Love and Hydrogen (22 page)

Hellos

I stood there in the field, holding my softball like an apple. Somewhere I'd lost my bat. Janet was wiping her hands on a dishtowel as she walked across the alfalfa stubble. There were apple trees and behind them a beautiful twilight, with our farm spreading out around us. A contrail made a quiet little line across the sky. I was attorney general of the United States. My father was sitting on my bed. He was telling me that things don't
happen;
they're
made
to happen. He had his palm to my face. He had only my welfare in mind. This was the only world we knew. This was the world that was swept away.

MESSIAH

Right off we'll talk about it: people are (were) wrong about Macon. Macon this, Macon that, Macon's what's wrong with college football today. What Macon is is the best Corvair to run the football for State since God knows who, and some class-A studs have hauled leather there, Pops can tell you.

Pops says, “It's like, you wanna back the Ferrari out of the garage, you gotta break some eggs.”

Pops is one of the trainers. He handles ankles.

Macon I met on a recruiting visit. I was ass-kicker at defensive back, all-everything in Ohio, he was a fullback phenom from Jersey, one of those guys who scored nine thousand times a minute. We were flown in by the same alumnus. We were taken to the same restaurant. We were favored with the same jerky grins. We were told to stand in the middle of our prime rib and we were cheered by the crowd. Ever have a crowd cheer you in a restaurant?

Once we'd hunkered back to our meat I said my name and stuck my hand out. He looked at my hand and said, “Messiah.” I said, “I beg your pardon?” and he said, “That's right, you
beg
my pardon.”

We were both scout teamers at first. Scout team being Coach's idea of a way of using the freshmen, drop-goobers, and general nose-pickers that infest a major college bench. What the scout team does is impersonate the upcoming opponent in practice and get its tiny brains beat out in the process. Neither Macon nor I intended to be on that little ride too long, but, like Pops says, “Caligula, he had to start somewhere.”

It is something to see, trust me: every week two thousand or so come to see it.

So here's Macon, little Wilber Macon out of New Jersey of all places, having sewn MESSIAH on his back where his uppercase humble name should be and taking all sorts of radical verbal and physical abuse from the starters in pileups for his presumption in such matters, here's Macon coming back to the huddle with blood dripping from his nostrils like he's some sort of bull and then turning all sorts of savage, absolute maniac, and this being practice. Real officials work these practices—State saves money in all sorts of places, but football is not one of them—and they were throwing flags at Macon like they were hoping they'd stick. Coach would take him out and talk to him, arm around his shoulder in the August heat, gruff but kind from the stands, but in your ear it was something like, “Meat, you don't start producing out there and we are going to collectively plant your ass like an azalea and tamp down the soil.”

So back in comes Macon, who goes wide on a sweep and tears through a linebacker and pops into the secondary expecting a big gain. You could see his eyes, big-gain eyes. Except Charlie Hall, starting monster man, cut his feet out from under him so that he went down like something hinged. Coach held his clipboard out for a flunky to take and then announced we'd run that play again. Not a radical nice thing to do, since the element of surprise was somewhat gone. Macon got stuffed big-time, and the sound he made when hit was like the sound of someone beating a rug.

Which is where this starts to sound like
The Sports Book for
Teens
: Macon, stung, pissed, lets fly on his final carry, coming out of his crouch like a psycho, a speedboat flipping, a ski jumper losing it, and is through a gap in the line before the hogs are up and set. It was terrifying, talent. We had seen a vision and some of us had to look away. Some of us saw but could not see. You could hear the whoosh of his breath on the sidelines and he lowered his helmet and stuck Jimmy Ford, as in starting weakside corner Gator Bowl MVP Jimmy Ford, such a shot that they heard the crack up in the practice towers. Jimmy let out what we call the dog yelp and went airborne with his face mask in pieces tumbling after. Macon kept going until he decided he wanted to stop. He carried Charlie Hall into the end zone and dropped the ball on his head.

So he started. He was, I wasn't. “Specimen under the bridge,” Pops said. Testing jokes were big that year. Everyone was pissing into bottles.

He not only started, he messed around at length with senior girls. He'd been on campus all of five weeks; they'd been on campus all of one. I couldn't find the student center. He had three different girls in three different dorms waiting up with the lights on, their hands on themselves, waiting for him to walk through that door.

This he told me.

The day he became a starter he took one girl into her room and slapped her face over and over and over. The resident assistant came to the door and asked her if she was all right and she said she was. She was not, but she said she was. I saw the swelling.

We opened against South Carolina. Dirty program, ugly uniforms, skaggy cheerleaders. They'd had another one of their nine-and-two-but-we-got-our-ass-kicked-by-the-good-team-in-the-bowl-game seasons, so they were underdogs, and deserved to be. I hoped we won big. I hoped to get in.

We were home. I lay in my bed from ten P.M. Friday night to seven A.M. Saturday morning, and I did not unclench my fists. My roommate lay there on his side whispering, “You fucker, you fucker, you fucker,” for that same amount of time, his consonants sounding like the wind.

We got taped early. I got Pops. He handled my ankles and wrists like they were already broken and gone and he was going to miracleize them. I remember him pressing tape along my heel. I remember him aligning tape with my Achilles tendon. He squeezed and molded tape to my arches and instep, and I believe I jumped higher and ran faster as a result.

I remember my locker, the steps of getting into the game uniform. I remember the cleats and the bright red rug. I remember the officials checking our pads. I remember the quiet before the tunnel. I remember the tunnel. I remember the run down that dark and hot and altogether soothing corridor into the light with the noise building until you hit cool air and nuthouse. We could not hear ourselves scream or touch pads and that was the way we wanted it. In the sunlight on that turf we were deaf but could hear, were blind but could see. We wanted a part of whoever was nearby, South Carolina, the Seattle Seahawks, mad dogs. We were a natural disaster that moved in stages, a moment of misanthropy so pure we could have dashed babies around on the ground and then just gone on to the next thing.

We only mildly calmed down the whole first half. There were about sixty of us Denizens of the Depth Chart, as Pops called us, and we roamed and lined the sidelines, making treaties, breaking alliances, watching the game. Adding to the circus of TV cables, condenser dishes, Mini-cams, yard markers, drink and aid stations, whatever. We got in the way.

Some hotshot we'd seen all week on the films fumbled the opening kickoff and we scored right off. Our defense kept hitting like animals and by the half it was 26–0. Macon didn't see much of the ball. In the second half they came out and scored on some kind of half-assed reverse and the game ended that way, 26–7. So there was that clear locker-room division afterward: the studs hunched over, spent, blue in spots and dripping, just really spent, and content, more content than we would ever be. Content to be there, content the hurting was over, content to have all that quality of stop. They sat there pulling at clammy tape like they were underwater and did not talk unless spoken to and sometimes not then. The rest of us bobbed back and forth like idiots in our fresh uniforms, wanting to go out on the town, show who we were or rather who we associated with, hurt people who weren't dressed as we were. We all listened to Coach. No one in fresh uniforms gave interviews.

I took to following Macon, when I found him. Hazardous hobby, Pops said, and Pops knew. Macon, the first night, took me to bars where he sat alone, took me to the video store, took me to the 7-Eleven. Did he notice me? He did not let on, and I was good. The second night he took me to a girls' freshman dorm called Sweet-water and I watched him through a second-floor window dry hump a girl who under no circumstances appeared to want to be dry humped.

Did I do anything? I did not.

I followed him more. This I told Pops.

Pops said, “It is definitively true that we as a country are producing a lesser breed of cat.”

Pops said, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I said, “Are you named after Louis Armstrong?”

Pops said Armstrong could not hit. Armstrong could not stick. This we laughed at. I would not, I realized, tell him that I wanted to see what Macon did when I followed him.

And did Macon know? What about the night he maneuvered the girl over to the window, got her there when it could not have been easy and could not have been necessary? What about the night I lost him crossing the quad and found him again standing under the streetlight, hands bouncing in jacket pockets?

What about the night he had the girl under the arch by the wrist and let her go, so that she walked and then ran past me, where I was waiting?

And how did I get to start? Macon made me a spot.

IN PRACTICE after our second game, Macon found the strong-side corner strung out and exposed after having absorbed the block from the guard, and Macon put the crown of his helmet into the earhole of our strong-side corner's helmet so that the strong-side corner's head went one way and his body went another. The strong-side corner's name was Jeff Voight. The cheerleaders turned away as a group. I myself thought he was dead. I thought, “He's dead, and I'm starting.” Someone orbiting the earth would have known it was his neck. This was confirmed very slowly by eleven medical staffers who finally removed him the way you'd pick up a finished jigsaw puzzle. While this was happening Macon was ranging up and down the sideline waiting, and my adrenaline was heading around the block, my college career about to begin.

So this Jeff Voight had a big scare but is now all right. He had, as well, a lot of friends on the defense and they were all now intensely interested in Macon in practice, and the hitting went from absurd to a little out of hand. They rode him in pileups. While people untangled, they pulled hair from his calves. They poked fingers through his face mask, searching for eyes.

The head terrorizer of this group was our weakside linebacker, Billy Jeter, who'd been Jeff Voight's best friend. Mr. Jeter and I took Macon down on a swing pass, and Mr. Jeter got up by standing on Macon's ankles. Macon said, and I quote: “Next play, motherfucker, you get yours.”

This was like Ruth calling his shot. Who knew the play would send him in Jeter's direction, and who knew if sent whether he could truly and permanently hurt Jeter? But both of these came to pass, Macon revving up, getting a nice start on a pitch, coming out all helmet and knees, and clawing up one side of Jeter and down the other. Jeter had both hands on his chest like a grandmother in distress and he was right to do so because he had a cracked sternum and his football career was now over.

This, maybe, Macon did for us.

So here is how I played, as a starter in week three for State in 1989: well. I was mesmerized out there at first, reacting too late to the snap and flow, but got it in gear for part two and started hitting, and things, as Pops said, turned out all right. People were much bigger at this level, so that I was frequently trampled and not infrequently felt like something in the spin cycle when I tangled with the big meat inside, but they were no meaner than I was, nor more willing to hurt, and this for me seemed a kind of grace.

We won games we were supposed to win. We lost one we were supposed to lose. While that was happening Coach took off his watch and jumped up and down on it on the sidelines. Charlie Hall behind me said, “There's Coach killing time again,” and the goobers on the bench laughed and slapped their pads like members of the team.

Claudia was my ethical dilemma. Claudia was my moral choice. Claudia was in my Many Faces of Man class and she had only been kind, to me and to most others. When the professor had said, “Mr. Proekopp, you aren't with us, are you?” Claudia had said, “Is the idea here that the football players can't keep up?”

Claudia I could have wanted to go out with. Claudia I introduced to Macon, at a mixer. She liked him. I followed them around the party. I followed them home. At her door he kissed her sweetly good night. At his door he whistled and hooted. I knew he would see her again.

In practice his eyes were unreadable in the heavy shadow under the helmet. Our big game was this week: conference rival and interstate matchup. Every day I went home trailing equipment behind me, watching Macon disappear in his direction, thinking,
Tonight?
Monday and Wednesday I sat next to Claudia and talked about everything that would not help. Thursday night he led me out and around the campus, the full tour, Macon the director of nighttime admissions, always fifty yards ahead, slowing down faintly at points of particular interest. When we got to Claudia's he went inside without hesitation. From the base of a tree I watched her fourth-floor window. But the light was a yellow blank, and they appeared in the lobby, came out, and started walking. We walked everywhere. I trailed, the tail of the kite. By a doughnut shop they kissed and I rubbed the glass of a bookstore window with my cheek. They passed a park and sat beside a series of bike racks. They ended in the arboretum.

In the darkness I lost them. I blundered along. I left the path. I did not call her name. I stepped on glass which crunched underfoot. By a tree I found her, kneeling. Her arms were behind her. Her head was back and her pants were open, though there was only a white triangle of belly in that light. Macon was behind her. Macon was holding her that way. Macon had convinced her to be silent.

Even with her head back she could see me. I could not tell what her eyes intended to communicate. I could not tell how long they had been there like that. I could tell she was not going anywhere. I could tell they could both see something in my face that I could not.