I was in the office yesterday, having a particularly absurd professional moment of chaos that eventually turned out just fine, when I walked past a conference room and glanced inside, wondering why all the lights were off but there was sound emanating from the room.
A bunch of dudes (yes, all men, at least at that point) were watching the World Cup. In the office. You know, utilizing company resources and stuff. With no fear of repercussion.
I love the World Cup for that reason alone.
I'm no fan of the sport. I don't know why. I still call it "soccer." I think it's like baseball. You have to grow up with it to love it, and I didn't grow up with soccer--I grew up with baseball. I grew up with the other kind of football, the one that is admittedly badly named. Anyhow, I do not love the sport itself. I have nothing against it--it just doesn't capture my interest. In that way, to me, it's kind of like...golf.
But I love everything else about the World Cup. I love anything that can take people outside of one cultural moment, like meeting/office culture, and bring them into another cultural moment, like sport. I love that people all over the world are watching the same events at the same time. I love that people lose sleep. I love the way I get information about the games through social media.
But most of all, I love the World Cup for the memories.
Exactly 20 years ago, Chicago hosted the World Cup. I was 18 years old and had just finished my freshman year of college. I came home for the summer and began working at Kroch's and Brentano's, a famous old Chicago landmark right in the heart of the loop, back when bookstores were a THING. That flagship store was huge. I have some extremely vivid memories of working there, all while collecting my $5 an hour and standing on my feet for 9 hours straight, realizing that I don't actually like people, or that at least I don't actually like CUSTOMERS. I remember:
the guy named Mike who was my closest "friend" at the store. He was a little older than me, maybe 22, and was already a vet, having served in the first Gulf War (remember that one?) when he was just a teenager. I remember how I could tell, even at my age, how hard it was for him to re-integrate into society after being in the army straight out of high school. He brought the same boring lunch with him every day: flavorless beans and rice. While the rest of us downed our lunches in 5 minutes and spent the rest of our 25 minute break outside smoking or blowing an hour's worth of wages on coffee or just walking around the park, he spent the whole time doing pushups. He woke up at 4:30 every morning, or so he told me. And, every single day, he "coincidentally" met me at my train stop to walk me to work, even though he took a different line. He walked me to the train after work every single day as well. If my boyfriend was meeting me, he would casually walk away as if that had been his plan all along. I was too clueless to realize why he did those things, though it should have been obvious, especially that one time when he
had my back as I got my revenge against the customers who harassed me while buying their porn. Kroch's was a major distributor of newspapers and magazines, and had more periodicals than any other single store in the country (or something like that) at the time. Twenty years ago, before Internet porn, men bought magazines. They bought Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler and Playgirl. They bought the French, Brazilian, and German versions of those magazines, all of which were hidden behind the register so they could not stand in the store itself jerking off to porn. Some of those men would be extremely embarrassed as they stood in my line and asked me for the porn they wanted. Those men got even more uncomfortable as Mike glared at them and muttered things about how they should have had the sense to get in a different line. Others lived for those moments. You see, the international porn magazines had naked women right on the cover! You didn't even need to look inside. So some dude would say, hi honey, can you show me that French Penthouse? And I would have to stand there holding it while he looked at that and at my 18 year old self. UGh. The worst. But then, a wonderful cultural icon named Tonya Harding decided to make the world's first truly infamous "sex tape" by filming herself having sex with a really crappy video camera...and then selling STILL PHOTOS FROM THE CRAPPY VIDEO TO PENTHOUSE. And then people pre-ordered this crap, and awaited its release with bated breath. And then the dudes came into the store in droves, asking for their special orders, and I spent an entire day selling porn to suits who were going to go jack off to blurry pictures of felons in company restrooms. By about 2 pm I had had enough. So when the really cocky, flirty suit WINKED AT ME, I looked him up and down and realized he had no briefcase and no jacket, so therefore nowhere to hide his magazine. And Mike nudged me, giving me a signal, and smoothly hid all of our paper bags from view. And I told the dude we were fresh out of paper bags. Here's your see-through flimsy plastic bag, sir. Now your boss will know what's up.
Ah, Mike.
But not everyone was like those guys. When I say we had more periodicals than anyone, I mean it. We had newspapers from all over the world, in dozens of languages. We had regular customers who would come in once a week to buy seven days worth of four different Arabic-language papers. Those customers had special shelves dedicated to them. We knew when they were on vacation. We knew their names and their families' names and we knew many of their stories. There were other regulars (regulars, people. regulars in a bookstore) who came in every morning for LeMonde. My little brain was always full of stories about all of these people, walking around with bundles of newsprint, trying to find a way to connect back home in a time just before those connections you could touch with your hands would become irrelevant.
And then, there were the people who came to Chicago for the World Cup.
The jerseys! The colors! The swearing in 27 languages! The women who wore white blazers! The men who wore short shorts! The young men who had no interest in porn because they were buying every single newspaper from Spain just for their country's version of the sports! The children who would have to console their parents over the outcome! The fathers who just assumed I loved football and would earnestly try to overcome the language barrier to talk to me about it, reminding me that the world was filled with people like them and like Mike and like the penthouse guys!
My God.
It was beautiful.
I've had a lot of jobs. I've even kind of made a career for myself. But I will always remember working in a bookstore for $40 a day when I was 18, discussing the news of the world with people from every corner of it, watching them fall to their knees screaming GOOOAAAALLLL, clutching crumpled papers to their chests as they grieved and rejoiced for places I had never seen. When you mention the World Cup to me, that's what I see in my mind. And I am 18 again, and the world is a very, very colorful place.
No comments:
Post a Comment