you'll sometimes walk alone
chapter 27
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It took about a month for my face to achieve total normalcy, though I returned to work only a week after my initial diagnosis. Eventually, the only vestige of the problem was that my left eye would sometimes fail to blink in accordance with the other, leaving it teary and wincing.
After I was done being ashamed of my facial condition, sometime after the new year, Tommy and I decided to make the trek out to The Torhaus, as he had suggested, to watch the Liverpool vs. Manchester United match.
Tommy and I had become Liverpool supporters sometime around the summer of 2005 when we saw their epic Champions League final-winning comeback against AC Milan. We followed them casually until around 2012, when almost all their games started being shown on American TV, at which point we became more fervent, inspired by their “You’ll Never Walk Alone” anthem and a crop of young players who were around the same age as us.
The Torhaus (which I believe translates to ‘The Goal-House’) was a recent attempt at implementing a biergarten-style bar in our area, with picnic tables, peanuts, German beer, and schnitzel. It was initially a place for people to enjoy American football in a non-traditional sports bar setting, but they found such demand for Premier League viewing that they started opening as early as 7:30 AM and serving breakfast.
Since Tommy was sober, my plan was to have him drive us out to Schenectady in his Impala, as my Town and Country van was becoming less and less reliable. I was looking forward to enjoying a Spaten Lager or two and watching Liverpool win.
We arrived just before the eleven-thirty kick-off, me wearing my Jordan Henderson kit and Tommy wearing his Coutinho kit. I ordered a Spaten lager (served in large steins), and we found a high-top table to sit at. We watched as the bar filled up to standing room only, a sea of red with white and a slightly different red, Manchester United and Liverpool fans blending together and doing their best impression of true supporters, starting chants and songs they learned from YouTube.
Although technically I wasn’t single, I scanned for any beautiful women among them, but each one I saw was undoubtedly already attached, hanging on to her broad-shouldered or athletically trim soccer fan husband/boyfriend, further confirming my suspicion that I should stick with Maggie Goodspeed. I looked across at my ‘date’, her cousin Tommy Goodspeed, whose eyes were glowing, fingers tapping on the table and shucking peanuts from the basket on our table as fast as he could, popping them into his mouth like little pills.
“I’m going to pee before kick-off,” I told him. It was a proactive decision, as I never wanted to miss a second of the games. I was highly invested and analytic in my watching of them, much more so than Tommy, who regarded the enterprise of fandom simply as an excuse to feel passionately about something.
After peeing into the soccer ball urinal cakes, I came back to the dispiriting sight of Tommy with a beer of his own, the largest stein one could order.
“Dude, what the hell?” I groaned as I sat down.
“What?” he asked, sipping it.
“What do you mean ‘what’? Aren’t you not supposed to be drinking? Aren’t you sober now?”
“Oh no, Jude-dude. You’re confused. I did not attend rehab.”
“Okay, a ‘retreat’ or whatever the fuck…but still, like…isn’t it best that you, ya know, not drink? Didn’t I tell you that I was done hanging out with drunk and fucked-up Tommy?”
“I can still drink, Jude-dude. I am healed. I am full again. I am cured. I know my limits, and I know how to control myself. There’s no need to worry,” he said, sipping again. “And surely your invitation to take me here came with an implicit acknowledgment we would be drinking. It’s a biergarten, after all.”
“That’s why I made you drive, though. So you couldn’t drink. What about taking me home? You drove your car out here,” I pointed out.
“I’ll be able to maintain my composure for automotive operation in the coming hours,” Tommy said, pretending to be more into the game than he normally was.
I have a habit of clenching my jaw when angry, a habit inherited from other humans since time immemorial, and Tommy no doubt read this as a conversation-ender, a method of shutting him up I wish I realized when we were kids.
Meanwhile, we were next to a table of United fans replete with numbered kits and scarves who were paying little attention to the game, joking and talking to each other with their little English bulldog in a custom doggie United jersey at their feet. In my newfound ill mood, it ruined my enjoyment of the match to know that such pretenders, so well-equipped, did not care to give the respect the game deserved.
It should have taken Tommy the whole game to finish such a large stein, but at halftime, he retrieved another without warning. I made up my mind that my Spaten lager was my last, just in case, and it proved to be a good decision. He became more and more boisterous in following the action, given that I was ignoring him, making up the deficit in yelling things like:
“Oh en garde, Emre!—Sublime spatial awareness from Hendo!—Well and truly neutralized, Mata!”
Many of these outbursts and their unorthodox nature made fans of both teams turn and raise their eyebrows and smile toward us. I always saw his uniqueness as Tommy’s strength: his streams of words, his rampant vocabulary, the unwillingness to be judged, and to live life without concern for the perception of others. But because I was angry with him as we watched that match at The Torhaus, and therefore disillusioned, for the first time I felt what many others felt when they encountered Tommy: embarrassment. There was something not quite right about Tommy that became aggravated as we got older, that seemed cool when we were young but had become a mockery of what a person should be and, I hate to admit, but in a small way I was ashamed of him and his pretentiousness.
Sometime after the half, United scored a goal in which I thought there was a clear foul against Liverpool in the build-up. They showed a replay and my opinion was confirmed.
“The back of his calf! He cleats him in the back of his calf!” I yelled toward one of the TVs with my hand outraised, far too emotively.
One of the United fans at the table near us, who were then digging into their schnitzels and who I had noticed before the goal had been paying the least amount of attention to the match as possible, turned around to me and said:
“Oh, come on, just a little touch, that’s nothing. He went down like a pussy.”
I shrugged and smiled, but that was enough to launch Tommy:
“It doesn’t really matter if he ‘went down like a pussy’ or not, as the rules of the game say that a direct free kick shall be awarded if a player kicks or attempts to kick another player, which in the course of this play is clearly what happens. And at no point do the rules say that such a kick should be forceful enough to bring a player down as a requisite to a foul, and this includes the provision saying not all contact is a foul, which of course specifies contact that is not a kick, which this surely was.”
“What are you, some kind of Shakespearean soccer rules Hitler?” scoffed the guy Tommy was addressing, unperturbed by the tirade. I had to admit this was a funny and specific insult.
“No rebuttal? No retort?” Tommy followed up.
“It doesn’t matter if he kicked him or not. If he just stayed on his feet like he could have, maybe he wouldn’t have lost the ball,” the United fan said back.
“Ah, so an attempt to direct the referee’s busy eyes to the subject of his calf being kicked should be viewed as cheating and immoral, simply because of said referee’s failed enforcement of the rules.”
“Yeah, it should. I don’t watch soccer to watch a bunch of prissy boys roll on the ground. Worst part of the sport, if you ask me.”
“Perhaps it’s part of the art form. If you were a soccer player paid millions to win games under this set of rules, you’d ‘go down like a pussy’ too, sir.”
The guy revealed himself to be an idiot and a meathead, despite his off-the-cuff insulting abilities. “Why don’t we head outside and I’ll show you how easily I go down or don’t go down,” he said, standing from his picnic table. He was barrel-chested and muscular, perhaps shorter but much more muscled than Tommy, the kind of guy who went to the gym twice a day simply because he was bored and had no other intellectual pursuits or hobbies. His friends regarded the interaction with pleasure.
He stood up and went chest to chest with Tommy, who was unfazed and who began to giggle uncontrollably in the guy’s face, which served to anger the United supporter even more. “Sir, if you mean to play a game of soccer in the parking lot, I think you’ll be very disappointed,” Tommy said.
“Tommy, leave him alone,” I said, putting my hand on Tommy’s chest.
“Stop it, Jude,” he said, pushing my hand off him and stepping backwards.
As he did so, his heel clipped the leg of the picnic table bench the United fan had pushed out beneath him as he stood, and Tommy tripped backward, kicking off a dastardly Rube Goldberg machine that sent our high-top table knocking into another high-top table which was laden with a round of steins filled to the brim, swiping them all off as it went to the ground.
We stood there suspended in the moment as the other Liverpool fans who just saw their new drinks get spilled opened their mouths with gasps and astonishment along with the rest of the bar, only the most faithful viewers of the game going undistracted by our shenanigan.
A muscled guy with a Torhaus shirt on approached us, but we needed no encouragement in leaving. I helped Tommy off the ground as I apologized in the plainest and simplest terms possible to all those around us, especially those whose drinks had spilled, leaving no doubt that I was only an accomplice and not the main perpetrator. We went out the garage door entrance and into the cold of the January air.
“Jude, all was fine. It was fine! I wasn’t going to fight that ingrate,” Tommy said, brushing peanut shells off his jacket. “I’m a pacifist, you know that.”
“I just don’t know what you’re going to do anymore, apparently,” I said. “Give me the keys, I’ll drive us home.”
“Oh, the keys? I suppose, if you don’t know what I’m going to do then it would be impossible for you to know that, actually, I am not going to give them to you,” he said.
“Oh, okay,” I said. “So how are we supposed to get home? You’re clearly too drunk to drive. Give me the keys.”
“The keys,” he said, taking them out of his pocket and holding them up.
“Yes,” I said.
He put them back in his pocket and began to run down the sidewalk.
“Tommy, what the fuck!” I yelled. He giggled as he crossed the street. It felt like all I could do was follow, but in hindsight, I could have done so many other things. I could have called someone to pick us up, I could have gone to a different bar alone and called him later, I could have gone back into Torhaus, apologized again, bought drinks for those we spilled, and watched the end of the game.
What I did was run after him, down Broadway in downtown Schenectady. My hands were quickly frozen, my breath connotating the exhaust of my labor, steam rising from my head. We dodged patches of ice and snow, or at least I did. Tommy ran right over them with his floating, precise, almost fairy-like gait, while I stomped around the obstacles, head down, legs heavy as usual. Tommy took risks at a couple of the intersections, counting on drivers to brake for him just after the light had turned green.
We must have only gone about a mile, but it felt like more with the weight of our boots and jeans and jackets. He stopped in front of a restaurant on Broadway and I caught up with him seconds later, my lungs massacred with the dry air I was heaving.
“What…is this…place?” I asked.
“Vietnamese. Banh mi,” he said. Vietnamese food was something my family would have never tried, but for Tommy’s family, it presented another option to break the monotony of their cultured palates.
We went in and Tommy ordered me a sandwich and paid for it, and I knew this was his way of making up for the scene at Torhaus. It was delicious.
We sat in the window to the street in silence, until Tommy said:
“Remember when, back in middle school, after we first met, I told the school you sucked your thumb because I thought it would make you quit?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said.
We talked for a bit more about the Liverpool match, and the laws of the game as Tommy had espoused them to the Manchester United meathead, then walked back to the car, at which point Tommy gave me the keys, and I drove the Impala back to Veddersburgh.
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