Lakers Set His Inner Maniac Free

I awoke the other morning feeling guilty, and I couldn’t remember why.

It isn’t unusual for me to greet the day burdened by vague feelings of culpability, even when I haven’t done anything gross or disgusting the night before. But this time it was more intense.

Some have suggested that the morning guilt syndrome is due to the fact that men are always thinking about participating in detestable acts. I read a Boston University study that said male humans had an erotic fantasy eight times a day, although it varied according to one’s age and level of creativity. Women had half that number.

Jimmy Carter admitted once that he often lusted in his heart, and has been praying away the guilt ever since. Other presidents lusted beyond their abilities to contain it in their hearts and spent a part of their administration acting out their fantasies.

My feelings of guilt on this particular morning had nothing to do with erotic thoughts. Lust is always there in a corner of my mind grinning at me like a hooker in a doorway, but it hadn’t emerged for several days.

I sat on the edge of the bed puzzled by the guilt until I remembered suddenly what had occurred the evening before. I had hung up on my sister Emily in Oakland, who prays for me, and later I hooted and hollered at my daughter Cindy, who lives in Sacramento.

Now neither of them will probably ever talk to me again, much less pray for me, and it’s all because of a bloody basketball game.

I’m not the most dedicated sports fan in the world, but the playoff Sunday between the Lakers and the Kings had me jumping up and down and screaming like a maniac in joy, agony and finally in triumph when our tall people beat their tall people.

That kind of behavior is usually foreign to my nature. I am not the type to bubble with enthusiasm and, in fact, have a tendency to regard those who do as suffering from an advanced form of dementia.

I have been known to clap politely for a grand-slam homer at a Dodgers game and have even murmured “Hear! Hear!” when the Raiders used to win with 90-yard passes in the final seconds of the fourth quarter. But scream and cry and bounce off the walls? Only when the Lakers are in some kind of playoff.

I realize, as I believe Yogi Berra or Dick Nixon once said, that it ain’t over till it’s over (or maybe Bill Clinton said it to Monica Lewinsky), but the Lakers make me wild even in the preliminaries. When they actually win a championship, I go nuts.

I was in a place on the outskirts of Monterey two years ago when they actually did win the NBA title. My wife, Cinelli, and I were traveling north and had stopped at a jock bar with one of those oversized TV screens because we knew the final game was being played.

I got so crazy when the Lakers won that I knocked over a chair that knocked over a table that knocked over the beer of a large, scowling hairy person who was at the end of the domino chain, so to speak. Thank God, the synaptic message of rage was slow to reach his brain, and Cinelli dragged me out before he had a chance to react.

Last Sunday, Emily telephoned right in the middle of the overtime segment. I hollered, “Not now, not now!” before she had much of a chance to speak, but Emily is as persistent as a tick on a dog and insisted on saying she’d pray for me during the riots. She was anticipating that any Lakers win would be followed by the usual post-victory chaos around Staples, and her prayers would be for my safety should I be there.

I said, “That’s crazy, they’re playing in Sacramento, and nobody ever riots in Sacramento!” and quite rudely cut her off in the middle of a response. If Emily had called at any other time but during a game that evoked the emotional fervor of a revival meeting, I’d have waited patiently while she lectured me on the abundance of evil in L.A. and told me how worn out she’d become praying for me all these years.

My frenzy was reflected throughout our quiet neighborhood. I got home just in time for the final quarter of the game, and as I drove by other houses I could hear the kind of screaming that usually accompanies intense forms of torture. Burning straws under the fingernails and electrodes attached to certain sensitive parts of the body. That sort of thing. But it was just the Lakers and the Kings driving everyone bananas.

At the end of the game I hardly had the strength to telephone my daughter, a Kings fan, and leave a cruel and shameful message on her answering machine, consisting of hooting and jeering. Now I have one less sister and one less daughter.

I feel guilty, but I’m still grateful for the momentary diversion brought into my life by a lot of tall guys throwing a ball through a hoop. The lust that is currently in my heart isn’t for sex but for a third Lakers championship in a row. That’s what a game like that will do to you.

*

Al Martinez’s columns appear Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.