I wrote this in 1978 when I was 25 years old. It was the first piece I wrote that I considered “finished.” The writing is somewhat embarrassing–clumsy language and far too much of it, overly discursive–but I choose to present it as is. The occasion for typing it into the computer is that I recently visited my friend Eddie, the subject of this piece. He has Lewy Body dementia and has very very little memory left. I’m just grateful that he still knows who I am. A long time ago I told him I had written this. I said, “I wrote this piece that you’re kind of the hero of.” He said, unknowingly paraphrasing Dickens, “I’m kind of trying to be the hero of my own life too.” Raising a glass to you, my friend, and the person you once were.
The Catholic high school I went to played its football games on Sunday because we borrowed a field from the nearby public school. They used it themselves on Friday afternoons. Being a football player I saw two disadvantages to this; one was that it turned playing football into a seven-day-week affair and even the fanatics among us knew that this was too much. The other disadvantage was that it prevented us from watching the Lions on television. Now it seems silly to think that we would have spent our one day a week off from playing football watching football, but I remember distinctly that that is the way we saw things in those days.
It happened one of those years that we played as away game on a Friday or Saturday night the very same week that the Lions were playing at home. My father said that he had been given four tickets from someone at the office for just that particular game, but looking back on it now it seems more likely that he had planned it out well ahead of time but some unwritten code among me prevented him from so blatantly expressing his affection. (The same code is no doubt at work =in making affection my first word of choice over love.)
My father and I were each to invite a friend. He picked an old high school football buddy –one of those guys I had heard about but had never met because they hadn’t kept in touch over the years despite the fact that neither of them had moved more than five miles from where they grew up. His friend, Bud Williams, was verry large man, over 6’3, I’m sure. When we were introduced, he said, “Pleasure” and gripped my hand firmly. He didn’t smile, was quiet and had a red moustache that curled up at the ends and brought to mind a north woods, Sargent Preston type, intent on getting his man. He made my father look small in comparison, and, though I was well past the age when a boy thinks his father is one of the biggest men in the world, it still surprised me.
The surprising thing was that it was my father, and not his friend, who was the star in their time. I knew this not from my father talking about it but from the scrapbook filled with faded clippings and photographs. I had always tended to pass off my father’s success as belonging to a somehow inferior era when the players were small and slower and the game itself only a crude forerunner of the Game as it exists today, the game that I played. Seeing this giant man standing next to my father instantly changed that picture of the past and I saw my father as more of a hero, a man much stronger and more aggressive than I had previously imagined.
I had asked Eddie to come along. Though I had a lot of friends there wasn’t much of a choice: he and I were inseparable that year, especially during football season. Of course, Eddie played football too and he played well, better than I did. He was loud and wild and known to drink and get into fights on weekend nights. Most of the things he did were the kind of schoolboy pranks that people refer to when they shrug and offer the inevitable comment “boys will be boys.” One of the amazing traits he had was his ability to charm the girls, which was envied by many and understood by few. It was for that as much as anything that I cast Eddie into the friend-as hero role.
As much as I idolized him I knew I would never be like him, nor did I want to be. His success with girls was not so hard to figure out after hanging around him for a little while. The rest of us pondered and deliberated, consulted our own friends, consulted the friends of the girl in question, and secretly studied her moves in the halls at school all the while plotting a “casual” conversation for sometime the next week. Eddies’ way of saying the first thing that came into his head precluded the need for any of the adolescent dating games that the rest of us found ourselves tied up in: he was never at a loss for words, never missed a chance. Sometimes I used to accuse myself of hanging around with Eddie just for all the opportunities that would theoretically avail themselves to me. After all, out of any one group of girls he could only deal with one at a time: what would the others be doing? But this theory not only remained unsupported in reality but only occasionally entered into the realm of speculation.
Half of the things we did together I was actually only a spectator to, perhaps living vicariously but acting more as a watchdog, keeping Eddie from either getting arrested or beat up, or both, a self-appointed task at which I was not always successful.
Playing football was our most common bond and in fact remains our most common bond. At the time, when we were actually playing, that kind of bond has its base in so many hours of shared experience that you think alike; one says things that easily could have been said by the other, a fact which, in retrospect speaks well of our coaching, a fundamental of the game: teamwork. Despite our differences and Eddie’s dominance of conversation and external events and my relative silence, much of what passed between our friendship was, to use the accepted adjective, true and much of what passed between us remained unmentioned.
Once on our way to the Lion’s game Eddie undertook a play-by-play discussion of our own game the night before, while the men sat quietly in the front seat puffing on cigars. My father would occasionally toss a comment over his shoulder: this or that was nice tackle, or some criticism of a coaching d decision. It occurred to me that Eddie’s incessant talking, exaggerating, and excitement might be a source of embarrassment to my father in front of his friend, but my father never hinted that it might be.
It was so quiet in the front seat that it seemed to me that my father’s friend must have considered us children. I allowed that perhaps he just felt like an outsider but still it seemed to me that they would have football stories of their own to reminisce and laugh over.
The silence wasn’t to last long because we were closing in on the stadium and the problem of parking the car had become the focus of everyone’s attention. Parking was a major consideration in any trip downtown but for a game there are about 15,000 vehicles looking for an easy access parking spot that is non-existent, in fact no single lot can hold over fifty cars. Everyone wants a safe spot, one that is in the public eye and somewhere you won’t get pinned in by too may other cars. Cost is not usually a major consideration: you enter the area, resigned to your fate. Shrewd drivers remove their hubcaps at home in order to prevent the likelihood of the same act being practiced at the game.
There is an inner-city subculture that thrives on working the parking lots. The idea is simple: park as many cars on the particular piece of property as it will possibly hold. On the upper level of the subculture there are legitimate property owners or their representatives waving in cars, then there are
[this is insane. In the first draft this whole scene didn’t even exist. In the second draft I found myself working it in. Now in this draft I’m so far off the point that I’m talking about parking lot subcultures. If this were a novel maybe I could afford to work on it further]
Black children sit on the curbs waving old red rags or holding tattered signs with the word ParKinHG printed in a peculiar mix of capital and small letters on a dirty background.
Somehow even though it was my father who was driving Eddie had overtaken navigational control. He blurted out, “Turn here!” with such urgency and authority (not to mention that he yelled about two inches from my father’s ear) that my father turned the wheel instinctively as if to avoid an accident. We found ourselves rolling down an alley of mud and water, bordered on both sides by battered tenements. As my father crept past piles of garbage and a mandatory assortment of stray dogs, Eddie insisted that we had absolutely nothing to worry about and that ”Mama Luigi” would take care of us. The only thing I worried about was Eddie’s insistence that he knew where we were–this was at least as potentially dangerous as being lost. I had no way of knowing exactly what my father was thinking, but I was secretly pleased that I couldn’t see his face. We crossed another alley, made a few turns (always on short notice) and found ourselves on an even worse alley that led us (by this time to no one’s surprise) to a dead end.
The lot to our immediate left was small. Empty and muddy. On the other side of the lot sat a typically dilapidated house with unsmiling Black faces peering out of random windows. On the porch of the house sat a large old negress whom I couldn’t help of as almost a caricature, right down to the red bandana tied around her head. Eddie leapt out of the car, yelling “Mama, Mama” in a crazed Italian accent and hugged the woman like a prodigal son returned home. They laughed like old friends, there was some negotiating that ended with Eddie waving us into the vacant lot and onto a position that would obviously entrap us into until every single car that parked in the lot after us was gone. Mama Luigi took my father’s money as he managed to hide a dubious expression from Eddie and Mama but not from me.
As we walked off she smiled and said, “Ya’ll have a good time,” and I realized in an instant she had a beautiful almost child-like face and that despite her name she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. We walked faster both against the cold and to get off this deserted side street and back onto the security of the mainstream. Eddie insisted that there was nothing to worry about because “Mama Luiggi will take care of us!” and he turned back toward her yelling “Won’t yah Mama?!” She hadn’t heard the first part of his statement, but it didn’t matter to her, she smile and yelled back, “You know it, Sugar!”
Soon we were safe among the throngs of people streaming toward the stadium. I spent the whole cold walk grilling Eddie about Mama Luigi: How did he know her, how long had he known her, what was her real name, why did he call her Mama Luigi when she couldn’t possibly be Italian, did he, in fact, know her at all? All of which he fielded in a superior tone with answers like, “Everyone knows Mama, I’ve known her for years.” The vagueness of his replies led me to suspect that perhaps he had parked with her once or twice before. After further speculation I realized that the instant familiarity Eddie somehow established with her was common between him and any easy-going stranger upon a chance meeting.
The stadium as filled. The Lions, though perhaps the most consistently mediocre team in the league, were having a particularly good season and even had a chance at a playoff spot. It was more than this that filled the stands on such a cold day–it was the fact that the opponent was the Packers they were playing and there was strong rivalry between the two teams. This was just after the Lombardi years and Green Bay still played good football, but they were on their way down and the masses always flock to see their heroes fall.
Once we found our seats they turned out to be marginal. They were way up in the upper deck and about a quarter of the end zone was out of view because it was actually underneath us. The game itself was not particularly memorable. It was unusually cold, even for late October in Michigan, but in Eddie and I there was certain delight in being a spectator rather than a participant. The wind whirled around the stadium, making it even colder and there were hints of snow in the air that never materialized.
The people sitting in front of us drank whiskey from a bottle and seemed to be having a much better time of it than we were. My father and Bud Williams smoked their cigars stoically. Eddie and I tried to drink scalding hot chocolate, burning our tongues and eventually settled to just hold the cups in our hands for warmth and bolt them down as they cooled. At a football game non one actually likes to admit to being bored because what does that make you? You’ve just spent a lot of money and gone through a lot of trouble to come out and freeze your ass off, and for some people it’s pretty difficult to admit that you’re not having the greatest time of your life. The people in front of us were obviously having the greatest time of their lives. While none of us was claiming to having a great time we were following the principle to the point that we were not complaining aloud of either the cold or boredom like any sane person miught.
During the game we made sporadic uninspired comments to one another more in the interest of demonstrating that we were still awake rather than the usual display of one’s astute understanding of the game. By halftime there was no longer any point in anyone’s pretending not to be cold, we had passed some invisible point that allowed everyone to admit that they were freezing with no damage to the strong silent type image. Eddie and I were grateful for the chance to get out of our seats even if only to stand in a line at a concession stand.
Mt father gave us a ten-dollar bill and requested hotdogs with everything on them and coffee black. I’m sure that the two men would have, liked a drink but beer was all they sold and neither of them were quite desperate enough to drink cold beer when they were half froze to start. Once we found the concessions the lines were as we expected, long. We found a place at the end of one, unsure whether we were being led to a concession stand or a restroom.
After sitting through a boring half of a football game, standing in line was more of test of Eddie’s patience than he was up for. He began raving about the cold in a voice loud enough for people to stare at us annoyedly– like Eddie was reminding them of something they were doing their damnedest to forget. He continued his little speech, simultaneously addressing me in private and to the general public, managing to display his command of the language in worn comparisons to the well-digger’s ass and the witch’s tit. I knew we wore getting to the crux of the matter when it became known that he was “Damned if he was going to stand in any goddamned line.” Then with a final “Screw this,” he was disappearing into the crowd in search of an easier way.
Through it all I stand feeling conspicuously young, half embarrassed to be seen with him and half holding back laughter at his lack of inhibition. By the time I found him he had indeed seemed to have found an easier way. He stood in a small group that surrounded a solitary vendor doling out hot dogs from a small portable oven.
This was one of the vendors who roam the stands during gametime. He had been backed up against a pillar by a small crowd and was grabbing the dogs with his tongs as fast as he could. Eddie was part of this small crowd.
“Screw the coffee,” Eddie said, beginning this monologue where he had left off, “and if Dougal and Bud don’t like it they can stand in line themselves.” One of Eddie’s simple pleasures was referring to adults by their first names. I suspected from the sarcastic emphasis on Bud’s name That I was about to hear more on the subject.
\ “What a dullard that guy is,” Eddie said. He considered about 95% of the world’s p[population to be dullards. He then began to hypothesize means to liven Bud up a a bit. “Yeah,” Eddie said, “if he don’t say something soon I’m gonna have to grab him by the nuts and give him a good shake and say, ‘Wat’s the matter boy, cat gotcher tongue?” At this point in our friendship I knew that to plead with him not to take such an action was the surest way to bring it about a and my best course of action was to totally ignore the remark and to keep a sharp ear open to cut off any serious smart assed comments before Eddie talked hi way into an uncomfortable situation he couldn’t talk his way out of. By the way. Bud outweighed Eddie, by about seventy-five pounds.
Meanwhile this small crowd around the hot dog vendor didn’t seem to be getting any smaller and Eddie saw fit to direct himself to the p[problem at hand. “All right, all right,” he began authoritatively as he waded into the crowd, “What seems to be the problem?”
Some people actually made room for us, fooled for a second than Eddie was someone in authority. The crow was murmuring under their breathe and there was some snickering and some laughing–a few words rose above the din: “spastic” and “retard.” Almost suddenly Eddie and found ourselves between the huddled crowd and the vendor, the object of their derision.
The poor fellow was little slow and spoke with difficulty, stuttering and struggling with words. He was used to roaming the stands during the game and dealing with one customer at a time. This onslaught of people that had cornered him was more than he could handle. He had worked himself into a frenzy trying to do his job as best he could. You could see the terror in his eyes as his hands shook as he tried to grab the hot dogs out of the little oven with the clumsy tongs and place them into the buns which seemed to all stick together. He dropped few of the dogs and had trouble making correct change.
Armed with a sixteen-year-old’s sense of justice Eddie and I were amazed that people could be so cruel, harassing this innocent man. Eddie always willing to go one step further and armed with confidence to back his out-ranged sensibilities, stared several of the hecklers into silence.
While we stood waiting our turn the man in front of us started yelling at the vendor.
“Hey pal, I gave you a five, that was fin, Mac!” and then turned, grinning at the crowd as if to say, “I’ll screw this retard,” in a way of continuing the big joke. But now one in the crowd grinned back. This was one of those curious moments of stillness as the speechless vendor gathered his strength and slowly stuttered, “You-you g-g-gave me a-a-a- wha-wha one one dollar.”
“Five,” continued the bully.
Eddie pushed his way through and said, “Hey, I saw it and it was a one. Now back off, you’re holding things up.”
Seeing that no-one was on his side, the guy did back away, muttering, “Goddamned spaz, I gave him a five,” trying to convince himself that his lie was true.
When it was our turn, Eddie told the guy to take his time. We got eight hot dogs at a dollar a piece and Eddie gave him a ten and told him to keep the change, which was pretty good of him even if it was my father’s money. By then most of the crowd was flowing back into the seats and the vendor had a little better grip on things. I had to wonder if the fellow went through that every game or if this were his first day. I remember thinking that if I owned the stadium I would give him the rest of the day off, a specific application of the youthful fantasy that begins, “If I ruled the world . . . and is bound up in a simplistic world view that perceives distinct boundaries between right and wrong.
By now everyone who wasn’t back in their seats was in line for mustard and ketchup, onions and relish. So Eddie decided that we’d have to “down ‘em plain.” I was looking forward to seeing how he was going to pull this off. We were sent to get hot dogs “with everything” and coffee black and we only had plain hot dogs, no coffee, and two dollars short on the change.
When we got back to our seats the game had already started. Eddie handed out the hot dogs explaining that there were 50 million people in line and that coffee was separate line and that mustard and onions were yet another line with 50 million more people ion it and that it was miracle that we came back with anything at all and it would have been the fourth quarter for sure if we had waited and on and on.
. My father hadn’t mentioned the two dollar and when we finally sat down Eddie quietly asked me if I had a couple bucks I could loan him. I did and handed them to him. The next coffee vendor that came by Eddie hollered at from two rows over and bought four cups of coffee.
“There we go,” he said as he distributed the coffee, turning to my father, “We’re even now, Dougal.” My father winked at Eddie, who turned and winked at me. Eddie and I didn’t make the mistake of trying to drink the coffee but cupped it firmly in both hand for warmth. When it was lukewarm I tried a sip but it was bitter and we held them until the last bit of warmth was gone and the placed them carefully under our seats.
The game droned on, the people ij front of us got more drunk, made fools of themselves, my father and Bud Williams remained above it all and continued to smoke their cigars. Near the end of the game people began to leave early. Detroit was actually winning and it felt unlikely that they would blow ten-point lead, considering the painfully slow pace of the whole game. None of our group suggested leaving early, knowing that a few minutes saved here only meant more minutes in the traffic jam later, and also, I suppose in light of the fact that we were men who saw things through to the end.
So when the final gun went off we filed out slowly, single file through the masses. One of the many drunks fell into Bud Williams and got up quickly and annoyed as if Bud Williams had somehow been responsible. “easy fella,” Bud Williams said calmly. The words seemed to sink into the man’s mind at about eh same time he became aware of Bud Williams’ size. This made us not think too badly of Bud , completely changing Eddie’s opinion of him.
On the way back to the car we heard my father and Bud Williams exchange a few comments on the game. On the order of:
“Lion’s still need a coach.”
“Yep.”
“It’s all over for the Packers.”
“Yep.”
“Farr’ll never make it through the season.”
“Nope.”
Eddie and I were listening closely but that’s as much of a conversation we ever heard.
Inside the car was another world completely: comfortable seats, warmth, and radio announcer explaining to us everything that we had just seen. The fact that the disembodied voice didn’t mention how cold it was between every sentence cast him under immediate suspicion. As suspected we were pinned in the back of the lot. Also as expected Mama Luigi was nowhere to be seen. It was a little claustrophobic for Eddie and me in the backseat, the cigars–how many had there been?–suffocating us. Once on the road it was little better, a bumper-to-bumper p[processional the way down Michigan Avenue and out of the city.
About a mile from the stadium a guy walked out of a bar directly into the street in front of the car ahead of us. We saw him flip up into the air and go down between the cars. The scene unfolded in slow motion, the cars moving only a few feet at a time. My dad put the car in park and ran over to the man. He was pronounced drunk and unhurt, and carried over to the sidewalk. This all happened in seconds, putting not even an appreciable dent in the traffic jam. By the time the traffic cleared the post-game radio show had given way to that easy-listening sort of music and the Sunday afternoon news and we were almost home.
When we finally shook hands with my father and said, “We’ll have to get together more often” and to Eddie and I he said “Pleasure, boys,” but did not shake our hands. We thanked my father a little too profusely. He knew we didn’t have that great of a time, but we wanted him to know that we realized such things were out of his control. It was little awkward, but we all understood.
My mother invited Eddie to stay for dinner, and of course, he accepted. We ate at the dining room table on Sundays and my six younger sisters and brothers were there. Eddie took control of the entertainment, recounting the excitement of the game quarter by quarter, obviously believing every word he spoke. My father and I looked at each other in amazement–Eddie had somehow serena different game. As portrayed by Eddie to the rest of the family this had been the greatest afternoon of all time, even my father and I were believing it, laughing and agreeing with him.
During his narration he would slip in remarks like, “And then the Lions were so pissed that . . .” and my mother would say “Eddie!” He would somehow get both my father and me to back him up and the rest of the kids would giggle every time he slipped in something slightly off-color, which was every chance he got. I think one of his theories had to be to get everyone concentrating and laughing at his stories so that he was able to help himself to all the extra meat and gravy; it was all the rest of us could do to eat and listen at the same time whereas Ed could simultaneously jabber like monkey and eat like a horse.
When dinner was over Eddie thanked my father again, managing somehow to be both polite and use my father’s first name in the same sentence. He couldn’t help himself from adding, “Say hi to your talkative friend Bud for me the next time you see him.”
“Will do,” my father nods, before he catches the sarcasm which brought a smile.
I walk with Eddie to his car and he’s his animated self. Talking about practice tomorrow, school tomorrow, who he, might take to the homecoming dance–he was relentless narrator of his own life. For all his incessant talking, I hadn’t heard a word about the hot dog vendor at halftime. I couldn’t help asking if he had really seen that guy give the vendor a one. He shrugged, “Does it matter?” jumped in his car and screeched off honking his horn halfway down the block.
Ten years later, as I write this, the Lions remain the most consistently mediocre team in football. They somehow continue to balance the won/loss column, usually by beating the good teams and losing to the inferior ones. They no longer play at Tiger Stadium but in a new indoor stadium that seats 80,000, all with unobstructed views. The new stadium has freeway access and ample parking. Inside, it never gets cold, temperature controlled at sixty-five degrees, and there is no wind. You can’t smoke cigars in the new stadium and there are probably no handicapped hot dog vendors. The game itself, underneath all these new layers, remains much the same.
We, too, have added a few layers, but underneath it’s hard to say how much we’ve changed, how much we’ve remained the same. Humans aren’t nearly so simple to judge as the game of football.
