by Guy Branum
22. She’s the Rosa Parks of Canada! She’s on the Canadian ten-dollar bill.
23. His name is Terry Fox and they fucking love him.
FOOTBALLWALLAH
I WAS INFORMED I was to play football.
I don’t know what I was doing at the end of my time in junior high, but I would imagine fantasy novels and rule books for role-playing games I did not have friends to play with were key. Until this point in my life, sports, as a concept, had been relatively avoidable. My dad had tried to get me to watch football with him, but I had no interest, and he didn’t really care that much.
As previously discussed, at the age of seven I had been placed on a T-ball team against my will. By thirteen, I knew the drill. This was some hope or dream of his. I was supposed to try very hard at it, fail him, and then be told I had not tried hard enough. I did not realize that the little town I was going to high school in, Sutter, was a farm town, and farm towns are football towns. On a Friday night, the lights from Sutter’s stadium would have been seen for miles, but they weren’t because there was nothing but rice fields and moths for miles. It was a town where everyone from the feed store to the Church of the Nazarene was going to have an opinion about how I played. I didn’t know this, I just knew I had to go and start being a man. I would have preferred the safe, indoor Torah chanting of my mother’s people, but alas, my bar mitzvah was on the gridiron.
Most of the kids from my elementary school went to the big high school in the main town in our county, but my dad wanted me to go to the same high school he had. Where he had played football, and had been reasonably bad at it, but had thereby solidified his own sense of masculinity. Sutter Union High School:1 Go Huskies. My best friend, Ramon, was going with me, so when I first went for pre-football weight training in the summer of 1989, I was, at least, not alone. I had one companion. My dad dropped us off, and we walked back to Sutter’s locker room. We walked in, and Ramon and I began the end of our friendship. He slid comfortably into a place in the masculine order: mediocre football player, discusser of women’s boobs, chill dude who insisted on being called ’Mon. I entered a place where I could not be comfortable, where the presence of my fellow football players meant I had to fight my instincts constantly, and which made honest communication with Ramon2 a thing of history.
Let us step back for a moment and say I had ejaculated for the first time in my life the previous year, in eighth grade. It was not one of those glorious nocturnal emissions I’ve heard so much about. Rather, one night as I was falling asleep, I noticed I was hard. I touched the soft skin just beneath the urinary meatus3 and enjoyed it. I stroked it exactly one more time, and then shame oozed out onto my nice blue comforter. During this time, I had begun noticing the strapping legs of Bo Brozner, the lower stomach hair of Dave Miehle, and the enormous bulge in the bike shorts that Joe Mendoza wore to school. I understood very well that men, and men’s nudity, were arousing to me. I was also reasonably certain that I was in no way gay.
So when I walked into the locker room at Sutter Union High School, I had a problem. Do you know what a locker room is? It is men,4 adult men, naked and showering. And not just adult men, athletes. We walked in, and I was immediately staring at the nude thighs of one of the senior halfbacks. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
This was before the Internet. My junior high erotica was limited to particularly muscular contestants on The Price is Right and occasional Calvin Klein perfume ads in Rolling Stone, and I think at that time, I didn’t even think to hoard them. I wasn’t yet masturbating on the regular, I just had a secret shame. Now, suddenly, all the porn I could possibly want was just there, live and right in front of my face. It was porn you could smell.5 Reach out and touch . . . well, that would have been a bad idea.
Which brings me to the bad part. Barely a year after I discovered I had a horrible secret which, if revealed, would cause my parents and community to revile and reject me, I was placed in the location most likely to make this revelation public. My greatest fantasy and my greatest fear were combined in the form of naked men and boys merely inches away whom I was supposed to be super chill and bro-y and not at all erect around.
Being gay is a lot like being a deep-cover sleeper-cell spy. You wake up one morning and your penis, the senior agent, informs you that you are not a nice little boy trying to make his family happy, but an agent of a foreign sexuality. It’s your job to sneak into to the heart of heterosexuality, get the secret documents,6 then bring them back to your superiors for document analysis.7 That’s a lot of pressure for someone who still slept with the closet light on.
I was fine at football. I was even, let’s say, good. It was a tiny high school where fielding a football team meant every able-bodied boy had to play. We didn’t have offensive and defensive players; everyone played both ways. We ran some sort of offense that didn’t have a quarterback until my senior year. I’m not sure, but I think it was to ensure that no player was irreplaceable. I never really understood. I just ran out on a cold field and crashed into strangers for no reason for two hours every Friday night while other, lither people determined the outcome of the game.
See, I was good at football only because I was twice as large as anyone on that field. I was slow and confused, but at the end of the day, they had to put two linemen on me to try to stop me at all. I have no idea if it was fun. I think the greatest pleasure I experienced in football was relief that a game was over. And sacking people, sacking people was fun.
Movies about football are rarely fun. The thing about football movies is they can never let their protagonist be interesting. He can be beleaguered, his dad can hit him, and his town can expect too much of him. He is definitely, totally the victim of forces, but at the core, he is just a white male cipher of the sort we’ll discuss later in this book. In the film Johnny Be Good, Anthony Michael Hall plays a football star who is playfully, gently arrogant, but by the film’s resolution, he still ends up being a good boy who plays by the rules. If Johnny Be Good is the spark of hope among the gridiron films, their darkest chasm is Rudy. Rudy is a horrible film about a pathetic person. Rudy Rudolph Rudnitsky, or whatever his name is, just wants to play football at Notre Dame so bad that he makes it the only purpose of his life. He is not good at football, but he persists, and finally, at the end of his senior year, the team takes pity on him and puts him in the game. The story is simple: If a man honors and abases himself to the male power structure long enough, eventually, that power structure will do him honor. Johnny Be Good is a gentle reversal; Johnny is much lauded by the male power structure, so in the end, instead of fabulousness, he chooses solid, responsible domesticity at the state school that didn’t offer him money or whores.
Football movies aren’t good because, with the exception of Air Bud 2: Golden Receiver, they’re always about people who are supposed to be playing football. This nice, athletic boy wants to play, but he’s sad. This nice, unathletic boy wants to play, but he’s unathletic. They’re not movies, they’re recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance to the phallus. They are a reaffirmation of a male order of power and obedience.
This is why no one in a football movie ever gets to experience real joy in football. If someone did, there wouldn’t be conflict, it’d just be a dude being good at something and loving it. Even Rudy, who isn’t good at football, doesn’t seem to love doing it. He loves the idea of who he is when he plays football. He wants to be Big Man on Campus. Just about every football movie is a bildungsroman for a Big Man on Campus. These films are all blandly romanticizing the apotheosis I was supposed to be seeking in high school, but never understood or wanted.
Here’s the thing about gay guys and team sports: You’re in a social dynamic that rests on homosociality. We’re all supposed to be comfortable and get along and be able to talk about who we want to fuck and make fun of each other. That is very hard when the person you want to fuck is the halfback. My teammates seemed to instinctively understand the flow of the game. They liked and
trusted each other, and they could process disagreements through violence, be it physical or social. I did not get how this stuff worked. I was terrible at being a guy.8 I lived in a football town, and I loved learning, but I hadn’t managed to actually learn anything about football. I’m sure I would have learned a lot more about gridiron strategy if just one of the opposing side’s tailbacks had been a suffocated housewife on the verge of alcoholism, but they were mostly just farmers’ kids with Trans Am hair.
Here’s what I did manage to learn from thirteen years in Sutter County: You take a long rectangular piece of cloth and you wrap it around your waist. You tuck the cloth into your undergarments as you go. Take the other end of the cloth, pleat it, then toss those pleats over your shoulder so they hang nicely down your back. Pleat the excess in front of you and tuck that into the front of your skirt. That was a uniform I could get behind.
(It’s a sari, that’s how you wrap a sari.)
This was the lesson Yuba City taught me. Not the specifics of draping and folding—that would take years and the patient instruction of girls at my school to really figure out how to turn one of my bedsheets into a quality sari. The lesson was decades of schools, restaurants, and grocery stores surrounded by South Asian women working an elegance and beauty of a sort I’d never seen on TV. To everyone’s surprise, powerful forces of plate tectonics, hydrology, agriculture, and colonialism had conspired to ensure that the only football movie I will ever truly love is Bend It Like Beckham.
When my ancestors traveled along the American Southwest, hooked a right at Bakersfield, then made their way up the long golden bowl of California, they did not know they were going to another country. Maybe they knew they were going to a place that had been, not so long ago, a chunk of Mexico, but they almost certainly did not know they were going to Punjab.
A Geography Lesson (Again)
“Punjab” comes from Persian and means “Five Waters.” This refers to five rivers in Northwest India that compose the strange geographic phenomenon of an inland delta. Normally, a delta is the triangle-shaped9 piece of land where a river enters the sea. The low elevation of the land and large accumulation of silt cause rivers to flood and move around a lot, filling the area with fertile, well-irrigated soil. It is in these glorious environments where agriculture and thereby human culture first flourished. Those are normal deltas.
But sometimes a grand, giant river has to make its way through some mountains. This is true in Northwest India, where five chilly rivers born in the Himalayas find themselves up against a mountain range, then come together to form a single river running through the lowest point in the mountains. The river they become is the Indus, a cradle of human civilization, and the inverted triangle of rich floodplain created by those five rivers is the Punjab.
Eight thousand miles away, there is another inland delta. You had no idea that buying the book by the gay guy from Chelsea Lately would have this much agriculture in it, did you? I never signed up for it, either. The point is, where I’m from is exactly the kind of perfect agricultural environment that Punjab is, and at some point in the early twentieth century, some Punjabi dudes figured that out. They were five railroad workers10 who’d initially come to Vancouver to work, but during construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad, they realized there was another version of their homeland. The point is that thirty to fifty years before my white ancestors made their way to Yuba City, the land was already a little colony of Britain’s largest colony.
Like I said, the first five guys were railroad workers. After the railroad work dried up, coming as they did from the breadbasket of India, they went to work on farms and, eventually, bought land of their own. They started bringing their male relatives over to work the land. By 1917, someone told Washington that all these Indian guys were showing up, and Congress passed a law banning immigration from most of Asia and the Pacific. It meant the guys were trapped. Some had come over as unmarried young men, some had left wives and families in India, but once the law was passed, their only option was to stay and find a non-Indian wife or return to British India and stay there forever.
Do I need to explain to you what Sikhs are? We all know what Hindus are. They are what Madonna pretended to be briefly in 1998 before she decided to become a Jewish witch. It’s the glorious polytheistic religion of a billion people, mostly in South Asia. It has the coolest gods of any religion, hands down. In Durga’s case, that’s a lot of hands.
And we all know what Muslims are—they’re followers of the Prophet Mohammed, who built upon the teachings of the other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity, to create a faith deeply rooted in law, literature, and words.
Well, Sikhism is different.11 It’s a religion that started in the fifteenth century in Punjab. It was founded by Guru Nanak and was expanded and guided by a series of gurus who taught the unified oneness of all creation. The religion has strong musical and literary traditions and celebrates justice and equality. Functionally, they’re the dudes with the beards and turbans. They’re the girls with bangle bracelets and braids. They are where I’m from. The current mayor of Yuba City, Preet Didbal, is the first Sikh mayor in the United States. We did not go to high school together, but I probably know one of her cousins.
Now let’s get back to those poor stranded farmworkers in the 1920s. If they left America to get wives, they could never come back, but Indian women couldn’t come to the U.S. I learned their answer to the problem one afternoon in high school, at lunch. My friend Karm started speaking fluent Spanish. I was a little surprised. Karm wasn’t a great student, and our high school offered only two years of Spanish. When I asked him how he knew Spanish so well, he said, “Oh, my grandma’s Mexican.” I soon discovered everyone’s grandma was Mexican—specifically, all the Indian kids’ paternal grandmothers (and some great-grandmothers). The Indian farmworkers from the 1920s all the way to the 1960s took Mexican wives who converted to Sikhism, learned new uses for cumin from their husbands, and pioneered the field of ethnic fusion cuisine.
And I say Indian, but when most of their families came to Yuba City, the modern state of India had not been formed. There was just one Punjab with Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim farmers, all of whom were willing to take the risk of going to a new land with new opportunities. But in 1947, India cracked (to use Bapsi Sidhwa’s word). As part of India’s transition to independence, it was broken into two countries: one majority Muslim, one majority Hindu. The crack ran right through Punjab. People found themselves, their property, their lives on the wrong side of a border that had never existed before. In a chaos of violence and loss, Hindus and Muslims left behind their homes to go to the new country where their religion would form the majority, but the Sikh community, a plurality in Punjab but a tiny minority in either of these states, opted to congregate in the eastern, Indian half of Punjab.
From childhood in Yuba City, white people’s understanding of Indian religions was more complex than other places in America where frog gigging12 and muddin’13 were popular pastimes. It was necessary and instinctual. Sikhs have long hair: Girls have braids, boys wear a patka.14 All Sikhs have bracelets. Muslim girls wear pants or long skirts. They can’t share your lunch. David Mehta was the only Hindu in my class. To my understanding, Hinduism centered on being able to get a haircut15 but not being Muslim. There was one Indian girl in my class who had secular parents. She wore her hair in a bob and dressed like the white kids. Until third grade, I assumed—because she didn’t have bracelets or braids and didn’t have to eat halal food—that she was black.
Want another story about how Indian my town was? When I was in third grade, my mom started working in the school cafeteria, so she took me to my grandparents’ house for the two hours between when she started work at six thirty a.m. and when I had to be at school at eight thirty. It was Valentine’s Day, and in classic Guy Branum fashion, I had failed to do the work I needed to do in a timely fashion. In this case, filling out Valentine’s Day cards for everyone in my class. I recruited my sevent
y-year-old grandfather to the task. I would tell him names of people, and he would write them on the card. He handed me one that said “Cindy.”
That was preposterous. Cindy? Like from The Brady Bunch? I said as much to him.
He said, “You said Cindy.”
I realized the problem. “No, I said SHINDI.” I paused, then clarified, “Like, short for Gurshinder.” To me, nothing could have been more obvious, but my grandfather who’d lived through the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and two world wars was not going to be condescended to by a fat eight-year-old, or write out a Valentine’s Day card to a male Punjabi kid.
Would you like another story? Every couple of years, a kid from out of town would move to Yuba City and enroll in my school. They would make a joke about some kid being named Balbinder. We didn’t understand. Balbinder was just a name, like Cory. There were four Balbinders at the school, plus a number of Baljits, Baldevs, and Balbirs. It wasn’t strange, it was home.
Enough charming stories, get back to the legislation!
In 1946, the U.S. Congress had relaxed immigration restrictions on Indians, and the loss and uncertainty of partition had left many families rootless. Just as my family was sending pioneers from the barren fields of Arkansas to the oilfields of Bakersfield and the shipyards of San Francisco, new Indian immigrants were finding their way to the place that would be my home.
No one ever explained to me how this happened.
There is one good work of art about my hometown. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, an Indian American poet, wrote a cycle of poems about the Punjabi American women of Yuba City. They are achingly beautiful imaginings of the lives of women like the ones I grew up around. Almost no one white in Yuba City knows these poems exist. They are not, to my knowledge, taught in our schools. It is a culture that exists next to ours, one that nearly all white people in my town take for granted but refuse to see. Plus, Yuba City wasn’t built for poetry. It’s prose country.