Football
Football
After criss-crossing the road four times and hitting every convenience store within a mile, we finally found the rolling papers. Of course, neither of us had a lighter so I had to go back in. Besides being mildly intoxicated from the couple Budweisers we drank en route, we were both unmanageably nervous. We needed to smoke to settle our nerves and our anxieties. In the name of bravado, neither of us could come to voice our anxieties. Both of us knew that after this event we would be inextricably changed. He rolled the joint like a pro, I chugged another beer. The searing February morning sun beat down on us from a crisp blue sky painted with wisps of whimsical cirrus as we sat in the parking lot at the intramural fields. We smoked. I finally relaxed. He finally relaxed.
A sudden pounding on the hood of his pickup truck announced the arrival of one of his brothers. They were all brothers and all the brothers brought their girlfriends, most of whom were sisters. This was their Sunday ritual. It predated me. “We” were not yet a ritual, and I really never expected that we would become one. Nonetheless, that he took me along meant something, just what I was not ready to contemplate. He was making a statement that I didn’t ask him to make. He, who usually just came to play with his brothers, who usually never brought anybody along, wanted me to come. He wanted me, who was neither brother nor sister, to watch him interact in his world. I, who was out of school and decidedly not Greek, looked the part alright even if I didn’t strut the strut. Before the echo from the hood-slapping ended, we were opening our respective doors. A rush of smoke filled the vicinity as he handed off the joint to the noisemaker. They laughed and shook hands—it was actually more of an elaborate handoff—as I cracked open a beer for our joiner. I introduced myself to whatever his name was, we shook hands—handed off and back—and they walked ahead of me. I grabbed the cooler from the bed of the truck as we moved through the clearing toward the football fields. They extinguished the roach and disposed of it. It became part of the scenery.
Within minutes, the worn brown and lightly greening expanse of fields was teeming with shirtless, glistening frat boys and uncountable dainty blonde Barbie girls whose pink lipstick matched their pink flip flops which matched their pink bathing suit tops. The football was flying all around and then to me. Instinctively, I threw one deep to another of the boys whose name was, I believe, Matty or maybe Matt E. For each pink and tan girl there was a chair, and for every fourth girl there was a dog. There were dogs on leashes, dogs off leashes chasing Frisbees, dogs running after the football, and dogs slurping up water out of stainless steel bowls.
The girls spread out their blankets, some even brought umbrellas. They had chairs. I had my backpack and a cooler. He didn’t think to tell me I’d need something to sit on. By now, he was out on the field in scrimmage mode. The four fields were being marked off as other people’s brothers continued to arrive in droves. Today’s games would determine the intramural champion. We had a three to four hour afternoon ahead of us, assuming his team kept on winning. It would really, I posited, come down to which team was least stoned and most sober. They fidgited with their flags and he showed his teammates how to tear the sleeves off of their shirts in such a way that they could get maximum muscle effect. They donned their uniforms and began to play. Knowing that it was my duty to take off my shirt, I conformed and—at least in appearance—fit in with tanned and tight bare-chested boys that I resembled. The winter sun was hot on my shoulders. I squinted.
I was, in this morass of people, suddenly and frighteningly all alone. The ball was no longer being thrown towards me. The games had begun. I was there as mere spectator, afterall. The usual thing to do would be to go over and hang out with my friends who were also there to watch. I had no friends there. These were all his friends, and his friends’ girlfriends. They were all related with roots reaching back to a lush and mountainous island in the Mediterranean. These were all sisters and brothers, and I was (at best) a second cousin from and in some distant place. My “half the distance to the goal” seemed more like a penalty than field placement. I sat off by myself for a while, self-consciously wondering how I could break into the sea of pink and tan 15 yards down field. I wondered if I should. I brooded and I watched. I pounded another beer and was feeling full.
My liquid courage arrived as I picked up the cooler, picked up my backpack and slowly moved towards the spectator’s area. I caught the unsunglassed eye of one of the girls who smiled at me. I watched her eyes wander down my tan and pinking body, then back up with a pause at my shorts and the muscular V that sprouted upward into my stomach, toward my chest. She asked me to confirm that I was his friend which I did. Barbie and I chatted a little. She introduced me to a few other girls who also politely smiled, flashing whitened white teeth surrounded by that same pepto pink I’d noted was the unofficial uniform. Lots of brown roots showed through yellow hair while lots of bikini bottoms peaked out through unzipped, bottoms-fraying jean shorts. The first girl offered some pink mixed drink concoction she had prepared before coming and which she had poured into one of several emptied out pink-labeled jugs. I declined in favor of my Red, White and Blue. I should have taken the drink.
Exposing the only completely bare chest in a sea of pink unnerved me. I self-consciously—in an attempt to move the gaze of my new acquaintances from my body to my face—put my shirt back on as we all chatted mindlessly a little more before the question about how I knew him came up. I froze—the fear paralyzed me in a way that I hadn’t felt since the time my mother caught me reading her red-covered romance novels when I was ten. Not even the unobstructed Florida sun could warm the chill that seized my entire body. I goose-pimpled, I could feel my nipples harden against the cotton of my t-shirt. I blinked, attempting to think of just how this should be answered.
I certainly couldn’t tell her that he and I met through a friend at that place where we’d met. I couldn’t tell her that he’d spent the last fourteen nights in my bed with me. I couldn’t tell her that, after playing one on one basketball 22 days before, we had taken a not-so-innocent shower together, mutually agreeing to our mastery of the art of soap- dropping. I couldn’t tell her about the planned tennis matches that never even made it to the courts. I couldn’t tell her that we had made a habit of taking long lunches together that did not include lunch. I couldn’t tell her that he was the topic of 53 sappy poems that I’d written in 30 days. I couldn’t tell her that he was the reason that I smile and sweat and—still in that smitten stage—breathe. Between nervous blinks, all I could think of was what I couldn’t tell her.
With a whistle came the thaw and there he was beside me. They had won their first game and saved me from having to answer the question. He asked if I had gone to the library yet, and in the process provided the out that I needed. “I’m gonna go now.” I reached deep into the cooler and pulled out a water and handed it to him. I smiled at my new girlfriends as I pulled on both straps of my backpack and started off. I’m still not sure if my non-answer was implicating or vindicating, but at least it was liberating. I waved myself off as I set off on my quest for the cooler library.
As I reached the three year old scrub pine shrubbery that marked the beginning of the path out of the football field area, I paused. I looked back and saw, running back and forth and around in a chaotic frenzy, the boys and girls of my consternation. I could make out pectorals and belly buttons, shoulders and sweaty tufts of dark underarm hair. Briefly, they were all the same: perfect in form, mere bodies. In varying states of undress and almost uniformly Davidian and Hellenic, the interplay between these distant and now faceless moving statues reminded me of the civilization that I had escaped. I had long ago walked away from the footballs and the blankets, knowing that I could—at best—visit each in short spurts; that my real place was between them or off watching from fifteen feet away. The fact that I was ripping him from this civilization, this carefree existence of sweat and play, chilled me anew. The fifteen feet became a football field’s length and then I was on the pine-needled path with a new and unpopulated clearing ahead of me.
I watched my feet for a bit. I contemplated walking, not so much the theory of walking or its metaphysical implications as the process of walking. I watched one foot go before the other and just as quickly be overtaken. I thought about how gravity is being both fought and used with each step. Perhaps it did grow into the metaphysical.
Suddenly deciding to eschew the library for a clearing by a retention pond called—in this manicured and planned nature—a lake, I plopped down on the ground. Once again, I removed my shirt and embraced the earth, bare-bellied. I reached into the backpack and found my solace, my journal. I caught the moment:
The grass is still wet,
The blades upstretched
And glistening…
And, now, so too
Are my shorts
And now my back.
The sun is still low
In the sky
And cirrus splatter
Wispy paint across
Mellow blue’d and
Hazy morning.
The breeze is still soft,
Supple as it dances
Around my arms
And hints at tickling…
The as yet undaunted
Promise of today.
I yawned and could feel the swirl of alcohol and marijuana acting upon my now inactive body. The flying oblongata, the pinks and Greeks, the penalty yardage, the anxieties that had less to do with winning or losing than they did with being accepted into the game all faded away. I super extended my toes and fingers and flexed my calves and then balled into one giant fist and released. The journal sat by my head as I rolled onto my back and felt no chill. I felt no heat. The promise of today was being realized in this moment as my eyes fluttered into shutness and I could see the pink of the sun in my eyelids. Critters, microscopic and some a little larger, danced upon my legs and chest and underarms and head in a rhythm that both tickled and soothed. The morning sun crept in the sky and only his presence could complete this near-completion.
Not knowing how long he had been there nor how long I’d slumbered, and not caring to ask, I leaned up on my elbows and saw him: chin on fist, elbows on knees, sitting on the cooler and holding a beer.
“We lost.”
Summing up our mutual love for sport, and the acknowledgment that we, in the face of our anxieties, were consciously forming a new team—for our own game—I responded: “I love…football.”
“Let’s go.”
Read more of my poetry, essays, and stories at Momentitiousness.com
After criss-crossing the road four times and hitting every convenience store within a mile, we finally found the rolling papers. Of course, neither of us had a lighter so I had to go back in. Besides being mildly intoxicated from the couple Budweisers we drank en route, we were both unmanageably nervous. We needed to smoke to settle our nerves and our anxieties. In the name of bravado, neither of us could come to voice our anxieties. Both of us knew that after this event we would be inextricably changed. He rolled the joint like a pro, I chugged another beer. The searing February morning sun beat down on us from a crisp blue sky painted with wisps of whimsical cirrus as we sat in the parking lot at the intramural fields. We smoked. I finally relaxed. He finally relaxed.
A sudden pounding on the hood of his pickup truck announced the arrival of one of his brothers. They were all brothers and all the brothers brought their girlfriends, most of whom were sisters. This was their Sunday ritual. It predated me. “We” were not yet a ritual, and I really never expected that we would become one. Nonetheless, that he took me along meant something, just what I was not ready to contemplate. He was making a statement that I didn’t ask him to make. He, who usually just came to play with his brothers, who usually never brought anybody along, wanted me to come. He wanted me, who was neither brother nor sister, to watch him interact in his world. I, who was out of school and decidedly not Greek, looked the part alright even if I didn’t strut the strut. Before the echo from the hood-slapping ended, we were opening our respective doors. A rush of smoke filled the vicinity as he handed off the joint to the noisemaker. They laughed and shook hands—it was actually more of an elaborate handoff—as I cracked open a beer for our joiner. I introduced myself to whatever his name was, we shook hands—handed off and back—and they walked ahead of me. I grabbed the cooler from the bed of the truck as we moved through the clearing toward the football fields. They extinguished the roach and disposed of it. It became part of the scenery.
Within minutes, the worn brown and lightly greening expanse of fields was teeming with shirtless, glistening frat boys and uncountable dainty blonde Barbie girls whose pink lipstick matched their pink flip flops which matched their pink bathing suit tops. The football was flying all around and then to me. Instinctively, I threw one deep to another of the boys whose name was, I believe, Matty or maybe Matt E. For each pink and tan girl there was a chair, and for every fourth girl there was a dog. There were dogs on leashes, dogs off leashes chasing Frisbees, dogs running after the football, and dogs slurping up water out of stainless steel bowls.
The girls spread out their blankets, some even brought umbrellas. They had chairs. I had my backpack and a cooler. He didn’t think to tell me I’d need something to sit on. By now, he was out on the field in scrimmage mode. The four fields were being marked off as other people’s brothers continued to arrive in droves. Today’s games would determine the intramural champion. We had a three to four hour afternoon ahead of us, assuming his team kept on winning. It would really, I posited, come down to which team was least stoned and most sober. They fidgited with their flags and he showed his teammates how to tear the sleeves off of their shirts in such a way that they could get maximum muscle effect. They donned their uniforms and began to play. Knowing that it was my duty to take off my shirt, I conformed and—at least in appearance—fit in with tanned and tight bare-chested boys that I resembled. The winter sun was hot on my shoulders. I squinted.
I was, in this morass of people, suddenly and frighteningly all alone. The ball was no longer being thrown towards me. The games had begun. I was there as mere spectator, afterall. The usual thing to do would be to go over and hang out with my friends who were also there to watch. I had no friends there. These were all his friends, and his friends’ girlfriends. They were all related with roots reaching back to a lush and mountainous island in the Mediterranean. These were all sisters and brothers, and I was (at best) a second cousin from and in some distant place. My “half the distance to the goal” seemed more like a penalty than field placement. I sat off by myself for a while, self-consciously wondering how I could break into the sea of pink and tan 15 yards down field. I wondered if I should. I brooded and I watched. I pounded another beer and was feeling full.
My liquid courage arrived as I picked up the cooler, picked up my backpack and slowly moved towards the spectator’s area. I caught the unsunglassed eye of one of the girls who smiled at me. I watched her eyes wander down my tan and pinking body, then back up with a pause at my shorts and the muscular V that sprouted upward into my stomach, toward my chest. She asked me to confirm that I was his friend which I did. Barbie and I chatted a little. She introduced me to a few other girls who also politely smiled, flashing whitened white teeth surrounded by that same pepto pink I’d noted was the unofficial uniform. Lots of brown roots showed through yellow hair while lots of bikini bottoms peaked out through unzipped, bottoms-fraying jean shorts. The first girl offered some pink mixed drink concoction she had prepared before coming and which she had poured into one of several emptied out pink-labeled jugs. I declined in favor of my Red, White and Blue. I should have taken the drink.
Exposing the only completely bare chest in a sea of pink unnerved me. I self-consciously—in an attempt to move the gaze of my new acquaintances from my body to my face—put my shirt back on as we all chatted mindlessly a little more before the question about how I knew him came up. I froze—the fear paralyzed me in a way that I hadn’t felt since the time my mother caught me reading her red-covered romance novels when I was ten. Not even the unobstructed Florida sun could warm the chill that seized my entire body. I goose-pimpled, I could feel my nipples harden against the cotton of my t-shirt. I blinked, attempting to think of just how this should be answered.
I certainly couldn’t tell her that he and I met through a friend at that place where we’d met. I couldn’t tell her that he’d spent the last fourteen nights in my bed with me. I couldn’t tell her that, after playing one on one basketball 22 days before, we had taken a not-so-innocent shower together, mutually agreeing to our mastery of the art of soap- dropping. I couldn’t tell her about the planned tennis matches that never even made it to the courts. I couldn’t tell her that we had made a habit of taking long lunches together that did not include lunch. I couldn’t tell her that he was the topic of 53 sappy poems that I’d written in 30 days. I couldn’t tell her that he was the reason that I smile and sweat and—still in that smitten stage—breathe. Between nervous blinks, all I could think of was what I couldn’t tell her.
With a whistle came the thaw and there he was beside me. They had won their first game and saved me from having to answer the question. He asked if I had gone to the library yet, and in the process provided the out that I needed. “I’m gonna go now.” I reached deep into the cooler and pulled out a water and handed it to him. I smiled at my new girlfriends as I pulled on both straps of my backpack and started off. I’m still not sure if my non-answer was implicating or vindicating, but at least it was liberating. I waved myself off as I set off on my quest for the cooler library.
As I reached the three year old scrub pine shrubbery that marked the beginning of the path out of the football field area, I paused. I looked back and saw, running back and forth and around in a chaotic frenzy, the boys and girls of my consternation. I could make out pectorals and belly buttons, shoulders and sweaty tufts of dark underarm hair. Briefly, they were all the same: perfect in form, mere bodies. In varying states of undress and almost uniformly Davidian and Hellenic, the interplay between these distant and now faceless moving statues reminded me of the civilization that I had escaped. I had long ago walked away from the footballs and the blankets, knowing that I could—at best—visit each in short spurts; that my real place was between them or off watching from fifteen feet away. The fact that I was ripping him from this civilization, this carefree existence of sweat and play, chilled me anew. The fifteen feet became a football field’s length and then I was on the pine-needled path with a new and unpopulated clearing ahead of me.
I watched my feet for a bit. I contemplated walking, not so much the theory of walking or its metaphysical implications as the process of walking. I watched one foot go before the other and just as quickly be overtaken. I thought about how gravity is being both fought and used with each step. Perhaps it did grow into the metaphysical.
Suddenly deciding to eschew the library for a clearing by a retention pond called—in this manicured and planned nature—a lake, I plopped down on the ground. Once again, I removed my shirt and embraced the earth, bare-bellied. I reached into the backpack and found my solace, my journal. I caught the moment:
The grass is still wet,
The blades upstretched
And glistening…
And, now, so too
Are my shorts
And now my back.
The sun is still low
In the sky
And cirrus splatter
Wispy paint across
Mellow blue’d and
Hazy morning.
The breeze is still soft,
Supple as it dances
Around my arms
And hints at tickling…
The as yet undaunted
Promise of today.
I yawned and could feel the swirl of alcohol and marijuana acting upon my now inactive body. The flying oblongata, the pinks and Greeks, the penalty yardage, the anxieties that had less to do with winning or losing than they did with being accepted into the game all faded away. I super extended my toes and fingers and flexed my calves and then balled into one giant fist and released. The journal sat by my head as I rolled onto my back and felt no chill. I felt no heat. The promise of today was being realized in this moment as my eyes fluttered into shutness and I could see the pink of the sun in my eyelids. Critters, microscopic and some a little larger, danced upon my legs and chest and underarms and head in a rhythm that both tickled and soothed. The morning sun crept in the sky and only his presence could complete this near-completion.
Not knowing how long he had been there nor how long I’d slumbered, and not caring to ask, I leaned up on my elbows and saw him: chin on fist, elbows on knees, sitting on the cooler and holding a beer.
“We lost.”
Summing up our mutual love for sport, and the acknowledgment that we, in the face of our anxieties, were consciously forming a new team—for our own game—I responded: “I love…football.”
“Let’s go.”
Read more of my poetry, essays, and stories at Momentitiousness.com
Aww, a sweet memory for you. I remember reading this when you first wrote it... for a class, I think. Love your short stories.
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