The U.S. was a rolling den of vice in its bitter 2-0 loss to Guatemala on Friday night. The team selection was poor. The team itself was poor. The ancient and moss-festooned Carlos Ruiz did things. All around it was cause for a bitter gnashing of teeth and grinding of proverbial gears.

Let’s say, for the sake of our sanity, 10 of the best authors of all time had been assigned to Guatemala City for this madhouse. What would they write? Better yet, how would they lead into their stories?

I know how. This is how.

Hunter S. Thompson

GUATEMALA CITY — Heat all nite until dawn. No sleep. Christ, here we go, a nightmare of sun and shadow and sweat. By noon I had my whiskeys and by 8 I am swimming inside some fishbowl. The first thing I saw was a crow dying outside my hotel and the last thing I saw was a man dying but in his career, and where am I. Bowels of a stadium suddenly through liquid, ushered through by men in batons and stern looks and where did I get this knife?

This man’s visage is a miasma of terror. Is this Klinsmann the man I am to interview? This place is a terror. I am worried about fire. The U.S. lost. God knows by how much.

Ernest Hemingway

GUATEMALA CITY — The goals fell until the boys fell and maybe the worst of it was that we did not see it coming. You never see coming what has marked you for the cleanest death. Where do we even go from here, he said to no one in particular, but there was no answer because there was no time for it and the stadium was already empty by then.

Leo Tolstoy

GUATEMALA CITY — Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.

Jurgen Klinsmann is a specter, a ghost of our pasts and we are suddenly aware that our love will not save us. We are all dying and our hearts are our blame. When the first goal fell, our hearts knew.

Stephen King

GUATEMALA CITY — When the day opened, there was a bleak sound buzzing like popping blood vessels in his ears. By the time the match ended the buzzing had grown, and black shapes materialized on the periphery of his vision all howling and whooping. Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.

The buzz became a roar soon, and Guatemala City closed around the U.S. Men’s National Team like a grinding vise. It’s hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else’s.

Charles Dickens

GUATEMALA CITY — It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Worst most of all.

Mark Twain

GUATEMALA CITY — He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who coaches fully is prepared to die at any time, and it is clear to this writer that at present, Jurgen Klinsmann is neither prepared nor willing to die to himself to become that which he espouses. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Edgar Allan Poe

GUATEMALA CITY — There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

In this we find the U.S. Men’s National Team, at odds with itself and fighting a blackness and a truancy of possession that has swung the axe above its very neck. The dark stalks this locker room, and in that inky void do we see our very selves redacted. We have wrought this pressing weight upon our chests, and we must bear it until our ribs shatter and the breath is out of the unoffending brute in each of us.

John Steinbeck

GUATEMALA CITY — They walked side by side along the dark track toward the away end, where the lights hung, necklace above necklace against the south. The Picaya crouched in the darkness beyond like a tired hound, resting: and the waves of dim cheers gently practiced at striking, and hissed a little. The night was cold and aloof, and its warm life was withdrawn, so that it was full of bitter warnings to the one man in U.S. Men’s National Team accoutrements that he is alone in the world, and alone among his fellows; that he has no comfort owing him from anywhere.

Dante Alighieri

GUATEMALA CITY — And I — my head oppressed by horror — said:

“Master, what is it that I hear? Who are

those people so defeated by their pain?”

And he to me: “This miserable way

is taken by the sorry souls of those

who lived without disgrace and without praise.

They now commingle with the coward angels,

the company of those who were not rebels

nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.

The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,

have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them —

even the wicked cannot glory in them.

They are the lost ones in Guatemala

And they are doomed to never return

Kurt Vonnegut

GUATEMALA CITY — And so it goes.