"Finally," Luis told me last night, "Shoeless can get some rest."

The Sox won the World Series last night, the first time since 1917. The curses, too many to remember, have been lifted. And in their place, a whole host of good luck charms and jinx preventions. Lucky World Series shirts. Lucky World Series underwear. Lucky World Series hats and shot glasses and jeans and pizza parlors and bartenders. Finally!

Earlier in the day Luis called me and asked if I wanted to come by his brother's place in Bridgeport to watch the game. I was invited, he said, because it was known already that I wasn't a jinx. I'd been at the studio with him and my mom when the Sox won the pennant, so it was okay for me to be around for the game. Lucky me! One wife was a jinx so she couldn't come. One of the girlfriends was an "unknown" so she couldn't come either. The game was too important to take chances.

Jinxes, and how to prevent them, are a delicate part of the sports calculus. Players and athletes have a host of superstitions that help them overcome their nerves (or contribute to them, I guess). One fighter I knew at our gym would wear the same socks the entire time he was training for a fight and not wash them until the fight was over. (I can imagine how painful it was to be in the locker room with him!) Another did the same with his karate gi, though we protested enough that eventually he washed it. (The thing was rumored to be growing furry creatures before he finally gave in. And the odor! I won't even go there.) Then there is the king of jinxes for fighters, the "no sex when you're training to fight" business. Supposedly your fighting spirit is tied to your virility, and in this logic if you orgasm while training then your fighting spirit leaves your body and you will lose, lose, lose. Along with swallowing raw eggs every morning for breakfast, this particular regimen would lead to an awfully fun train-up, I'd think.

Fans, though, outdo the athletes and teams they admire in the areas of jinx prevention and good luck charms. There seemed to be more "rally caps" on the heads of Astros fans last night than not. They wore them inside out, backwards, sideways. Then there were the clinched hands held up in prayer (apparently they didn't know that God was on the Sox's side -- Cardinal George said so) and countless lucky jerseys. And in Bridgeport? Well I won't name names, but one of the brothers I watched the game with hadn't showered in six days (you know who you are!) and another had worn the same underwear for two. The other, reasonable enough, had worn the same tee-shirt throughout the series. And then there was me. I was dubbed the "good luck charm" after the game, practically guaranteeing me a place on the couch whenever the Sox play an important game again, which hopefully will be around this same time next year.

Well, whatever worked worked.

"I can't believe it," Luis said. "I've waited 30 years for this. Every spring I say 'Maybe this year they'll do it' and then every June I say 'Fuck them, I can't believe they screwed up again.' This year they finally did it. I can't believe it!'"

The game was won and the neighborhood came alive. In the distance we heard fireworks and gun shots (in the air, of course), honking horns, billowing "White Sox!!!" screamed out for several seconds. The brothers' compadre Leo came in with his crooked teeth and his Sox tee and cap. Luis said, "We should go out and streak like that redhead guy a few years ago who streaked at the game," and Leo said "Yeah," and Luis said "I'll be right behind you" and then we all laughed. Fernando called local bars to see if we could get into one (they were all packed and therefore closed), then called neighborhood tattoo parlors. He wants a world series/Sox emblem on his right arm, but he's got to wait since none of them were open, maybe because it was nearly one in the morning on a Wednesday night.

We wondered how many cars would be turned over that night, and on TV they said that the celebrators near 'The Cell' (Sox Park) were cordoned off in the C section of the parking lot. José said "Yeah, Cell Block C!"and we all laughed again. Nothing bad happened at all, probably because Sox fans were too stunned and falling-down-happy to burn anything. As usual, though, the TV coverage was crap. They showed footage from two bars: Jimbo's in Bridgeport and a place called Bourbon Street down near 111th in Beverly, the more upper-crust Irish neighborhood that has the "authentic" south side St. Patrick's Day parade each year. One newscaster waxed (hardly) poetic on the south side, naming ethnic groups from the neighborhoods: Lithuanian, Polish, Irish, Italian. When he stopped there, Fernando put his hands up and said "No Mexicans?" And I said "No African-Americans?!"

If your only knowledge of the south side of Chicago came from watching Fox's coverage, you'd think only Irish-Americans lived there and they all went to the same two bars. The city is 25% Mexican and 34% African-American. It was downright silly (if not worse) to leave out Mexicans and African-Americans. Bronzeville, an historic black neighborhood, is one of the most famous neighborhoods in the country and it's directly across the highway from Sox Park. It's where Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote; where Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday stayed and played along with every other black entertainer, sports star, or celebrity when Jim Crow was still in effect all the way up here. It was home to Gerri's Palm Tavern and the Wabash Street Y, the hotel of choice for all of those celebrities who were refused by the Palmer House no matter how famous they were because of the color of their skin. It was the home of the Chicago Defender, the newspaper of record for African-Americans across the country. And all this doesn't even get into other famed neighborhoods like Pilsen and Back of the Yards and Pullman and Hyde Park and Kenwood and South Shore. And none of them are Irish!

When we went out to our cars, everyone honked and waved on the streets and rolled down their windows to say hello to Luis and his brothers. The neighborhood had finally won. No more jinxes. It was drizzly cold, but who the hell cared. Fans ran through the neighborhood and waved Sox flags. In the rain I left the brothers and drove down Loomis through Pilsen, the historic Mexican neighborhood home to the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, down to Roosevelt (which Chicagoans pronounce "Rooosevelt" not "Rowsevelt") then down to Lake Shore Drive. I drove down the drive where the skyscrapers half-mooning Grant Park were dark except for lit-up windows spelling "SOX" and "GO SOX" in big screaming letters. And then I drove all the way north to the end of the drive, up Hollywood then Ridge to the corner where Clark Street and Ashland become one, to the neighborhood of cab drivers and junk collectors. Lining both sides of the street were countless cabs from a dozen companies and up the road sat several sloppy, stooped junk pick-ups, their cabs weighed down with thrown-away water heaters, broken-down dryers, and toilets. Ah, sweet home Chicago.

Today Luis is going to buy tees for his brothers, the same championship grey tees the team wore after the game. They are the good luck tees of next year, the guaranteed jinx preventors. Hopefully Luis won't have to wait another 30 years to buy another championship tee shirt and next June won't be filled with cries of lement bur rather cheers and joys as the team inches its way toward another World Series victory. If I can manage to keep my lucky charm status, maybe I'll get to watch the game with the brothers, enjoy another sausage pizza and Sam Adams Octoberfest beer, and help the diehards ward off the jinxes that are bound to slither back in.

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