SoMa Literary Review - Playing for Something

Playing for Something

By Scott Joseph Campbell

William Bittleston had an estranged wife, a daughter he hardly saw, and a mother in England who constantly asked him when he was coming home.

He never meant to stay here. He said he’d been in the States on a backpacking trip, and in San Francisco he’d met a girl, a beautiful American blond, the kind he’d always seen in movies. She’d let him move into her apartment, and the first three months were beautiful. Far from family and friends, from all obligations, he was happy. No time like stolen time, he said.

Into the third month of their affair, a tiny, disposable piece of plastic told them. From then on everything went wrong.

Yeah, she said. I believe in all that, but not for me.

But we can’t have a fuckeen baby.

Look at me. Look at me and tell me you can know you have a baby and kill it. Our baby, she’d said.

And he’d relented.

So he’d stayed. His mother forwarded him all his letters from England except the one in which the university finally threw him out. When his visa was set to expire, he flew back home to pack up or sell off all the few things left in his old flat, and spent the night before his final flight to America in a pub rooting for Manchester United in a football match. Then he came back to the States.

A baby is a different thing when it’s out and you have to look at it, and with Amber there, blinking in the sun, things started to break down. The blond harbored a deep anger about his wanting to have the pregnancy taken care of. She wouldn’t marry him. She said, How can I have you around Amber when your first thought was to kill her?

So even though he calls her his wife, she never really was.

After that, his status lapsed, and he was technically an illegal alien. I say whatever. San Francisco ’s a sanctuary city and all. I say there’s only rich folks here buying things up, and illegal aliens at the bottom making and moving the shit they want to buy. Hell, I’ve never had a job I didn’t work next to somebody with the terror of la migra. But it bothered him.

He worked down in the warehouse, one of those basement hells of dust and sweat, right down in the middle of downtown that nobody knows about. Above our heads, all the fancy people in fancy clothes, smiling, happy, drinking coffee drinks that would cost me a half an hour of work, and we all die beneath their feet for ten bucks an hour, which in this city, is a kinder way of phrasing slavery. You have to steal your booze on that. And that’s where I knew him, the warehouse. He hauled boxes and moved 1500 pound cubes of packaged product around with a palette driver. We’re all like him. Illegals, drunks; everybody hiding from something. He did get some shit from the Mexicans, because they don’t think any gringo has it as bad as they do. But the Central Americans hate the Mexicans for what they do to them sneaking through on the way to the States. You hear about all of that, and you realize that you can’t touch any of it. Everybody hates everybody. Just drink together and find a few things you both don’t hate to talk about. So William, I guess, fit in just fine.

A year after his daughter Amber was born, all blond ringlets and blue eyes, as he used to say, his wife threw him out. Said he was a go-nowhere baby killer, and she needed to make room for somebody who would be able to provide.

For me and my baby, she said.

And then you know what she said to me? You know what she fuckeen said? She said, All I ever loved of you was your accent anyway. Can you fuckeen believe that?

He threatened to fight it, but then she handed him little Amber’s birth certificate. In the space left blank for the father’s name, where his name should have been, was the word “Unknown.”

He realized two things then; that fatherhood was a matter of paperwork, and that through all of it, she had been planning this.

If he wanted any access to his daughter, he would have to sue for a paternity test. He would need money. And since he didn’t have any, he was dependent on the mother’s good will for everything. So he left quietly.

He stayed three weeks at Carlos’s apartment in the Castro. After that, the supervisor found him a place. 900 a month, no questions. I know what he made. I amazed he could afford to eat. It was a shithole in the darkest depths of the Tenderloin, and yet he wouldn’t leave. He hardly saw his daughter, but he didn’t go back because when he could see her, he said, things made sense.

You should see her, man, all fuckeen eyes and such. She’s fuckeen gorgeous, man. The picture of her mother, ‘at fuckeen bitch. ‘at fuckeen bitch, he said. It’s nicer that I would’ve said.

William had been at the job 6 years now. He was afraid to leave. Although no one was really deporting anybody, he was still always scared. Every day he was scared. Every day. Anything could happen.

Say what you want about illegals, I’ve seen it, and I know. The trouble is that for someone like that, everything is at stake, all the time. A simple incident with the police could conceivably end in the loss of everything in their life, and they could be sent back to a country that is no longer home. That’s why all the Mexicans in the press are rapists and murderers; there is no in between. Either they’re hiding successfully, anonymous, invisible, or they’ve been pushed to the other side of the line. The Brits have a phrase for it:

In for a penny, in for a pound.

But William was different. He was always stepping across the line, and then scrambling back again. He made that penny/pound decision at least three times a week, always just as desperate, always just as total. It made him crazy.

I’d sit there and watch the change. Sometimes it seemed like he got mad because he’d had too much to drink, and suddenly he realized that for the sake of a couple bottles of beer he had put it all in jeopardy. Then he’d go fucking nuts. He’d get in fights, or throw his glass across the bar. I was with him when he shoved a guy we were drinking with through a window by the d.j. booth. We had to run half a mile down Sutter, and I hate to fucking run. When I asked him about it, he said he didn’t know why he acted that way. Said, Maybe I just don’t want to get sent back without a good story to go with it.

The way I thought about it was when he’s out there throwing things, and jumping up on cars, and whatever the hell else he did, I saw it as some kind of way to be near his daughter. I don’t know how that makes sense, but that was the impression I got. Like he was in a war in her name, some kind of invisible, insane crusade. Of course it’s probably more likely that he was always hoping it would go too far, and that this was his way to get out of an impossible situation.

All I’m saying is, Will was crazier than I know how to be. Having fun with Will was like a barrel of monkeys with a pipe bomb inside. Monkey parts everywhere. Splinters. Orphans. But at least you could say you did something with your Saturday.

During one particularly bad time, he told me something while drunk. He said that there’d been a World Cup years back, and he said he saw a sign at a pub saying they would show the games. When he got down there, he said that Brits from all over the city converged on the pubs to watch the games, and go fucking nuts in true English style.

It’s the only time I’ve been English in four years years, mate.

Because I knew he liked saying her name, I asked about Amber. I said, You gonna get Amber into all that soccer stuff, and he said no.

My daughter’s from here, man. America . She’s not even English.

I remembered that, and what that stupid soccer ball rolling around on the grass had meant to him, so when he told me there was another World Cup coming up, and he said he’d like it if I could catch one of the matches with him, I felt obligated.

Now I like soccer, but not in a way where I thought I’d ever enjoy actually watching a game. I don’t consider it a noble clash between modern heroes, I don’t think of it as some modern version of warring tribes. If anything, I like it because of the opposite: nothing is at stake. Territory and kin are not threatened by the battle. It’s not even about God or Beauty and Truth. I like soccer for the same reason all sports are beautiful: it’s senseless. All of it, completely absurd. They’ve mowed a patch of grass, inflated a replica of a pig bladder, invented a bunch of rules that go counter to instinct (thou shalt not use your hands) and still people get so worked up that they’ll shout and riot and cry. They’ve even got a guy in there acting as judge. You didn’t touch that ball with your hand, now did you? Tsk, tsk. And people go with it. Get a ball in a net/through a hoop/past a line? Go nuts. Shout. Stamp your feet. Riot maybe.

We are a stupid fucking species.

And it’s beautiful.

It was important enough for Will to take some vacation time off to watch, but the schedules were all messed up that time of year, and most of us were working doubles, so I couldn’t make any of the games. I kept putting it off, but he’d suck it up and say, Alright, next one then. But England kept winning.

It was a quarterfinal game, 8 am, England vs. Portugal , and even then, he had to be at work at 11, but we finally made a game together.

When I got to the place, I thought I’d be yawning, head-on-the-bar bored. It was a small, dark pub on Bush, one of the places I don’t drink in because they charge full price for a beer. Where they think they can charge more because Robert Louis Stevenson sat coughing into a cloth in a building nearby. As I moved through the crowd, it was clear that the whole place was packed with Brits, just like he’d said it would be. Everybody was laughing and yelling and only a few sharp American accents pierced through to my ears. As I greeted William, I listened. I was vaguely ashamed of the way I spoke, and afraid to say too much. William shook my hand and I could tell he was in a mood. Not knowing what else to do, I went and got the first round. Across the room, William looked like everybody; short hair, facial features that became obviously English when placed next to so many others with the same. He wore a red jersey with the same logo on the front as everyone else’s jerseys and windbreakers: England . When he turned, I read the name across the back: Rooney. He took the beer from me without looking at it and drank.

This is going to be a good game, he said, and set down the beer. I sat down next to him and put my eyes on the screen.

We sat for a while talking about nothing, and looking down into the people’s legs as they passed. Then he said, She’s getting fuckeen married, man. To a guy in Web Design.

It was strange him telling me something like that without both of us being tanked. He’d never done it before, and at 8 in the morning, surrounded by a bunch of riled up soccer fans, it was so far away from what I was expecting, it was almost surreal.

Jesus, man.

I didn’t know what else to say.

That moment lasted, and William stared into the forest of legs. I knew I should look at him. I knew I should say something better than I had. He wouldn’t tell anybody else something like that, and I had to do better for him. But when I looked at him, slumped over, turned slightly away, peering into all those hairy fucking legs, there were no words. Without thinking, I read the word in front of me.

Rooney, I said. Who’s Rooney?

William blinked, and his brow pulled together, and he narrowed his eyes. He looked down at his jersey as though he didn’t understand where it had come from, had never seen it before in his life. It was an alien object that made no sense. Then his forehead relaxed, and he looked back into the crowd of legs.

Striker, he said. A young lad done well for himself.

Just then, people on the TV screen talked into huge padded foam microphones and the house went into a cheer. The men took the field, and soon they were playing. I let the awkwardness disappear into the game.

As the players took the field, William’s lethargy evaporated. He locked his eyes on the screen, and wouldn’t take them away even to buy beers. We drank round after round, and I cheered when the crowd cheered, but William and I didn’t talk.

William watched every move, and when plays were close, he leaped off the bench and cried out or cheered, raised his fist, screamed more than anybody around us. When the guys in front of the big TV launched into chants, William’s voice boomed along with them, Referee’s a wanker, a wanker, a wanker, until the next major play distracted their cheering. To the uninitiated, the strange tunes and chants seemed cultic and threatening. They were all madmen, and as the game progressed, neither team scoring, the crowd grew more fevered and desperate.

You could plot it on a graph; oil prices, inflation, the world’s population and drama in a soccer match all increase exponentially. More people took to their feet, fear of losing their view sent more to their feet, especially at critical moments when the crowd roared and waved in unison, like the movements of a single organism.

The crowd got louder, but I could still hear William over all of them. The closer the players got to scoring, the louder we got. Sometimes in a blur I realized it was stupid to cheer, as though making a save or not depended on our ability to say oooohhhhh in unison. But then I realized that it’s the opposite: it’s exactly because you’re helpless. All you can do is cheer and yell and pray and wait. Someone else does the work. Someone else decides. No matter how much you care, you’re helpless, but desperate to take part in some way. That’s why you cheer.

It was amazingly fun; when the TV gave a close up of a Portuguese player, we booed. When the ref called a foul, we called him a wanker. When the crowd cried Eng-uh-land, so did I, shamefully and in American, but honestly. Go England .

Where did they all come from? Why were they there? I mean, they’re anonymous among the millions, but all of a sudden, there they are, a fifth column, an army for England , rooting for the home away from home team. I imagined every one of them like William, trapped here by some mysterious circumstance, and maybe each of them were burdened by a silent and enormous hurt. They were poisoned by a long and lingering homesickness, and were crushed between the silent pressure to assimilate and be American, or to turn into a caricature, and become what Americans expect the British to be. Both options meant death. Either way, whatever they truly were, would disappear.

And William was the craziest of them all. I had never seen William like this before. In all the fights, the drinking, the madness and the work, I had never seen him so wild. I planned to make fun of him.

So intense, man.

But it turned out I didn’t get the chance.

Rooney went out. I don’t really understand it as it was happening, but a kick went foul, and Rooney’s foot made contact with the opponent’s crotch. To me it looked like an accident, but the referee held up a red card, and William stopped shouting.

What I didn’t realize then, is that when a player is red carded, he isn’t replaced, he’s just gone. The team plays on without him. In this case, with 11 men to 10. Given the pitch of the game, I guess William took it as a death sentence for England . And it was his man to boot. Or maybe that isn’t it at all. What I do know is that when Rooney went out, William shut down.

He cried.

He hardly watched the rest of the game. Even at the end when everybody was cheering frantically. Even in overtime, with one dramatic play after another. Even in the shootout when it was one for one and the crowd, probably the whole of the English people went absolutely fucking nuts in unison.

I cheered until the last ball hit the net, and the announcer said England ’s dream is over.

The crowd was heartbroken, and all the faces were sad. Small time hooligans shouted, Boo fucking cheat, and You know who won the game? The ref. But among all the sadness, there was a spot darker than the other. William sat there, staring blankly at the same space of wall he’d spent the last half of the game watching. But I didn’t think it was as bad as that. I said, Hey man, next time we get ‘em. What the hell, we might even root for America for a game or two.

But William wasn’t for talking. I looked at my watch, and told him that it was almost time for work. He looked at his watch, and looked around. Then he looked at me.

I’m gonna go, he said.

Next day, when we were scheduled to work together, he didn’t show up. I went by his place, but nobody answered. I thought he might throw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge or something. I kept thinking to scan a newspaper for a suicide or a kidnapping, but I was always too busy, and I forgot. I expected that if anything dramatic happened, they’d talk about it at work. But they didn’t. They had another guy in William’s place at work in two days. He was just gone. Like that.

I found out much later that Wayne Rooney, the striker, had started playing the year William had come to San Francisco to live. The way I imagine it that that last night in England , at that pub he told me about, it was Rooney he had been watching, and rooting for. Since then it was like Rooney was playing for him. But I know that’s probably not true, any more than Lennon was playing for that cook I used to work with, who looked exactly like him, or Crouch was playing for me. If I liked the way Crouchy ran around gangly on the field, it had nothing to do with anything. And certainly less to do with me. But it bothered me that all that disappeared. He had suffered so much for his daughter, but she’d never know. She’ll grow up and always be angry that daddy went away. Abandoned her. She’ll be angry if she’s anything. But who was I to tell her about it? What am I going to do? Say, Hey kid. Your mommy fucked your daddy over, and your Daddy was in pain, and there was this weird thing with a soccer player named Rooney, and that’s why your Daddy’s not around. For all I know, he’s still in contact with his daughter, and he didn’t drop off the planet, he just dropped off mine.

So that’s it. Something happened here in the city of San Francisco , and it was pretty. There was a good man, and now he’s gone. Same story as all stories. But that’s why I watch World Cup soccer every time it comes around. And that’s why I always root for England .

Also by Scott Joseph Campbell on SoMa Literary Review :

Me, the Man Who Cried, and the Palestinian

Scott Joseph Campbell has been traveling around the West working odd jobs and writing more years than he can remember. He has a wife and a cat. He currently lives and works in the city of San Francisco .