17. A river of red and a river of white flowing in opposite directions on Lake Shore Drive, as seen from Montrose Harbor at night.
18. The wind: the sailboats in Grant Park Harbor bobbing on the water, the mast wires hysterically clucking; the Buckingham Fountain’s upward stream turned into a water plume; the windows of downtown buildings shaking and thumping; people walking down Michigan Avenue with their heads retracted between their shoulders; my street completely deserted except for a bundled-up mailman and a plastic bag fluttering in the barren tree-crown like a torn flag.
19. The stately Beverly mansions; the bleak Pullman row houses; the frigid buildings of the La Salle Street canyon; the garish beauty of old downtown hotels; the stern arrogance of the Sears Tower and the Hancock Center; the quaint Edgewater houses; the sadness of the West Side; the decrepit grandeur of the Uptown theaters and hotels; the Northwest Side warehouses and body shops; thousands of empty lots and vanished buildings no one pays any attention to and no one will ever remember. Every building tells part of the story of the city. Only the city knows the whole story.
20. If Chicago was good enough for Studs Terkel to spend a lifetime in it, it is good enough for me.
IF GOD EXISTED, HE’D BE A SOLID MIDFIELDER
By Bosnian standards, I’d been an athletic person. Even though I’d for years smoked a pack and a half a day, had started enjoying alcoholic potions at the ripe age of fifteen, and was fully dependent on a red-meat-and-fat diet, I’d played soccer on the gravel and parking lots of Sarajevo once or twice a week since time immemorial. But soon after my landing in Chicago, I gained weight due to nutrition based on Whoppers and Twinkies, exacerbated by a series of torturous attempts to quit smoking. Furthermore, I couldn’t find anybody to play with. My Greenpeace friends deemed rolling joints as physical exercise and only occasionally arranged a lazy softball game, where no score was kept and everyone was always doing great. I couldn’t get past understanding the rules, but I did stubbornly try to keep score.
Not playing soccer tormented me. I didn’t really care about being healthy as I was still young enough — for me playing soccer was closely related to being fully alive. Without soccer, I felt at sea, mentally and physically. One Saturday in the summer of 1995, I was riding my bike by a lakeside field in Chicago’s Uptown and saw people warming up, kicking the ball around while waiting for the game to start. It seemed they might have been getting ready for a league game, for which you had to have registered as a member of a team. But before I had time to consider the humiliating prospect of rejection, I asked if I could join them. Sure, they said, and I kicked the ball for the first time after an eternity of three years. That day I finally played, twenty-five pounds heavier, wearing denim cutoffs and basketball shoes. In no time I pulled my groin and quickly earned blisters on my soles. I humbly played defense (although I’d preferred to play as a forward) and strictly obeyed the commands of the best and fastest player on my team — one Phillip, who had been, I’d learn later, on the Nigerian 4 × 400 relay team at the Seoul Olympics. After the game, I asked Phillip if I could come back. Ask that guy, Phillip said, and pointed at the ref. The ref wore a striped black-and-white shirt and introduced himself as German. He told me there was a game every Saturday and Sunday and I could always come.
German was not in fact German — he was from Ecuador, but his father was born in Germany, hence his name (Hermann) and nickname. He worked as a UPS truck driver, and was in his mid-forties, suntanned, wearing a modest pompadour and a mustache. Every Saturday and Sunday, he’d arrive by the lake around 2:00 p.m. in a decrepit, twenty-some-year-old van, on which a soccer ball and the words “Kick me make my day” were painted. He’d unload goalposts (made from plastic pipes) and nets, bagfuls of single-color T-shirts, and balls. He’d distribute the shirts to the guys who came to play, put a board on the garbage can, and, on top of it, a number of cheap cups and trophies, little flags of different countries, and a radio blaring Spanish-language stations. Most of the players lived in Uptown and Edgewater and came from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Belize, Brazil, Jamaica, Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Senegal, Eritrea, Ghana, Cameroon, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, France, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, USA, Ukraine, Russia, France, Vietnam, Korea, et cetera. There was even a guy from Tibet, and he was a very good goalie.
Normally, there’d be more than two teams, and they all had to rotate, so each game lasted for fifteen minutes or until one team scored two goals. The games were very serious and contentious, as the winning team stayed on the field for the next game, while the losing one had to wait on the sidelines for its turn to come back on. German refereed and he almost never called a foul. He’d follow the game with glazed eyes, as though watching soccer made him high; it seemed he needed to hear the sound of a breaking bone to use his whistle. Sometimes, if a team was a player short, he’d referee and play simultaneously. In such a situation, he was particularly hard on himself and once gave himself a yellow card for a rough tackle. We — immigrants trying to stay afloat in this country — found comfort in playing by the rules we set ourselves. It made us feel that we still were a part of the world much bigger than the USA. People acquired their nicknames based on their country of origin. For a while, I was Bosnia, and would often find myself playing in the midfield with, say, Colombia and Romania.
Ever hurting to play and fearing that I’d be left out if I was late, I’d often be the first one to arrive before games. I’d help German set up the goals and then hang out with him and others, talking soccer. In his magic van, German had albums of photos in which people who had played with him were recorded. I could recognize some of the guys when they were much younger. One of them, whom everyone called Brazil, told me he had been playing with German for more than twenty years. German had been the one organizing games from the beginning, although he’d had some drug and booze problems and had taken a few years off at one point. But he came back, Brazil said. I understood, for the first time since my arrival, that it was possible to live in this country and still have a past shared with other people.
It wasn’t clear to me why German was doing it all. Even though I like to think of myself as a reasonably generous person, I could never imagine spending every single weekend putting together soccer games and refereeing, subjecting myself to verbal and other abuse, dismantling the goals and loading up the van long after everybody had left, then washing a large number of T-shirts stinky with worldly sweat. It was clear that without German those pickup games would not be happening, but he never asked for anything in return from us.
I abused for years German’s inexplicable generosity. As we often played in the winter in a church gym in Pilsen, which was beyond the reach of my bike, I’d catch a ride in his clunky “Kick me make my day” van, holding the passenger-side door, whose lock didn’t work. On the way back, I often feared for my life, as German was prone to celebrating the successful completion of yet another game with a few beers — he always had a well-stocked cooler in his van. He’d talk incessantly, driving and sipping beer, telling me about his favorite team of all time (the Cameroon of the 1990 World Cup) or about his search for an heir, someone who’d continue organizing the games once he retired and moved to Florida. He had a hard time finding the right person, he said, because few people had the guts to commit. He never suggested that I take over, which slightly offended me even if I knew that, gutless as I was, I’d never be able to do it.