Sadness of a cancelled Opening Day

The patron saint of the Detroit Tigers’ Opening Day is a drunk guy whose phone is either dead or lost. The saint, being abandoned by his friends, doesn’t know how he will get home since he lives outside of the city and came to the game and post-game celebrations with his friends. He is always found pacing back and forth by an intersection that’s a bit away from the post-game celebrations, begging passerby for help. The chance to use their phone or for someone to help him get a ride. People usually walk past him without breaking stride, angling their bodies away in disgust when the teary-eyed drunk man approaches them.

The drunkenness and loneliness reduces the saint, at least for a moment, to the level of the homeless people in downtown Detroit. His explanations can’t save him from this fate. Without friends and without hope, he is a nobody. He becomes invisible. People walk past him as if he doesn’t exist, and when he makes himself visible by coming close to them, he’s met with immediate dismissal and contempt. So he walks around begging and crying for someone to help lift him out of his tragic state which makes him a perfect picture of despair.

Last year, I let him use my phone to call his wife. When he was done, he thanked me and walked off into the distance. An hour later, his wife called my phone asking if I knew where he was. She had driven from Ann Arbor to come get him but he wasn’t waiting where they had agreed that he should. I had to spend part of the night unsuccessfully looking for a drunk and desperate man in a downtown that was filled with thousands of drunk and desperate men.

The saint’s loneliness is usually amplified by the drunken exhilaration of the party around him. In a normal Opening Day, people would have been running through the streets, yelling, laughing, stumbling, and generally celebrating. This year the game was rained out and postponed to Friday, but the announcement came late. By that time, a lot of people had already made their way into the city. So, rather than the all-consuming feverish horde that usually descends onto downtown on Opening Day, there was only a scattering of confused people trying to stay out of the rain and wondering how to celebrate the day when there was nothing to celebrate.

A lot of people went home, some tried to party as if the game did happen, and there were others who had traveled a long way and booked hotels for the night, who didn’t know whether they should have extended their or make the best out of it. One lady who was obviously drunk spent ten minutes repeating this conundrum to me by Starbucks.

After walking around aimlessly for a few hours, a friend and I decided to go to Old Shillelagh, a bi-level Irish bar that had a huge tent next to the actual bar in anticipation of the usual crowds. There was a DJ and waitresses walking around with test tube holders lined with tubes of alcohol. The tent wasn’t packed, not even close, and it represented the eerie problem of that day. There was too much open space.

When there’s too much space, there’s no crowd of people, just identifiable individuals. The chaotic energy that’s needed for these type of events and celebrations can’t be transmitted and refined. There’s no fever to it.

A couple of drunk people doing shots and dancing wildly to Lil Jon’s “Get Low” stands out in all of its awkwardness rather than being hidden by the rest of the crowd dancing awkwardly along to the song. The bad hip-hop and Blink 182 songs that the DJ played was made more annoying by the boredom of his audience — I couldn’t even bring myself to yell for him to play “March Madness” as I do everywhere. Everyone just stood around as if it was a middle school dance. People whispered and pointed to the impromptu make-out sessions rather than cheering and hooting. And it’s much easier to see how fed up and tired the waitresses who have to walk around and smile at guys who touch and hit on them are.

The open space also affords clarity. A chance to see the behaviors of people at parties away from the environment that makes it normal and accepted. When the destruction of a party doesn’t have the context of a party, it’s infuriating and sad.

A pet peeve of mine is a lot of Tigers fans come from outside the city of Detroit. They come from the surrounding suburbs of Birmingham, Sterling Heights, Bloomfield Hills, Grosse Pointe, Royal Oak, Ferndale, Shelby Township, Saint Clair Shores, and so on. They come to the city to watch the games, or attend concerts, and then go back to their private communities. They never experience the actual city or engage with the people of it. And now, with a lot of the younger suburbanites moving into midtown, they don’t even have to drive through the city to get to the Tigers’ stadium anymore.

On regular Opening Days, these people come to downtown to drink and party. But there’s an unspoken agreement — as there is at all parties — between them and the city that destruction will be tolerated. It’s the consequence of having a lot of drunk people together. I’m always celebrating with them, I love Opening Day. Not particularly because of baseball but I like to see people having fun and being ridiculous. People should be allowed to be ridiculous, everything else in this world is already so structured and restrictive. I like to see people without the inhibitions of civility, when they can be as drunk, free and as happy as they want.

When the party is cancelled, when there’s no agreement that destruction will be tolerated, it’s just a regular Thursday night. What’s left outside the ecstasy of celebration is people breaking bottles, throwing up, and being aggressive to the homeless people in a city that a lot of them don’t live in. It’s no longer carefree but careless. It’s actions that aggravates the tension between the poor city of Detroit and the richer suburbs around it and they’re hard to ignore.

Then there’s the sadness of reckless drinking. Of watching someone drink themselves into near unconsciousness on a nearly empty Monroe street, with their friends struggling to hold the body up, and the Renaissance painting scene illuminated by the bright lights of Greektown casino and surrounding stores. Without a party, it looks like stupidity and self-destruction.

When Opening Day is cancelled by rain, the patron saint is is harder to spot. There’s no chaos, he’s not as drunk and there’s no real urgency to his situation. His friends haven’t abandoned him, they’ve only been separated for a moment. His phone being dead is an inconvenience rather than a critical situation. People aren’t repulsed by him, they’re glad to help him contact his friends. Afterwards, he wanders around aimlessly, not really knowing if he should meet up with them, go home or try to find something else to do in the area. The saint is elevated to being like everyone else.