“This is going to be cool, daddy,” said Devon.
“Are you excited, Slugger?”
“Mmmphhh,” mumbled Devon as he took a huge bite of a three-merguez baguette sandwich bigger than his head. We were at an outdoor café about a block away from Marseille’s soccer stadium. We had great seats for Devon’s first professional soccer match, the hometown Olympics against Valencienne.
“Okay, eat up. The game starts at seven.” I drained my Orangina.
“What time is it now?”
“Six fifteen. Giddyup.”
We arrived at the main gate, which was closed. The security monoliths weren’t letting anyone in yet, but only a smattering of fans were waiting.
“Where is everyone, daddy?”
“I don’t know. This is weird. There are 50,000 seats in this stadium, and hardly anyone is here yet. How will they get everyone in their seats in time for the game?”
“And I want to go to the OM store to buy some OM stuff,” whined Devon.
At ten to seven, about 500 fans were waiting with us, and after practicing my question in French in my head first, I turned to the man beside me.
“Do you know why they haven’t let us in yet? The game starts in 10 minutes.”
“Oh, didn’t you know?” said the man. “They changed the time of the game to 9 p.m.” This was mildly irksome, as I had printed the tickets at home the previous day, directly from the team’s website; they clearly showed a seven o’clock start. It was difficult enough to wait for half an hour with an excitable Devon at the gate, but I now had another two hours to amuse a hyper eight-year-old.
We were finally allowed through the gate at 7 p.m. Entering the bowels of the stadium, all concrete and echoes, we followed a sign for the OM boutique. It couldn’t have been more difficult to find or have a less-imposing entrance. We wandered lost through the stadium’s tunnels, avoiding the drips coming from overhead pipes, blinking from the flashing florescent lights, turning into dead concrete ends. At the end of a long, cold corridor, the kind that you walk down when you know you shouldn’t, because you’ll likely meet nasty brigands styling themselves as amateur vivisectionists, there was a small white sign on the wall, 10 feet from the ground, advertising the boutique as just around the corner. Following this clue, we were led out of the concrete labyrinth for 100 metres, and then re-entered the building by following a father and son through an unmarked door into the glittering boutique. My strong impression was that the entrance to the store was designed to discourage anyone from entering it, and yet, there it stood, brimming with fans and every conceivable article of clothing or equipment ever manufactured on Earth in its history, printed with the OM logo.
After an hour touching every conceivable article of clothing or equipment ever manufactured on Earth in its history, printed with the OM logo, Devon said, “Daddy, I gotta go pee.”
“Good idea, Slugger. Let’s rock.”
Now I have travelled widely in my life, and the appalling bathroom conditions in much of the world outside of North America phase me no longer. However, we were in a major professional sports stadium, and our tickets cost about $80 each, so I expected a minimum of serviceability. It was also an hour before the match, so presumably the restrooms would have recently been cleaned. The lone toilet was your standard French porcelain hole in the floor, the kind with ribbed foot pads so you know exactly where to stand, ensuring that you get an unhygienic soaker when the tsunamic flush washes over your feet. There was no door on the stall and the dispenser was out of toilet paper. The washroom’s urinal, a room-wide metal trough, should not have been overflowing, considering the loosey-goosey directional attitude of the patrons holding their secondary brains in their hands. A non-mysterious liquid wetted the floor and ran towards an open drain without a metal grate. It was slippery in there, and if Devon fell down I would have burned all his clothes. I’m funny that way.
I couldn’t get out of that washroom fast enough, and went straight for the concession/bar. I needed a beer. This is where I learned that no alcohol was sold at the stadium. A dry venue, in a country where wine could be purchased at my eight-year-old’s soccer practice? That Saturday was the first day since I arrived in France that I drank no alcohol, breaking my enviable string, and I hoped it to be the last. To compensate for the lack of alcohol revenue, the concession did a brisk business in cigarette sales, which fuelled the feverish chain smoking during the match by every adult (save one) in the stands.
The match was about to start, and even though it was already past Devon’s bedtime, he was wide-eyed and excited. We made our way down a long, tight row of 20 or 30 fans, no one standing up to make our passage easier, and at the midpoint of the row I found one empty seat. My seat. That couldn’t be right. Someone must have been in Devon’s seat, and I quickly went over in my mind how I would awkwardly argue with the trespasser, in French, in front of 50,000 people who didn’t know that Céline Dion and I share a birthday. Before the accusations starting flying, I checked Devon’s ticket and saw that a ‘pair’ of tickets meant that you have bought two tickets. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the tickets share any other properties, like a pair of sevens. Devon’s ticket was four seats over, two rows in front, which meant he sat on my lap for the entire match. As the game wore on, I reigned in my irritation at the usual French administrative deficiencies, and realized that this seating fuckup greatly enhanced our enjoyment of the spectacle. Holding my son for two hours, a slight chill in the air, the sights and sounds of Devon’s first professional match, the raucous crowd, I was overwhelmingly happy; my mind drifted into the contented bliss of one knowing he is on the right path, without any idea of the destination.
“That’s my move,” Devon shouted, as a Marseille player performed a graceful spinaround move, twisting an opponent up in knots before advancing toward the goal. He forgot that he learned his move from an older kid at school, who learned it watching old Maradona videos on YouTube.