Chapter Seven

The Man I Hold So Near

Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is about forty-five minutes west of Birmingham, and from the interstate, it’s a town easily missed. It appears as little more than a depression in the forested landscape to the north, and only two structures in town rise above the trees: a nine-story brick building with a flashing clock and thermometer on the roof—the AmSouth Bank—and Bryant-Denny Stadium, where Alabama plays. During night games, the stadium lights throw a luminous pillar high enough into the sky to be seen throughout the county. During the day, though, it merely peeks over the trees, like a porcelain bowl set in high grass. Anyone adventuresome enough to leave the interstate at Tuscaloosa will first have to run a gauntlet of strip malls—fast-food restaurants, a yogurt stand, a fried-catfish joint called Ezell’s Catfish Cabin, and a bait shop called The Worm Shack—before encountering any structure that looks more than a few months old. The campus, though, is of another era. The president’s mansion has massive white columns and sweeping staircases, and even the fraternity and sorority houses look like the architectural offspring of Tara. A stately bell tower called Denny Chimes provides a soothing soundtrack for campus strolls, and the central Quad is shaded by ancient oaks. A mile or so past the school is downtown Tuscaloosa, which has the forlorn charm of an old river port town. The buildings, many of them old cotton warehouses, are brick with wooden awnings, and seldom over two stories tall. On some, faded murals advertise merchandise long obsolete, and businesses that long ago closed their doors. The side of town away from campus peers down on the Black Warrior River, which oozes silently by between seemingly endless curtains of willows. As long ago as 1580, there has been a village on this knoll. Creeks and Choctaws lived here alternately until white settlers moved in and forced them west in the 1830s on the Trail of Tears. Those settlers set up a port to ship their cotton south toward Mobile. From 1826 to 1846 Tuscaloosa served as the capital of Alabama; the university was founded there in 1831. During the Civil War, the school was converted into a military college for the training of Confederate officers, a change of curriculum that in 1865 attracted the attention of a pyromaniacal Union Army brigade called Croxton’s Raiders. Croxton was particularly good at his job, and as a result, there are just four antebellum buildings on campus now; the most beautiful of them is a small brick columned structure off the Quad known as the Gorgas House. It overlooks a large grassy mound—the ashes of the original campus library—which is now a semisacred place where fraternities and sororities perform their secret rites.

The first football game in Tuscaloosa was played in 1893—Alabama lost 4-0 to the Birmingham Athletic Club—and with a few ignominious exceptions, like George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door,” almost every subsequent dispatch from Tuscaloosa to the outside world has mentioned the sport. Local T-shirts now proclaim Tuscaloosa a “Drinking Town with a Football Problem,” which is meant as a boast. Perhaps in spite of itself, Tuscaloosa isn’t completely behind the times. Mercedes recently built a huge factory outside of town to produce SUVs, and as a result it’s now possible to watch German news on the local cable TV and to walk into bars downtown and see squads of baseball-capped fraternity boys slugging beers next to tables of men with mustaches, wearing sandals with socks and shouting “Prosit!” Some transplants—particularly professors—take offense at the notion that their new home is hopelessly monomaniacal. They’ll tell you that not everything in Tuscaloosa revolves around football, that there’s a health food store, a yoga studio, and a whole throng of folks who go to the mall during games because they know the parking lot will be empty—that there is a mass of people in town who just don’t care. And imams have overrun Opp.

When I was a kid, Tuscaloosa was on par with the North Pole as a magical destination. Instead of Santa Claus, Tuscaloosa had Bear Bryant. Even the town’s name—which derives from the name of an old Choctaw chief—suggested someplace remote and magical. Despite growing up just forty-five minutes from Tuscaloosa, I’d only been there on football Saturdays. On a Wftnesday, traffic slips along at an easy pace. The roads aren’t crammed. There’s no crowd noise, no plumes of barbecue smoke curling over the grassy clearings. A languid silence hangs over campus, broken only by the occasional shriek of a train whistle and the distant pistol-pops of snare drums at marching band practice.

On Friday morning, all that changes. By 8:00 A.M., a line of fifty RVs has formed on Bryant Drive in front of the Law Library parking lot. They’re prohibited from entering before noon because until then the lot is supposed to be used by . . . well, the sort of people who frequent law libraries—professors and law students. The idea that a few tweeds get precedence over the RV corps strikes the RV-ers as ludicrous. This isn’t as irrational as it first sounds. The lot is about 90 percent empty—just a few cars parked on the gravelly perimeter. Perhaps three times as many RVs wait to get in the lot as there are cars parked there. Every now and then, as the RV-ers wait impatiently to get in, a student walks lackadaisically from the Law Library and climbs into his car, then rolls out of the lot in unhurried defiance. After a while a few of the RV-ers begin to gesture at the exiting drivers, urging them to hurry up and get out of the way. The scene starts to resemble a picket line. Eventually, it’s too much for the man driving the lead RV. A few minutes after ten o’clock, he puts his RV in gear, swerves past a dazed law student, and rips into the lot. The land grab is on. A few bold sooners try to save places for friends—they claim turf by setting out lawn chairs—and are set upon by their peers. In the confusion, someone—an RV-er or somebody at the Law School, it’s never determined—calls the cops. A squad car pulls into the lot, as RV-ers are dropping their jacks, unfurling their awnings, deploying grills and picnic tables and big Astroturf carpets. A few ambitious bon vivants have cracked open the day’s first beers. The police officers don’t even bother to get out of the car. The RV corps is here. There’s no undoing it.

In the evening I do my own informal RV census: two hundred and fifty in the Law Library parking lot; a hundred more in the parking lot behind the Ferguson Student Center; fifty in the parking lot behind Tutwiler, the women’s dorm; twenty-five downtown, in a lot overlooking the river; twenty-five in a private lot near the Druid City Hospital, a bus ride from the stadium; and perhaps a hundred more scattered all over town as haphazardly as Matchbox cars on a playroom floor. People are outside. The evening is filled with voices and music and horns and skeins of barbecue smoke. There’s a pep rally, and fireworks crackle in the sky. Crowds spill out the front doors of the fraternity houses. The melancholy induced by the Tech game has dissipated as quickly as morning mist off the Black Warrior River. The cure for football-induced melancholy is clearly more football.

I come upon a curious scene near the Strip—a line of people standing sock-footed in front of the largest RV I’ve seen yet: a Liberty Prevost—a $1.4 million job, the sort of thing you’d expect a country music star to travel in. The owner is giving tours to everyone willing to take off their shoes before boarding—he doesn’t want red Tuscaloosa County clay getting tracked throughout his million-dollar bus. I add my shoes to the pile and get in line.

The owner is a fleshy, gray-haired man who works the line with the practiced reserve of a clergyman greeting parishioners at the front door of a church. He introduces himself as Sherrell Smith. The name rattles around in my head for a minute before I put it together. It’s the Chicken Man, aforementioned by Donnie.

To make any vehicle worth $1.4 million, a manufacturer has to cram it with an excess of gadgetry. Smith’s model has a global positioning system, two phone systems, a fax machine, a fifty-inch projection television, a VCR, twin satellite dishes, a trash compactor, a microwave, a convection oven, twin washers and dryers, four air conditioners, a ceiling fan, a twenty-five-cubic-foot refrigerator—“all that crap,” in Smith’s words. An onboard computer allows the owner to do everything but drive from the queen-sized bed in the back. The decor is equally excessive: mood lights; pastel-colored banquettes; a spaceship Enterprise–style retractable door that swooshes open and closed at the touch of a button; a marble bath; a reflective stainless-steel ceiling that makes the interior shimmer like a casino; and, in the bedroom, a glass wall etched with an image of galloping horses. Taken as a whole, the interior looks like Graceland jammed into a closet.

Ironically, Mr. Smith couldn’t seem less like Elvis. He’s almost catatonically subdued. He speaks in a whisper and seems not so much to walk as to tiptoe. Everything about his manner suggests caution and reserve, and yet what could be less reserved than the purchase of a million-dollar motor home? No one seems more puzzled by the contradiction than Smith himself. “I just broke down and bought it,” he tells me, as if explaining how he came to own some new fifty-dollar handheld gizmo.

Smith started out as a chicken farmer, raising an average of a million birds every seven weeks for the Tyson Corporation, before getting into the much cleaner business of building chicken houses in north Alabama and Tennessee, a part of the world that just happened to have no end of need for new chicken houses. Smith then had the idea to open big hardware stores in areas where he’d built those chicken houses, and to act as the farmers’ main supplier. He eventually opened four. The whole operation, known as Smith Poultry & Hardware, is now a $20 million-a-year business.

Smith’s wife pokes her head in the door. “Hey, Sherrell—how do you turn on the neon lights?”

Smith hits a button on a switch panel. There’s a smattering of applause from outside as the lights come on.

Smith got his first RV in 1986 and traded up every couple of years, but it wasn’t until 1997, after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, that Smith went in for his million-dollar job. Smith’s doctors told him the cancer had spread to his kidneys and lungs, and they gave him six months to live. So, figuring he should enjoy his final months on earth, Smith sold his chicken farm and sank the cash into the Prevost, as a final act of indulgence. He and his family drove together to football games and took trips, preparing for his demise. But on a ski trip out west, Smith ran into a man who told him about an experimental oxygen-tent therapy some doctors were using to treat cancer. The therapy wasn’t approved in the United States, but it was available in Mexico. With a million-dollar RV, Smith was nothing if not mobile, so feeling he had nothing to lose, he climbed in his Prevost and drove from Alabama to a clinic near Tijuana. He spent several weeks in an oxygen tent, and his cancer went away.

“My doctor’s impressed,” Smith says with a shrug.

Surviving cancer has changed Smith’s relationship with his RV. The Prevost was no longer a final act of indulgence—it is an ongoing act of indulgence that has consequences both for Smith’s bank account and for his dealings with fellow fans. It’s hard not to seem uppity pulling in the lot in an RV that costs as much as ten or fifteen of the RVs around it, and seeming uppity is probably the worst offense a member of the RV corps could commit. The fan hierarchy, such as it is, values ticket stubs more than dollar bills. For Smith, being thought of as rich was the downside of owning a million-dollar RV. “It’s nothing to brag about,” Smith tells me. “The others know whatever I drive, I’m a chicken farmer. I’m just who I am. All my life I’ve never tried to be bigger than I was. I still consider myself a lower-type person.”

The paradox is that for Smith to enjoy his own RV, he has to let others parade through it all weekend. He seems at ease with the bargain. Fellow fans get to marvel at the interior of a million-dollar RV, and Smith gets to make clear that he sees himself as one of the crowd. A weekend-long stream of visitors is just one of life’s necessary inconveniences, like working eighteen-hour days in a chicken house or sitting in an oxygen tent in Mexico for a month, or, for that matter, just filling the thing up with gas. Smith is happy to do it, and asks only that guests take off their shoes.

*  *  *

My first task on Saturday morning is to get a ticket to the game. I’ve never worried much about getting tickets to Alabama games—in part because scalping is legal in the state, and you can almost always pick up a last-minute single outside the stadium. The RV-ers, though, take a different view; tickets are a basic provision, up there with food, water, and beer, and few would ever think of driving all the way to a stadium without a guaranteed seat. I ask some RV-ers I recognize if they happen to have a spare, and they react as if I’ve declared a medical emergency. A man tells me to stay put, and he and two pals strike out across the lot with business-like haste. A few minutes later, I hear my name yelled. A Mobile pharmaceutical company employee named Frances has been stood up by a friend and so now has a spare. Frances is in her mid-thirties with a lustrous wave of black hair and a big friendly smile. I anticipate some haggling over the price, but Frances only wants to grill me about my team allegiance. The extra seat is in the Alabama section next to her own, and she has no intention of sitting beside an Arkansas fan. I give a “Roll Tide,” and Frances parts with the ticket for face value.

There’s one more stop before kickoff—the Bear Bryant Namesake Reunion at the Bryant Museum. The namesake reunion is exactly what it sounds like—a gathering of people named after Paul William “Bear” Bryant. The museum keeps a registry of such people—they fill out a form headed “I was named for Coach Bryant” and are invited once a year to a pregame barbecue at the museum. The list is, of course, voluntary and only modestly publicized, so it can’t account for everyone named after the Bear—or those who’d been named Paul, Bryant, or Bear for reasons that remain a mystery even to them. But these limitations notwithstanding, the current tally of registered Bear Bryant namesakes stands just shy of six hundred.

The Bryant Museum is just across Bryant Drive from the main RV lot; a mere quarter mile from Bryant-Denny Stadium; not too far from Bryant Hall, the dorm; and a short drive from Paul William Bryant High School in Cottondale. A quick drive around Tuscaloosa puts the idea of naming your kid after the Bear Bryant in a new light. Why not do it? Everyone else is.

A red and white tent has been set up on the lawn out front of the museum, just to the left of the life-sized bronze statue of the Bear at the entrance. Two guitar-strumming fraternity types are singing “Brown-Eyed Girl,” and people are milling about eating hot dogs, hamburgers, and Golden Flake potato chips (the Bear’s favorite). The paper nametags tell the story: Bryant Adam Paris, Bryant Christopher Carrol, Bryant Marshall Lambert, Bryant Atkins, Paul Bryant Mitchell, Katherine Bryant Hawks . . .

The Bryant Museum’s director and the event emcee is a man named Ken Gaddy. He’s a slight, professorial-looking man in a coat, tie, and glasses. I find him between raffle drawings in the big tent, giving away houndstooth hats—part of the Bear’s uniform—to a few lucky namesakes. The reunion, he says, was the idea of the original Bear Bryant namesake, Paul Bryant Jr., a quiet, highly successful business man who made a fortune owning dog tracks. Bryant Jr. is on the University’s Board of Trustees and is a major booster of the football program—he donated $10 million to the expansion of Bryant-Denny Stadium, for example. Over the years he received dozens of letters from fans saying that they, like him, had been named after the Bear, so in 1996, Bryant Jr. urged the museum to try to get the group together. Gaddy drafted a press release calling for the namesakes to declare themselves that was picked up by local newspapers and the Associated Press. After that, Gaddy says, “Namesakes started ringing the museum’s telephone off the hook.”

The museum is packed. A crowd of Bryants stands mesmerized in front of a television, watching a documentary about the late coach. Another group of Bryants stares confoundedly at the suit Tony Brandino wore to his five-hundredth game (apparently five hundred games in a row seems excessive even to people named after Bear Bryant). I walk over to a bulletin board in the lobby where the father of one Connor Bryant Hajek has posted a poem.

My saddest day thus far Was the day Coach Bryant died.
It hit your dad so hard.
I hurt so bad I cried.
I wish I could have played for this
Man I hold so near.
But at least his name shall live
In the son I love so dear.

The poem suggests that naming a child after a favorite football coach is the fan equivalent of a baptism or a bris, a way of putting the cultural marks on your children before they’ve had a chance to survey the offerings of the cultural smorgasbord and build their own meal. The biggest fear most parents have is that their children will grow up to become something totally different from themselves, and the key to avoiding this fate is to start indoctrination early. As an act of preemption, naming seems to work. There aren’t a lot of Baptists out there named Mohammed, and there aren’t a lot of Auburn fans named Bryant.

Actually, the religious comparison is apt. In a paper titled “Meanings and Interpretations of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant,” a group of anthropology students at Alabama polled hardcore Crimson Tide fans and locals on their opinions of the late coach and found that fully 26 percent associated the Bear with “godlike qualities.” The default explanation for Bryant’s exalted status in Alabama is that he won and gave Alabamians something to be proud about at a time when the rest of the country and world looked down on the South. He was a kind of redeemer. I suppose the theory makes sense for a certain generation, but I liked the Bear long before I was old enough to understand that people outside of Alabama held my home state in exceedingly low regard—long before I felt a need to be redeemed. I became an Alabama fan and Bryant fan the way most people come to their teams and their heroes—because my father liked Alabama. ¹ He went to school at Alabama—his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, occupies a monstrous antebellum knockoff just around the corner from the Bryant Museum.

It could have easily been otherwise. My father considered going to Georgia Tech in Atlanta to study engineering, but went to Alabama to be closer to his parents, who lived nearby and were divorcing, largely because my grandfather, a country lawyer and politician, was an alcoholic. So it’s fair to say that the ultimate reason I like Alabama is because my grandfather drank too much. (It’s not so grim—he stopped drinking and remarried my grandmother twenty-five years after their divorce, but that’s another story.) My granddad might have known that he was screwing up his marriage by drinking, but he couldn’t possibly have imagined the effect it would have on his yet unborn grandson’s autumn Saturdays fifty years later. I doubt the thought would’ve deterred him, but I like to think it might have caused him to pause contemplatively mid-Bourbon.

There are some practical benefits to liking the same team as your parents—not getting disinherited, for example; or avoiding years of arguments at the dinner table—but that’s probably not why it happens so often. I imagine people follow their parents because continuity is reassuring, and because it takes a lot of energy to break with the past. It’s a threatening notion to a lot of fans that we don’t like our teams for all the reasons we say we do (the colors, the tradition, the fight song, the style of play) but rather because of the random process of imprinting. I find the thought liberating. It’s a lot harder to hate the other side when you allow that your arguments for liking your team are just as contrived as the other guy’s are for liking his. The way we find teams isn’t so unlike the way we find wives or husbands—through happy accidents—and with sports it matters little if, as with myself and young Connor Bryant Hajek, the marriages are arranged.

I make my way back through the throng of Bryant’s unofficial heirs, and head to another one of them, Bryant-Denny. “Sweet Home, Alabama” is playing over the PA system. The sky is a vivid blue, the air a clean and cool 66ºF—perfect football weather. Mike Dubose paces the field watchfully during warm-ups. He’s wearing an unreadably bland expression, a look either of resignation or of confidence—I can’t tell which. The mood of the crowd is just as difficult to gauge. It’s a mixture of anticipation and unsettled anxiety, the lingering effects of the Tech loss and Bockrath’s firing and the unresolved doubts about the coach’s competence.

I sit down next to Frances during warm-ups, and manage to learn a little bit about her. She describes herself as a “major Bama fan,” the exact phrase, in fact, she had used to introduce herself to potential mates in a personals ad on Match.com. Frances hasn’t missed an Alabama game since 1994, when her then-husband had a heart attack. They’ve since divorced; he got the season tickets, but the two are on friendly terms and have worked out a kind of custody arrangement that allows her to attend a lot of home games in their old seats. Otherwise, she has to scrounge.

“I don’t miss a game,” she says. “If I watch it on TV I get sick—literally throw up.” Frances opens her mouth and pokes her finger in and shakes her head in disgust. “If we lose, I want to crawl up and die.”

A clarion blares from the loudspeakers. The stadium grows hushed and the crowd turns its attention to the Sony JumboTron above the south end zone. I haven’t been to Tuscaloosa for a game since the JumboTron was installed, and it feels strange that before the sacred entry of the team, we’re all going to kick back and watch a little TV. The crowd hardly seems to mind; fans are comfortable nowhere if not in front of a television. What follows is essentially an infomercial for Alabama football. The buzzword at Alabama is “tradition”—12 national championships, 20 conference championships, 49 bowl appearances over more than a century. Constantly invoking our tradition doesn’t help us win football games exactly, but it’s an implicit defense of our obsession. Tradition provides consolation for our losses, and it’s the moral force behind our victories. The infomercial starts with a few black-and-white stills from the old days—including a picture of the Bear when he played tight end—grainy footage from the 1926 Rose Bowl, then moves on to color shots of the goal line stand in the 1979 Sugar Bowl against Penn State that led to a championship. The crowd roars as if the play is happening in real time. Bear Bryant’s face appears, craggy, MacArthur-like, and his thundering voice rattles the girders: “I ain’t ever been called nothin’ but a winner,” the old man intones, “because I ain’t ever been nothin’ but a winner.” More cheers. I look at Frances; her eyes are glassed with tears. Next, the replay of George Teague’s miraculous, come-from-behind ball-jacking of a Miami receiver in the ’93 Sugar Bowl. I get goose bumps and let out a howl myself. The Bama logo appears on the screen. The stadium rumbles with the piped-in sound of stampeding elephants; after an elephant’s trumpet, the stadium announcer proclaims, “This . . . is . . . Alabama football!” and the team shoots out of the tunnel. It’s utter show biz, but I’m won over—another hapless victim of the JumboTron.

It doesn’t take long, though, before we’re back to reality and the mood is spoiled. On Alabama’s first drive, just two and a half minutes into the game, Zow drops back to throw a screen toward the left flats. The ball is tipped, and Arkansas intercepts and goes on to score. We’ve picked up right where we left off last week, and the crowd is plunged into a brooding funk. Zow, though, responds with a touchdown drive of his own, and Alabama ties. A few minutes later, he throws another interception, and the crowd begins to boo. Tyler Watts, the backup quarterback, is brought in—to cheers—and throws an interception—to boos. It goes back and forth like this—Bama fumble, Arkansas interception—and at the half, miraculously, Alabama leads, 14-13. Frances and I agree we’ll take it.

In the third quarter, the Tide starts off with a confident drive for a touchdown. The defense holds and we get the ball back. We’re driving when Shaun Alexander is crossed up and drilled, jarring the ball out of his hands. It hits the turf on its nose, bounces into the air, and is snatched by an Arkansas linebacker who sprints into the end zone: touchdown Hogs. But before the depression can sink in, Zow heaves a forty-three-yard pass. We’re cheering again. Two plays later Alexander knifes his way through the Arkansas defense for a touchdown. Frances and I high-five, and Bryant-Denny froths over. We score, on a sixty-six-yard throw from Zow, and nearing the end of the game, Alabama is up 35-28.

With fifty-eight seconds to go, the Hogs have a fourth and fifteen from their own fifteen-yard-line. Stoerner, the Arkansas quarterback, lofts a pass over the middle for fifteen yards and a first down. On the next play, he drops back again—and this time hurls a thirty-yard completion to the Alabama thirty-one. The Hogs scurry upfield to the line. There are six seconds to go. It’s happening again, just like last week. One more play. Stoerner has to go for the end zone. I look at Dubose on the sideline. He’s clapping awkwardly—he always claps in a pinch—and wears a deep, innocent look of dejection on his face, like a child who has let go a helium balloon. His dream job is floating out of reach . . .

Arkansas snaps the ball, then, something eerie: it’s the same play as the week before. Stoerner drops back, his receivers sprint for the near right corner of the end zone, and he throws the ball high. There’s a paralyzing sense of déjà vu, then here it comes . . . an arcing spiral into the end zone as the clock hits zero . . . another jump ball. A cluster of red and white jerseys leaps upward like bridesmaids to a bouquet. The ball disappears into a bundle of groping hands and after a moment squirts out at ankle level, falling to the turf. It’s incomplete. We’ve won.

 

In such moments, a very strange image crosses my mind. I imagine that somewhere deep in my brain there is a little cheerleader, perhaps no bigger than a sea monkey, leaping and kicking ecstatically. How else to explain the percolating, giddy tickle to the psyche that follows a win? With each footfall and herkie, some pleasure-giving cocktail of serotonin, testosterone, adrenaline, and god knows what else is extruded from my brain cells, and goes trickling across my frontal lobes. In fact, it’s amazing what doesn’t matter after a win. Anxiety is soothed. Life’s quotidian concerns become insignificant and utterly manageable. To take a simple example, I have $7,000 locked up in an RV that isn’t even roadworthy—and I don’t mind at all. My new friend Frances is recently divorced and lovelorn enough to be buying personals on Match.com; does she feel the slightest bit lonely or lovelorn at this particular moment, as her squad jogs off the field, pumping their helmets in the air? Not a chance. Chris Bice has to wake up at dawn tomorrow to drive all the way back to South Carolina to go to work guiding airplanes safely to earth. Does this obligation weigh on him in any way? Of course not. He’s heading back to the RV lot to “pitch a bitch”—his term for a parking lot hoedown. Even Mike Dubose is able to put aside the question of his job security long enough for hugs and high fives from his team. He’s scampering off the field when a CBS reporter intercepts him. “Coach I have to ask you—Do you feel like this win is important in terms of taking the focus off you and putting it back on your football team?”

“I don’t know about all that,” Dubose says. “This football team is a good football team. The other stuff—we don’t have any control over.”

Fatalism is the right attitude, I think. In Moby Dick, Ishmael says that the secret to enjoying time on a whale ship is just to assume from the outset that you won’t survive the journey. After that, every subsequent experience—every moment of not dying—is gravy. The same might be said of the Alabama coaching job. Last week, Dubose was gone. This week, he came within one play of losing his job. But he’s still alive, in a sense, with nothing to lose.

The question of Dubose’s job is one every Alabama fan is content to put off, at least for an evening. It’s time to hit the bars. I follow Frances to a place called Harry’s—a rat hole of a pub covered in rusty, bullet-pocked road signs, with a ten-foot-tall mural of Bear Bryant overlooking the bar. The place is overrun by college kids enjoying the house drink—a bucket of red punch and pure grain alcohol. The bar is a swirling olfactory kaleidoscope of cigarettes, whiskey fumes, and the stale smell of wet, beer-soaked wood. A band rips Pearl Jam covers at an eardrum-searing volume. Everyone, especially Frances, is dancing. There’s a lake of vomit in the men’s bathroom, which the patrons walk around blithely, as if it were supposed to be there, like a piece of furniture. No one seems to mind. Life in Tuscaloosa has returned to normal.