Making Room

“Stupid fucking cunt!” my friend Brock said about his GPS misleading him into taking a wrong turn.

“Nancy just let us down, that bitch!” I said supportively. “Maybe you didn’t name yours Nancy. Get fucked…Lady!”

We’d been busy mocking Charles Barkely’s voice and insistence on reiterating his main point over and over during an interview with Bill Simmons, “First of all, Beel!” getting quoted often when making a point the rest of the day. It was our fourth trip in five years to the U.S. Open, not counting the time in 2014 when we attended with Brock’s future wife along with another then-co-worker, Sam, the dark-haired girl sitting to my right. As the stadium screen showed couples on the Kiss Cam, I leaned toward her and joked, “My girlfriend does not watch tennis. She will never find out about this. If they show us, we are going to vigorously make out.” Thankfully, they skipped our loveless yet anxious mugs, an incident I referenced along with one old ticket broker’s spiel he told innumerable customers in his thick New Yawk accent: “Yer gonna go to the end’uh tha boahdwahk. You’ll see a puhple umbrella. Dat’s Rachel thayyuh. She’ll have ya tickets.”

As we walked to that now umbrella-less boardwalk various detritus decorated the sidewalk and bike path, including loose tampons, which I noted were at least unopened in case any capricious free-bleeders were also patronizing the day’s matches. Some meager raindrops fell, not a harbinger of things to come, more a reminder to be grateful that the weather had a knack for minding its manners when we came to town on Labor Day weekend. The pungent smell of ganja wafted through the air as some religious zealots solicited attendees to find Jesus, the guy consistently involving himself in the periphery of major sporting events (and perhaps bogarting that unseen L).

Intent on watching doubles prior to catching singles matches at Louis Armstrong Stadium, the venue named for one of America’s legendary tennis players (he hit a mean backhand with his trumpet), I wanted to dine at a specific Mediterranean spot. After weaving through the grounds, not nearly as unable-to-avoid-elbowing-strangers swarming as they’d been on our last two visits, we located the restaurant, home to cement tables with umbrellas opened above them, as I ordered falafel with hummus and pita bread plus a water and Diet Coke.

“That’s $38.25,” the cashier, an Asian girl with fake eyelashes big enough to titillate a lepidopterist, said.

“A bargain,” Brock told me as my credit card wouldn’t tap.

“This is all new to me,” I told the girl, busting out one of my prized test-the-innocent lines. “Just got out of prison this morning. Immediately came to the Open.”

“Welcome home!” she said without missing a beat.

“Thank you so much. I hear our president’s doing very well,” I said.

“Oh yeah!” she said, now entering Eye-Roll City. “You should see all the great stuff he’s done!”You should see all the great stuff he’s done!”

“How long were you in for?” her co-worker asked me.

“Cut it out,” I said as my inserted card was approved. “I’m kidding.”

“Ohhh! I believed you! Your food will be ready shortly. Keep this ticket, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

“I’m gonna go grab food from the Grandstand,” Brock said, unwrapping the foil surrounding his preordained selection—a fried chicken sandwich—upon his return, and commenting disdainfully on how it appeared like it came straight out of a freezer.

“How are those?” I asked a lady beside us plucking one at a time from a bag of eight-dollar roasted green beans doused in olive oil, garlic, and salt, a new buzzed-about foodstuff I’d seen highlighted on social media.

“Pretty good,” she said in between chews. “Simple and easy to eat, too.”

While waiting a half hour for my straightforward order to surface, we ridiculed some dainty fops in men’s sweater-style, ribbed-textured tee shirts, snickered at a smoldering, sharp-cheekboned mute couple both in designer sunglasses with an almost matching eggshell-hued sweatshirt and blouse combo tied conspicuously around their respective necks, and fretted about the outcome when the bulging, stretch mark-lined belly of one chunky woman in a crop top threatened to announce eminent domain to the ripe tomatoes decorating the counter.

“When you think about it, hummus is really just bean puddin’,” I said, a rare word I proudly pronounce like a hayseed.

“That’s a way to look at it.”

“Well, not sugary like ketchup aka tomato puddin’, but comparable.”

“How is it?”

“Good and creamy. Too much for one slice of pita, though. Feel like they should give me more pita for the wait.”

“See if you can get me a Diet Coke refill instead,” Brock said. “You’re the right guy for that kinda job.”

I said a second hello to the Asian girl and her male co-worker, stating how I’d endured the “interminable wait” and wondered if I could, Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell-style, get a second cup on the house.

“To be clear, I’m not being manipulative. I was very patient waiting for my food. I think we all know I earned this.”

It worked, the surreptitious lever-squirting done at the guy’s groin level so no meddlesome co-workers would catch him violating the restaurant’s soda code of ethics. With time to spare, Brock and I entered one gift shop, him suggesting that a pink Roger Federer hat was my style as a black lady restocking some other headgear on the wall display smiled at Sade on my chest.

“I love your shirt,” she said sweetly.

“The Queen!” I said in lieu of a thank you. “The voice of love. My favorite singer in the world.”

“She’s the best.”

“I saw a Sade tribute band recently. The lady sang a lot like her.”

“Ooh! Really?! Where was it at?”

“Northampton, Massachusetts. Next time she’s in town, we’ll go to the show together. What do you think?”

“Deal,” she said, a bit confused while rapidly blinking her lids coated in glittery cornflower eyeshadow, telling me to have a nice day and departing to grab more overpriced merchandise for the thinning rack.

“Charming more black women, I see,” Brock said. “Your specialty.”

We settled in at the sparsely occupied Grandstand for a men’s doubles match, Brock asking if we were too close: “Not close enough to stab Monica Seles again, so this works.” Debating if one impassioned brunette in the first row, two rows in front of us, was dating one of the college-age Ohioans on the court, I side-eyed a gaunt, curly-haired woman in a pretty lilac-colored dress in the section to our left, assuming based on her engagement ring that she was the betrothed of one of the foreigners on the opposite side of the court, her rigid-postured, hollow-cheeked inner tension noticeable. Brock shifted to detective mode to research the Wikipedia pages of the four players before us.

“Get a load of this shit. Marcelo Melo’s singles record is 1–0 all-time.”

“What?!”

“How do you win one match then never play again?”

“He’s The G.O.O.T. The Greatest Of One Time. By the way, what the fuck could they possibly be talking about between points?”

“‘I’m gonna serve it again and then you’ll hit it. Unless it’s hit to me. Then I’ll hit it. Cool?’”

“‘You fucked up. Let’s not do that this time.’”

“Look at the bad tats on this broad,” he said about a new viewer in the front row.

“That’s a thing for chicks of a certain age. A blob of shit above the back of their elbow.”

“Just so they can never see it and make us suffer instead.”

“Exactly. And it’s typically something completely unnecessary like a pro-LGBT thimble or a sentient bagel.”

We sang along to the P.A. system during game breaks — Brock matching me word for word as Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” played — and unable to harmonize louder than them, failed to antagonize the group of fans on the other side who turned “Hang On Sloopy” into a “Sweet Caroline”-esque obnoxious singalong as encouragement for the Americans, the two kids also members of Ohio State’s tennis team, they would persevere in three sets. Brock and I agreed that one member of the duo had date-rape-capable psychotic eyes, the type of scathingly sarcastic banter we’ve shared watching major events together for thirteen years, this the one day each year when we bring our absurd camaraderie to the event itself. As the winners signed hats and oversized tennis balls following the match, I pointed out how the brunette was not yet banging either player as she took an eager, fawning selfie with one of them.

With the next match scheduled to begin fifteen-ish minutes later, the announcer introduced the players, the most noteworthy among them Hungary’s Fanny Stollár, a fetching blonde woman with claw-like manicured fingernails.

“Make room for Fanny,” I said in a feeble voice.

“What is that from?” Brock said through laughter.

“Chris Elliott’s character in Scary Movie 2!”

“A modern masterpiece. Who would’ve believed that the woman named Asia on the court was not the Asian woman? She has long-ass fingernails like Fanny’s. I’m losing respect for women’s doubles now.” Brock barely took a breath, one more observation loaded. “And look at Andreja’s serve,” he said to lead the witness while pointing at one of Make Room for Fanny’s opponents.

“Like a corkscrew struggling to get unwound,” I said about her ample torso, surprising myself by neglecting to announce that her nipples appeared large enough to be a pair of dinner plates.

“You see that guy at the top of the stands not wearing a shirt? Nothing says douche more than that. Is that his son with him? How embarrassing.”

“I wanna go over there and ask him to remove his pants. Then I’ll tell him I want him to put on more socks and hand over mine. You in?”

“This sun needs to go back into hiding.”

“You worried I’m gonna take my shirt off too?” I asked, hinting that I was sporting tennis-themed nipple piercings.

“Do we need human chair umps anymore?” Brock said in the wake of his raspberry-like laugh, his lips making a short-lived fart-like noise as he blew air out of them.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Even with tech doing all the work? They don’t even speak into the microphone.”

“Sure, they do. I guess maybe not for everything. I think it beats a robot regardless. Do I miss a sclerotic elderly man’s fingernail on the net calling lets? Of course. But he definitely was expendable.”

“Along with the fat guys squinting on the baseline calling in and out.”

“Who knows when they’d last seen their ophthalmologists.”

“What would Johnny Mack’s career be nowadays? Who would he yell at?”

“Himself. Like Kyrgios minus the cocaine. We’d know how fucking insane he truly was.”

When the first set ended, we made our way to Armstrong Stadium, first considering a stop at a booth we frequent each year.

“Too early for ice cream?” Brock inquired.

“I’m always ready for ice cream.” We neared the cashier. “It’s so nice of Mr. van Leeuwen to set up this kiosk each year,” I joked to the man, another Open employee happy to see Sade. “Doesn’t he erect it all by himself so you guys can get some rest before the tournament?”

“Oh yeah, right,” a different guy digging out scoops said through a smile.

“That was a bit genderist of me,” I said to Brock afterward in between licks of nectareous strawberry in a waffle cone. “Who says Mrs. van Leeuwen couldn’t be the sole proprietor?”

Initially picking some borderline nosebleed seats at the center of the court, I eyed two seats in the corner with a much closer and more intriguing view from the edge of the baseline, Brock and I hurrying to them as I opted to walk into a man staring at his cell phone, a new tactic I’m trying out to passive-aggressively make impudent assholes feel stupid in public. This guy said nothing and continued onward. One running gag Brock and I enjoy is how the sport of tennis won’t recognize the Russian or Belarusian flags for players representing those countries — “That sure deterred Putin,” Brock sagely stated — as we watched a Ukrainian woman attempt to come back from a set down.

“Why is everyone cheering for Kostyuk?” Brock said.

“To help the war effort! And while we’re here, Free Palestine as well.”

“Look at how red her face is.”

“About to have a myocardial infarction.”

“It’s not even that hot.”

“It is when you’re representing all of the bombed-out cities in the motherland.”

“Is that acne on Nosková?”

“Yes. Not as much as there was on the back of that girl in the Grandstand, though.”

“She keeps screaming at her coach.”

“‘Why’d you make me miss that shot, Coach?!’”

“‘You really suck right now, Coach!’ Bet she doesn’t credit Coach for all her winners.”

Kostyuk tossed the ball to serve, caught it, and tried again, something she did throughout the match.

“Must be all that damn wind!” Brock said.

“It’s not windy!”

“Yeah, but those big ceiling fans above us are very strong.”

“True. And the pigeons flapping around. Huge wings.”

“Have we ever seen any stupid birds in here?”

“A couple times. In the past, they were kind enough to find a spot in the rafters and stay there.”

Having a blast being an idiot at a major event with one of my best friends is as good as life gets. Kostyuk would ultimately lose as we assumed she’d murder her coach during their post-match meeting. More people began shuffling in to watch an American player, Francis Tiafoe, a guy who’d perpetuated his own nickname, Big Foe, one of his friends first coining it, a factoid Brock guessed correctly when we’d pondered it while texting days earlier during Big Tia’s previous match.

“Chances he wins?”

“Big Fee Fi Fum? I don’t think he does it.”

“I wanna like him more. Wonder if he’ll crip walk out to keep pretending he’s ghetto.”

“Me, too. Yet I also wanna see Medvedev and his effortless forehand go to town.”

The redheaded, middle-aged lady in front of us asked her daughter, “Where’s Daddy’s water?” as the guys warmed up. She swiveled around and, referring to the filled cupholders behind their seats, said, “Are any of these yours?”

“This one’s mine,” I said about the bottle on the left. “But those other two could both be Daddy’s water.”

Later, Brock would drop a few things, his phone among them, as the lady’s son asked if he was missing anything else.

“Just his dignity,” I said. “Do you see it down there?”

“It might be with Daddy’s water,” the lady said and half-turned her head with an incipient smirk at me. We’ve been given a huge advance to write a tennis-themed sitcom to debut during next year’s tournament on the Open’s YouTube channel.

Many people in search of seats would be told they were on hold for someone in the bathroom and/or at the concessions, my cue to say “Sayt’s tayken” a la the fuckface kid on the bus in For’st Guhmp, the way the film title is spelled in tribute to denizens below the Mason-Dixon line. As the first set played out, Big Pho, his nickname now a nod to Vietnamese soup, traded three breaks of serve with Medvedev, the set lasting almost seventy-five minutes. The cameraman found a kid in the crowd who tried to guzzle the water from his bottle, spilling several profligate mouthfuls on his shirt.

“He should’ve grabbed his dad’s beer,” Brock said.

When they showed him again, he ripped his wet shirt off and twirled it in the air.

“That’s what the women they show on the screen should be doing every single time,” Brock added.

“What if the kid rips his pants off next time?”

“And helicopters his penis?” he said as I cracked up. “Hey man, it’s what boys that age do,” my friend, the father of an eight-year-old son, said in seriousness.

“If he helicoptered his penis, I would yell out ‘KOBE!’”

“Sorry to change the subject, but it’s crazy how fast they update the score on the screen.”

“No shit!”

“Have caught myself waiting for them to change it a few times today.”

“Okay, shhh. Let’s please be quiet. These multimillionaires playing under immense pressure can’t focus if we’re up here talking.”

“Yet they all listen to music while they practice.”

“They’re multimillionaires. It’s different for them. You wouldn’t get it. Oh hey, Johnny Sins needs to get by,” I said as a tall, bald guy in our row stood up facing toward us.

“Who?”

“He looks like the pornstar,” I said, having mentioned Alexis Fawx and, at least as Brock would recall, a harem of others earlier.

“How do you know so many pornstars by name? I know Jenna Jameson and that’s it.”

“I’ve been cranking my hog almost daily for thirty years. I keep a list of names to save myself time. No ninety minutes to find the perfect video. Put in a whore’s name, open some tabs, and get the job done. Side note: it was Johnny who smelled like sandalwood, not the lady who I thought it was.”

“Figures. He seems like the type,” Brock said about the guy, this douche in an ill-fitting baseball cap, taupe sweater tee, and brown corduroy pants with faux faded tennis sneakers. “By the way, look behind us. Two rows up, lady with glasses. She’s got a laptop open.”

“Weird choice to dig into her spreadsheets since this is such a great venue to spend all day looking at your phone.”

“First it was a guy drawing, now this,” he said about a sketch artist’s rendering shown multiple times on the big screen.

“You wanna do some scrimshaw during the third set? Maybe with her?” I said as a busty brunette in a short green dress walked up the slanted staircase, her head down watching her feet while we ogled the predictable area a triggered feminist would love to criticize us for.

“Not a fan of the slanted staircase either. Is it racist to say slant now?”

“I dunno, but I went to the cinema the other night. They show this ad with a buncha guys pretending to be mafioso and I like to blurt out, ‘Because stereotypes are funny as long as the people are white!’ Nobody’s bitten yet, but I’m holding out hope.”

“There’s only one race you can’t make jokes about, Adam. You know that.”

“What if Cinemark showed a buncha Asians building a railroad trying to get me to enroll in their Rewards Club?”

“Back in my day,” Brock said to scorn his elderly father’s go-to phrase, “it was cool to be racist!”

“Back in my day, I signed my slaves up for the Cinemark Rewards Club!”

Big Archrival won the second set, the crowd repeatedly chanting in unison, “ONE! TWO! THREE! FOE!” We abstained. Cool guys. Brock went to get another Diet Coke as members of the Indian family sitting beside Mr. Sins got up for the eleventy-seventh time, me graciously standing moments ahead of each reappearance to let them pass while purposely not acknowledging their dead-eyed toddler son fond of staring, probably unable to verbalize how much he also loved Sade. Kid’s got promise.

“Daniil doesn’t seem to have it this afternoon,” Brock said as the third set unfolded.

“I thought he might have a chance to beat Caveman in the semis,” I said about Carlos Alcaraz, the vacuous Spaniard succeeding Rafael “Asspicker” Nadal as my new favorite player to passionately cheer against.

“Need Big Foe to win this in straight sets. I wanna see Pegula,” he said as the men were on pace to play a tiebreaker to finish the third set.

“Make room for Danny,” I said as a timeout concluded, him and Big Foam simultaneously standing up to resume play. “And make room for Franny.”

Brock began laughing so hard he was quickly cry-laughing, something I couldn’t stop myself from doing in kind, the dramatic play before us momentarily rendered meaningless as we tried to regain our collective composure, both of us holding our eyeglasses in our left hands while rubbing the tears on our faces with our rights. Small Friend (Big Foe’s antonym nickname) would win the inevitable seesaw tiebreaker eight to six, a straight sets victory that brought us to our feet cheering for him along with the entire crowd. One couple waving an American flag a bit too excitedly reverted us to our cynical ways within seconds, noting how it wasn’t exactly the finest hour for American patriotism, still happy we got to see our countryman get it done at the Open, hold the rah-rah poppycock.

“Why don’t they flash other scores on the board?” Brock said.

“Dude, I’ve been thinking the same thing this whole match.”

“They’d rather just show a U.S. Open logo to remind us where we are right now.”

“Fucking sick, you dumb twats. I know I’m at Thelonious Monk Stadium! What’s happening here in the areas where I’m not? Check it out. The guy about to interview Big Nemesis is a dead ringer for The GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan.”

“If you gave yourself a nickname, you could wear a BIG FRI chain.”

“Or just Big AHF. AHF’s my name in our work Slack, by the way. The Filipina girl I work with each day pinged me last week: ‘Can I ask what your first name is?’ I replied, ‘Are you serious? It’s Adam.’ ‘Oh, I wasn’t sure if AHF was a joke.’ ‘You waited two-and-a-half years to ask me that?!’”

Brock and I moved down to a reserved seating area, the majority of the rows empty, to watch another American, Jessica Pegula, the woman one we had long wished to see win the Open sometime. As she won the first twelve points of the set, I speculated if anyone had ever won forty-eight points in a row in a women’s major tennis match, Pegula’s skeletal Romanian opponent promptly winning the next two games. Unwilling to endure a potentially lengthy back-and-forth, we concurred that we’d had our fill for the day.

“You’re not gonna buy anything this year?” I said.

“We haven’t left yet.”

“Wanna hit the main gift shop?”

“Sure. You gonna grab a Honey Deuce hat?”

“Nothing like paying fifty more bucks to honor a thirty-dollar beverage.”

As Brock searched for his routine choice, a navy blue shirt, I said I was going to wander in search of the unknown, grabbing a soft long sleeve tee shirt and spotting a poster, unsure of its dimensions.

“Excuse me,” I said to a gift shop employee.

“Yes,” she said.

“First, how are you?”

“Good,” she said while beaming. “How are you?”

“Good as well. Better if you can tell me the size of this poster.”

“Let me go check.”

She resurfaced and informed me she was unsuccessful as I approached the co-worker she’d discussed my stumper with.

“You think it’s twenty-four by thirty-six?”

“I honestly don’t know. I can tell you it’s this size,” she said while pointing to a different poster on the wall beside her.

“Well, I need to know if it’s a frame I can buy for twenty dollars at Michaels or a frame I need to have custom built for four hundred dollars at Michaels.”

“I’m sure you can find the right size frame on Amazon,” she replied.

“Right. Or like I just said, go to Michaels. Anyway, thanks for your help.”

“They didn’t know the size?” Brock asked me, poster tube not in hand.

“Nah. Not a tape measure to be found at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center.”

“That’s a shame.”

“I should’ve asked to put it on layaway until next year when I brought a ruler.”

As we walked the boardwalk back to the parking garage, I referenced the same ticket broker from earlier and told Brock my philosophy that when addressing any person you want to ask a question, you should first ask, “How are you?” It’s a vital way to see the good in strangers by letting them know you care on the simplest level. “And it definitely gets you extra pizza toppings when calling in your order,” I said to conclude my pitch. Fearful that I might be going too far on behalf of strangers, I omitted adding, “Make room for humanity.” That’s what the annual trip is for, and why we’ll keep returning to goof around even if I already know Brock’s reaction the day I decide to rip off my shirt.