When we were eight or nine, we used to insist that our parents drop us off at the high school football on Saturday afternoons, before the games were moved to Friday nights, so that we could congregate in front of the hot dog stands in anticipation of our pastime: Kill the guy with the ball. I can smell the scents of those cool and overcast fall afternoons as I write, the steam and mustard from the concessions, the earthiness of the dried mud on our sneakers and sweatshirts. Kill the guy with the ball is a modified form of rugby, in which a rubberized kid-sized football is tossed up in a crowd of about 15 and the person who catches it runs away for as long as he can without being gang tackled. Inevitably when this happens he’ll drop the ball and another player will take up where he left off.
There are no sides picked in this competition and no scoring. It’s a rotating 14 against one, by contrast dodge ball is for mood indigo girls. I think my record was eight yards without getting tackled, and I didn’t have the advantage of a low center of gravity. And of our home-town team that Saturday afternoon? Hell, who won. Good times.
I woke up from this daydream and summoned a genuine dream, in which we were young again and standing around in the library deciding what we would choose for names on fake IDs. Naturally our characters transitioned into cult actors or musicians, and I feel for the classmate who was a generation insufficiently liberated to have chosen the Wilson sisters. These pieces of plastic were cheap enough, we could have had five each, but the irony is that no sane beverage outlet would accept them as real, and those that would, would serve 16 year olds with or without IDs heralding that the buyer was of legal drinking age.
Thus, five of each it was, though Sue was too young to understand the rules and she could get older guys to buy for her regardless. Her ante was Comaland, see. Her day to day outfits could make a blind man see again, but she turned out to be the girl next door who wasn’t the cutest thing around after the age of 40, and who didn’t learn how to play the game. This is not the Sue who was 10,000 maniacs, but she was close.
The dream returned and Gary, this Gary who I liked, pleaded with me:
“We have to be near the elevator, we have to find the elevator.”
“But we’re on the ground floor, the first floor,” I reasoned back.
The back of this Gary’s leg itched through his jeans, and it turned contagious. The car spun out of control, and that turned contagious too, causing my heart to stop.
Did you wake up on the right or wrong side of the bed? It depends on what hue of dreams my night closed with. The positive omen of good dreams is that they put you in the best mood to start the day and the silver lining to nightmares is that they were only a dream. It’s the dreams which are inconclusive or noncommittal which cause the most unsettlement, and the ones led by the stewards of sustainability which prompt the most anguish, those gentlemen and air hostesses of climate change. We should be conscientious citizens as a matter of course, without special titles, nanny states, prizes or make-work jobs. Stop the boat or don’t, I’m already off.