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USC Football Gameday, And Why College Stays Young

Michael Juliani |
October 6, 2011 | 4:34 p.m. PDT

Columnist

Editor's Note: "USC Football Gameday, And Why College Stays Young" is part of Michael Juliani's poetic series, "From Young Rooms."

 

(Photo by Hannah Liu)
(Photo by Hannah Liu)
“He was seeing all those things which are invisible to young people…experience was much more than a defense against death; it was a right; the right of old men.” -Sartre, Nausea

This area at night turns colors in more than the obvious way. The people look different. It’s the divide of desire: those who during the day have their hair in buns drawn tight with drawstrings or snipped nooses stalk the spotted sidewalks like lovely Medusas in Catwoman outfits—athletes suddenly turn to men of muscled sophistication, showered, cologne-smelling (limes), fresh gum-chewed winterbreath mouths, ears sparkling with studs—windows brighten with the off-white diseased illumination of cheap lamps and lights, pajama pants curled into a study chair like cats. The windows of tall buildings collect into a scattered checkerboard of electricity.

It is not a place meant for the old. Privacy preserves itself in solitude. Time becomes a form within which life becomes content. Days combine themselves into a monologue of responsibility or idleness. Left alone with the mind, the psychology creates its own problems: the simple world concaves with metaphysics, superstitions, almost a surrealism played out in the expanse of opportunity. The street corners, the doorways, these small interactions with people, they take on an unknowable energy. It fills you with futility. Should I be walking now? I should’ve spent all day in my room, diligent in a life pursuit of constant dream. Old folks, regal, deserve any rest they can get. They’ve lived, they’ve adventured. No moment up till now has been wasted. Young people are at war with opportunities.

That’s why therapists say to exercise if you’re feeling depressed—there is science to it. The science seems insane in its obvious rules.

(“I’m sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am.” --Dostoevsky)

The science holds to a practicality that verves from hindsight—it’s an old practice that the young must respect, must pursue. Exercise begets pristine presence—the healthy body reflects the healthy mind. The old would have their bodies in shape if only the body would let them. Their minds are bent with the strongest preserve—their lives have been static in their devotions, the type of story a painting tells about someone’s life: depth and perspective, all from the wrinkles and sense of themselves—their skins like cured meats.

“Normal” men with physiques like mine get their fulfillment vicariously from the little red men beating brains down in the amphitheater of noise and collision. The red men get their sense of worth from all our platitudes. They look healthy in comparison to us. We look healthy in comparison to them.

(Football, the multitudes of men):

 The immortal man is 20 years old (in America). No one man gets the ethereal bandage—it’s the age. And if you have the physical talent, you’ll be godlike on Saturdays and television for a year or two, subject to all the dreamlike pains and awed excuses of the gods. Football player bodies seem drained of normal fats, like it slides out of them quickly in the sweat. What’s left is gargoyle stone. Lumbering in basketball shorts and sandals with socks, necklaces, headphones, mumbling lyrics to themselves, calmly jaywalking, they’re like urban bears designed by quasi-natural chemistry. The alchemic results of erosion from a mountainside. When you walk close to them sometimes you feel like throwing up (their anomalous size/shape is overwhelming like a shocking piece of breaking news, legends in the flesh).

(Saturday, September 19…12:22 p.m.):

It’s gameday (Syracuse) so I head for the notebook right after stretching, seeing it’s 12 and cracking my neck, my back, my push-ups on the floor. Someone’s taking a shower. The water sounds like rushing pipes full of steam. I’d like to use the bathroom—we’re all in the habit of hogging. Lately we’ve been getting a lot of cold water. I dance around the back of the tub introducing my body to the shock one section at a time. It’s like being stabbed, I imagine. The surprised piece of flesh reverberates into the coils of the body, and I shudder like a slinked length of metal adopting the freeze.

The football game shows who’s powerful. The air everywhere smells of barbeque smoke twirled with the meats’ fat drip and dense cigar almost-sweet nauseating smell and beer. The girls (most of them) turn the day into a fashion show and party. A good number know the rules and nuances (reasons for excitement) of the game—some know more than anybody and like to be loud about it. –“When they called that penalty I almost went into labor!” Graduate students sit together visibly older, calmer, out-of-shape, fine being lost within us. They’re the people who bring their own food and water to the game—they’re like parents. Some of them do have children. If I’m old enough to have some they are too.

Whole handles of vodka—they look like chilled bottles of ice water set in the center of tables at Italian restaurants. The girls’ cheeks look powdered and lips cherried. The Stereotype.

(“The Greeks teach me to shout into the waves so people will listen,” Nick Flynn, “1967.”)

My mother and sister shuffle between chants and cans like refugees, my mother noting the torrential mayhem, the incredible escape and waste-of-time of booze—she counts her blessings, never having had more than sips. My sister marvels.

Half-hour later I spin around like in a funhouse checking mirrors warping my own need for the young renegade prerogative. They don’t look like rock stars. They fill garbage cans with collapsed cardboard 30-packs. Charcoal digs into the grass like black cubes of ice. Portable televisions, tents, refrigerators, footballs, jerseys, sodas, beer, meat, beads, hairspray, coolers, sofas, chairs, heating lamps, fans, bandanas, tables, cigars, malt liquor, sandals, sunglasses, and bright white tennis shoes. A bunch of men who look like Ronald Reagan and a bunch of men who look like they just got out of jail.

The Trojans, the breeders of an ancient war over a woman—Helen taken from Menelaus by Paris—some say raped, some say seduced into a nebulous Stockholm Syndrome of egomania: the most prized possession, she feels, to be admired and warred over by two empires of mighty men. Aphrodite promised Paris the most beautiful woman in the world—he picked, inevitably, the one who brought the greatest destruction. They run onto the field like warriors in expensive jerseys. The drunken masses explode. Our hands go up with pure release. Athleticism is an art form. Sport is something else. I wonder where Helen of Troy sits and watches.

(5:04 p.m.):

One of the defensive linemen worked in the bookstore the day I came down to school to get my books for freshman year. “My first day,” he kept saying, like a puppy. He was in cargo shorts that were long even on him, corn rows, a work shirt: USC BOOKSTORE EMPLOYEE (or something like that). August. It was hot. I asked him what he knew about my Spanish class, third level. I passed into it with an online placement test I thought I’d failed. The Spanish classes in high school were more exercises on whether or not you could guess logic in the teachers’ insanity. “Where’d you go for high school?” he asked, cocking his head, smiling. –“Loyola.” --“Psh, Loyola. You be fine.”

(7:31 p.m.):

The guardrails and barricades of the student section entrance line throb with the loud complaints, shoulder shoving, inebriated attitude of entitlement and purpose—tunnel vision is what it is…the goal to cut up to the front and with all your friends, too. “Come on! We paid for tickets and look where we are!” a girl, stuck in reason, calls to police on the other side. The officers have their hands full, sometimes literally. Young people don’t like hearing no, and in the worst way sometimes some dudes don’t understand why a big fist in the chest is escorting them out. Who would like that? Cops, in the end, are only people—but they’re also just doing their job. I think it’s still hard to believe being touched by an adult that way (even though we’re, you know, adults too). This cop had spiked blonde hair and looked a bit removed from college-aged. Black “skater” sunglasses, pretty big arms. Guy was in a tanktop, probably equal size, freckles all over his arms, kept backing up with knuckle raps on the letters over his breastbone. “Why, man, come on—what?—I didn’t do shit.”

Three glittered shot-soused girls stare horrified into another officer’s face, hearing some bad news. Everywhere smells like running makeup and alcohol breath—“mustard gas and roses,” Vonnegut called it. Suppose they’re being asked to leave. Their faces look like does’—soft, firm, arched. They start to rebut, “No, but—“ “No, but—“ “No, but—“

But keep moving everybody—high fives, yells, squeezing between crags in the steel system. “Fuck this shit, let’s go.” Rushing in like a river toward a waterfall. ID’s out. Dressed like a Trojan circus—gold short shorts with black custom t-shirts, long knee socks, painted bodies, full spandex costumes. The grass ground trampled completely to dirt. “Empty your pockets. Alright, lift up your shirt. Turn around.”

(Rivalry):

Once, at a Notre Dame game at the Coliseum, a few drunk Trojan fans, clearly not alumni, designated a urinal in the men’s room as SC-only. A Notre Dame guy, late twenties, pushed his way in front of it (there were rows of open bowls). With his penis in his hand he got decked in the temple. A white-haired donation-heavy grandpa in Cardinal and Gold said, despairingly but unsurprised, “Ah come one boys, why the fuck did you do that?” I walked out as LAPD came in, six deep, looking sick of the gameday gig.

(The new breast milk):

Spilling out of her shirt careless, dressed in the dark, makeup’s just fine. Gladiator sandals, ankles strapped for war. Regularly dresses and undresses in the company of our gay friend. She came to school with a nose ring, a pot-smoking boyfriend of three years, brown hair that looked like a woven basket, a Northern California tan (a forest tan). It sounded fair to save her and a couple friends good student section seats in exchange for some smuggled vodka baggies.

I still didn’t very much want to—sitting in the sun till it went down past the rim of the Coliseum from the ocean at around 4:30. The Coliseum got rid of alcohol sales several years ago presumably after being sick of fistfights, vomit, and drunk driving en masse. They’ve certainly jacked up the hot dog and soda prices to counter the dent in profit. What you have then is hundreds of severely liquored young people and nostalgic alumni descending onto the narrow gates on the verge of all varieties of collapse, illness, and accident.

The kids barfing weird colors of tailgate food onto their shoes. The cops have to cordon off rows and quarantine the green, ghostly dude before paramedics clean him up and take him away. I heard recently about a guy who passed out sometime during the second half, waking up an hour later in his seat to an otherwise empty, trash-strewn stadium. The game had ended. Everyone had left him there. Or you have people like me who take sweaty, warm plastic bags of vodka from stash spots in buxom bras and mix it with a concession stand Coke to avoid arrest and a flat first quarter.

 

Reach Columnist Michael Juliani here; follow him here.



 

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