Shop 'til I Drop

Yesterday was a mall day for me. Hold your sniggers, please. We all have them. I don’t care how “green” you are or wish to be, how committed to local products and services, how opposed to mass consumerism, how righteous in your avoidance of Recognizable Brands. Like hangnails and nosebleeds, nobody gets through life without an occasional visit to the mall. Indeed, such visits are closely akin to hangnails and nosebleeds, as follows: 1) they’re not such a goddamned big deal, so quit whining and get over it; 2) still, you have lost some precious part(s) of your corporeal (or spiritual) being, and so can be forgiven for feeling a little blue in the aftermath, and 3) if the hangnails, nosebleeds or visits persist, and/or if worse you find yourself secretly enjoying them, you have the warning signs of a much more serious and perhaps fatal condition for which you ought to seek professional help at the first opportunity. I feel pretty safe on the last score, although damn I remember some epic nosebleeds as a child; scarlet gushers from a busted tap that terrified my parents and delighted my siblings. But not in years, now. I think my cuticles are no worse off than the next guy’s. And my shopping trip really was no fun at all.

I did my mall business in Delaware. I’m here on a family vacation involving in-laws and a beach house. It’s an annual event for me. I believe I’ve had but one summer in which I didn’t go to Delaware since the early 1980s. I’ve walked, jogged and driven all over its freeways and toll roads, its byways and cornfields, its sandy strands and fetid canals, its backwaters and beaches. But until yesterday I hadn’t visited its malls. Do you know much about Delaware? I didn’t think so. Unless you’re a native or denizen of the Chesapeake Bay, there really isn’t much reason to know anything about the state beyond its capital, and that only to impress your trivia buddies. It’s almost entirely rural except for Dover and its airbase, and a few towns sprinkled around like a cheapskate’s chocolate sprinkles on a plain vanilla cookie. They raise chickens here, and grow vegetables and cranberries, and the beaches provide vacation spots for millions of visitors from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and sometimes (though rarely) points beyond. (Seldom as far as Seattle.) That’s about it. But all these activities require the presence of people, and as we all know, an awful lot of people get nosebleeds every day like to shop. Thus, malls.

It’s flat here. The only elevations significantly above sea level are osprey nests, suspension bridges and the upper decks of the tonier “cottages,” if such a word can be—and it is, actually—applied to three thousand square-foot mansions with as many bedrooms as my house has drawers. Most of the state’s perimeter is sea or bay shore, which gives way to countless acres of marshland, much of which was diked, drained and dammed long ago to make way for fields and farms. And malls. Some are crumbling and decrepit, while others are quite new. Whatever their age, they’re big. Very big. We think we’ve got big malls in and around Seattle—Southcenter, Northgate, Alderwood, even Bellisfair up north, and so on. They are but overgrown convenience stores next to the sprawling monsters of mallness one encounters on, say, a drive up or down Route 1. With essentially unlimited room to expand, the malls hereabouts have no need to cluster a bunch of stores around a central court, walkway or other “feature” in the usual risible effort to (re)create an ersatz “village square” environment. They tend instead to the horizontal, with parking lots the size of Midwestern counties. My visit(s) yesterday were by way of an errand, one of those occasional bumps in the Vacation Road that involves a long, uninformed, wandering search for something one could find in ten minutes at home but is maddeningly elusive even with the help of the interwebs; an old-school experience, I guess it would be called, in which one simply must hunt for the object of one’s desires in real time, via car, traveling from likely suspect to likely suspect with no real hope of success yet nothing better to do than sit on the beach and get skin cancer. For what it’s worth my search eventually and to my surprise was successful, though the hunt took the better part of seven hours, door-to-malls-to-door. I had a lot of malls to visit.

Route 1 is a busy highway during the summer months. It’s gridlock on the weekends, as you can imagine, but even mid-week it can be a waking nightmare.

I had it fairly easy for a while until I had to get back onto the highway from a set-back mall complex in the small town of Smyrna. Though most of the coastal malls are visible from the big road, they tend to be recessed a good distance—as much as a quarter mile—from the traffic, with labyrinthine turn lanes and access roads connecting them to the ribbon of tractor trailers and SUVs that speeds by; skinny limbs and capillaries carrying a vital life-force into the retail extremities, but loathe to allow its natural return to the principal veins and arteries. Ninety-eight percent of the mall stores are the usual suspects; the ubiquitous chains and franchises that so completely have doused the last sputtering sparks of creativity, integrity and value in the retail universe. As if (and possibly literally) by fiat there is a Wal-Mart every fifteen miles or so, and a Home Depot, and its make-believe competitor Lowes, and of course a Macys, a Sears, a Costco, a Radio Shack, a Godfather’s Pizza; you know them as well as I—the reigning hangnails and nosebleeds of post-modern commerce. At each mall the large flagship stores bookend an unbroken string of lesser brethren; plate glass forward, dumpsters behind, side-by side like cars on a mile-long train. Once in their asphalt realm, it is very, very difficult to turn back and regain the highway. This road dead-ends at a Burger King dumpster; that one delivers a driver precisely to the very parking lot, even the same space, he or she was trying to escape. I passed a couple of cars yesterday whose occupants, glimpsed fleetingly through tinted windows upon which they beat their sorry heads arhythmically, clearly had been trying for days or even weeks to leave the self-same malls I too was attempting to flee. I made it out and back to the highway, and if the journey involved a couple of bumps over berms and maybe one trip the wrong way down a one-way access road, there’s no reason to tell my mother-in-law, whose borrowed car I was driving.

I worked in a mall once, a long time ago. It was the summer after my senior year in high school. A friend got me the part-time job. He was employed there as well, and thought it would be good fun for us to work side-by-side as early morning janitors in a department store called “Lazarus.” Why, by the way, in our regressive, pop-Christian culture, do we not tap the Bible more often for its rich store of wonderful monikers when it comes time to name our commercial enterprises? The best ones are found in the Old Testament, of course. A hair salon called Esau’s? A butcher’s shop called Cain’s? Perhaps Zipporah, a fabric store? Pest control by Baal-zebub? Maybe Jeroboam, your tax advisors? Who would dare not to shop at a hardware store called Yahweh’s? Alas I digress. Ours was a New Testament employer, in any case; the high-end garment and gewgaw dealer in that part of the state. We were hired not by the store but by a maintenance services contractor, and our job was to have the place spic and span each morning for it’s 9:30 a.m. opening. That meant being at work by 4:30. I would make the coffee and Bill would pick me up in his Dad’s immaculate Oldsmobile. Bill Senior was a union honcho, and the car, which smelled strongly of graft and dirty politics, had a loaded handgun in the glove box. (Having mentioned this, have no fear—this is a blog not a short story, so the gun need not be fired before its end.) The mall was called “Northland.” It was pretty new at the time, and like every other mall in existence back then it claimed to be the first in America, a dubious distinction one would think, but this was a different era. Bill and I arrived at the parking lot in stygian silence, sliding in alongside the pickups and rattletraps of our hapless coworkers. There we would sip our scalding Joe and wait for our boss to arrive. We could not enter the building without his key, and the night crew, which had attended to the heavier and dirtier maintenance tasks—painting, moving and actually fixing things—could not leave. They would stand trapped behind the wide, locked door of the loading dock, beating on the galvanized steel and hollering for release, as many of them had day jobs waiting.

I don’t recall the boss’s actual name, but we referred to him out of earshot as Shithead. He was always late, sometimes by as much as an hour. He’d arrive in his own good time, generally with a buddy in the front seat, from whatever mischief or festivities had kept them up all night. Shithead drove a beat-up Buick as long as a short city block; a car that seemed to creep rather than roll into the lot at last, its headlights dim and dirty, its engine growling in misery. Shithead was a prodigious boozer, and always had a quart bottle of Seagram’s Seven in hand when he arrived. Whether dregs or freshly opened he and his buddy would finish it, taking their own sweet time, passing a fat joint all the while. We’d be out of the car by then, standing on the dock with the other janitors, shouting back and forth with the graveyard shift guys, who by this time would be frantic and furious in their imprisonment. We’d watch the red ember of the doobie pass back and forth between the men behind their filthy windshield, then the bottle, and often we could hear their radio blaring Motown, though their window remained closed even if the night was warm. Eventually Shithead would roll out of the Buick and smash the empty bottle onto the asphalt, then make his way to the dock. He was a pudgy, repulsive toad of a man, staggering, slobbering and mean as a weasel. His fire-red eyes would be narrowed to slits, and he stank so badly that we could smell him the instant that he shoved open his creaky car door. He wouldn’t say a word as he unlocked the metal gate and the prisoners spilled out, silent now as well, for no one ever, ever, ever crossed words with Shithead. I had a sick sense that someone once tried, and whatever ugliness was provoked had become unspoken legend. Everything about the man told you, with no need of speech, that he would not hesitate to maim or kill you for no reason should you be in his vicinity when the urge struck him. Thankfully he would disappear instantly once we were inside. I never knew where he went. His buddy slept in the car until we were done.

Bill’s and my job was vacuuming. The store was big, as department stores must be, and we’d split into crews by floor, wheeling our equipment out of a cramped closet and calculating how much time we had to get finished, depending on how tardy Shithead had been that day, and thus the speed at which we would need to work to make it seem as though we’d done a passable job, though I don’t recall anyone ever assessing our work. The only rule Shithead enforced was one possibly imposed by Lazarus management, though it may simply have been a personal quirk of his. In either case it was hard and fast: Under no circumstances were we to allow the employees of the store to see us at work, or indeed to spy us at all. The place was to be clean by nine o’clock when the floor managers and sales clerks began to arrive, and we were to hustle our vacuum cleaners back to the store room invisibly, whether that meant taking the escalator, the elevator or a back stair case that supposedly served as a fire escape. The only words I recall ever leaving the boss’s gap-toothed mouth were uttered on the rare occasion when a store worker would arrive unexpectedly, threatening detection and whatever dire consequence might follow. Then Shithead, with some weird sixth sense doubtless developed in one or more state penitentiaries, would materialize in front of us, reeking and unsteady, and mutter “les go dis way,” leading us circuitously through racks and behind displays and eventually to a service door where we would vanish from the apprising eyes of the regular employees, stash our gear and go home.

I learned three valuable lessons about work that summer. My only prior experiences as a paid employee had been playing gigs, mowing lawns for neighbors and, occasionally on Saturdays, assembling two-way radios for a friendly uncle who owned an electronics business. He was nice to me, paid me minimum wage and sometimes bought me donuts on the way to the shop. This was a Real Job for Strangers, albeit horrible ones, and I was determined to Make a Good Impression. On my first day, I vacuumed myself into a bit of a panic. I’d been assigned one-half of the first floor, which was Ladies’ Wear. I worked as quickly as I could, dragging my asthmatic machine around by its accordion hose, learning the locations of the most efficient outlets for its thirty-foot power cord. I glanced at a wall clock a couple of hours into the shift and realized that there was no way I could be finished by nine. Just then Bill appeared, checking in on my first day and laughing uproariously at my methods. It seemed I was, um, overdoing it, specifically vacuuming not only around but beneath the display racks of dresses, skirts and underthings. “You’ll never finish like that,” he giggled. Then how--? I didn’t need to ask. Taking the hose from me he proceeded to “show me how it’s done.” This involved his simply moving up and down the aisles at a brisk amble, pushing the vacuum wand before him like a shopping cart. When he came upon floor debris—torn tags, wadded tissues, bits of broken plastic hanger—rather than pick them up as I’d been doing and put them in the plastic bag that hung from the handle of the machine, he’d deftly kick them out of sight under the racks, without breaking stride. In this manner he finished the area on which I’d spent the last two hours in about forty seconds. He handed me the hose. “See?” I saw. And, I learned my First Lesson about the life of the working man, i.e. that far from being frowned upon it is in fact expected that a fellow will do the bare minimum of a semblance of a job in order to keep the boss man off his back, and get through the day with as little sweat as possible. It’s a reality to which I’ve never easily cottoned, often to my derision and detriment. Throughout my wage earning years I have been accused of “going the extra mile” (that’s the nicest characterization), or more often insisting on the “last one percent,” when much less trouble is all that is required to get by—even in myriad circumstances where I believed the officially-sanctioned effort (sometimes by time or budget constraints, more often by the culture of the particular workplace) to be miles shy of I would consider to be bare competence. There are two sharp edges to this sword, as most of my professional life has been spent attempting to repair or undo the misfortunes engendered by half-assed attitudes and sloppily cut corners, thus imparting a sub-lesson, though one harder learned, which is that one perpetuates the work at hand by doing it less than well, another assumption that’s never sat well in my apparently overly-fastidious Catholic schoolboy conscience. But when in Rome, or Lazarus, and so on. By the end of the summer I was marvelously adept at cleaning entire departments—Lingerie, Junior Miss, Formalwear—simply by glancing at them as I passed by, the footsteps of a sales clerk thudding somewhere on the dirty carpet behind me. Les go dis way.

One memorable morning I came face-to-face without warning with what I imagined to be imminent dismissal, followed by pummeling, knifing or whatever other punishment Shitface might see fit to perpetrate upon my sorry high-school self. To my shock and dismay, as I rounded a corner in the Fragrance department, dragging my vacuum behind me, I heard a male voice summon me into a tiny office the door to which theretofore always had been closed and presumably locked. For a moment I stood shell-shocked. It was only a couple of minutes after six a.m., far too soon to be playing cat-and-mouse with the quality. Nervously I peeked around the doorframe, only to see a manager, in early for lord knew what reason (embezzlement? homelessness? an inability to tell time?) standing behind his desk, his face screwed into an unconvincing semblance of imperious authority. “Get these here, boy,” he said to me, pointing to the carpeted office floor, on which were littered thousands of tiny, round, hole-punch “chads”—though the word wouldn’t be common for another twenty-five years—that were the obvious result of his time-passing creation of the crude paper doilies that covered his desk. He held a hole punch in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other. I can see him in my mind’s eye as clearly as though it was yesterday. His hair was black and greasy, swept back off his narrow forehead. The skin around his slack mouth was as pockmarked as a moon. He wore thick glasses, a thin moustache, a pale yellow button-down shirt and maroon, polyester pants with a white, faux-leather belt. (This was 1974 remember. His outfit, tragically, was not all that unusual among mid-management types.) Trying desperately not to make eye contact, so as not to laugh, spit, gag, puke or punch his oily face, all of which seemed reasonable or even necessary reactions, I quickly ran the floor tool over the rug, sucking up the evidence of his idling and exiting the office like Jack out of his box. Thankfully Shithead was nowhere in site as usual, and of course I told no one about my verboten little detour. Thus I learned Lesson Two: You have to do what they tell you to do, no matter what, if you want to get paid.

My next lesson came toward the end of the summer, as the last dog days of August heralded the coming return to school. We were instructed to vacuum the dressing rooms as well as the showroom, though we seldom bothered. This particular day I’d done such a good imitation of Bill with the vacuum that I had a half-hour to kill before our shift ended, so I ventured into the ladies’ dressing rooms in the Comfy ‘n’ Casual section. They were filthy, which of course was largely my fault for having ignored them since June. I tidied up, tossing hangers, boxes, tissue paper and miscellaneous trash into my hanging plastic bag. On a bench in one of the rooms, I picked up a McDonald’s bag that had an unexpected weight. Assuming it to be a discarded Big Mac, I peeked inside on a whim, only to find a large, chocolate-colored human turd. In that instant I was struck by the lightning bolt of Lesson Three: no matter how badly you think your job sucks, just wait until tomorrow, and it likely will be worse.

I’ve been pondering my Lazarus experience, and my subsequent decades of gainful work, quite a bit this summer. I have for some time now, through no design of my own, been effectively unemployed for the first time since graduating from college. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that as the country and the economy struggle still, two decades nigh, to squirm out from under the jack boot of Reagonomics and all of the misery it has caused, my long-time field of self-employment has morphed beyond recognition from the circumstances that allowed me to pay my mortgage and buy decent beer until fairly recently. The work, in other words, has changed; vanished, dried up and gone generally vamoose, and as something of a tangential player at the best of times, I can be counted among the inevitable casualties of its transformation.

It’s a squirmy predicament in which I find myself. It is axiomatic that an out-of-work Caucasian American man with as much gray hair as I have is approximately as employable as a butterfly is submersible, regardless of, and often because of, his skills and experience. My most trusted peers and coworkers over the years typically have been several years my senior, and thus for the most part are in the process either of winding down their careers or (in too many cases) of dying. Some long-standing clients have simply gone the Bill route with their the career hoses, cruising the aisles with a wink and a whistle, kicking pesky problems out of sight as they go. For a host of reasons, then, the professional relationships I’ve forged are blinking out like fireflies at dawn. Hiring decisions at companies large and small tend increasingly to be made by managers younger than I, often much younger, and the last thing they want lurking the hallways is some old guy who asks hard questions, doesn’t like leaving jobs half-done and might know more about their business than they do. So it’s a weird new world for me. I spend my mornings going through the motions of looking for work—contacting colleagues and acquaintances (thus garnering alarmingly few responses, let alone leads), filling out applications, scouring the on-line classifieds; all the pointless, pro forma busywork of the unemployed. Afternoons I spend emptying savings accounts, dodging creditors and looking around my house for things to sell. Of course I’m not alone. Unemployment is the new black, after all, and things promise to get much worse before they get better, as American economic policy even as I write is being hijacked by home-grown Congressional terrorists bent on punishing the despised electorate indefinitely for having the gall to put a literate man of color in the Oval Office. Meanwhile said man of color swings so far to the right that the Gipper himself seems a socialist by comparison, yet still cannot appease his new chest-thumping bosses, who play him like a squeaky fiddle while Rome burns. One cannot live indefinitely without income of course, so as I wander hat-in-hand past the shuttered windows of my few remaining prospects, I try to imagine what “lifestyle” changes are in store. I cannot imagine them in any detail, which probably is a good thing.

I kind of miss Shithead. I can’t help but think that I went astray in my work ethic way back then, when I quit the janitor business and went off naively in search of education, expansion, enlightenment and all the other anathema of the century towards which I was rushing, eyes wide shut. In the years since I’ve never been a boss, praise god, and indeed seldom even have had one, at least not of the Shithead variety. But there was something plain and simple about the model he presented: he hates you, you hate him, you do your work begrudgingly, he hands you a check even more begrudgingly, and thus the wheels of commerce turn. There’s no turning back the clock, of course. I couldn’t qualify today for the job I had when I was seventeen. I’d be dubbed “overqualified,” and passed over for a younger, more malleable man. But I wonder if there’s not some needle of hope to be found in the haystack of nostalgia for those simpler times. The Northland mall is dead now. I saw it a couple of years ago on one of my rare trips back to Buckeyeland. It sits shuttered and abandoned, a hulking, decaying monument to failure on a busy Columbus road—too big even to tear down it simply sits, the asphalt cracks in its parking lot sprouting small, spindly trees. Facing the road, covered in warping plywood, its letters and logo long-since stripped away but leaving their Cheshire cat image high on its cement front wall, is my old first locus of labor:

And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes…

Nah, I’m not ready to quit, not yet. But I reckon I’m in the market for a miracle.

Maybe a trip to the mall?

Wherefor art thou ponytail

It being the first innings of the election season, the end of the second quarter of the year, the dog days of summer approaching and the hay fever season in sudden death overtime—quite literally, I fear—it seems characteristically predictable of me to turn my halting attention to sports. No baseball rant or reminiscence, I promise. I am thinking this evening of women’s sports, primarily, and of the ways they delight us. 


First off, women’s soccer. It’s in the news of late, as the American team is making a bit of a run at the World Cup this year, hoping to regain the ascendancy the enjoyed briefly in the late ‘90s and a few years after. I’ve not seen any of the matches yet, but I did watch the first half of another women’s game last night, a fierce grudge match between two Latin American teams. I am a nascent soccer fan at best, crowded on the fandom scale with millions of other earnest boomers, some of whom, men and women both, go even so far as to cluck their tongues, shake their fully gray heads and mutter in an inner voice so low they can almost pretend not to hear it: Now there’s a game I could have been good at. Really good. Maybe made a name for myself…


Now, I am as hair-trigger delusional as the next guy if a fantasy is engaging enough, but I’ve never gone that far. At my youthful athletic prime, which lasted for almost an hour one June morning in 1971 (unfortunately during Language Arts class and not on the playground) I am certain that neither I nor anyone I knew could have come up with the name of a single player of the world’s most popular sport. We lived in Ohio. Soccer was a game we played for a week in gym class in seventh grade, in between rugby and bocce ball during “Sports of the World Month.” (You could pick tennis instead of bocce or swimming instead of rugby, whatever the eff-gee-aich was up with that.) Then I didn’t think about the game until my first child, at the age of five, was determined to have a measurable pulse by the local Tiny Clueless Children’s Soccer Club, and thus assigned to a team of earnest, shin-guarded turf-tumblers. For genetically mysterious reasons he excelled at the game and rose steadily in its ranks until he was injured playing for a local “select” team during his senior year of high school. Then I went back to ignoring the sport completely until quite recently.


Thus my education in the game was slow, tamely paced, and, as I have learned since, utterly inadequate to prepare me as a knowledgeable fan. I picked up some jargon. I admired the stand-out players. I hoarsened my lungs with invective hurled at terrified referees barely old enough to shave. I cheered when our team won, commiserated otherwise. I became deft with an Ace bandage and familiar with nearly all of the items in the team first-aid kit. I sliced ten thousand halftime oranges. Under the park lights with my son I played the dummy keeper, the dummy forward, the dummy midfielder. (And every weekend, the dummy chauffeur.) I ran the lines at games, flagging off-sides with decreasing confidence as the players got older, louder and profane in their reactions. All told I spend thirteen years as a soccer dad. I learned almost nothing about the game.


In 2008 MLS soccer came to Seattle. Although a vast, rowdy contingent of the city’s sports fans became overnight devotees, Seattle sports media still keeps the game at arm’s length, reporting on it with the squeamish enthusiasm of a rookie docent displaying a Brazilian tarantula at the insect zoo. This aversion, sadly, is a matter more of politics than aesthetics or even plain ignorance. Sports-talk radio stations, TV networks and big-city newspapers are owned without significant exception by far-right-leaning fat cats who embrace the twisted tenet that soccer is and ought to remain a sissy, European, socialist, faggot game. They particularly are incensed when municipal football fields are used for soccer play, sullying the sacred turf of America’s legitimate pastime with the mincing flicks and crosses of foreigners who don’t even swear in a language that real men understand. Professional match and transaction reports are relegated by fiat to late-night broadcasting and the last pages of sports sections, along with the fishing and clamming reports, PCL box scores and track-and-field results. Eschewing the imprimatur of the airwaves, Seattle fans still turn out in green screaming droves, meeting before each game in a Pioneer Square park to sing fight songs, accompanied by a ragged brass band, after which they march en masse to the stadium (corporate owned, so god knows what its name is today), waving their gaudy team scarves stretched high above their heads. It is a wondrously quirky and endearingly awkward thing to observe, or better still to be in the midst of. And yes I suppose it is a little Eurogay after all. Maybe if they didn’t march so en masse.


Which brings me back (somehow) to women’s soccer. It’s been with us for a long time, but most red-blooded ‘mericans first took note of it when Brandy Chastain showed off her sports bra in 1999 after scoring the winning World Cup penalty kick. I struggle still with the newsworthiness of this moment, but it did mark a notch-raising in the national consciousness of the Beautiful Game for Girls. Twelve years later, I am pleased to see that Association Football is enough of a legitimate lobe of the collective Seattle sports brain (for it is a beautiful game, more so each day to me) that one is every bit as likely to see it on the big screen above a bar as any other offering, even, *gasp,* at some few places on Autumn Sundays. (Yes, these places serve mainly gay socialist anarchist atheist perverts. Your point?) The game on view quite often is the women’s variety—not as often the men’s, but never met in my experience with the protests, yawns or less-than-modest receipts that might accompany a game of women’s basketball, for example. (More on this anon.) Last night, the bar was nearly full and the room perhaps half-so, a reasonable week-night draw with no karaoke or trivia to boost the door. The game was close, hard-fought and for some reason the bartender had the volume up high. Usually it’s off altogether, as there are four screens in the place, often with four different showings, nearly always sports. Last night the only other game, on one of the screens, was the Mariners vs. Someone That Was Beating Them, and no one was paying it any attention. (Even though this has shaped up so far to be a year of modest rehab for the club, there has been no perceptible buzz about the M’s since Bill met Monica.) 


I find the women’s game every bit as captivating as the men’s, and no it has nothing to do with anyone’s bra. I’m not savvy enough to recognize core differences in strategy, attack or technique, but the matches I’ve watched seem, not unlike women’s hockey, to be somehow a purer and more poetic version of the men’s game. The geometry appears more precise, the passes more purposeful, the fundamentals more joyfully executed. A woman running and dribbling a soccer ball often looks like a perfect model of what an awful lot of the men are trying to do. But one difference is clear from the get-go, and whether it’s good or bad depends on your perspective from the stands: Women can’t flop for shit. Their efforts at face-plant drama on the pitch after a trip, elbow or shove are pathetic imitations of the thespian histrionics of even high-school level male players in the U.S., and can’t touch the skills of little flopping boys abroad. 


Are women simply too honest to flop? Are there basic social standards, clear right/wrong lines and canons of ethical rectitude that are genetically hard-wired into the live-bearers of babies, while we mere inseminators muddle along on some lesser moral plain? (Well, duh, of course we all know this to be the case; I just hadn’t thought about it in a sports context until last night.) The efforts of professional soccer gals to feign life-threatening, crippling injury, engendered by physical contact frequently no more aggressive than one would find in any grocery store line the day before Thanksgiving, are typically risible in their lack of resolve, execution and persuasiveness. It’s a wonder they even bother, when they do.


In the match I watched, a midfielder took a genuine hit from a defender just outside the penalty area. It didn’t seem to be an intentional blow, and no card or even warning ensued; it was a collision of two women racing for the ball, with the larger running on a higher head of steam and catching the midfielder sideways, sending her pin-wheeling across the grass. She lay for a moment in tentative imitation of a genuine flopper; flat on her back, legs splayed, corpse-like, one hand thrown backwards across her forehead in a gesture of departing resignation. Her teammates hurried to her side while he team doctor gathered his bags beyond the touch line and the crowd hummed in skeptical speculation: Was she dead? Had she broken something? Were her injuries internal? Or perhaps nonexistent? It’s a moment of Big Good Fun for a soccer crowd. I suppose it’s the sissy, Socialist equivalent of that rare half-second of silence at a NASCAR race, when a car on the midfield is engulfed in flames and every Bubba in the bleachers is praying silently that the driver has been fatally burned and will emerge in a moment to die horribly in plain view. Generally the driver instead bounces out of the smoke plume waving an asbestos fist of reassurance (drawing unconvincing applause from the Bubbas), not unlike our midfielder, who, after a few seconds, actually stood up without assistance, laughed, shook her opponent’s hand and resumed play.


Laughed? Shook hands? An insult to flopping, is what it is. Even an apprentice male flopper would have played the moment at least thirty seconds longer, allowing the doctor to arrive while keeping one eye on the on-field camera crew, ready to intone a choked, barely audible requiem in his native tongue should the microphone come near. Flopping is serious business in the men’s game. American players typically are the worst at it, but then, as the U.S. plays catch-up in all other aspects of the game it’s not surprising that flopping skills will have to assert their place in the culture over the coming generations. Is not an art that can be mastered willy-nilly or overnight.


In all of Europe, some parts of Latin America and a growing number of African communities, flopping is taught from a very early age. Summer flopping academies (les ecoles tomber) abound in the suburbs of most large French and Italian cities; so popular with wannabe FIFA-parents that admission is as cutthroat-selective as that of any Westchester County preschool. Children in many soccer-centric communities are encouraged from the cradle to respond instinctively to all flopping opportunities (“floportunities,” as they are known to Premier League families). Infants are conditioned to cry inconsolably at any touch, even a caress, and to hold their breath and turn purple at any cross word or the slamming of a door. At the professional international level, first-class flopping creates a parallel dynamic to the actual contest on the pitch that can have far-reaching political implications. A truly well-executed flop, meaning one in which the flopper spends at least a full minute in gyrations of agony while play is stopped and the announcers begin a solemn appraisal of his career, is an occasion for the marshaling of riot police and the possibility of post-match marshal law. Should a yellow card be issued, attorneys clear their calendars, diplomatic channels are opened and trade agreements are in instant peril. On those occasions when the red card is waved, fighter squadrons may scramble, and prime ministers are summoned déshabille from the sweaty boudoirs of ambassadors’ wives. Seldom do these incidents escalate further, but in the Beautiful Game, one must always be ready for Ugliness. Never has a female flop elicited more than a snarky text from a diplomatic underling. As superior as they are in just about everything else, when it comes to flopping, the girls just don’t get it.


She laughed, for crying out loud.


Not that girls can’t play dirty. God no. A couple of years ago, a University of Mexico defender embraced her fifteen minutes of infamy by grabbing the ponytail of a rival BYU player and hurling her to the ground. The UNM woman was suspended, and the incident was a fleeting Youtube sensation, not that there are any other kind. I have a niece who plays rugby, who was perhaps fifteen at the time. I mentioned the story to her at a family dinner, just the bare-bones facts that I had read: that the offending player, who subsequently turned up in a fistful of home-made videos as a habitually aggressive, not to say dirty competitor, had made a flap (not flop) with her vicious Yank of the Hank. My niece—a lovely, poised , sparkle-eyed young woman, simply stared at me, waiting politely, I realized, for the rest of the story. Informed that this was the story, she was genuinely confused. Was the victim, she asked, in the perpetrator’s way? Was the ref looking? In other words, what was the big deal? Taken aback, I asked her if she had girl-handled other players by their ponytails. “Of course,” she said, sincerely baffled by my curiosity. “It’s rugby.”


I mentioned women’s basketball. It’s as popular as anywhere in Seattle, as the Storm, our vaunted Gal Team, has brought the city its only sports championship, indeed its only reliable sports competency, since the Super Sonics took the national crown in 1979. (I am discounting a fluke appearance by the Seahawks in the 2005 Super Bowl, a dreadful contest that eked out a Neilson rating significantly below that of the Home Shopping Network.) Despite its local popularity, both the Storm and the league are in perennial crisis mode. Indeed, a lot more digital ink is spilled forecasting the sport’s demise than reporting on games. I know both men and women who love to see the Storm play live, though come to think of it I’ve never heard of anyone watching them on TV, and couldn’t say whether the games even are broadcast. Without exception these folks either are the parents of girl hoopsters or themselves former players whose spouses come along because—well, imagine the consequences to a husband of declining to attend. To the rest of us, and to our admittedly small-minded shame, the women’s game more often than not is a tedious embarrassment; an unintended parody of its taller, faster, testosterone counterpart. While a grown woman sprinting down a soccer pitch is a thing of grace and splendor, a grown woman making a layup looks simply silly. This is merely an observation, presented as an opinion.


Women’s hockey is another kettle of estrogen. It’s not something one sees on the screen, to my knowledge, outside of the Winter Olympics. But each time the Games roll around I anticipate a reintroduction to the only way I’ve ever really comprehended the game. It’s not just the vaunted de-emphasis on vicious checking and side-show fisticuffs, or the pure grace and precision—not unlike soccer, come to think of it—of its practitioners that attracts me. It’s the fact that I can see the goddamned puck. As fast as the women’s game is, I still can, perhaps as often as not (though never more) actually follow the little black thing they’re batting around. When I watch men play, I never see it. Never. No one does. Near my semi-usual grocery store is a tavern that is run by two hockey-crazy fellows, and naturally their hockiphile buddies pack the place during the final run to and during the Stanley Cup. I was in during the recent championship, after a game but watching highlights on some hockey-only channel (who knew?) that’s always on above the bar. An owner and I got talking about the women’s game, and the puck. He laughed, but I sensed discomfort, and became doubly suspicious when he turned his back quickly and began dunking an already clean pint glass in the soapy water. I pressed him: So: can you see the puck when you watch? He ignored me, suddenly whistling. I bided my time. When he came to offer a second pint I had him trapped. Do you? Do you see the puck in motion? He shuffled a little, one foot to the other, grinning fretfully. Finally he shrugged. I’ve seen it, he said.A couple of times? He ducked his head, laughed a little choked laugh. Yeah. Sure. A half dozen maybe. And you watch every day, I said. He grinned again. His face was red. Suddenly he did a funny little dance, hopping from side to side, his considerable bulk jiggling like custard. Then he nodded. You know where it is, he said, his voice cracking a bit with indignation. You watch the defender. Which way he leans. 


Right.


Softball needs a word here. It’s women’s basketball backwards. Softball is a women’s game. The spectacle of men playing fast-pitch softball is rare. I’ve only seen it played by male oldsters, former minor leaguers and top-notch amateurs, well into their dotage, and such contests no way are intended as a spectator sport. They attack the game with the lazy confidence of age-advanced hand-ball players, certain in advance of every angle and bounce, so that the defenders, even the infielders, seldom need to move more than a half-step in any direction. The women’s game is “soft” ball too, but it’s hard core and then some. Being on the perimeter of an NCAA-level softball game, or I imagine in the midst of one, god save us, must be as close a waking experience as a human can have to being on the playing board of an old-time pinball machine. The pitching is absurdly fast, and the paltry wingspan distance between the hurler gal’s release and the plate requires a hitter’s bat speed to be approximately equivalent to that of sound. Once the ball is in play, a frantic choreography ensues that is a distant cousin at best to the comparatively lazy waltz of a baseball play. There is a palpable sense of urgent, reckless desperation on a softball field—one senses that these women would and perhaps will do (and likely have done) anything to win. (Short of flopping, I suppose.) My understanding is that there is currently a women’s professional softball league consisting of four teams. I don’t understand why it’s not more popular. 

A sport played (almost) exclusively by women that is a recent huge pop culture favorite in the Pacific Northwest is Roller Derby, so it too deserves a word. The word is Why.

It’s nearly 11pm on the Third of July, which I commemorated earlier by composing a guitar instrumental of the same name; a syncopated finger-picky thing that borrows shamelessly from the “Jamaica Farewell.” Outside I hear the muted explosions of distant fireworks, unless it’s a tactical air attack on the llama farm in Greenbank. I suppose if the wrong something got into the water up at the Naval Air Station, Bob’s your uncle on where the bull’s-eye would land. If llamas aren’t a threat to National Security, I don’t know what is. Precious, temperamental, aloof, over-sensitive, volatile, neurotic critters are llamas—the soccer players of the animal kingdom. I wonder if llamas flop. No, come to think of it, I don’t.

Time to calm the agitated dog. God bless Vespucciland.