Fort Lauderdale

In my supine ignorance, never heard of Gerd Muller before until today: a great goalscorer and a very successful footballer. His appearance and his play style was, I heard, not very appealing -like those of Raul Gonzalez, I presume-, but his figures are excellent -like Raul's-.

I just read that Muller, now working for the Bayern Munich, got disorientated and lost in Trento for hours. His wife had to fly to the Italian city to pick him up and return home with him. His story after the football era does not look happy -at least, from what I read. Muller tried to open a restaurant at some point after his career were over in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The reason of such location can be found, I guess, in that he played for The Strikers of Fort Lauderdale between 1979 and 1981. There he ended his being a professional footballer. After the failure of the business, he got depressed and slid down the hole of alcoholism.

I guess that a movie could be shot on the story of a footballer when his age reaches the 35.

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The piece of news caught my attention because I actually spent once one weekend in Fort Lauderdale. I guess one is surprised at the popularity of the place, given the extraordinary extension of the United States; unfortunalety, I can't say that "I have been to everywhere, man", as Johny Cash says.

I flought from Huntsville, AL to Charlotte, NC and from there to Fort Lauderdale, FL for a job interview in Deerfield Beach. I remembered it like a very European-like (Spanish-like) resort about 50 miles away from Miami.

The trip was an adventure. First, because I arrived to the airport at midnight of Thursday and the person who was supposed to pick me up had been fallen asleep at home. I had to wait for half an hour at least. Then, he took me to a pub in the beach and made me drink a couple of beers until close to 2 am. I was dead hungry and tired and the interview was scheduled at 9 am Friday morning. Later on, I spent the weekend in the house he occupied along with some other people... . Only that nobody knew of my staying.

My flight on Sunday got some troubles and I ended up in a hotel in Dallas, TX awaiting till the morning to flight back to Huntsville. I had to phone my boss to let him know that I was not going to make it to work next day. At 10 pm that Sunday night a group of at least 10 people going to Huntsville were having a burger in the hotel bar. Curiously enough we were more or less familiar to each other. I bumped into K., a peculiar German guy, with who I finally rented a car to drive from Nashville to Huntsville on Monday. The end of the story is that I did not get the job, but a nasty letter from my current employer at the time with a warning for having my annual leave sheet almost at zero hours in March.

Fort Lauderdale and Deerfield for me: a beach, a misty and crowded highway, a secret store packed with magic vinyls, the hope of seeing sharks, a road trip among mansions, a tall, huge condominium, a guy of 50 in the house, sick-look, skinny and tattooed, playing video games with a plastic guitar in a titanic plasma TV, an untidy and suffocating room and a Leonard Cohen's song, sand in the feet all the time, the ghost of a high salary, a drinking gathering in the trunk of a Mercedes, and picture of myself in a green, plaid shirt of short sleeves with sun all over my face.