me the basic courtesy of a simple “haha.” Or at least like my message.

You hold the day in the palm of your hand.

Are you going to pony up with that thumbs up, or are you waiting for me to arrive at our first round of tournament play with my snare drum, a box of loose crickets, and a Bluetooth speaker that only blasts the eerie sounds of a Huey helicopter retreating into the sunset?

If you think I’m bluffing, ask Joey’s mother what happened last spring when no one on the Tee-Ball Moms group chat acknowledged my hysterical Apocalypse Now reference. I’ll give you a hint: It didn’t not involve me hurling an expensive and incredibly realistic-looking severed latex head onto the pitcher’s mound.

Your move, Mackenzie. Just because I haven’t done anything yet with the body-bag imagery in this iconoclastic dirge that sailed to the top of the pop charts in the Netherlands in 1983 doesn’t mean I won’t.