The Empty Cup
I mark my life in World Cups.
Events seem to cluster around them, leaving node points to hop back through and survey the changing states of me and mine. This kicked off in ‘94, when I was just old enough to kind of appreciate the significance of the tournament being in the US. Being with my dad in a crammed stadium for the Italy-Bulgaria semifinal is one of my best and most visceral memories.
With apologies to Dr. Manhattan - It’s 2006. I’m sitting in a low-ceilinged office surrounded by people whose notice I am beneath. I’m also beneath florescent lights that hum about 1.5 herz above the buzzing voice in my head asking over and over again if this is the kind of place I’ll end up once I graduate college. For all its sleep deprivation and overwrought romantic drama I actually like college; the idea of graduating drip-feeds an awful terror down my back. However, I share the drudgery with one of my best friends, and I always have a browser window open to live World Cup updates. The drama and clash playing out on that screen drowns out those plaguing my own life.
It’s 2010. My dad’s been gone for half a year. I haven’t really dealt with that in ways I should. I’m just starting the kernel of what will become my real life. I’m acting, and working on my first book. A ghost from the past has reached back out and I’m slowly, foolishly, taking its hand. Through it all, I hop from pub to pub in New York, watching the US and Germany. The Americans achieve one last beautiful moment as Landon Donovan scores that goal and Ian Darke cheers “Go, go, USA.” Germany is knocked out by Spain as I sit in a bar in the suburban town I’ve been trying to escape since my teens, and at half time, drawn by an odd scent of smoke, I step outside and watch my favorite Indian restaurant burn to the ground. I watch the final with two dear friends and the ghost, knowing I’ve slipped back into its haunt.
It’s 2011. I’m so close to breaking the gravity well of that town, and I can feel it. I’m starting to do something in the world and I have no idea if anyone will ever care. A cold spot is left at my side by a vanished specter. I stand shoulder to shoulder and chest to back in a bar in greenwich village, watching the US women so nearly clinch the Cup. But though it hasn’t been Japan’s year, it is its day. I can’t begrudge them this, and I nod and move on.
It’s 2014. I live in a couple hundred square feet of Harlem with someone I’m terrified I’ll fuck things up with. I spend my weekdays wearing out my feet on the upper west side walking dogs five social strata above me, and my nights performing all around the city. The life I’m in is rough and exhausting and there is never ever time, but when I hop back to 2006 I recognize how excited that me would feel about it. I return my last dogs of the day just in time to catch the late afternoon game. Brazil fans in a bar on Amsterdam avenue buy me tequila shots as their golden boys score against Croatia. The US bows out early, but Germany perseveres. In a burger bar on 110th and Broadway, sitting with my favorite person, I watch them dispatch Argentina in the final. I roar in triumph, thinking about what other wonders may come.
It’s 2015, and I’ve just finished moving farther from New York than I’ve been since college. I’m in a new city where I know almost nobody. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know staying where I was and letting my favorite person leave my life wasn’t it. The paranoia, reflexive self-excoriation and emotional flinch response scarred into me by a long ago abusive relationship has wrecked so much in my life, and I’m not letting it do that again. One of the first things we do is set up our small TV and using good old antenna reception, perch on the barely assembled bed to watch the US win the semi final and then the final. I look at the blank canvas in front of me with a cautious smile.
I could go on to ‘18 and ‘19, of course, but now it’s 2022 and I feel adrift. This node point of my life is cold and warped, even as my life itself is as good as it’s ever been. The World Cup is at the wrong time, in the wrong place, presided over by the wrong people, and I can’t subsume myself in it the way I have for literally as long as I have any coherent memories. It drifts along in the background, occasionally poking its head into my waking thoughts and more rarely into my viewing eyes. I’m busy. There isn’t much time to do things I enjoy and I’m not spending precious time on something operating under abhorrent circumstances.
Maybe the worst thing is the banal slumped-ness of my feelings. I could be responding with acrid fury and a flat personal boycott, not watching a single minute and actively avoiding news. Taking the kind of high minded, high energy principled stand that I have in other situations with other things. But I’m not. I just feel a cold, melancholic flatness about it. I’ve watched the odd game if one happened to be on, and largely shuffled on past the rest, occasionally even forgetting it was happening in moments. It’s just kind of there, and I’m just kind of not really bothering with it.
This is where FIFA’s corruption and Qatar’s abuses have gotten us. The World Cup was never a substitute for, a distraction from, or an isolated bubble outside of life and reality. The thing that gave it its richness was how it was completely entwined with our lives and our jobs and our communities. People came together to watch players from their cities and their neighborhoods meet people from wildly different parts of the globe and despite all language and cultural barriers, communicate emphatically and perfectly through the medium of the world’s greatest game. Offices followed games together, families connected over tense knockout rounds, whole countries lived and breathed the dramatic arcs of their representatives at the tournament. The World Cup is life. Or was. Will be again. But this one, this is just a sporting event.
It’s 2022. I’m sitting in a café with a World Cup game on in the background, not watching. Writing about how I’m not watching. And waiting for the summer of 2023 to come.
