Goooaaallll!!!

Of course I didn't watch the Knicks last night.  I watched about two minutes and when the referee called the second foul on the Knicks's center, Karl Anthony Townes, which was obviously a foul on Wentanaby , I switched it off.  Unable to find anything else to watch, I left the television to my mother and went to bed.  It was nine p.m.  

It was probably a good decision in many ways.  I needed the sleep.  I didn't get up this morning until six.  Then I went to the highlights of last night's game on YouTube.  Holy shit!  I missed it!  What a spectacle.  

Obviously Trump was not there.  He was off designing $12,000 coins to commemorate his UFC birthday, and coincidentally, maybe. . . 250 years of the democracy he has undermined.  

Today kicks off the World Cup.  The game will start at 3 pm my local time.  Maybe I'll go to a pub somewhere and take a peak.  I mean. . . three o'clock.  

I was in a small town in Peru when Germany played the final game against Argentina in Mexico City in 1986.  We sat in a garden restaurant with a few other people and the restaurant staff watching the game on a 12" black and white t.v.  Argentina won 3-2 and the place went crazy.  

I was in Manhattan when the U.S. soccer team made the quarter finals in 2002.  I was staying at the Pod Hotel on East 39th St. and had just gotten up and hit the street.  It was early.  As I walked by a pub, a crowd was rowdy and cheering.  I decided to go in and have breakfast.  Men in suits were going to be late and drunk for work, it seemed, for everyone was drinking beer.  I ate breakfast and watched until halftime.  

I was headed downtown to the Leica Gallery.  When I got off the subway, I could hear people cheering.  As I stepped into the building where the Leica Gallery was housed, the security guard was sitting at his desk with a small t.v.  

"What just happened?" I asked.  

"The U.S. just scored a goal."

I went up and perused the photos in the gallery.  As I left the building, it was unusually quiet. . . and then, it seemed, the entire island erupted.  I could hear cheers coming from near and far echoing through the canyon-like street.  Covered in goose bumps, I just stood still and listened to one of the most spectacular things I have ever heard in this life.

I can imagine the same sound was heard all over New York last night.  

In 2006, I was on a short vacation trip to Charleston with my girlfriend.  I fell in love with South Carolina then.  We had rented a car and decided to get out of town for a day.  We toured an old plantation then went to the beach.  It was mid-afternoon when we decided to stop in a outdoor beach bar and get a drink.  It was July, and the weather was gorgeous.  The place was packed.  The World Cup Final between France and Italy had just begun.  We stayed and drank and watched the entire thing.  It was tied 1-1 at the end of regulation.  Italy won dramatically in the shootout.  It was a spectacular game and a capstone to the weekend.

I have become something of a World Cup Finals fan, though I never watch soccer otherwise.  I guess I'm like a lot of other Americans.  I'll probably watch today's game for fun.  I could use a little.  

So. . . I think I mentioned this already, but. . . I'm not feeling so great.  Yesterday, I decided that maybe a little retail therapy would pick me up.  I decided to drive back to the mall and buy those round Ray-Ban sunglasses.  Oh, sure, I don't need them and will probably lose them in a week, but I felt the need for something.  Then it started to rain, so I stayed inside.  I was home and at my computer.  I started looking through old photo files.  I started in 2016.  What I discovered was that I haven't looked good for a long time.  I was fat even then.  As I went through the photos, I found that Ili wasn't as pretty as I thought she was, either.  We were both fat.  Puffy, really.  And yet, at different times, we each looked good.  There were photos of her that made my heart melt.  There were photos of me that made me happy.  Sometimes neither of us was as puffy as at others.  

I worked my way forward as the rain continued.  After she left, I swear I looked better.  Then worse.  Then better.  

I came across my vacation photos from the end of September through early October, 2018.  Ili and I had broken up.  Then the night before I left, she mysteriously showed up at my house while I was packing.  Why?  I needed to get some dinner and asked her if she wanted to come.  We climbed onto the Vespa and drove to the good bbq place where we used to go.  Takeout.  I could feel her emotions as she held onto my waist, her head resting sometimes against my back.  That was the last time we ever rode the Vespa.  After dinner, I told her, "Why don't you come with me.  I have already booked the rooms and the car.  All you have to do is buy a ticket." 

I looked it up.  A round trip ticket for tomorrow's flight to LA was cheaper than the one I had booked.  Same flight.

She hemmed and hawed and I said, "Look, I need to go to bed.  It is an early flight.  If you want to come, I'll see you at the gate.  But you have to go now.  I need to sleep."

She didn't come, but I thought the whole episode strange.  

I flew to L.A. the next day and picked up my car and drove straight out to Palm Springs.  I stayed in the coolest little historically niche hotel you can imagine.  After a few days, I drove back to Venice and stayed for about a week.  I was taking photos and sending them back to Ili each day.  

The last picture from that trip was from a surf spot in Malibu, the sky and water supernaturally clear.  

Then the next photo.  October 7.  I have tubes going into my chest, my body black with bruises and bloody from I don't know what.  There are tubes in my nose and bandages on my torso.  Seven broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a broken clavicle and several broken places on my scapula.  My A.C. joint was torn apart.  My hip was black and there were deep gashes in my left foot.  My eyes were closed.  

Ili took those pictures.  She stayed with me every night but one in the hospital for over two weeks.  I remember little of it.  But there are pictures I took of her with my phone.  She brought up a speaker and we played slow jazz.  She brought crystals and put them around the room.  Along with the morphine that I got on demand, it kept me calm.  

The next photo is Halloween.  I sat out and passed candy to the kids with my mother.  Then Christmas.  I was not supposed to be released to go back to work for months.  I was in such bad shape they hadn't even begun physical therapy with me yet.  But I got up and walked, first up and down the driveway, then to the end of the street, then around the block, then twice.  It was very, very hard.  I still had a PICC line running from a vein in my arm to my heart.  I had to have strong antibiotics shot into it three times a day.  A nurse came to see me at my mother's home in the afternoon, first every day, then every other.  

I began walking three miles at a time but I had a hard time breathing.  They had cut me open and plated two of my seven broken limbs.  My chance of living, they said, were much worse than my chances of dying.  

But in early December, I returned to work.  The crew at the factory had showered me with thousands of dollars worth of food and gifts.  They were teary-eyed when I made my first meeting.  

When the team of doctors were at my door talking, they thought I was out, I heard them say they didn't know if I'd make it.  

"I don't know," one of them said.  "He's pretty tough.  He gets up several times a day and walks around the corridors."

Yes, I thought, I'm tough.  

Ili and I began to travel.  There were photos from Mexico, Carmel, Detroit, Miami, Paris.  I often didn't look so good.  

I retired, Ili left, Covid came, and the photos change.  I walked with a camera every day documenting the abandoned world.  Lots of people-less pictures.  And selfies.  My hair was blonde now, and longer.  Sometimes I looked better, sometimes not.  There were photos of my meals, my drinks, flowers, the cats.  I had made them all look so good.  

I looked through eight years of photos.  There were photos of my mother in the hospital.  Lots of them.  Two broken shoulders.  A head injury.  A broken wrist.  Lots of falls.  There was no use in looking at the last two years of photos.  They are shit.  

Then I looked at the photo the fellow took of me with the camera the other day.  Of course I'm fat.  I was fat ten years ago.  But I had a girlfriend.  Now I am just fat.  

And ten years older.  Without a life.  I look worn.  Of course I look worn.  

I don't think the sunglasses will help.  I'm glad it rained.  

So today, I think I'll watch some soccer in a bar with strangers.  That sort of sounds appealing.  They say France and Argentina are the favorites to go to the finals.  It's O.K. with me.  

"Goooooaaaaalllllllll!" 

I loved that guy.