The news reached me while I was still in South America: Nick Finden had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. I remember the moment clearly because when the phone rang I was sitting on the balcony of my apartment in Sopocachi, a middle class neighborhood built on a steep dry slope overlooking the glow of downtown La Paz. S.’s words filtered through the thin Andean air and left me with an intoxicated feeling. I barely knew Nick. He was a quiet, sad-faced kid. He had sad hang-dog eyes and thin pouting lips always with a bit of white, a crust of some kind, encircling them. That was the image I had and, strangely, my first thought when S. broke the news was whether Nick had fallen facing Alcatraz with a view onto all those little white sailboats dotting the blue enclosure of San Francisco Bay. Or, more likely, had leapt off into the steel-colored horizon of the Pacific.
I know it doesn’t matter, because they say a person faints in any case once he leaps or falls from a tremendous height toward certain death. It’s a type of defense mechanism provoked by the body’s nervous system to kill the heart’s dread before contact with the ground (or in this case, the sea). I’m not sure I believe it. It’s what I’ve heard. I suppose it’s a consolation. Of a sort.
Nick had done time, S. said, and had got it bad from the boys in jail. He’d been caught high on speed robbing a deli and next he knew he was in the pen getting thrown up against the bars, wrestled to the tiled floor, cornered by three men every time he went to take a piss and having his manhood fucked out of him. My face twisted in discomfort. Poor Nick, fallen, like Daedalus who soared so high and crashed down into the sea. I’d always associated him with that moment of glory – an everlasting, adolescent glory greater than the glories most men achieve in a lifetime. When we hoisted him on our shoulders and carried him off the field, holding Nick to the sky like a god, like a prince, like a savior after he’d scored the tying and winning goals and led our club to the California state soccer championship. S., me, all of us, we were 14 years old, and at 14, at that moment, you couldn’t have convinced me there was a luckier person in the world than Nick Finden with that triumph bobbing in his eyes, riding success like a magic carpet suspended around our heads.
He’d made it out of prison and that’s the sad part, S. told me. At first Nick managed to keep things sorted. He got a job. He stayed clean. Then something went wrong, perhaps we’ll never know what. He returned to his old crowd in the East Bay. He got involved in a break-in. The judge gave him two years. That’s when Nick decided he couldn’t take it any longer, couldn’t take the thought of going back, and so he jumped. As I sat on my balcony listening to S., gazing at the white peak of Mt. Illimani which towered over me phantom-like in the Bolivian night sky, the whole era we’d shared – the soccer, the childhood, the possibilities – seemed sickeningly remote.
***
S. and I weren’t yet friends in those days, though it’s fair to say we were allies. We were the weakest points on the team: perennial substitutes, each stuck at opposite ends of the midfield, neither of us fast enough or confident enough or creative enough to make a multiple pass-and-run play (to engineer one, as the trainers would tell us) that could lead to any great result. S. and I, when the coach in his generosity put us in to play, served primarily as a warning line of defense. We were two more shirts who kept our opponents marked while doing nothing that might positively impact the game. There were others for that. Many of them. They weren’t all as talented – nor ultimately so self-destructive – as Nick. But it was curious how nearly every athlete on that championship team leaned toward social retardation and in some form or other, delinquency.
There was the goal keeper Bobby Stern, a tall, blond pampered boy who embodied the middle-class Californian upbringing. Bobby’s father was a tax attorney and his mother, well, like many in those days she was a soccer mom whose mission it seemed was doting on her son. Most of us walked or bicycled to practice each day; Bobby’s mom delivered him from the leather interior of a gray luxury sedan. And she always returned promptly to pick him up when training was finished. Bobby played with heart but there was something dictatorial, spoiled and unlikable about his company. Years later at a fraternity party in college he drugged and raped a girl, though he was not convicted.
More dependable was our team’s hulking line of defense which consisted of three square-bodied, heavy-chested, blue-eyed boys who looked plucked straight off the Polish farm. They dashed around on strong, thick legs and swinged into the ball with strength and finesse. None of the three was bright; all would become Republicans. Mark, the center fullback, later got mixed up in a pyramid scheme for which he owed his boss $70,000 dollars though he managed to escape to Mexico in a stolen car and is still living there, I hear, renting surfboards to tourists on the Oaxaca coast.
None of which compares to the characters who controlled our midfield – on the center-right Enrique Suarez, short, well-built, the son of Mexican immigrants and an incredible ball handler who had a laser shot on goal and would eventually (at 18, if I heard correctly) join one of the most feared Mexican gangs on the south side of San Francisco where he participated in numerous street fights, and was at one point rumored to have killed a man. On the center-left, Enrique’s key play-making partner, stood Lionel Meeker, a tall, thin boy with pale cheeks and a lazy, loping gait though he was technically the most skilled and exciting player on the pitch to watch. Lionel came from poor family. He hoped a college scholarship for soccer might save him; instead he got one, then two girlfriends pregnant and wound up living alone in a trailer somewhere in the Mendocino forest where he did construction jobs, traveled into town to shoot pool on weekends and otherwise emptied Jim Beam bottles while taking occasional pot shots with an Army-issue assault rifle.
If you wanted me to go on and describe the distinctly perverse ways each kid on that team screwed his life up, I could. I could tell you, for instance, about the heroin habit that landed our nimble-footed left striker Peter – who at 14 already knew he wanted to be an actor – into a rehab program in Oregon which lasted off and on for six years. Or the blown hopes of our other winger, a mulatto kid named Jerry who was being courted by several college teams before he flunked out of high school his junior year. But this story is not about them. It’s not about the underbelly of middle class life in a small Californian town, either (though you could make the case that it is that, too). It is about the quiet, sleepy-eyed, enigmatic hero that Nick Finden became that afternoon he won us the state trophy down in Lafayette, 15 miles east of Oakland.
***
The tournament started early on Saturday morning. It was a two-hour drive from where we lived, so our mothers packed us into the backs of a few VW station wagons and Ford minivans at dawn, along with the water coolers and sliced oranges for halftime, and raced down the East Bay highways to get us to the field at quarter past 8. The first team was a rollover at 3-0 with Enrique, Peter and Nick each scoring. In the afternoon we faced a stronger team from Modesto, handling them less cleanly but battling and eventually hanging on for a 4-2 win. Nick had a pair of goals and so did Lionel, and we were feeling good. At night we splashed around making lots of noise in the hotel pool, then caused trouble when we ordered room service and didn’t leave a tip. That was forgotten the next morning, though, when we suited up and sprinted on to the field at 8, one hour before the game. Thanks to a stellar defense, Lionel’s and Enrique’s dominance at midfield, and Jerry’s header off a corner kick late in the second half, we marched to a 2-1 victory over the Central Coast winners from Monterrey and landed ourselves in the championship game that afternoon against Nox United.
The best team from Los Angeles and winner of southern California, Nox looked bigger and older than us (and unlike our generic whites and reds they wore fearsome stripes of orange and black). We held the game scoreless through the first half. But 20 minutes into the second, Nox’s center striker hammered a direct kick into the back of the net. Our hearts sank. Their defense was impenetrable. We were playing feisty ball but failing to control the midfield, and one of our backs got a red card. Nevertheless, all it took was a long cross-field pass from Lionel with 8 minutes to go, which Nick settled; he then accelerated past a defender, juked another and glancing at the net from 20 yards out, fired. The shot arched in, just below the crossbar and above the outstretched fingers of the goalkeeper, tying the game at 1-1. All of a sudden we felt re-injected with hope. We played fiercely, dangerously, leaping high and sliding to win every ball. The minutes passed. We anticipated the whistle blow. Then Enrique sent a pass that sneaked through Nox’s defensive line and found Nick alone on the outside. All he had to do was dribble toward the box. The keeper came out. Nick faked to the right and gently pushed the ball under the flailing arms. It was an effortless touch and we all watched it roll, impossibly slow it seemed, toward the corner until shouts erupted and the team, the coaches, the parents sprang into the air in a rush of victory. Our yells drowned out the tinny sound of the whistle as we hoisted Nick onto our shoulders and carried him in a processional dance around the field. It was Carnival. It was World Cup. It was an Olympian sense of glory: of being the best, of winning, at 14, the greatest game of soccer any of us would ever play.
It wasn’t long after I quit my newspaper job in South America and returned home for the holidays that I ran into S. who was drifting along, aimlessly it seemed, peering in the shop windows on Main Street. We stepped into the warm pretzel-flavored air of the town’s only bar and ordered two beers. Our conversation was slow. S. told me in tedious detail about the legal practice he’d worked at since getting his degree. We caught up on other news, joked about a few old friends, then S. asked me if I’d heard from Nick’s family. I told him I hadn’t. Nick’s mother was organizing a team reunion to play a memorial game in Nick’s honor. They were the best years and the closest friends Nick ever had, so it was understandable. But like I said, I barely knew Nick. He was a quiet, sad-faced kid and I’ll always remember his wounded-looking eyes. I didn’t see much point gathering with a group of men I didn’t know to relive a sad nostalgic glory. Because that’s what this past is, even if we paint it with tinsel and glory: it’s sad. I tipped up my glass of beer, took a last swallow, and told S. I wouldn’t be suiting up.