End Zone (2 page)

The first unit was called back in and I headed slowly toward the dust and noise. Creed up in the tower spoke through his bullhorn.

“Defense, I’d appreciate some pursuit. They don’t give points for apathy in this sport. Pursue those people. Come out of the ground at them. Hit somebody. Hit somebody. Hit somebody.”

On the first play Garland Hobbs, our quarterback, faked to me going straight into the line and then pitched to the other setback, Jim Deering. He got hit first by a linebacker, Dennis Smee, who drove him into the ground, getting some belated and very nasty help from a tackle
and another linebacker. Deering didn’t move. Two assistant coaches started shouting at him, telling him he was defacing the landscape. He tried to get up but couldn’t make it. The rest of us walked over to the far hashmark and ran the next play.

It all ended with two laps around the goal posts. Lloyd Philpot Jr., a defensive end, fell down in the middle of the second lap. We left him there in the end zone, on his stomach, one leg twitching slightly. His father had won all-conference honors at Baylor for three straight years.

That evening Emmett Creed addressed the squad.

“Write home on a regular basis. Dress neatly. Be courteous. Articulate your problems. Do not drag-ass. Anything I have no use for, it’s a football player who consistently drag-asses. Move swiftly from place to place, both on the field and in the corridors of buildings. Don’t ever get too proud to pray.”

R
OLF
H
AUPTFUHRER COACHED
the defensive line and attended to problems of morale and grooming. He approached me one morning after practice.

“We want you to room with Bloomberg,” he said.

“Why me?”

“John Billy Small was in there with him. Couldn’t take the tension. We figure you won’t mind. You’re more the complicated type.”

“Of course I’ll mind.”

“John Billy said he wets the bed. Aside from that there’s no problem. He gets nervous. No doubt about that. A lot of tension in that frame. But we figure you can cope with it.”

“I object. I really do. I’ve got my own tensions.”

“Harkness, everybody knows what kind of reputation you brought down here. Coach is willing to take a chance on you only as long as you follow orders. So keep in line. Just keep in line — hear?”

“Who’s rooming with Taft Robinson?” I said.

“Robinson rooms alone.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’ll have to ask the powers that be. In the meantime move your stuff in with Bloomberg.”

“I don’t like tension,” I said. “And I don’t see why I have to be the one who gets put in with controversial people.”

“It’s for the good of the team,” Hauptfuhrer said.

Five of us sneaked into the nearest town that night, a place called Rooster, to see what was happening. We ended up at Bing Jackmin’s house, right outside town, where we drank beer for five hours. Bing’s father joined us, falling off the porch when he came out to say good night. We drove back to campus and held a drunken Olympiad in the moonlight at the edge of the football field — slow-motion races, grass swimming, spitting for distance. Then we walked slowly back to the dorm and listened to Norgene Azamanian tell the story of his name.

“A lot of people take it for a girl’s name. But it’s no such thing. It comes from Norge refrigerators and from my uncle, Captain Gene Kinney. How it all came about, my being called Norgene, makes for a real interesting story. You see, everybody in my mother’s family going back for generations, man or woman, always had a Christian name of just one syllable. Nobody knows how it started but at some point along the line they decided they’d keep it going. So I go and get born and it comes time to name me. Now it just so happens there was an old Norge refrigerator out on the back porch waiting to get thrown away. It also happens that my daddy wasn’t too happy about the syllable thing, it being his belief that the bible carries a warning against one-syllable names,
Cain being his brother’s slayer. And finally there was the amazing coincidence that my uncle Gene Kinney was on leave and coming over to visit so he could see the new baby, which was me, and so he could get in on the naming of it to be sure the family tradition would be carried out. How all these different factors resulted in the name Norgene is the whole crux of the story.”

“Very good,” Bing said. “But first tell us how you got Azamanian.”

I went up to my room. Bloomberg was asleep, on his belly, snoring softly into the pillow. He was absolutely enormous. It was easy to imagine him attached to the bed by guy-wires, to be floated aloft once a year like a Macy’s balloon. His full name was Anatole Bloomberg and he played left tackle on offense. That was all I knew about him, that plus the fact that he wasn’t a Texan. One of the outcasts, I thought. Or a voluntary exile of the philosophic type. I decided to wake him up.

“Anatole,” I said. “It’s Gary Harkness, your new roommate. Let’s shake hands and be friends.”

“We’re roommates,” he said. “Why do we have to be friends?”

“It’s just an expression. I didn’t mean undying comrades. Just friends as opposed to enemies. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“You were snoring,” I said.

“That’s the way I breathe when I’m on my stomach. What happened to my original roommate?”

“John Billy? John Billy’s been moved.”

“Was that his name?”

“He’s been moved. I hope you’re not tense about my
showing up. All I want to do is get off to a good start and avoid all possible tension.”

“Who in your opinion was the greater man?” Bloomberg said. “Edward Gibbon or Archimedes?”

“Archimedes.”

“Correct,” he said.

In the morning Creed sent us into an all-out scrimmage with a brief inspirational message that summed up everything we knew or had to know.

“It’s only a game,” he said, “but it’s the only game.”

Taft Robinson and I were the setbacks. Taft caught a flare pass, evaded two men and went racing down the sideline. Bobby Iselin, a cornerback, gave up the chase at the 25. Bobby used to be the team’s fastest man.

T
HROUGH ALL OUR DAYS
together my father returned time and again to a favorite saying.

“Suck in that gut and go harder.”

He never suggested that this saying of his ranked with the maxims of Teddy Roosevelt. Still, he was dedicated to it. He believed in the idea that a simple but lasting reward, something just short of a presidential handshake, awaited the extra effort, the persevering act of a tired man. Backbone, will, mental toughness, desire — these were his themes, the qualities that insured success. He was a pharmaceutical salesman with a lazy son.

It seems that wherever I went I was hounded by people urging me to suck in my gut and go harder. They would never give up on me — my father, my teachers, my coaches, even a girl friend or two. I was a challenge, I guess: a piece of string that does not wish to be knotted. My father was by far the most tireless of those who tried to give me direction, to sharpen my initiative, to piece together
some collective memory of hard-won land or dusty struggles in the sun. He put a sign in my room.

WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH
THE TOUGH GET GOING

I looked at this sign for three years (roughly from ages fourteen to seventeen) before I began to perceive a certain beauty in it. The sentiment of course had small appeal but it seemed that beauty flew from the words themselves, the letters, consonants swallowing vowels, aggression and tenderness, a semi-self-re-creation from line to line, word to word, letter to letter. All meaning faded. The words became pictures. It was a sinister thing to discover at such an age, that words can escape their meanings. A strange beauty that sign began to express.

My father had a territory and a company car. He sold vitamins, nutritional supplements, mineral preparations and antibiotics. His customers included about fifty doctors and dentists, about a dozen pharmacies, a few hospitals, some drug wholesalers. He had specific goals, both geographic and economic, each linked with the other, and perhaps because of this he hated waste of any kind, of shoe leather, talent, irretrievable time. (Get cracking. Straighten out. Hang in.) It paid, in his view, to follow the simplest, most pioneer of rhythms — the eternal work cycle, the blood-hunt for bear and deer, the mellow rocking of chairs as screen doors swing open and bang shut in the gathering fragments of summer’s sulky dusk. Beyond these honest latitudes lay nothing but chaos.

He had played football at Michigan State. He had ambitions on my behalf and more or less at my expense. This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.
He had spent his autumn Saturdays on the sidelines, watching others fall in battle and rise then to the thunder of the drums and the crowd’s demanding chants. He put me in a football uniform very early. Then, as a high school junior, I won all-state honors at halfback. (This was the first of his ambitions and as it turned out the only one to be fulfilled.) Eventually I received twenty-eight offers of athletic scholarships — tuition, books, room and board, fifteen dollars a month. There were several broad hints of further almsgiving. Visions were painted of lovely young ladies with charitable instincts of their own. It seemed that every section of the country had much to offer in the way of scenery, outdoor activities, entertainment, companionship, and even, if necessary, education. On the application blanks, I had to fill in my height, my weight, my academic average and my time for the 40-yard dash.

I handed over a letter of acceptance to Syracuse University. I was eager to enrich their tradition of great running backs. They threw me out when I barricaded myself in my room with two packages of Oreo cookies and a girl named Lippy Margolis. She wanted to hide from the world and I volunteered to help her. For a day and a night we read to each other from a textbook on economics. She seemed calmed by the incoherent doctrines set forth on those pages. When I was sure I had changed the course of her life for the better, I opened the door.

At Penn State, the next stop, I studied hard and played well. But each day that autumn was exactly like the day before and the one to follow. I had not yet learned to appreciate the slowly gliding drift of identical things; chunks of time spun past me like meteorites in a universe predicated on repetition. For weeks the cool clear weather
was unvarying; the girls wore white knee-high stockings; a small red plane passed over the practice field every afternoon at the same time. There was something hugely Asian about those days in Pennsylvania. I tripped on the same step on the same staircase on three successive days. After this I stopped going to practice. The freshman coach wanted to know what was up. I told him I knew all the plays; there was no reason to practice them over and over; the endless repetition might be spiritually disastrous; we were becoming a nation devoted to human xerography. He and I had a long earnest discussion. Much was made of my talent and my potential value to the varsity squad. Oneness was stressed — the oneness necessary for a winning team. It was a good concept, oneness, but I suggested that, to me at least, it could not be truly attractive unless it meant oneness with God or the universe or some equally redoubtable super-phenomenon. What he meant by oneness was in fact elevenness or twenty-twoness. He told me that my attitude was all wrong. People don’t go to football games to see pass patterns run by theologians. He told me, in effect, that I would have to suck in my gut and go harder. (1) A team sport. (2) The need to sacrifice. (3) Preparation for the future. (4) Microcosm of life.

“You’re saying that what I learn on the gridiron about sacrifice and oneness will be of inestimable value later on in life. In other words if I give up now I’ll almost surely give up in the more important contests of the future.”

“That’s it exactly, Gary.”

“I’m giving up,” I said.

It was a perverse thing to do — go home and sit through a blinding white winter in the Adirondacks. I was passing through one of those odd periods of youth in which
significance is seen only on the blankest of walls, found only in dull places, and so I thought I’d turn my back to the world and to my father’s sign and try to achieve, indeed establish, some lowly form of American sainthood. The repetition of Penn State was small stuff compared to that deep winter. For five months I did nothing and then repeated it. I had breakfast in the kitchen, lunch in my room, dinner at the dinner table with the others, meaning my parents. They concluded that I was dying of something slow and incurable and that I did not wish to tell them in order to spare their feelings. This was an excellent thing to infer for all concerned. My father took down the sign and hung in its place a framed photo of his favorite pro team, the Detroit Lions — their official team picture. In late spring, a word appeared all over town.
MILITARIZE.
The word was printed on cardboard placards that stood in shop windows. It was scrawled on fences. It was handwritten on loose-leaf paper taped to the windshields of cars. It appeared on bumper stickers and sign-boards.

I had accomplished nothing all those months and so I decided to enroll at the University of Miami. It wasn’t a bad place. Repetition gave way to the beginnings of simplicity. (A preparation thus for Texas.) I wanted badly to stay. I liked playing football and I knew that by this time I’d have trouble finding another school that would take me. But I had to leave. It started with a book, an immense volume about the possibilities of nuclear war — assigned reading for a course I was taking in modes of disaster technology. The problem was simple and terrible: I enjoyed the book. I liked reading about the deaths of tens of millions of people. I liked dwelling on the destruction of great cities. Five to twenty million
dead. Fifty to a hundred million dead. Ninety percent population loss. Seattle wiped out by mistake. Moscow demolished. Airbursts over every SAC base in Europe. I liked to think of huge buildings toppling, of firestorms, of bridges collapsing, survivors roaming the charred countryside. Carbon 14 and strontium 90. Escalation ladder and subcrisis situation. Titan, Spartan, Poseidon. People burned and unable to breathe. People being evacuated from doomed cities. People diseased and starving. Two hundred thousand bodies decomposing on the roads outside Chicago. I read several chapters twice. Pleasure in the contemplation of millions dying and dead. I became fascinated by words and phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, kill-ratio, spasm war. Pleasure in these words. They were extremely effective, I thought, whispering shyly of cycles of destruction so great that the language of past world wars became laughable, the wars themselves somewhat naive. A thrill almost sensual accompanied the reading of this book. What was wrong with me? Had I gone mad? Did others feel as I did? I became seriously depressed. Yet I went to the library and got more books on the subject. Some of these had been published well after the original volume and things were much more up-to-date. Old weapons vanished. Megatonnage soared. New concepts appeared — the rationality of irrationality, hostage cities, orbital attacks. I became more fascinated, more depressed, and finally I left Coral Gables and went back home to my room and to the official team photo of the Detroit Lions. It seemed the only thing to do. My mother brought lunch upstairs. I took the dog for walks.