Meet The Enemy

"On December twenty-fifth, 1914, they stood at the middle of the battlefield, in No Man's Land, shook hands and exchanged gifts. Think of it: Both sides of the Great War met and shook hands."
I wasn't paying much attention to Griswald, I was preoccupied with the word out of Chicago - the streets on the northside were blocked by burning cars. Baseball fans were on a rampage. I looked up. "So they did what?"
"Both sides shook hands."
"OK. But did they stop fighting?"
"Nah, the holiday ended, the clergy switched from carols to a war cry. The soldiers jumped right back into the trenches and lobbed artillery shells at each other." Griswald nodded his head. "You know, I don't think we are sure if each side went back to the right trench. It doesn't say."
No, it doesn't. I wondered if France might be in Germany or the other way around. I looked in his direction and could see the skyline reflected upside-down in the Chicago River. Half the population was undoing what the other half was doing. I turned my head sideways to see. "Maybe that was part of the strategy. The sum of battles equals the war."
"And if you win the battle but lose the war? The sum is zero. Not only that: They would have to switch political sides. Then they have defeated themselves."
I had to think about that. My eyes drifted to the sports section. Cub fans were outraged after another off-season ended in bitter disappointment. Pictures showed black smoke rising from overturned cars. I looked up again. "And the other side too."
“Enemy combatants dress up as their enemies, to fool the enemy. What if everyone dressed up and acted like their enemies?" Griswald was staring at me.
I looked away. My eyes strayed to the sports page. One fan, I think he was from Vimy Ridge - I think it's on the northwest side - he lamented, "We had high hopes for this winter." A picture showed him stomping on a burning t-shirt emblazoned with the team logo. He was wearing fatigues. "We expected so much more. We thought this would be the year. The year to end all years."
"Well?"
"Oh." I looked back up and he was still staring at me. "Then we are our own enemy." It was becoming apparent that I wasn’t going to win this argument. I turned and I could see a smoky haze drifting out across the lake, coming from the north. Up there somewhere, there had been a team poised on the brink of greatness, certain to add strength, speed, and savvy to the roster from a bounty of all-star free agents, a deep college draft and dozens of electrifying high school prospects. Not to mention cash reserves that would make a banker blush. My hands started to shake.
"Then why don't we hire the enemy not to fight for us?" He saw me rolling up the newspaper and leaning forward on the bench. Rocking back and forth was comforting. I began to hum.
"I don't know."
“The perfect economy.”
I looked down. I couldn’t win. Another off-season had failed to live up to that promise, slipping through executive fingers like a greased pig, leaving the team in its familiar role of spoiler. "At least we can still disrupt the negotiating process so everybody loses," stated one front-office executive. "Nobody can beat us at that – we lose but we win."
Griswald started talking again but his words didn’t have the same impact; I was losing my interest. He was waving his arms and pointing and talking but I heard only an occasional word, scattered like broken glass: "The commodity of loss...macroeconomics of war...the ultimate consumer…the marginal utility…” A breeze came up and I watched the winds shatter the waters, breaking the skyline into a thousand pieces.
I unrolled the paper. This made sense: The Cubs were entering a second century of failed winter negotiations and deal-making. Trading deadlines had passed, free agents signed with other teams, draft prospects switched sports. An off-season with so much promise, so much expectation. Once again, fans wandered the streets in stunned disbelief.
Griswald continued, "Satisfaction of war is..."
I was thinking but my mind was blank. Then I remembered. One morning, a fan made this statement into a news camera: “It's simple. To continue to produce loss, there must be a demand. The reality is, everything is zero in the end. Loss is universal. As fans we need to expect nothing more, we must lower our demands or we will wallow in disillusion and utterly defeat ourselves." Like a rumor whispered in an agitated mob, these words were repeated thousands of times across the airwaves and front page. Within hours, fans, players, management, and press broke into chaos. Players openly questioned their teammate’s work ethic. Fans challenged each other's loyalty. The manager undercut his coaching staff before front-office personnel. Union representatives were shut out of player’s meetings. Management leaked details about injuries suffered by players with expiring contracts. The press reported what players were saying about other players behind their backs and that it was obvious to thinking people everywhere that the teammates could no longer trust the other teammates to tell the truth. Management canceled the annual January convention for “security reasons”. And the fans started overturning cars.
By nightfall, management appeared on television screens appealing for calm. They released a statement to the press: "We urge all fans to remain loyal to the team. If this continues, we all lose." But people continued to stream into the streets, streets filled with riot police and teargas. Fans stormed the front office and took hostages, demanding a change in leadership. Players swapped uniforms with security. Reporters broke into locker rooms and carted away sporting equipment.
Griswald was adamant: "A diminishing utility..."
The six-o’clock news showed another fan lamenting, "I don't even know who the infield is." He pointed at his shirt. “I have two dozen sweatshirts with names that are no longer with the team. What good are they? Who am I supposed to cheer for?"
And now, cars burning on the north side. I looked out at the cityscape. From where I sat, I could see the steel, concrete and aluminum girders named after the dead - the sarcophagus of the rich. And the illuminated letters and logos of inanimate corporations in the skyline, like lighthouses guiding the wayward pedestrians into onto rocky shoals littered with the bones of workers from the space age which lay upon bones of workers from the industrial age which lay upon bones from the textile age which lay upon bones from the iron age. A bus growling past, leaving a swirl of Styrofoam cups and cigarettes and black dust and pigeons in its wake, and nervous automobile horns, armies of voiceless employees staring into the gray distance, doors opening and closing, elevators and doormen and steaming manhole covers and lines of cars at every intersection, idling, filled with idle people listening to shopping music and broadcasts of angry middle-aged men arguing about sports. Yes, sports. This could be anywhere.
Griswald continued, "Which reaches a saturation point..."
Behind me, in a sports tavern, a television blinked. A very small sportscaster was interviewing a very large player. "What if you lose, will you sign with another team?" The player shrugged, "It’s all about winning, putting one up in the win column, about hard work and the fans and giving one hundred and ten percent." The reporter replied, "But you haven’t gotten an extra-base hit in three months." "My record speaks for itself." The reporter pressed, "But you have four years left on your contract and your numbers are declining." The player shrugged again, "Not the numbers that matter." The reporter again, "Twenty-thousand dollars a game. Do you know what I could do with that sort of money?" The player looked down at the reporter, "Play baseball." He stuck the microphone closer to the player’s face. "Other players say you don’t have the same drive you used to." The player had headphones on, the same shopping music in his ears. "I read your columns; neither do you." The reporter pushed forward, "Well if I were you, I would show more respect for this great institution and honor my contract -" The player stiffened, the reporter backed away. "- But you're not."
I looked over to my left and Griswald was still talking. "And continued consumption..."
Another screen played a video of a World Series game from some thirty years ago. A player was standing by the pitcher's mound, with a mob of reporters around him. He was holding his son in his arms. He was in tears. "What are you thinking about now, Sam?", asked one reporter. The athlete choked on his words. "I am thinking about the other teams. I am thinking about those other teams that lost, about their anguish and loneliness. The experience of defeat is a severe one, unimaginably so. Do you understand this? You spend your entire lifetime working for this moment, your chance to be on the world stage, to execute all of your skills which you developed through so much effort and training and coaching. You imagine this moment and you fully expect yourself to be the one who wins it all. And then the big day comes and goes and you find that some other person who has spent the same amount of energy and has the same amount of innate ability and quality of coaching has not outplayed you but is the beneficiary of the most insignificant and arbitrary of events...a passed ball, a balk, fan interference, the glint of sunlight, umpire error, a spitball, a blown kiss from the stands, bad water in the drinking fountain, an argument with the catcher, and it tips the delicate balance and you lose the game. The taste is bitter, the anguish wells, the hunger subsides, and ultimately, you feel an overwhelming sickness. The arms are heavy and numb, the legs rubbery, the body shakes. You bloat up, you can’t keep down water. You have lost, not only the championship game, you have lost your appetite for the game itself." He wiped a tear away from his eyes. "Their loss is our loss."
Griswald was still at it: "At which point we reach disutility..."
I looked at the newspapers tumbling down the streets. I remembered that Sam was a utility infielder, and, before that night had ended, he signed on with another team for a scandalous sum of money. His team went on to defeat his former team in the following World Series. I remember wondering why he seemed so pale and blinked so much during that interview. Now I know. I looked back up at the television. Now it was a live program and they were interviewing the same player. But today he was in a wheelchair, hunched and puffy, with slanted, knobbed hands, jaundiced and liver spotted, spindly legs with crooked toes with long yellow nails, and breathing oxygen through a tube. A nurse rolled his wheelchair up to the camera and he watched a television in the lobby of the nursing home. Fans broke windows and danced in water spraying from fire hydrants. He stared at the burning cars. "Why is it always this way? Every year the same thing." He pointed a gnarled hand at police with nightsticks chasing a crowd of youths. "And even if the team beats its opponents, it is never enough. It's like whiskey. First the Division, then the Pennant, then World Series. Then another World Series. Then another. Eventually we want to take on Japan, and then the Soviets, then the League of Nations, then the Intergalactic Federation, then other life forms. We can never feel big enough. Where does it all end? It's always this way." He looked at the Scottish wool blanket on his lap. "You know, to contemplate that generations from now nobody will remember a single thing about this team moves me to question the amount of energy infused into the moribund ballclub and its insolent fans."
He paused to cough, a paroxysm of sustained, phlegmatic wheeze that stretched his mouth wide like a perch that swallowed the hook. Slowly he gathered the breath to continue. "So what if we win? Then what? It's like having a baby dropped on your doorstep. It will need and you will feed and you will not be able to escape from it; it will cling and grow and grow and grow and it will hound you at your heels and claw at your back for the rest of your life. Your life, once so full of promise, now a reptilian struggle for survival."
His chest pulled upward, reaching for air. The fires on the television reflected in his glasses. His hand instinctively picked lint from the blanket then probed his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “No, no, Sam,” said the nurse, “you can’t smoke anymore. It will kill you.”
He looked up at the streetlights. "They don’t know what they hope for. The night of victory will be as dark as all the millions of nights that have occurred since the dawn of the universe, yet many will hail the spectacle beneath artificial lighting as the second coming of Ernie Banks and the balm for world recession and human malaise. But the lights will illuminate ever so briefly, like a lantern during a nor'easter, and it will crash to the floor, and the klieg lights and flash bulbs will be spent, and the darkness will envelop the wandering crowds until they fall silent, like the millions of sports fans that have fallen before them. The fields around the Coliseum are filled with the bones of men and women whose unwavering attention to the gladiators prevented them from noting the hail of burning arrows that descended from the hills surrounding the stadium." He paused to lift his left arm onto the armrest. It slipped and fell to his side, swinging slowly. "Did the Visigoths win the World Series? Modern sports stadiums crumble under controlled implosions to be replaced by greater structural illusions. The ultimate illusion isn't the stadium, it is victory: In the end, we all follow the heroes to the nursing home, crippled by shattered knees, ruptured lungs, fingers that bend and break like cane fishing poles, and a dehydrated mind with frayed circuitry that fires promise after promise after promise, pledging to be better tomorrow, better yesterday, better but I-don't-know-what-day-it-is. Help me, nurse.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. He paused to catch his breath. He pulled his chin up into the air and spoke. “But the memory is fibrous and riddled with gaping holes, as if tunneled by ants and attacked by woodpeckers and it doesn't recall anything, much less a promise to be better tomorrow, next week, next year. The next year came decades ago and it was actually worse than the year before." He closed his eyes and held his forehead with one hand. "I don't feel so good. I really don’t feel so good." He rubbed his forehead. "Silence, memory. Failure to retrieve is permission to believe...and...I want to believe again."
And there, to my left, was Griswald, still staring at me, laboring on: "Until there is nothing more. Until we have reached zero; a state of illness, a terminal illness of mind and body, where we experience permanent loss and dissatisfaction...a condition that leaves us as mute and lifeless and stained as those bronze statues of valiant warriors that stand guard around our Coliseums."