The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (17 page)

 

Diego Viveros, whose light shone so brightly among his New York fellows, looks frail of foot alongside the stronger talents on the national squad. In the first practice match—against a pubescent hockey team at an Orange County rec center—he claims an injury to his toe and broaches the topic of plane fare back to New York. Yet he returns for the second scrimmage, only to quarrel with the coaches and belabor his teammates with unwelcome commands.

The hostility between Diego and the team is increasingly mutual. "I'm starting to suspect that Diego might be kind of an asshole," Tad Christie remarks. "I mean, he can't play soccer worth a shit. All he wants to do is walk around with that camera and tell people what to do like he's some kind of superstar. At least I know
I
suck."

Relations are likewise cooling between Diego and myself. Ours is now a camera friendship, with little friendship to it at that. Every evening the camera is returned to me, and every morning I am visited by Diego, who sometimes says, simply, "Camera." I check the memory card periodically and am surprised to see how few photographs Diego takes each day. My camera's chief function to Diego, it seems, is as an emblem of his distinction from the others, as if he has come to California as a tourist, not as a member of a team of homeless athletes.

It's troubling, Diego's reversal, and maybe it could have been foreseen, if not for my obtuseness and, perhaps, bigotry. After all, it was Diego's hauteur, his handsome face and good clothes, his very difference from the homeless folk around him, his similarity to people like myself, that inspired me to push his nomination on Lawrence Cann. Little wonder, then, that finding himself publicly tethered to a team through the bonds of poverty, misfortune, and error should fill him with abhorrence.

Nevertheless, I begin to withhold the camera spitefully. I run the battery down by snapping flash photos of my hand. I vanish with it at the "magic hour." On Thanksgiving morning, the day of our departure for Melbourne, I go into hiding in a coffee shop while angry messages from Diego accumulate on my cell phone.

When I see him later in the day, he is in a fury and demands to know where I got off to with the Canon. "You promised me you would bring a camera for me, and now you're going back on it." He puts his face very close to mine. "You want to fight? We'll go right over there. We can fight." He points to a palm glade that, he says, might make a pleasant spot for him to punch my face.

 

Woozy trans-dateline arrival. Malarial with exhaustion and inadequately braced for the spectacle of Melbourne, a city in convulsive throes of architectural pizzazz, almost every building erumpent with giant plastic blisters, chain-mail mullions, or Mondrian facades. Diego: "This looks like Flushing."

 

Homeless World Cup proceedings begin in earnest the following afternoon, over at the University of Melbourne, where all the teams will be quartered for the week. The teams assemble in a quaddish area for the Cup's opening rites, and it's thrilling to stand amid the clamor of so many unguessable tongues, to see so many skin tones and skeletal habits and disparate facial structures in a single throng and pretty much everybody out of their minds with happiness—the women's team from Paraguay, chatting shyly among themselves and sporting at least four different styles of straw hats; the Afghans, tall and Harlequin-cover handsome, with gray eyes and dark hair, and not looking even faintly hardscrabble—indicating, one imagines, the rampancy of homelessness in Afghanistan, a place where it probably doesn't require drug addiction or mental illness or exceptional poverty to find yourself without a roof to sleep beneath; the stolid, unsmiling women of Kyrgyzstan; Team Australia ("The Street Socceroos"), one of whose number is running in circles and squawking like a crow; the frighteningly well-muscled Netherlanders; the frighteningly undersized Filipinos, Namibians, and Cambodians. Most of the African teams have shown up with drums and flawlessly rehearsed contrapuntal songs and synchronized dance steps. The Ghanaians are doing this dance where they turn in a slow circle, rising and dropping in a supercool, loose-limbed, jellied piston-boogie, like sand being shaken on the hide of a pulsing tambourine, all the while bellowing a catchy song from the deeps of their throats. Then Namibia, evenly coed, cranks up their song, a call-and-response number with the women going high in a pained and jubilant alto and the guys coming in on the low, harmonious moan, and the melodious riot of the whole mob pulsing in a mass anthem of beauty and force and sorrow.

Tad Christie, who on our first night in Melbourne caused something of a crisis by disappearing on a bender, only to be discovered asleep in a public toilet, has recovered his spirits and is moved by the ascendant mood. "I want to fly back with the World Cup trophy," he declares. "We're gonna get it too, because there is something about our team that no one can touch. There's an aura about it that is untouchable. It cannot be destroyed by anyone." Tad pauses. "Except by Diego."

Yet in the early days of tournament play, Team USA's aura is pretty well ravaged, first by the Irish (11–2), and then the Romanians (7–2). The USA lands its first victory against Cambodia, whose players look like third-graders and most of whom, the team liaison tells me, spent much of their lives in a garbage dump, surviving on 25 cents a day and huffing glue in their leisure hours. The USA win is a 6–5 squeaker that feels tantamount to defeat. "Six-five against those guys?" Jeremy Wisham, a bright and charming reconstructed gutter punk from Atlanta, says after the buzzer. "We got our asses beat. I was cheering for
them.
From the perspective of the universe, it would have been cooler if we'd lost."

 

In hopes of bettering the USA's 36th-place finish the previous year, in Copenhagen, the coaches have benched the team's weaker players. Strolling along a downtown sidewalk, Tad Christie reflects with equanimity on the strategy. "Tad Christie, on day three, remains remarkably upbeat despite no playing time whatsoever," he says, dictating my notepad jottings. "We must piss-test him immediately to see what's keeping his motor running."

During lulls between matches, the Cup's more ambitious athletes jog the banks of the Yarra River or train in dribbling scrums, but Tad, who entertains no visions of competitive glory, spends most of his idle hours with me, recounting his biography. He tells me of his origins, of his grandfather, who was an off-and-on rich man, a contractor who whizzed a lot of money away gambling and who was also kind of a prick. When Tad would go to visit him, he'd say, "You bring me a whore?" and Tad would sigh and say, "No, Paw, I didn't."

Tad's father was a truck driver. He was once a handsome man, a Golden Gloves boxer in Vietnam who used to have such thick hair in his underarms that when Tad was a child he thought it was seaweed growing there.

Tad's late mother was a biker chick who, along with some of Tad's aunts, maybe hung around with Charlie Manson and all that gang, and in fact there's a rumor that Manson is possibly Tad's real father. June 14, 1971, is when Tad Christie was born in South Oak Cliff, Texas. When Tad's father was off doing long hauls for Frozen Food Express, his mother would sometimes put Tad and his two older brothers in a playpen, and then she would climb out a rear window so the neighbors wouldn't see her get on the back of somebody's motorcycle to ride off to Louisiana or God-knows-where to party and have a good time.

When Tad was eight, he saw his mom after she had been gone a long time. In his memory, his mother was this beautiful, slender, model-looking lady, but when the car pulled up in the driveway an obese woman stepped out, and in a panic Tad turned to his brother and said, 'Jim, that fat lady ate our mom!"

Tad was molested a lot when he was growing up. People were always coming and going at the house. He thinks the first time was when he was about two. The perpetrator might have been one of Tad's mother's boyfriends, or maybe one of her girlfriends, a really manly-looking one. Probably half a dozen people molested Tad Christie, but that stopped once he was old enough to swing a crowbar.

By the time he was 12, Tad Christie was allegedly committing felonies and misdemeanors: breaking and entering, grand theft auto, smashing stuff, stealing beer off the beer truck.

Burger King gave Tad a job when he was 12 or 13, and with money of his own he left home to go live under an overpass in Plano, I-35, or maybe I-75, over by Collin Creek Mall. There were no other kids down there, just Tad and two older guys, one named Mr. Vario. Up until that point, all Tad had done was weed and LSD and meth in his Coca-Cola. One night, Tad told Mr. Vario he wanted some heroin, so he turned his head while Mr. Vario administered a dose of black tar, which made Tad Christie feel perfect. That went on for a while, until one night the police showed up because Mr. Vario had overdosed and rolled down the embankment and died facedown in the creek.

 

Tad got sent to the West Texas Boys' Ranch, which was kind of like a boot camp but also a ranch where you had to work your ass off. Rough-stock producers would bring in bucking bulls and have the boys buck them out so they could tell whether they had college stock or pro stock on their hands. Tad was good at riding bulls. He got to where he nearly had enough points to start riding in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, and he might have had a career, except he got on this one bull named Airplane. Airplane hooked him in the mouth, and that's what knocked out most of his teeth, which people think he lost because of drugs.

After some time in Louisiana, Tad went to Colorado, where his mother had a job managing a run-down apartment complex, and he started cooking meth. What he would do, he would break open Vicks Inhalers, mix the cotton with muriatic acid in an empty Cuervo Gold bottle, shake it up until it got milky, pour it into Pyrex, and scrape off the white powder when it cooked down. Tad oversaw the theft of thousands of inhalers (hypothetically speaking, allegedly, by the way), and that is how Tad earned the nickname the "Benzedrex Bandit."

So Tad was cooking meth and, a little later, living in a shooting gallery, a trailer owned by a man named Uncle Jesse, who was fairly throwed off. The reason Tad was able to move into Uncle Jesse's trailer was that Tad could give him a bump when nobody else could. Uncle Jesse would be trying to find a vein, going, "Ah, motherfucker, I'm a dartboard. I'm a fucking pincushion." Fat guys would come to Tad to have him find a vein. And usually he found one, and that is how Tad earned the nickname "Dr. Tag-'Em Tad."

But then the Feds got in touch with Tad. They said they knew what he was doing. They had also pulled his rap sheet and read his psych evals and decided he was someone capable of turning his life around. They told him to leave Colorado and to stay gone for at least five years or he'd spend the next 50 behind bars. Tad's father Western Unioned him 50 bucks and told him a Denny's to go to in Colorado Springs. Five or six hours later, Tad's father showed up in his truck.

Back in Dallas, Tad met a girl. He got her pregnant and was kind of relieved that he had. This girl was a churchgoer, kind of snotty and judgmental, but he needed someone like that, you see, a parole-officer-type girl to give structure to his life. She was not bad-looking either, but a big girl nonetheless, with motherfucking facial hair. He married her at the age of 20.

Tad got clean and did the family thing for, like, 10 years. He was making good money as a pressure fitter and a material expediter at oil refineries. Do you know the big tanks you see in oil refineries? Tad put all the internal and external shit on them, and he earned enough to keep a nice home near Shreveport, Louisiana. Everybody would gather there for Thanksgiving and Christmas. He had three children with his wife, a boy and twin girls.

But then Tad got laid off. He had to take a job at a local grocery store, making $300 a week. In his new occupation, the opportunity showed itself for Tad to get back into the meth game. He could steal cough pills, pseudoephedrine, and sell them for $300 a case to a fellow he knew who would also kick him back some dope straight off the Pyrex, which he could take a gram of and turn into a fucking eight-ball, $350 street value. Before long, Tad was bringing home an extra grand a week.

But it got to where one night another employee, a crackhead, took notice. She said, "I know you got something going on, Mr. Tad, come on, hook me up." And Tad was like, "Look, you want a hundred dollars? Take this bag and set it out in the back alley on the cool." Well, that crackhead flat told on him, maybe to try to get promoted. Tad didn't mind getting fired, but he had taken some money too, and he wasn't interested in getting locked up. When his boss called a meeting, Tad said, preemptively, "Oh, I need to talk to you too. I got a drug problem. And I've been taking money."

His boss was a religious guy, and nice. He said, "How much have you taken?"

"About five hundred bucks."

He said, "Since you been honest with me, if you agree to pay back the five hundred bucks and you resign, I won't call the cops."

Actually, Tad had taken closer to $50,000, in money and pills, so he put his Johnny on that motherfucker
real
quick. The crackhead got fired for stealing money out of the Coke machine. She did some time. Thirty days or so.

Basically, that was the end of Tad's marriage. When the money ran out, so did his wife. She wiped out his bank account, took everything. Tad left, and around that time was when he started doing his suicide attempts. He would get in his truck and drive out to the country. He would pick a big thick tree—"There's my bitch!"— and he would floor his fucking truck, and
wham!
He bashed out a few of his remaining teeth on the steering wheel, busted his nose, split his chin, wrapped barbwire up around the undercarriage, anything
but
kill himself.

One day he took a gun, a Lorcin .380, chambered a round, cocked it, put it to his head, and said, "Fuck you, motherfucker." He pulled the trigger, but the gun didn't go off. He took that bullet out, put another bullet in the chamber. But that one didn't go off either, and that second time, it was a wrap, and he quit doing the suicide attempts.