Solo, Hope Solo [best non fiction books of all time .txt] 📗

Shortly after Dad and Mark became friends, my father was implicated in Emert’s murder. My dad was afraid it would ruin their friendship, but Mark believed in him, sensed a good heart beneath the rough exterior. “If you tell me you didn’t do it, then nothing else matters,” Mark told him.

Mark spent a lot of time with my dad, who liked to joke that they were like the mismatched cartoon characters Mutt and Jeff. My father was a loud, large, heavyset Italian American. Mark was a soft-spoken, small Japanese American. He would take my father to Burger King and get the two-for-one deals. When my father insisted he wasn’t hungry, Mark would shrug and say, “You might as well eat it. I can’t eat two.” Just like me, he learned to help my dad in subtle ways, without hurting his pride.

Mark was an incredible resource. He understood how the system worked and how to help homeless people get on their feet. He helped my father sign up for Social Security benefits and disability. He helped him get full veteran benefits—tracking down his service record and clarifying at least one thing about my father’s mysterious past: that he had, indeed, served in the navy. My father badly needed surgery for his knees, and Mark assisted in arranging the operation at the VA Hospital. While my father was recovering, Mark did something even more profound. He helped secure low-income housing at Hilltop House, an affordable complex for the elderly in downtown Seattle. In a quirk of bureaucracy, my father couldn’t qualify for the housing if he was homeless. He needed to prove he had been living somewhere besides the street. So Mark filled out the paperwork and said that my dad had lived with him.

“A little white lie ain’t hurting nobody,” Mark told me.

Mark’s mother-in-law had recently moved into an assisted-living facility, so he had all her furniture in storage. He gave it to my father to furnish his new studio apartment. He took him shopping for groceries, filling the refrigerator and cupboards in the small kitchen. He helped my father move in. My father had a roof. He had food.

After years on the street, he had a place to call home.

CHAPTER EIGHT

An Arm Like Frankenstein

After a slow start, I was getting the hang of college life. I dated a lot of guys, and I enjoyed the party scene around campus, so when the All-American Club—sports bar by day, trendy nightclub after dark—opened near UW, I wanted to get in. Still several months away from my twenty-first birthday, I stood in front of an intimidating bouncer and presented the Washington driver’s license I’d borrowed from a friend who looked vaguely like me.

The bouncer shined his flashlight in my face and then back down on the license. He shook his head. “Nope,” he said.

That couldn’t be the final verdict. They had already let Cheryl in, and she looked ten years old in her fake ID. I pleaded with the bouncer, who called over the club manager, a handsome dark-haired guy with a friendly smile. He looked at my ID and rolled his eyes. “I’m going to give you one chance,” he said. “Tell me the truth: Is this you?”

For some reason I couldn’t lie to him. “No,” I said. “But can I have my ID back? It usually works.” The manager started to turn away, but our friend Mark—a UW soccer player who possessed a legitimate ID—stepped in. “Dude,” he said, pointing to me. “Don’t you know who this is?”

“I have no idea who she is,” the manager said. “And I don’t really care.”

“Come on, let her in,” Mark said. “I won’t let her drink. Trust me, she’s cool.”

The manager sighed. “Just this once,” he warned and looked me in the eyes. “Remember—no drinking. I’m watching you. And,” he added, pulling the ID back from me, “I’m keeping this.”

When I thanked him, he warned me not to make a habit of it, but the next weekend, I was back in line behind the ropes, catching his eye. He smiled, rolled his eyes, and let me in again.

And that’s how I met Adrian. A grown-up by my standards and seemingly worldly, he was twenty-five years old and managing nightclubs; he had played soccer in community college, and didn’t care one way or the other about my soccer career. He made it clear that he’d rather watch water boil than women’s soccer. I took that as a challenge.

Adrian liked to do the same stuff I did: shoot hoops or go snowboarding or just hang out. He was easy to be with, and pretty soon I was spending most of my free time with him. I still dated other guys, and he dated plenty of women, but when we were together, it felt special. And I needed a friend. There was a widening gap in my life as Cheryl and I grew apart. Malia had graduated, and every time I came back from a stint with the national team, I felt pushed farther out of Cheryl’s circle. I was living a dual existence with my college and national teams, pulled between two sets of women who often seemed less like friends than work colleagues. I wasn’t good at doing the things that kept friendships smooth—returning phone calls quickly or staying in touch while I traveled. But Adrian wasn’t bothered and we could pick back up where we had left off, without a lot of drama.

He made me comfortable. He didn’t pass judgment—not on my family or my background or my father. He had his own rocky past and complicated family matters. He’d grown up in West Seattle, also from a broken home. Though his parents eventually reconciled, his father had been physical with his mother when Adrian was young, which made him protective of the women in his life. For a time, he and his mother were homeless, moving from vacant room to vacant room in the hotel where