Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  In temperament, Gaines was the complete opposite of his predecessor, for just as John Wilkins had been dubbed Darth Vader by some of those who worked for him, so Gaines was privately called Luke Skywalker. He did have many of the qualities of the Star Wars hero, a kind of wholesome purity that seemed too good to be true but was so natural as to make him appear almost delicate.

  “No high is higher and no low is lower than what this game is, I’m tellin’ you,” Gaines said in the dressing room minutes after the game against the Rebels had ended. “A year’s worth of work goin’ down the tubes in a New York second.”

  A few minutes later Wilkins came in.

  “Sorry, Coach,” said Wilkins.

  “Me too.”

  Gaines fell silent after that, looking boyish with his hand propped against the side of his neck and his black PERMIAN cap resting in his lap like a kitten.

  Wilkins was quiet also. He stared at the floor and then pulled out his pocketknife and started whittling his nails.

  II

  “America can’t even take care of America anymore,” said Jerrod McDougal.

  He had a shotgun lying across his lap and he was going hunting one fall afternoon with his dad and younger brother for white-tailed deer on a plot of land that seemed as vacant and exotic as a moon crater. They were near the town of Girvin, which had a population of fifty and a closed-up store with an outdoor concrete dance floor so smooth and sweet it seemed as if it only could have been built for ghosts.

  “We bombed Japan in World War Two, and now they’re kicking our ass,” said Jerrod, riding atop a specially built bench on the back of a pickup that was a little like riding in a rickshaw. “Our smartest kids are average compared with Japan’s smartest kids.”

  The pickup truck bounced along a dirt road, past jagged bits of rock that glinted like discarded razor blades, and strangling, spurting limbs of mesquite, and brittle branches with half-inch thorns like uncut fingernails, and draping braids of low-lying cactus. Jackrabbits weaved in and out.

  “It was stupid not to let MacArthur finish off those rice eaters. Push ’em back.”

  In the front seat was Jerrod’s father, Evert. On a wing and a prayer after quitting college he had scrounged up enough money to buy a dump truck in Crane. Starting with that one truck he had built himself a company that specialized in oil field construction—building roads and drill sites. In the good times the company had grossed $6 million a year, with yards in Crane and Odessa and Kermit. Evert had bought a house for his family over in University Gardens with ceilings as tall as in a cathedral and a pool out back and a beautifully appointed living room that had elegant figurines in the shape of elephants. But then the hard times of the bust had come and the gross of the business had been cut in half. He had closed one of the yards and was trying to get rid of that house with the ceilings as tall as a cathedral’s if he could somehow find a buyer for it.

  Jerrod’s brother Jaxon was also in the front seat, with a shotgun hanging out the window. He was fourteen and he was still feeling the physical and psychological effects of a football injury two years earlier. It had come during kickoff practice in the seventh grade. A couple of kids had hit him high and a couple had hit him low. The right femur snapped. As a result of extensive surgery, his right leg had a steel plate in it with eight bolt holes. It had stopped growing. Because of that, his left leg needed surgery so that it would not become longer than the right one. He had been on crutches for about a year, and sometimes he cried because he wasn’t able to play football. Given the chance, he would eagerly suit up again. Like thousands of other kids in Odessa, he wanted a piece of the dream.

  “I don’t know what America’s thinking was,” said Jerrod as the pickup edged its way to a little butte rising out of the stubble and the rock. “You go to war. We popped the atom bomb. That should have been it. No more discussion. We’re on top and stayin’ on top.”

  The wind was getting colder, but Jerrod seemed impervious to it. His jacket remained unzipped, and he stared off to a point that only he could see.

  He thought about going to Australia.

  “It’s like the world’s last frontier, like America was the last frontier,” he said as the pickup got back out on the lonely highway and dissolved into the burnished hues of a red and purple sunset, past the buttes, past the endless fields of mesquite and thorns, past the ghostly dance floor of Girvin, on its way home.

  Whenever Jerrod talked about the possibilities of life he dwelled not on what he saw, but on what he didn’t. He couldn’t help but feel how strange it was to be growing up in this country now, in this place that didn’t seem like a land of opportunity at all but a land of failed dreams. How could he feel otherwise when he had seen what had happened to his father, how helpless his dad had been as all that work, all that sweat, all that go-for-it, take-a-chance fearlessness, had fallen victim to a crash in oil prices engineered by a bunch of people halfway across the earth? How could he feel otherwise when all he heard, all he read about, was how smart the Japanese were and how dumb Americans were? He could never do what his father had done, go out on his own after high school, start his own business, will himself into becoming an enormous success. It was like a fairy tale, something that just didn’t happen anymore.

  To think about it at all, about taking that terrifying plunge off the ramp of high school, scared him to death. But as long as he was in high school, doing what he was doing, he felt insulated. He felt safe.

  Winchell described Jerrod as being “kind of emotional.” Unlike most Odessans, he wasn’t afraid to express his fears and vulnerabilities. But like many kids who lived here, anger raged within him, and he liked to cultivate an image of fearless toughness.

  During lunch break from school he drove his jet black pickup, which looked liked something out of Road Warrior with its mile-high tires, at breakneck speeds through alleys and over curbs on the way to some fast-food Mexican place to wolf down food so quickly it was impossible to have tasted it. The sounds of Van Halen howled over the cassette player with the upbeat lilt of a dying wolf and his girlfriend of the moment sat next to him and giggled, “I love the way you drive.”

  He talked of how honored he was when the bat handed down by a group of senior players to the junior most likely to use it in a fight one night had been given to him. He talked of the time he and a kid from Andrews had gone at it over at B.S., a vacant spot over by the loop that kids used to hang out at to drink beer until the cops had finally busted it up. Someone had turned on one of those big flashlights and in the glare Jerrod could hear his friends yelling “Kick ’im! Kick ’im! Kick ’im! Kill ’im!” as he got it on with this fucker from Andrews who had pissed the shit out of him earlier that night. By the time Jerrod got off, the kid from Andrews was bleeding from his nose and lip and around the eye.

  “We got two things in Odessa,” Jerrod said once. “Oil and football. And oil’s gone. But we still got football, so fuck the rest of you.”

  He went to school and he behaved well in class, because outside of his Saturday night fighting he was polite and quiet. But school posed virtually no challenges his senior year. He was taking mostly electives, and he breezed through them with ease. Then came the real work.

  He got to football practice, where the demands and pressures were ceaseless the second he stepped on the field. Nothing he did went unnoticed. If he did something well, he received praise. If he did something wrong, it was pointed out in painstaking detail. And if it wasn’t detected during practice, it was discovered afterward, when the coaches retired to their office to watch videos of the day’s workout on the elaborate video machine that had been donated by the booster club.

  Jerrod had done everything it took to become a starter for the Permian football team. He knew he had to because of the physical liability of being only five nine. He threw up regularly during the off-season workouts. He worked tirelessly in the weight room, his red cheeks bulging and his body vibrating. He religiously studied his blocking assignm
ents for each game, because he was not about to make a careless mental error. He got up twice a week around six-forty-five to be at the early morning practice before school had even started. On Saturday mornings, he got up to listen to the five coaches tear the team apart during the critique of the game on film.

  He routinely pushed himself beyond what he thought possible because he knew if he didn’t, he wouldn’t make it. In return there was a fantastic, visceral payoff—a single season of his life in which he became a prince, ogled at, treasured, bathed in the unimaginable glory of Friday night. It was he who described being a Permian football player as like being a gladiator, like walking into the Roman Colosseum with all those thousands in the stands yelling yay or nay, all wishing they could be you down there on that field.

  All he thought about, all he dreamed about, was playing for Permian. Although he anguished over the future and worried about this country that seemed so impossibly hard to grow up in now, he tried to block it out of his mind. “lf I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have played very well,” he said.

  The house with the cathedral ceilings wasn’t his home. The locker room was. “That is our place,” he said. “There’s days we come up here before the sun comes up and we don’t come home until it comes down. It’s ours, it’s like our home. I’ve spent more time up there. . . . I’ve eaten more food up there than I have in my own dining room.”

  There were days when he didn’t know if he could take it anymore, days during the off-season when it was time to do the dreaded mat exercises in the hot, sweaty weight room, those endless flips and somersaults at full speed. “I threw up whether I ate anything at lunch or not. There were days I didn’t eat, it didn’t do any good.” But the image of Friday night always kept him going.

  “I just think this is what I wanted to do, so let’s go. Friday night, it’s gonna be great, it’s gonna be beautiful.”

  Beating the Rebels, said Jerrod McDougal, was the most important thing in his life. When Permian lost, it became the biggest disappointment in his life. “There was no doubt in my mind we were going to win that game,” he said. “There was no doubt in anyone’s mind in Odessa.” He said he felt heartbroken, as if someone painfully close to him had died, and he said he had no idea what he would do if Permian didn’t make the playoffs and the season suddenly ended in a few days. What would life without football be like? He knew he would be lost, just like his senior friends before him had been lost. He would feel as if it was no longer possible to keep balance anymore, as hopeless as if he was trying to ride a seesaw by himself. All during the season he had worried about it. “It’s gonna suck,” he said right before the Lee game, “but hopefully I can keep busy. The only way to make it decent is if we win State. For the seniors, it will be the fulfillment of a dream. But even then it won’t lessen the pain.” And now it had become an absolute mess.

  His mother, Dale, felt the same way, for football had become as important to her as it had to her son. She went to every practice, and on Thursday nights she always invited a bunch of the players over for lasagna. She had sobbed after the loss to Lee just as hard as Jerrod had, for she feared the season’s ending every bit as much as he did.

  She blamed Coach Gaines for the pain she and her son were going through, and she simply couldn’t face him anymore. “I told my husband, I’m sure he needs a friendly face right now. Unfortunately, I can’t bring myself to do it,” she said as she watched practice several days after the Lee game, her face rilled with apprehension at the thought that the team might not make it to the playoffs.

  “I’ll be okay. I’ll get over it,” she said. “I thought he was a better coach than that and he got scared.”

  Like many others in town, she wasn’t sure if Gaines had what it took to be head coach at a place like Permian, to withstand all the pressure, to win all the games that were requisite to survive. “It may have cost Jerrod what we consider a state championship team,” she said in the soft afternoon light of the practice field, “but it may have cost Gary a career.”

  But there was a way for Gaines to salvage the season. There was a way to turn those who hated him into good, loyal believers again, to get all this incomprehensible pressure off him. He alone held the power to set his life, and thousands of others’ lives, on the right track again.

  It just depended on what his instincts told him as he lifted his wan, depleted face to the ceiling of a truck stop off the interstate past midnight and silently decided where he would rather place his fate: heads or tails.

  (13)

  HEADS OR TAILS

  I

  The Permian Panthers finished the regular season on the first Friday night of November by pummeling the San Angelo Bobcats. That same night, the Midland Lee Rebels finished the season by routing the Cooper Cougars, and the Midland High Bulldogs did likewise by beating the Abilene High Eagles. All three teams had identical five and one records in the district, and a numbing scenario was set up.

  Since only two teams could go to the playoffs, the district’s tiebreaker rule went into effect: a coin toss.

  After all that work and all those endless hours, it seemed silly. But that’s what the outcome of the season had finally been reduced to—three grown men still dressed in their coach’s outfits driving in the middle of the night to a truck stop so they could stand together like embarrassed school-boys and throw coins into the air to determine whether their seasons ended at that very moment or continued.

  It was a simple process of odd man out. If there were two tails and a heads, the one who flipped heads did not make the playoffs. If there were two heads and a tails, the one who flipped tails did not make the playoffs. If they all flipped the same, they just did it again until someone lost.

  It was hard for Gaines to find solace in any of this. But at the very least, the place wouldn’t be a complete circus. By universal agreement among school officials, it had been decided not to disclose the location of the coin toss to the public. Doing so, they felt, would result in a crowd of several thousand waiting outside and a possible riot depending on who won the flip and who lost it.

  “We are not releasing the place of the meeting,” Midland school district athletic director Gil Bartosh had told the Midland Reporter-Telegram several days before the toss. “We are fearful that four or five thousand people might show up and we don’t need a carnival atmosphere for this. After all, some people are going to be unhappy. There is no way around that.”

  As Gary Gaines drove along the dark ribbon of highway past Bobs Creek and Fools Creek after the San Angelo game, he knew he had no control over anything now. All he could do was pray that God felt mercy for all souls, even those who somehow found themselves needing it at the Convoy truck stop, where grim-faced men in white cowboy hats picked at plates of gargantuan steak fingers as if they were picking up rocks to see what might be buried beneath them.

  To no one’s surprise, Permian had just trounced the Bobcats 41-7. Winchell had thrown for 211 yards and two touchdowns, giving him a total of twenty for the season. Comer had rushed for 135 yards to up his total to 1,221 yards. If anything, the game simply proved how talented the team was. It gave Permian a regular season record of eight and two, and both losses had been by a single point each.

  But it wasn’t good enough without a trip to the playoffs and everybody knew it, most of all Gaines. This hadn’t been one of those underachieving teams whose only hope was a fantastic combination of luck and miracle. This had been a can’t-miss team, and if it didn’t make the playoffs, it was scary to imagine the enmity that thousands in town would feel for him.

  Unseen, on the edges of the undulating buttes, deer and wild turkeys stirred and every now and then the night burst alive with a shooting star that left a delicate and misty trail. It was a beautiful night and his car was just one of a steady stream of vehicles belonging to Permian supporters making their way back from San Angelo like worshipers returning from a pilgrimage. They had prayed in San Angelo for a win. And now they would go to th
eir homes to pray that Gaines would have the presence of mind to throw heads if it should be heads, or tails if it should be tails.

  He was in the front seat and next to him was Belew, nervously sucking one Marlboro Light after another as if they gave him strength. They talked softly, their voices barely rising over songs by Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond.

  Somehow

  Someday

  Some way.

  Time don’t wait around forever

  We’ve got to do it right now

  Let’s do it all together.

  A little later one of those songs from the sixties came on, refreshingly tinny, made in a day when not all studio sound was automatically reduced to perfect resonance.

  Something tells me I’m into something good

  Was it an omen? Or was it pure silliness?

  “It’s a song of my era, Mike,” said Gaines with a laugh, and one could imagine him back in Crane looking pretty much the same as he did now, with those liquid eyes and melt-any-heart smile, captaining the football and basketball teams, throwing in the half-court shot against Fort Stockton that forever made him a legend, winning the Babe Ruth award for being best all-around everything, distinguishing himself as one of those kids you just knew would make their way in the world not because they did anything with any particular flair but by the sheer will of their own determination.

  All week long Gaines had been nervous, almost snappish, but now he was surprisingly relaxed, glad to be insulated from it all as the car spun its way toward the Midland loop.

  A coin toss . . .

  If there wasn’t so much riding on it, if hundreds of people didn’t already feel like running to the city council to get an emergency resolution passed legalizing lynching, it would have been laughable. But it wasn’t.