Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  A worksheet was due that day deciphering the meaning of some lines from Macbeth, and Don was handed a copy of the homework by someone else so he could copy down the answers. The class time was supposed to be spent doing a little crossword puzzle on the play, but Don didn’t do much of it and it didn’t seem to matter. The instructor for her part believed that the text the students used, Adventures in English Literature, which contained selected works by Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and Daniel Defoe among others, was too hard for them. She said also that they absolutely hated any assignment in which they had to interpret what they had read. If they had to think about anything, make critical judgments and deliberations, the cause was hopeless. The best they could be expected to do was regurgitate.

  In sociology, Don generously passed around his bag of cookies. He and the other students watched eagerly as accounts of one gruesome murder after another passed over the tiny VCR screen, accompanied by the hushed melodrama of Geraldo Rivera. The teacher gave no instruction the entire period, except to applaud the actions of a man who, in broad daylight at an airport, killed a manacled criminal suspect accused of molesting the man’s son.

  Don, of course, was a football player, which gave him special status among his peers regardless of how he performed in class. In the hierarchy of the school, where girls and partying and clothes and fancy cars were as important as academics, being a football player opened doors that other students could only dream of. All other achievements seemed to pale in the face of it.

  Eddie Driscoll, a wonderfully articulate student ranked number two in the senior class, loved to read and debate and throw out ideas. He stood out in class like a sore thumb. There were some who admired him and others who considered him a pompous windbag. Despite all his academic accomplishments, Eddie himself often wondered what it would be like to sit in those two rows at the front of the pep rally each Friday in a brotherhood as supremely elite as Skull and Bones at Yale or the Porcellian Club at Harvard. Such musings didn’t make him resentful of the football players; he liked them. He just felt a little envious. No matter how many books he read, no matter how exquisite his arguments in government class about gun control or the Sandinistas or the death penalty, he never got the latest scoop on who was having the weekend parties. Only the football players were privy to that sacred knowledge.

  “The football identity is so glorious,” he said. “I always wondered what it would have been like if I had been a football player. I think it would be great to be in the limelight and be part of the team, have a geisha girl bring me candy three times a day.”

  Roqui Pearce, who had graduated from Permian in 1988 and was going out with starting defensive cornerback Coddi Dean, said there was definitely a mystique in the school about dating a Permian football player. “Everybody’s into football. Football is the sport. I wouldn’t say it’s an honor or anything but it’s looked up to: ‘Wow, you’re going out with a football player, a Permian football player.’”

  Roqui had been chosen a Pepette her senior year. Lots were drawn to see which player each Pepette would be assigned to for the season. Some of the players were obnoxious and egotistical, but Roqui didn’t really mind as long as it was a football player she got and not one of the student trainers. “Nobody wants a trainer. You want a football player.”

  She had ended up being assigned to Coddi, who was then a junior. At the Watermelon Feed that year, she hadn’t worn his number on her jersey, which angered him. But they hit it off well. “I liked him, plus I wanted to be a real good Pepette. I didn’t want him to think I was a bad Pepette. I wanted to be a good Pepette.” She brought Coddi an ice cream cake in the shape of a football field from Baskin-Robbins. She baked him cakes and brownies. She got him a black trash can and filled it with popcorn balls. She gave him a towel and pillowcase decorated with the insignia of Mojo and Texas. After several months they went on a date and then started going out steadily.

  From time to time the role of the Pepette became controversial. A stinging editorial in the school newspaper, the Permian Press, applauded a new rule prohibiting Pepettes from placing candy in players’ lockers every Friday. “Though losing a tradition, Pepettes have gained much respect,” said the editorial. “No longer will a member be the personal Geisha girl of a player. Instead, she can focus more on the organization’s original purpose, boosting morale. And in so doing she will carry the image of professionalism she deserves for her work bolstering the famous Mojo spirit.” But the Pepettes still spent time baking players cookies and making them signs. Since they could no longer put goodies in the lockers of the players, they just handed the stuff to them instead or dropped it off at their houses.

  Their role was symptomatic of the role all girls played at Permian. “You hate to admit it in this day and time, but a lot of girls are conditioned towards liberal arts courses rather than engineering and science,” said Callie Tave, who found herself perpetually buried under a blizzard of forms and recommendation requests since she was the only college counselor for the seven-hundred-member senior class.

  The attitude that girls at Permian seemed to have about themselves was reflected during an economics class one day when Dorothy Fowler, a spirited and marvelous teacher, tried to wake students up to the realities of the world in West Texas where the days of the fat-paying blue-collar job were over.

  “Think about your jobs. Where do you want to be in five years?” asked Fowler of a female student.

  “Rich,” the student replied.

  “How are you going to achieve that?”

  “Marry someone.”

  On the SAT exam, boys who took the test during 1988-89 at Permian had a combined average score of 915 (433 verbal, 482 mathematical), 19 points below the national average for boys. Girls had a combined score of 840 (404 verbal, 436 mathematical), 75 points below their male counterparts at Permian and 35 points below the national average for girls. Of the 132 girls who took the test during the 1988-89 school year, there wasn’t one who got above a 650 in either the math or verbal portions of the exam.

  “It’s very revered to be a Pepette or a cheerleader,” said Julie Gardner, who had come to Odessa from a small college town in Montana as a sophomore. “It’s the closest they can get to being a football player.” Gardner found the transition to Permian enormously difficult. She was utterly unprepared for her first pep rally, for all those fanatical cheers, all those arms pumping so frantically up and down, and she found the girls cliquey and obsessed with appearance. At first she dressed up like everyone else, but then she began to reject it. And because she was intelligent (she graduated from Permian in 1986 and went on to become an honors English major at Swarthmore College), she also felt ostracized.

  “It was very important to have a boyfriend and look a certain way. You couldn’t be too smart. You had to act silly or they put you in a category right away. It was the end of your social life if you were an intelligent girl.” The pressure to conform was so intense, said Gardner, that she knew girls who privately were quite intelligent and articulate, but were afraid to show it publicly because of the effect it would have on their social lives.

  Her father, H. Warren Gardner, vice president of the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, a branch of the University of Texas system located in Odessa, believed the disparities in performance between boys and girls were a result of the social hierarchy of the school. Gardner said it was clear to him that girls had to “dumb down” at Permian or else run the risk of being excluded from dating and parties because the boys considered them too smart. “It’s not appropriate [for a girl] to be intelligent,” he concluded. “It’s not popular to be bright.”

  And being a Pepette, despite the restriction making candy off-limits to the locker room, still carried status. “I hate football players, especially at Permian,” said senior Shauna Moody. “They’re the most egotistical . . . they think they’re God’s gift.” But for a girl at Permian, the only thing worse than being a Pepette was not being one. Or as Moody explained
her own reasoning for having joined, “Well, everybody’s a Pepette.”

  Cheerleading had a special cachet for girls at Permian as well. Just as the football players walked down the school halls in their game jerseys on Fridays, so did the cheerleaders in their uniforms. There were five girls on the cheerleading squad, all of them white, and they had enormous visibility.

  The most popular of them was Bridgitte Vandeventer, who had always wanted to be a cheerleader. “Everyone knew who Permian was and who Mojo was, and I thought it would be neat to be a Permian cheerleader,” said Bridgitte, who had lived with her grandparents since she was eight.

  The most wonderful moment of her life, she said, was being crowned Homecoming Queen, and she had vivid memories of it—changing from her cheerleading uniform into a black velvet dress, wearing a fantastic spread of mums adorned with black and white streamers and trinkets in the shape of little footballs that one of the players had given her, dutifully waiting in line with the other finalists at halftime and then hearing her name called, holding the hand of her best friend as she walked around the oval of the stadium with tears in her eyes, receiving four dozen red roses afterward from admirers. Because of her status at school and her friendliness, she had no lack of them.

  For a while she went out with Brian Chavez, and it was hard not to feel proud when she saw him on the football field. “It was neat to say, that’s my boyfriend out there, that’s who I’m dating. The time Brian scored a touchdown, I was never so excited. . . .”

  Brian was Hispanic, but that didn’t make her uncomfortable. “My grandmother says, ‘whites are for whites, Hispanics are for Hispanics, blacks are for blacks.’ I don’t think blacks are for whites, whites for blacks. I think Hispanics are fine because they’re as close to whites as you can get.”

  She had many ambitions for her life. She wanted to go into the medical field. She wanted to be Miss Universe. She wanted to open a dance studio. She wanted to be famous. She wanted to write a book about her life.

  But for the immediate future, her plans included going to the junior college in town, Odessa College. A main reason she was going there was her failure to take the college boards, a requirement for admission at most four-year schools. Bridgitte said she had been advised by a teacher at Permian not to take the SAT exam until after the football season because of her myriad duties as a cheerleader. But she didn’t seem upset about it, and one thing was obvious—her popularity at school was unrivaled. Not only was she crowned Homecoming Queen, she was also voted Miss PHS by her classmates. Clearly she was a role model.

  “I just want to be known,” said Bridgitte in summing up her hopes in life. “I want everybody to know me, but not in a bad way. My dream is to be known, to be successful, and to help people. I love to help people.

  “I look forward to getting out on my own and tryin’ the world. They say it’s a real rat race and I hope to win it.”

  With his dark, pouty looks, it was hard not to think of Don Billingsley as a movie star when he walked down the halls of Permian, gently fending off female admirers in his black football jersey, except for those two or three or four or five who seemed to have a certain special something. The way he talked to them, with his head ducked low and the words coming out in a sweet, playful cadence, suggested a certain self-recognition of his aura. Sophomore girls fantasized over having him in the same class so they could catch a glimpse of his buttocks in a tight-fitting pair of jeans. He received inquiries about his availability for stripteases. The characterization used by girl after girl to describe him was the same, said with the wistfulness of irrepressible infatuation: “He’s so fine!”

  Aware of his image as the best-looking guy at Permian and fortunate enough not to have school interfere with the responsibilities that came with such a title, much of his day was spent flirting either silently with his eyes or with his benign naughtiness in the classroom. He might not be learning anything, but school was a blast and everywhere he looked he was fending off girls—the one who sat behind him in government and wanted a relationship (Don had to explain to her gently but firmly that he didn’t “do” relationships), the one who sat behind him in food science (he went out with her for a while but it wasn’t what he was looking for), the one who came up to him in the hallway.

  Then there was the girl who had been dubbed the “book bitch.” So desperate was she to ingratiate herself with the football players that she bought one of them a brand-new backpack and then offered him fifty dollars to sleep with her. When that didn’t work, she offered to bring the books of several of them to class. Dutifully, she waited in the hallway, whereupon Don and some others loaded her down with books so she could trudge off to class with them with a slightly chagrined smile on her face, as if she knew that what she was doing was the price you paid for trying to gain the acceptance of the football players when you had blemishes on your face and didn’t look like Farrah Fawcett.

  Don was clearly not motivated to be a scholar. His class rank at Permian going into his senior year was the second lowest of any senior on the football team, 480 out of 720. He reveled in playing the Sean Penn role in his own version of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but beneath all that was a witty, personable kid. During the fall he was voted Mr. PHS, an honor that delighted his classmates and stunned the hell out of his teachers and coaches. The nondemanding, lethargic nature of the classes he was in made it difficult to fault his attitude about school. Left to his own devices, he did what any high school senior in America would do: he took advantage of it.

  Asked what the purpose of school was at Permian, Don had a simple answer. “Socializing,” he said candidly. “That’s all senior year is good for.” That, and playing football. If there was any angst about school, it was over the number of girls who desired to spend at least some part of their lives with him. They were everywhere. Girls in short leather skirts. Girls in expensive designer jeans. Girls who spent the last five minutes of class carefully applying rouge and lipstick to their faces because the teacher had run out of things to say. The perplexity of it all gnawed at him a great deal more than the meaning of Macbeth. Or as he put it in a line probably not inspired by Shakespeare’s play, “There’s so much skin around, it’s hard to pick out one.”

  There were other football players who had light schedules. One of his teammates, Jerrod McDougal, had taken senior English the previous summer so that he wouldn’t have to grapple with it during the football season. There was something wonderfully soulful about Jerrod. He was unusually sensitive and spoke with pained and poignant sorrow about the confusion of growing up in a world, in an America, that seemed so utterly different from the one that had spawned the self-made success of his father. His class rank was in the top third, but because of football Jerrod wanted as little challenge as possible his senior year. With English out of the way, he was taking government and the electives of sociology, computer math, photography, and food science.

  “That’s why I took all my hard courses my sophomore and junior year, so I wouldn’t have to worry about any of that stuff,” he said one afternoon after food science, where Billingsley and he had just spent sixty minutes on a worksheet containing 165 fill-in-the-blanks on the uses of a microwave. “Maybe that’s a bad deal, I don’t know.”

  Permian’s best and brightest, those ranked in the top ten, reported few demands made of them in the classroom as well. Eddie Driscoll, who would end up attending Oberlin College, said he had never been pushed at Permian and generally had half an hour’s worth of homework a night. Scott Crutchfield, another gifted student ranked in the top ten who would end up going to Duke, said he had two to three hours of homework a week. “I think I’d probably learn more if I had to do more work. As it is, I still learn a lot, I guess. In general, I don’t do a lot.”

  II

  In computer science, Brian Chavez wore faded blue jeans and black Reeboks. The number 85 jersey around his expansive chest nicely matched his earring with the numeral 85 embossed in gold. He had a fleshy face i
n need of a shave and his hair looked a little like that of the main character in Eraserhead, high and square on top like an elevated putting surface. It came as no surprise that he held the Permian record for the bench press with 345 pounds.

  The way he looked, five eleven and 215 pounds, the way he loved to hit on a football field, the way the words came so slowly out of his mouth sometimes as if he had a two-by-four stuck in there somewhere, it was hard to think he had any chance of making it past high school unless he got a football scholarship somewhere.

  He fit every stereotype of the dumb jock, all of which went to show how absolutely meaningless stereotypes can be. He was a remarkable kid from a remarkable family, inspired by his father, whose own upbringing in the poverty of El Paso couldn’t have been more different.

  Ranked number one in his class at Permian, he moved effortlessly between the world of the football and the academic elite. On the field he was a demon, with a streak of nastiness that every coach loved to see in a football player. Off the field he was quiet, serene, and smart as a whip, his passivity neatly hiding an astounding determination to succeed. “He’s two different people,” Winchell said of him. “He’s got a split personality when he puts on that helmet.”

  From computer science he made his way to honors calculus, where a black balloon from the Friday pep rally floated casually from his knapsack. On the way there he was handed a note by Bridgitte that read, “Have fun at lunch and I either will see you before lunch or after lunch. Okay! Smile! Love you!” In calculus class he casually scribbled his answers in a white notebook, an exercise that seemed as mentally strenuous to him as trying to see whether he still remembered the alphabet. While others strained and fretted he just seemed to glide, and inevitably several classmates gathered around him to watch him produce the right answer. After calculus it was off to honors physics and then honors English and then honors chemistry. These courses came easily to him as well. Part of that had to do with what was asked of him—with the exception of English, he said he had almost no homework.