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Last fall I wrote a tentatively euphoric column about being an exiled Red Sox fan in Paris. It was during last year's American League Championship Series and I was anticipating the Red Sox beating the Yankees and I boldly claimed that I would fly to Boston if the Sox made it to the World Series. I wrote the essay in the kind of fog that only arrives after you've put your body through the following hardships:
1. Attended Oktoberfest in the rain wearing only jeans and a t-shirt and then later, a garbage bag.
2. Slept in a tent in Munich that featured a shallow swimming pool of rain water in your sleeping bag.
3. Put yourself on Eastern Standard Time because the Red Sox games weren't televised until two in the morning.
4. Drank excessively every night because you were watching the games in a bar and someone kept buying pitchers so you figured that you might as well drink them but you were sitting down so you didn't realize you were drunk until you stood up.
After you've done all these things to yourself, you're not thinking straight. You forget things. You still remember that you're a Red Sox fan, but you forget what that entails.
I never wrote a follow-up to that column. Not because I was depressed (I was, but whatever). I just didn't have the energy to type. I was sick. The kind of sick that only comes after you've visited a Taiwanese whorehouse during monsoon season. In fact, I never even made it to the bar for game seven. I was bed-ridden with the worst fever I had had since I was like three months old (the fever I had as a baby was so bad that it's completely blacked out from my memory). I thought I was dying, a notion that was only fortified when I hallucinated the grim reaper into my bedroom. He said, "Hey. You're dying."
It may have been a bad omen.
After I got hot, I got cold. I had to ball up under my covers in fleece socks, two pairs of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, a sweater, a jacket, a winter hat, and ski goggles because I was convinced that most of the heat was escaping through my retinas. My dad was calling me frequently - partly to make sure I was still alive but mostly to update me on the Red Sox game. As the late innings arrived, the updates were getting better and better and my temperature was zeroing in on normal. When my dad told me that we were winning 5-2 with Pedro still going strong, I drifted off to sleep contented that I would wake up the fan of a World Series team.
Then my dad called again and delivered the bad news. The Red Sox had blown it. The grim reaper came back through my window and he was laughing so hard that he started coughing because he's a lifelong cigarette smoker. Then he pulled back his hood and I saw his head, which was just a black hole under a Yankees hat. I passed out.
Now it's almost a year later and I'm preparing to do it all over again. But this time I'm home in New England. I have friends whose hands I can hold if things get scary.
I used to think that I didn't want the Red Sox to win the World Series until I was ninety-nine years old. Because I'm pretty sure I'm going to die when I'm a hundred. And the victory is going to be that much sweeter if the wait is longer. It's like if you don't brush your teeth for a long time and then you finally brush them and it's glorious because you can't even remember the last time your teeth felt so clean. (If you don't understand this, try not brushing your teeth for a week.) Yankees fans always brush their teeth. Somtimes three times a day.
That's why I don't agree with any peer who curses Bill Buckner. I was four when that ball rolled through his legs. I don't remember it happening. But if it hadn't happened, then winning the World Series in 2003 or 2004 wouldn't be a big deal. An eighteen year drought? No problem. That's like yesterday to a New Englander.
Let's say I really started caring about the Red Sox when I was six. I know six sounds early, but that's when I started listening to Red Sox games when I was supposed to be sleeping on school nights. So I have fifteen failed seasons under my belt. That's not too long. I could take a few more decades. But some Sox fans have been waiting for almost a century. It's like they haven't brushed their teeth since ever (which would actually make them British).
Of course I want the Red Sox to win. I am literally begging for a Red Sox World Series Championship in my lifetime and you know what they say about begging and choosing. But when you're twenty-two, the urgency hasn't quite set in like it has for the senior citizens of Red Sox Nation. For them, each year is like having to go to the bathroom in Fenway during the seventh inning stretch. You know how it is. You're standing over one of the troths but you get stage fright so nothing's coming out. If this were the third inning, it woudn't be a problem. Come back an inning later, maybe find a toilet stall, and work everything out. But this is the seventh inning. The game is tied. This is the last time you're going to feel comfortable leaving your seat. Now a minute has passed and the guys behind you are beginning to grumble and your forehead is starting to sweat. The pressure is mounting.
When you've got your whole life ahead of you, you don't feel this urgency yet. Unless you've already had a brush with death. Twice in one night. And Death was wearing a Yankees hat. Now I have a whole new perspective on the Red Sox. It's now or never because the Red Sox might not survive the potential exodus of their free agents and I might not survive my next fever.
All I can do now is wait and watch and hope and pray. I'll have to remind myself that the Red Sox aren't the most important thing in life. It just feels that way sometimes. And there's always next year. If I'm still alive.
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