Thursday Afternoon(ish) Lights

As you can see by the length of this post, I have had a lot of free time on my hands as of late (and we’ll leave it at that). What inspired me to write another blog? Well, there’s the free time. And, I had kinda already written this to post someday and then thought that I shouldn’t. But then I read today that Friday Night Lights, the best show in the history of mankind and executive produced by Jesus Christ himself (at least, that’s my guess), would finally be going off the air after next season. This doesn’t shock me. No one watches this thing. I’m amazed it made it this far, seeing as how I am their only viewer. But it makes me sad. It also makes it a perfect time to post this.

I’m not going to lie to you and say that, because I am a male who grew up in Texas, I felt it was my obligation to try out for the junior high football team the second I got the chance. Or that I joined out of some sense of male pride and wanted show the other kids in school that I was more than just the weird son of their reading teacher and that I possessed more quality traits than a weird set of teeth. No, I actually generally, enthusiastically, like football. People always assume that I would hate the sport (and sports in general), because, you know, I’M FAAABULOUS! To which I respond: have you ever even watched football?

But beyond my love of the sport, I probably signed up for seventh grade athletics because I am a male that grew up in Texas and I felt it was my obligation to try out for the junior high football team the second I got the chance.

I would not call Gatesville a football town per se. I mean, they have a prison so there are other things going for it. But football is naturally pretty big in Gatesville, your stereotypical Texas small town. For example, the Lion’s Club meets at the Dairy Queen, tractors have the right-of-way down main street, and I have heard more goat-fucking stories from classmates than I care to recall.

I stepped into this world in 1996, eleven going on twelve. This is the perfect age to NOT move from a city to a small town. My parents, God bless them, apparently wanted to make the move as unnatural and completely awkward as they possibly could. So I was adrift and confused and awkward and weird and lonely and looking at other boys too much and I figured football would be the perfect thing for me because it would make all of those problems go away!

Practice started the first day of school. August in Texas. I don’t think miserable is the correct word. I don’t even think les miserables is the correct word. First off, the helmet is absolutely the most uncomfortable thing I have ever put on. It was like placing my head in a vice grip that itself was in a vice grip and then wedged in between boulders. My mouth guard almost made me pass out. Because I had braces, the rubber implant had to cover both the top and bottom of my mouth and since I was a heavy mouth breather, hilarity ensued. And I could never get the knee pads and thigh pads to sit just right in my pants. They would overlap on each other and wedge themselves between my legs and give people the general impression I had elephantitus. All of this would suck in nice weather. It bears repeating: August in Texas.

And then they expected us to shower in front of other people? This is something that I absolutely would not tolerate. Thirteen is an awkward time, especially if you were going through what I was going through.

When people try out for the team, I assume most of them aspire to be the quarterback or the running back or one of those big glamor position. Looking back, I find it kind of fascinating that I never harbored dreams of any of these positions. I knew I was going to be a line backer or something, and I never though anything more of it. So when I was assigned the position, I was not at all surprised.

I was surprised, however, that I did not make the A Team. Or the B Team.

I would be a lineman on the Gatesville Junior High Seventh Grade C Team.

My confidence was shot, but I figured I would have to make the best of it. It did not help that I had bragged to people about my abilities, and that I was assured a spot on one of the higher teams. The situation was not terrible, however. Both of my best friends were on the team, albeit in the more flashy positions of running back and wide receiver.

And then there was the coach to beat all coaches: Coach McKamie. Coach Charles McKamie moonlighted as our Texas History teacher during the day, a Baptist minister on the weekends, and a poet and philosopher to us young men in between. He was huge, unhealthily so, and wore big Coke-bottle glasses. But the guy rocked. He wasn’t a hard ass like the other coaches. He knew his place and what this all meant. If I faced certain disappointments in being selected to this team, I had to wonder what Chuckie McK thought about being selected as coach, especially compared to the others in his position.

The B team coach was Coach Morgan, who would one day be my sophomore world geography teacher and would eventually lead the high school varsity. His tale ends rather sadly: Morgan replaced a coach who had led the team to an undefeated season and a state championship. When Morgan failed to reach these heights, he was run out of town. So it goes.

The A team coach was Coach Price, a Vietnam vet from California who yelled until his face turned red, ran at least five million miles on the weekends and after school, and frequently had Nam flashbacks in the middle of his eighth grade American History class. He was certifiably, bat-shit insane. Whenever you were injured, or had any problem whatsoever, his response would be, “What are you telling me for?!? Put some ice on in and go run a mile!” When I twisted my ankle once, and I dared to inform him, Coach Price screamed, “Ah, Ament! What are you telling me for?!? Go put some ice on it and run a mile!” He probably wouldn’t have cared if I told him following these instructions would result in my premature death.

However, even though I did not play on his team, Coach Price and I eventually developed a rapport, since he was my teacher the next year. He was incredibly taken by me, and sometimes amused himself in my humiliation. Once we had to write constitutions for a class project. Price assigned the groups and stuck me with every looser and deadbeat in the room. When I dared to complain about this, he told me, “Ah, Ament! What are you telling me for?!? You gotta’ motivate these people! Put some ice on it and run a mile!” I ended up doing the entire assignment myself. Another time, he asked me point blank what my views on abortion were. Revealing my views on abortion to Coach Price was a greater moral quandary than abortion itself, especially since I was a freaking eight grader and no more had a view on abortion than I did on nuclear proliferation between India and Pakistan. I weighed my options. If I told him abortion was great, he would yell, “Ah, Ament! What do you mean? You want a bunch of innocent babies to get murdered?!?” If I told him I was against it: “Ah, Ament! What do you mean? You want a bunch of unfit mothers to have babies they can’t take care of and kill them?!?” So I gave him the only viable option: I replied, “What’s abortion?”

“Ah, Ament!” he screamed. “I thought you were one of those genius kids!” But he let it go. At the awards banquet at the end of the year, when every teacher gives a medal or something else useless to their favorite student, Coach Price selected me. Of all the awards I was… awarded in my school years, this was my favorite. Coach Price eventually retired and moved to California. As far as I know, no one has heard of him since.

But I digress.

C Team. Seventh grade. Coach McKamie. I was left guard on offense and occasionally tackle and middle linebacker on defense. This is how practice went. The team trotted onto the field and tried not to pass out the second the heat worked it’s way under the helmets. No one was benched at practice. Half the team played offense and the other half defense. Coach McKamie tried to teach us plays. I imagine this was difficult work for, say, the quarterback or a receiver or something. My instructions were the same on every play: hit the guy in front of you. So we would run a few plays and then complain about the heat. Coach knew we were a lost cause, so he let us take water breaks whenever we wanted. Water was run from a garden hose into a series of plastic pipes and tasted like ass. But drinking it was better than actual practice.

I’m serious, all we did was bitch and moan about practice. We were the C Team. We were only out there because we were males who grew up in Texas and felt it was our obligation to try out for the junior high football team the second we got the chance. When our bitching was too much, Coach would assign us “bear crawls” after practice. A bear crawl consists of running up and down the field on all fours like a goddamned bear. It was humiliating, and doing these back and forth for hundreds of yards in the Texas heat with all that equipment on is probably the closest I will ever get to torture by the Iraqi guard (I say “probably” cause I don’t like to rule things out).

Occasionally, we would scrimmage the B Team at practice. We never scrimmaged the A Team, who practiced far away from us on top of a fucking hill like they were the gods of Olympus and just because their asses looked better in the football pants than ours they were not allowed to fraternize with us. Funny thing is, every time we played the B Team, and I mean Every Single Time, we beat the crap out of them. Coach Morgan would yell at his B Teamers, “What the hell are you doing, getting beat by the C Team?” and Coach McKamie would laugh and my friends would run all over the field and I would stand and stare with my mouth agape, dreaming of 5:00 when I could go home and watch The Drew Carry Show or play Goldeneye or read a Michael Crichton book and maybe listen to my No Doubt or Spice Girls CD.

I. Fucking. Hated. Football. Practice.

But I stayed in football. A) I was a male in Texas yadda yadda yadda. B) No way was I going to join gym class with all the losers and deadbeats who would eventually be my group partners in the “Write Your Own Constitution!” project for Coach Price. C) I liked football and actually liked playing in games (especially away ones). And D) The Locker Room.

The Locker Room.

Teenage sex comedies usually include a scene where the guys drill a hole into the girl’s locker room so they can see the opposite sex shower and frolic and giggle and all that girl horseshit.  This involved great feats of engineering to achieve, and the risk of stiff punishment. And I do mean stiff punishment. I got all the pleasure out of this scene in real life but without the girls, without the feats of engineering, and without the threat of stiff punishment. The stiff punishment came later as I drifted off to sleep. Boo yah!

I think it’s fairly safe to say I knew I was gay back then. I mean, I wasn’t exactly familiar with the concept or anything since absolutely no one in Gatesville could ever possibly be gay. But I knew something was going on when I was forced to change before and after practice and, while it scared and scarred the crap out of me, I must confess I looked forward to it all day. That semester I spent playing football taught me leagues about myself, and most of that learning was off the field and in the locker room. I grew as a human being. Literally. I grew.

Practice, heat, learn plays, drink ass water, tackle, scrimmage, bitch, bear crawl, run, put ice on it, change, rinse and repeat. That was my life five days a week during the fall of (shudder) 1996. That is, every day except glorious, glorious game day.

Game day meant you got out of class early. Game day meant you might get to ride on a bus and eat with the team afterwards. Game day meant you got to show off for your family. Most importantly, game day meant no practice.

Games for the C Team were scheduled at the weirdest, stupidest times. Some days it would be 2:00 on a Tuesday. Some days it would be 9:00 on a Wednesday. Most of the time, however, we battled for glory and honor on Thursday afternoon, the undercard to the B and A Team matches scheduled after us. Home games were only moderately exciting. Home games usually meant a full practice and then a thirty-second march to the varsity stadium across the street. Often, we would be the only team playing that day and our march to the stadium would bring us past the A Team or even the eighth grade practices. The coaches would blow their whistles and the practicing teams would pause, stare at us, and then start clapping as we passed. Like they gave a flying fuck what the C Team did. Like they didn’t make fun of us in the halls. Whatever. How many of those A Teamers have a blog today, huh? Huh?

I’d be lying if I told you I remembered every game. I don’t. Even I knew how stupid and insignificant they were, and I had yet to develop my finely tuned sense of sarcasm and cynicism. Scheduling teams for us to play must have taken some fancy footwork. All the schools in our district were small compared to the mighty Gatesville Independent School District, and most didn’t even field a B team, much less a freaking C team. So we often had to play far away, in distant lands such as Stephenville and Brownwood, and against B and sometimes A teams. I remember the Stephenville game well. We played their A Team. Even our moms were beaten that night.

Our first game was against Clifton. If you’ve heard of Gatesville, you’ve probably heard of Clifton. So you probably haven’t heard of Clifton. It’s something like and hour and a half away from G’ville. They have an exceptionally good Dairy Queen.

So, anyway, the Clifton game. My whole family was there. They came to every game. I often get frustrated at how little I can get emo about my childhood, which was supposed to be miserable like everyone else’s. My parents were (are) far too supportive of me. They weren’t (aren’t) even Republicans! What do I have to rebel against?!? We won the game by a score of 16-6, which implies that no field goals were made. I’m pretty sure none were attempted and we just had to go for two every time.

I chiefly remember three things about this game. I remember going to the bathroom right before the game and discovering I was incredibly nervous because my junk, which was just starting to get respectable, had shriveled to pre-What’s Happening to My Body? size. I remember making my first tackle and immediately drawing a face mask call. Everyone was frustrated by this so I kept my hands at my side for the remainder of the game, tackling with the force of my body instead of using my arms and probably looking pretty stupid in the process. And I remember winning and thinking how cool winning was and that we were going to win every game that year cause this wasn’t hard at all and that would show those A Teamers on the hill with their perfectly-fitted pants and their hair and their party invitations and their talent.

We lost the next game at home to Hamilton. Hamilton. What a stupid name for a stupid town.

Games for us were a combination of barely-succesfull plays mixed in with utter confusion and the chaos and banality of war. I paid attention maybe 30% of the time. Since I could give two shits about the actual play call, seeing as how my action was the same every single time, I only had to know if we were on offense or not. I only played defense in the rarest of circumstances. I instead spent most of my time on the bench, staring at clouds, waving to my mom in the stands, drinking putrid water out of green Gatorade bottles, talking to people, and thinking about where we were going to eat after the game. When the offense went out, I went out with them and hit the guy in front of me. Maybe we scored, maybe we didn’t. I trotted back to the bench and repeated the process. I didn’t even have to listen for the coach to call on offense, since it was obvious when a bunch of players were coming off the field that I would be going on next. Point it, I just rolled with it and didn’t pay attention. This is called foreshadowing.

Our biggest game of the year was against Brownwood. The game was big not because we were big rivals or that the game would win us the championship or any of that shit. Haven’t you been reading? C Team. No, it was the biggest game of the year because Brownwood was three hours away and we got to miss almost an entire day of school. Plus, since other teams were using the Brownwood High Stadium, we got to play at the local regional college, Howard mother fuckin’ Payne, bitches! Howard Payne was (I think) a Baptist seminary and home of the fighting, praying Yellow Jackets. I would later attend a band camp here in the summer between my junior and senior years and room with a guy who used shampoo for soap. But that has no baring on this story. Point is, we, the lowly Gatesville High School Fightin’ Hornet Seventh Grade C Team (or GHSFHSGCT for short) got to play at a real college stadium, something those asshole A Teamers on the hill never got to do with their shiny helmets and their tied laces and their getting-to-third-base-before-I-even-knew-we-were-playing-a-game and their eventual spot on the 2000 state championship team where they got to play in bigger, better college stadiums. Nope. Coach Price’s A Team didn’t get to play at Howard Payne!

I can’t remember if we won or lost this game. I think we won. I’m just going to say that we won, since no one remembers. But what I do remember, and what my two friends on that team still remember, is this.

So on one play, the defense is out on the field. I am not paying attention. The next play, our offense goes out, the regiment I am a member of. Nope, I’m still not paying attention. I’m talking to the guy next to me about how Ellen really is a great show, probably my favorite, and who cares if she’s a lesbian, it’s still a funny show! I hear Coach McK say something to the effect of, “Who the hell is missing out there?” (Baptist preacher on the weekends, remember?). This causes me to look up and out to the field. That’s funny. Our quarterback is out there. My friends, the wide receivers, are out there. There’s a big gaping hole on the offensive line. It dawns on me when the guy whom I should be next to on the line looks over at to the bench and throws in my direction a look of absolute horror and panic. Yes, it dawns on me: I am supposed to be filling that big gaping hole on the offensive line.

I bolt off the bench and make my way to the sideline just as the ball is snapped. Alas, I am too late. A Brownsville defensive tackle shoots through the hole vacated by yours truly and makes a bee line towards our quarterback (more appropriately, a yellow jacket-line). The glorious GHSFHSGCT QB is going to get sacked. But he has quick feet, this quarterback of ours. He hands the ball off to one of my fiends, who bolts ahead for a gain. It might even have been a first down.

Coach McKamie is waddling my way, a steam of rage fogging his stylish Coke-bottle glasses. “Ament!” he yells. “What the hell was that? Why the hell weren’t you out there?”

What do I say? “Sorry, but have you ever watched this Ellen show?” Or, “It’s exactly what I planned, sir! Now we have them right where we want them!” Or, “What’s abortion?”

This is what I think I said: “I thought we were on defense… sir…” And then: “We moved the ball… sir?”

“Do you want to sit on the bench for the rest of the season?” he screams, belly sloshing this way and that.

“No? Sir?”

“Get out to the huddle! NOW, AMENT, NOW!”

He really couldn’t say much more than that. We were the C Team. Who. Cares.

The other guys, they are loving it. “Austin,” they say (we always addressed each other by our Christian names), “why don’t you go sit back down? We got this!” I have no comeback to this. I smile, let the fuckers know that I am in on the joke, and take my place on the line. Three plays later and we punt. With me off the field and a man short, they had positive yardage. With me on the field, it’s three and out. This story is still rehashed when I see the two guys on the team that I still talk to. And to the others: I bet you feel sorry now! You had no idea that your mean comments were going to live forever, in a story written at 4:30 in the morning by the gentlemen who would one day be voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by the GHS Class of 2002 (colloquially known as Brew Crew ’02). I bet you feel silly now. And I was totally checking some of you out in the locker room, so bite me.

And that pretty much sums up my football playing career. I performed my duty as a male growing up in Texas and made the team. I showed up to the games. What else did you want me to do, it’s the C Team for Christ’s sake!

Like I said, I don’t know how many games we won or lost. There was no trophy or nothing at season’s end. I told people that I was going to go out for the team next year and try harder, but I already knew when I took my helmet off after the last game I would never put it back on. Playing football was not for me. I would have much more fun watching it from the stands as a member of the Gatesville High School Marching Hornet Band, The Pride of Coryell County (GHSMHB, PCC for short). But I am proud to say that I played beside a few champions. Several of these guys, these C Teamers, they eventually made varsity years later and helped bring to Gatesville the school’s only state championship. I mean, they were total dicks in school, for the most part. But the football field is the great equalizer I suppose.

After that, I did not go out for the basketball team, seeing as though I am incredibly clumsy despite my height (might I remind you, I fell off a roof trying to get a tan). I did not go out for baseball either cause who the hell would want to do that? I stayed in the athletics class, but only so I didn’t have to go to P.E. When I was confronted with my lack of participation, I lied and said I was conditioning for next year (we had to run like 85 miles each day during the off season) and then tried my hand at making the discus squad in track and field. I failed miserably. Evidently, it ain’t like throwing a Frisbee. When it came time to sign up for eight grade classes, I discovered I did not need another P.E. requirement and decided to get a head start on high school with First Year Spanish. And we all know how my Spanish skills turned out (“Tengo… big stick?”).

No, I was not destined for football stardom. But on some nights, as I sit exactly 100 miles from Gatesville High School’s McKamie Stadium, I hear the city sounds around me and cars passing on the street morph into the roar of a crowd. The air is crisp and the moon is full and the lights from Memorial Stadium on the UT campus blind the starless sky and I dream of gridiron glory. Everything is on the line, the clock is winding down, the time outs are spent, and there exists just One. More. Play. The ball is snapped, the lines crash, and I am not in the trenches but running down the sideline, my cleats striking craters into the perfectly manicured earth, my hands outstretched in the air, hanging there, waiting for that perfect spiral pass. I am beyond coverage now and the quarterback see this and the ball is thrown and darts to me, like a hornet, and alights in my hand. I am off, no one can stop me now, like a longhorn on the stampede I quest for the end zone and when I am there the game is over and my name is legend. That night I bang the quarterback and my world is perfect.