Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The red and the black, two.


I'm already in bed when the power goes out, so I only notice it happens from the sudden drop'off of air-conditioning. Outside my bedroom door are the groaning shouts of the Americans and Germans tourists in the common areas of the pousada, who miss it far more. Their conversations and Facebook uploads suddenly cut off. And even in darkness and separated by layers of solid wood and stone, and further layers less tangible, I register how their immediate panic hesitates only slightly before sprinting to annoyance. 

The pousada is in Olinda, an old colonial town outside of Recife, just about as far east as one can travel in South America. It's a locale that suggests isolation. We're far from the Lapa street parties that raked away my voice and my energy, one caiprinha and I BELIEVE chant at a time. Far from the watchzone parties on Copacabana that share this same coast, and impossibly farther from the mentality of the travelers down there in Rio de Janeiro. Here we're surrounded by Germans and Americans who came to be around other Germans and Americans. We're not immersed in the shouts of vibrant Chileans and Colombians, and sheepish Brits, and proud Iranians, the rich amalgam of cultures that a World Cup intertwines during its month of games. We're surrounded instead by those who came, not to see Brazil, but experience the borders of their own country extended to somewhere else. 

In fairness, by being here Derek and I had in a sense come to experience a small degree of that too. It was unthinkable for us to travel to a World Cup and not watch our country play. To see the best of our country (along with the worthless Brad Davis) fight on the world's grandest stage, and to be in the stands for those 90 minutes. To cheer purely, not for a club of capricious choice, but rather a country inherited by birthright. One game in Rio at the legendary Maracanã and one US game, in whatever corner of Brazil that may be. Our thought going in was to chase the biggest spectacle possible. And so, in analyzing the States' Group of Death draw, we thought it better to see Germany than Ghana or Portugal, and better the cultural and coastal Recife than Natal or the jungle outpost of Manaus. Which is why I'm in Olinda, near Recife, as the power goes out the night before the Yanks play Die Mannschaft.

I don't know if the other visiting Americans around us, those shouting impatient questions and dinner orders in slow, too'loud English, went to Rio as well. But their behavior suggests that scenario as doubtful. Because if they did they'd understand the context at play here. The everyday realities of Brazil that we're only hinting at experiencing. That this party, this tournament and the resources being diverted for it has a trade'off. Our first night in the country, Derek and I were a few dozen feet from a spontaneous protest that leaped quickly into haphazard demonstration, watching smoke from a canister weave with that born of cigarettes. As we ate a bit later, a chain of better'organized citizens streamed past our restaurant's open storefront for several minutes, shouting against the tournament's corrupt organizing body, FIFA. Two nights later, out in a pack of a few dozen travelers from our hostel, several of us were pepper sprayed indiscriminately by a Brazilian officer younger than us for stepping'back off a curb into the already'crowded street. We all paid quite a bit to be here for the games, but nowhere near enough to insulate ourselves from this still'developing nation's realities. Its growing pains. Our ignorance will not immunize us from the anger that many Brazilians feel over $14 billion being spent on a football tournament rather than on improving infrastructure, purifying water and paving more roads, funding schools for a wider'reaching public education, training and equipping inundated police forces in one of the world's most violent countries. We returned to our hostel late on our last day in Rio, one we'd spent out all day absorbing as much of the experience as our pores and synapses could handle, to a lack of running water and apologies in the form of endless free drinks from the staff. That utility failing under the sheer demand and pressure during the tournament, the Lapa and Santa Teresa districts swollen with life past the point of functioning. The drinks and a bit of perspective made our shrugging'OhWell easier. But I don't trust the 20'something man in the leather fanny pack sitting near me in the packed restaurant to understand these things, given that he's focused on complaining that his dinner being made in the 2'person kitchen is taking too long.

But we had been in Rio. And during our days there, Brazil played one game and so we took to bars near Copacabana to watch. Locals gathered in jerseys and shirts that screamed yellow and whispered green and blue, vibrant pigments reflecting a collective optimism for winning the tournament played on their home soil. My new friend Tommy and I drank Brahma tall boys by the ocean and watched their laughing conversations swirl by. With the game about to kickoff, we turned back toward the bar our other friends sat in, and saw the massive crowd flowing toward us, interspersed with an occasional phalanx of officers in riot gear.

They came down the main street on Copacabana, the last pavement before the sand yawns down to the water. With most everyone around them in those national team colors of yellow and green and blue, they marched in red and in black. The colors of Rio's working'class team, Flamengo. The colors of the rejected, the overlooked. The colors of regional interests. Local necessities trumping national aspirations. Then also the color of absence. Of nothingness. Or mourning for those killed too young. And with it the color of blood, from the drug murders in the favelas. From the rapes, and miscarriages, and vomiting from disease. Marching to call attention to the problems ignored by FIFA, valid complaints drowned under waves of PR and corporate sponsorship. They carried black banners, letters the size of the children some clutched in their arms, shouting COPA PARA QUIEN?... THE PARTY IN THE STADIUMS ISN'T WORTH THE TEARS SHED IN THE SLUMS.

They marched closer, bringing their rage and frustration, emotions if not contagious, then catalyzing. Their voices triggering my latent shame. Because I knew exactly where our money was going. The indulgent amount of dollars and reals spent on game tickets, stadium beers, official keepsakes for my five'year'old nephew, all branded with that FIFA crest that should stand only for disgrace. An organization whose highest tiers thrive chiefly off bribes. That was why we needed to come to Brazil in 2014. Because in 4 years the tournament will move on to a nation that, 4 days after the World Cup Final was completed, would be connected with shooting 298 civilians out of the sky to their fiery deaths. The stadiums in places like Saransk, Nizhny Novgorod, and Kazan to be built with steel, concrete, and other materials grossly overcharged, so as to further fund the cronies of an unapologetic dictator. And 4 years after that, the games move to a geographic flea of an island where an estimated four thousand immigrant workers will die building the stadiums, due to their slavish working conditions in unbearable Middle Eastern heat. According to some reports, those laborers include prisoners imported from North Korea. This is the organization we were inherently supporting, and for those paying any attention at all, the chants we heard during the march down Copacabana resonate as stubbornly as those inside the Maracanã. Our exhilaration from attending the World Cup travels back with a stowaway guilt that comes with sight and experience. The weight of perspective.

I said to some people once I returned that it felt less like we were visiting Brazil than just a giant soccer party, that happened to be held in Brazil. And that's the truth, when it comes to the positive aspects of my experience. We were at the World Cup. At the Maracanã. At those night'into'morning street parties in Lapa. But we were also in the FIFA marches, the FIFA blackouts, the FIFA protests and skirmishes, if not fully in the FIFA riots. And it was in those moments where I felt most that I'd earned the new Brazilian visa in my passport. The faint, too'used ink a shaded echo of their hand'sewn banners.

I remain in bed while the electricity is off, with this guilt dribbling in my head. It's how I keep out the muffled complaints of the tourists outside my room. The whines about how they paid for better than this. Totally uncomprehending that this brief annoyance for them is a way of life for the people of the country we've temporarily invaded. But I don't need to distract myself from them for long anyway. The drinking and the laughing resume before the power does. They have already moved on. They were never really here to begin with.



Wednesday, December 24, 2014

A decade under the influence.


The two'by'two photo shows a kid with raggedy'long hair and a glazed near'drunken look in his eyes, who has no hint of what he's in for. Ten pages later the fresh passport gets its inaugural stamp as it leaves North America for the first time, to London via JFK. Even with no true knowledge of the sport, I'm aware that there's a major soccer tournament going on that summer and I'm looking forward to cheering England on from London pubs packed with fans. It's not until I land and see the massive headlines that I realize a horrendously'taken penalty kick by David Beckham has seen England go crashing out of Euro 2004. The only sliver of the games I see is a bore of a final between Greece and Portugal, the lack of action enough to reinforce all the negative American stereotypes about soccer. But the lasting legacy of the event is that the world is introduced to new superstars Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, and at the same time I'm introduced to the world. It's that summer I buy my first legal drinks, at 20 on Tottenham Court Road in London, and then a month later in Huntington Beach, California, minutes after the midnight I turn 21. It's that summer I first see something beyond America and Canada- even if it's merely a toe in the safe'harbored waters of England.

Two Junes later I'm up early to beat the gym rush in Orange County, already 10 minutes into a turn on the elliptical when Costa Rica and Germany kick off, beginning World Cup 2006, an event I didn't even realize had been approaching. But from the flag'clutching team entrances, most of the other necks around me craned up at the hanging television screens as well. Timid cheers from the majority as Germany scored after just 6 minutes. Groans from those same people and a yelling vocal minority as Costa Rica answered back after 6 minutes more. Germany taking the lead again after another 5. Three goals in seventeen minutes and the hook was in me. Forever.

I devoured the rest of the tournament. McBride's bloodied cheekbone from DeRossi's elbow (that I still haven't forgiven the Italian for). Ronaldo knocking his teammate Rooney, and all of England, out on penalties, Zidane's headbutt and his shamed walk off the pitch and out of the sport forever, Italy raising the trophy just a half hour later as champions. From there I began to follow my favorite US players, all of whom played for the same small club in London, Fulham FC.

My remaining years in Los Angeles, the addiction became something to travel for, near and abroad. All the trips down the 405 to Carson for the LA Galaxy, starting with Beckham's first game to the seasons of spending far too much on field'side tickets with my friend Jared. And when it looked as though Fulham was so terrible that they would be relegated, dropped to an inferior league in England's football hierarchy, I flew from Los Angeles to London for a long weekend, determined to see them play a match at their home stadium at least once in the top tier. It was London again, me somewhat more knowledgeable this time about the sport and the city itself, but still a total novice when it came to travel. Soccer was the motivation for the trip, but not the totality. It was Fulham that catalyzed my journey, but it's one I remember for getting to sit in the House of Commons during a Parliamentary debate, for flea markets by the Thames and an absurdly cramped Couchsurfing experience. And conversations over endless pints with my friend Jenn who came with me and my other ones I caught up with there. Being back in London after 4 years and seeing Rooney and Ronaldo play together in for Manchester United in person just gave the trip its symmetry.

A year and a half later, when I used my passport once again, it was on a daily basis. For 19 weeks that fall and winter of 2009, I memorized its number like a second identity, its blue and red pages rarely leaving my pocket. My four and a half months of backpacking started in Russia and next took me to Estonia, where I watched the Premier League season kick off in a packed Tallinn bar, with newly'met friends, including an Everton Toffee from Melbourne and a Liverpool Red from West Virginia- Dave and Jonny. Their hometowns separated by ten thousand miles, and their allegiances by only a hundred'acre park in the same city of Liverpool. Weeks later it was a seeing an unforgettable 4-3 Manchester derby from the stands at the "Theatre of Dreams." I started checking off
the iconic stadiums with the same diligence as Europe's great cathedrals. Old Trafford, the Camp Nou, San Siro.

The list of how football intertwines with my backpacking is exhaustive, and that's only a sliver. Soccer has followed me on my travels both due to my love for the game, and its unique place in world conversation. Its all'pervasiveness makes it perhaps my easiest entrance into a Venn diagram with strangers on the road, akin to discussing travels with strangers when back home. When we backpackers discuss our journeys and are getting tuned out by others, what we're really discussing is self-discovery, introspection, self-awareness. Perspective. And when we're discussing football, we're discussing goals and golazos but also legacy, rebellion, historical context. Why FC Barcelona's motto is Més Que un Club, calling back to the days when its supporter stands were the only venue where the people could voice anti-Franco chants without repercussion. Where we were when Landon scored in the 91st minute against Algeria, to send the US into the group stage in South Africa. Our communal eruptions of celebration, and the instantaneous kinship when we recognize our team's badge on someone else's breast. Its corner flags provide tentpoles, allowing us a venue to discuss why we love the things that we love.

This decade of speedballing, of having my three chief narcotics of soccer, traveling, and alcohol coalesce into one, reached its triple milestone this summer of 2014. The same summer the world's largest tournament, the World Cup, came back to football's spiritual home of Brazil. I wish I could say it was a lifelong dream to attend the Cup, but that would be a lie. When it came to the States in '94, my father asked the 11 year'old I used to be if he wanted to attend one of the LA games at the Rose Bowl, and the little shit thought only briefly before giving a negative shrug. That moment, the 3 seconds of my indecision and juvenile thought process, is one of the more complex regrets of my life. The untaken Yes would have meant attending the World Cup with my father, and given me a few hours, like many afternoons of then, that grows more potent in retrospect. Loves and admirations both intrinsic and intentional. A pinot memory that aged into something priceless much later, even if I could never appreciate it remotely at the time. But the well'bent No I've folded over mentally in the two decades since I spoke it is what set up this trip. The decision that became my obsession, to attend the World Cup in Brazil. For my experience of the event to be not a fogged recollection from preadolescence, but made as a world'weathered adult. Eyes and arms and heart and passport wide'open to a new experience on a barely'met continent. 

Eight years of longing and three years of saving delivered me to Brazil in June, along with my one of my oldest friends, Derek. Like Jenn joining on the Fulham trip, my crazy just contagious enough to recruit a traveling companion. Our World Cup experience would be one game at football's Vatican, our Hajj to Rio's Maracanã, followed by one United States game, so that our cheers could hail from our hearts as well as our lungs. And so we spent seven days at the world's greatest tournament; one where, unlike the Olympics, everyone is watching the same exact game, the many'practiced leg whips and deft, improvised genius applied to the same lone ball in unison.

The cheap but true answer is that it was everything I wanted. Rio was the biggest party I've been to in my life, with an energy and happiness so pure that it ignored language, homeland, one's innate timidity. We Americans screamed deliriously on Brazilian sand for an Argentinian striker's injury'time curler past an Iranian keeper. Messi delivering his distinct magic yet again. We joined in with the Belgians, and local Brazilians, in cheering on the Red Devils' flair against an unimaginative Russian squad's mundane plodding. If there was a complaint of the trip in recapping it to friends after I returned, it was that I didn't feel like I managed to see Brazil, but rather that I'd been to a country that was hosting the World Cup, which just happened to be Brazil. But such complete surrender, a total shunning of anything of the world outside the tournament festivities, is in itself something only Brazil could achieve. A country used to indulging in its passions, rallying and recruiting for its most central one of all.

Coming back from the Kentucky Derby two years ago, I overheard a group of friends at an airport gate near my mine discussing going en masse to the Cup as their next shared adventure.  A group of strangers instantly recognizable in that they were almost identical to the one I had just left. We six friends that had reconnected at the Derby, a mixture of age and gender, united by a thirst for experience. Part eavesdropping, part savoring the last of that trip's sensory, I listened in. "If we're gonna do it, it has to be Brazil. After that it's Russia... and then what, Qatar? You think we're gonna be in our late 30s and be like, Hey we should go to fucking Qatar?!" And I knew exactly how they felt. It had to be Brazil. 

Two years and seven weeks later, Derek and I shuffled with the communal motion of a packed crowd toward a subway station in outer Recife, the one closest to the Arena Pernambuco, where Germany had just defeated the United States, 1-0. We thousands, victors and losers, all left ecstatic. The result we'd just watched ensuring that both nations were moving on to the Cup's knockout stages next week. In 18 hours, we would be at the airport heading back above the equator, ending our time at the World Cup. In those last hundred yards before we reached the turnstiles and the trains taking us farther away from this moment, screaming children pressed up against the fences lining the way to the station. They screamed at us like we were rockstars, clamoring with the same furor as though we'd earned the jerseys we wore, rather than purchased them. They asked for pieces of memorabilia from us as their souvenirs; the minority calling for the absurd such as jerseys, but most of them for simple buttons, flags, bandannas. Some craned out arms and palms and hopeful smiles, content with just our touch. Brief high'fives. The children were mostly under the age of 10, the youth of the distant suburbs of a third-tier town in a developing nation, one criticized for its crime and its economic polarity. In the months since I saw them, they've lingered as part of my World Cup experience, just as much as the street parties in Lapa, or massive watch parties on Copacabana. A resonance I thought had to do merely with their exuberance, the unique feeling of importance they'd allowed us visitors to feel in those last steps within their suburb. Or they echoed in my emotions because they weren't the children that had attended the game, but the ones who were content just to see the spectators pass by, to watch as the world, for once in their lives, came to them. Or maybe because they were just slightly younger than the age I was when I said no to my father, chose not to attend a World Cup in my backyard. The child I was, the antithesis of their emotions, their excitement subbed for my insensitivity, my ungrateful lack of appreciation. 

But those guesses are only partially true. Those children of São Lourenço da Mata still echo because at age 10 and 8 and younger, they were born at the same time I first traveled. Their lives coincide precisely with my following of soccer, football, futebol. If my exuberance for the sport and for the world I've come to meet a border check and passport stamp at a time could be personified, that excitement given hands and happiness smiles and passion a voice, it was those that stretched and called out to us this June, from the World Cup in Brazil. 

The two'by'two photo now shows an older man with a determined look in his eyes. And though the Brazil visa is the first stamp of his newly-issued passport, the retired book that preceded it, one warped and swollen with use, means he knows what he is in for. He is in his early'thirties, but also in his preadolescence. Still coming of age, in a life that will inevitably decay and expire long before his passions do.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Wave after wave.


She and I are already in the ocean when the rain starts, so it's of little consequence. Our clothes are up above the high tide line, discarded peels that we'll return to eventually. With the rain chasing the tourists and locals vendors away, there's no one along the beach who would want them and we have nothing of value with us, save each other's touch.

We came to watch the sunset, the last of our week in Costa Rica, but the storm clouds stretch lazily down to the horizon, and we have no hint of where the sun is behind them. Turning back from the gauzed horizon, we see three little girls along the sand, playing a wordless game. Only occasional chirps of their laughter make it to our senses above the sound of Pacific waves crashing between us and them. They stay for a handful of minutes, a few turns of their game, before the sprinkling speeds into downpour and chases them home, as it has already done to those far older. But the lone boy is more determined, more patient. Like us he's merely in swim gear, the cord around his ankle tethering him to a surfboard. He hugs close to the talismanic shore, staring like us into the abyss of the Pacific. I follow the path of his eyes back into the nothingness and the everything of the water, and under its surface I retake my lover's hand. We watch the waves swell in our direction and brace ourselves against the smaller ones, diving beneath for the larger. We sometimes stand, and sometimes kneel on the sandbed, our motions borrowing a fluidity from that which surrounds us. 

A 30'minute drive up the same coast is where we spent our last day, the hours preceding this obscured sunset, snorkeling briefly in the water off Playa Conchal, and galloping along the sand atop sprinting horses. A far longer drive north above this same coast is where both my love and I spent our childhoods, our adolescence, our early years as adults in California. The same Pacific Ocean that served us on weekends, on days we cut class to chase a better tan, unknown to each other completely, but both out there, experiencing the same unending pattern of breakers of our shared ocean. The Pacific of Kerouac. Of Steinbeck and of Didion. Or of a younger me. In not just Newport or Santa Monica but Kaanapali and Port Douglas and Ko Phi Phi. Even those different, foreign coasts still part of the same vast blanket of water to return to again and again and again.

As the rain picks up even more, we sink to the always'changing surface and watch the rain hit the ocean, water pebbling water, with our eyes just above it. A liquid typewriter to chronicle the afternoon forever into our memory. The mood behind our eyes undulates, from wonder, to gratitude, to a lust so pure it feels scandalous. In love with not simply each other, but this moment, and this pocket of coast and ocean. This set of waves. This life.

A brown pelican traces shapes in the air above our heads and dives down chasing spotted prey. I see it bring its empty mouth back above the water and I do the same, looking just beyond the bird to the south and spot the little boy again. He's laying on his board in the coming waves that are too gentle to surf. He stoically faces a line of boats that have anchored near shore for the night, their skeletal lack of sails making a crude ruler of the horizon. And as she and I clutch each other closer before going back to shore, the red sun blinks reluctantly through for the two of us, for the pelican, and for the boy. For those who waited and didn't abandon it because of a little rainfall. He turns back to us and we three share waves and smiles and calls of "luego" and we step out of the water, leaving the ocean to him.