by Rick Bragg
I remember that night in New York, because it was every night in New York. I could have called my momma, could have whined to her about how awful it was for me here, the biscuit head, so far from home. But that would have been a lie.
I was not some poor Southern boy in run-down penny loafers and fashionably frayed khaki pants whining to his family about how much he missed the whisper of the river and the breeze on the veranda. I had been much further away from home than this, in places where they would kill you for your shoes. I could not even ask myself how in the fuzzy hell I got here, because I knew precisely how it happened, year by year. From the first time I tried to hunt and peck on that old Underwood typewriter, sitting behind that scarred desk in that little newspaper office that smelled of ink and cigarettes, I had been searching for this, or something very much like it.
It was not even picturesque. I lived in Midtown, for God’s sake. You have to live in the Village or SoHo to be picturesque, or Spanish Harlem if you have the guts and an angel on your shoulder. I was not a suffering writer, searching for inspiration. I worked in a city so rich in stories that I had to step over ten to get to the one I wanted, like stepping over the sleeping beggars to get to the subway. I was not eating canned soup and crackers, waiting for money from my rich daddy as I penned poetry no one would read until I was deader than Aunt Minnie’s house cat. I worked for wages. Millions read the words.
I was not sure that this meant success, this New York, but I was pretty sure it didn’t mean failure. For a minute I thought of Rudy Abbott, the baseball coach at Jacksonville State University, who had won two college world series. I had always respected Rudy, I suppose because he had started in the smokeneck section of West Anniston, in the shadows of the mills, and climbed out of it. He gave me some advice once, or maybe it was more of a warning.
“People like you and me,” he said, “we can’t fail.”
No, I was doing fine.
It is true that there is something about the enormity of this city that forces you to be reflective, as if you have to constantly peek inside yourself to make sure your character has not somehow slipped away from you in the onrush of strangers. With so many rats in the box, you want to make sure that your rat is still unique, so you sit and think back to any place but here, any time but here. You find yourself in there somewhere, in that memory, and it comforts you. I do not know what native New Yorkers do. Maybe the New York in their memory is greatly different. I hear it was. Maybe they just make something up, and go there.
The only real regret I had, one I felt most acutely then and there, was that I had not been able to talk with my momma about what I did for a living, not for years and years. It was not because I was ashamed—I was proud of the work—but because it was what it was. I remember a young American soldier in Haiti, a boy from Mississippi who baked inside his bullet-resistant vest and wrote letters to his girlfriend and momma. He told his girlfriend the truth, mainly, of the filth and hate and cruelty without bounds, but he lied to his momma in those letters. “You only write your momma the good stuff,” he said, and he didn’t have to explain.
I wanted her to believe that everything I did was warm and safe and clean, just sitting around telling tales, waiting for room service. How could I tell her that I had spent the past two weeks, even the past ten years, searching out the homeless, the hopeless, the eternally damned? How could I tell her that her scrapbook was hopelessly out of date, that, just a few days ago, a streetwise photographer named Michelle Agins had told me to get my happy ass back in the van on a particularly vicious corner, not just because I might get myself killed, but get her killed, get everyone with us killed. How could I describe to her the look in the eyes of inner-city boys who paid for their funerals in advance, because they did not expect to live beyond their teens, who killed because someone stepped on their sneakers or looked at them hard. How do you go to a woman who lives at the foot of a mountain of sadness and shovel more around her ankles, the sadnesses of strangers? No. I left the phone on its hook.
I would call her Sunday, and tell her I went up to Harlem to eat turkey wings and cornbread at a place called Sylvia’s, that New York was just one Big Rock Candy Mountain where the people talked slow so that I could understand, that they ran everything I wrote on the front page, both of them. That, I thought, was all she needed to know. When I wrote a happy story, I would send it to her with a hundred-dollar bill taped to the inside, and she would show the newspaper around and put the hundred under her mattress. She had three. Country people never throw away a mattress. They just stack ’em up on the bed, higher and higher, the new one on top. If you die in your sleep, you are that much closer to heaven, from Jump Street.
It was past ten o’clock by then, and she would have been asleep an hour, anyway. If it was this cold here it would be pretty cold down there, too. She would have let the dogs into the house, and left the water trickling in the sink, so that those patched-together pipes wouldn’t freeze and burst again.
She would get up at five to put wood in the heater, which would have nothing but coals left by then. She would think about making biscuits and she might even get the lard can and the flour out, but she would put them back, because there is no need to fix a big breakfast to sit and eat by yourself. Sometimes she lets the fire go completely out, and has to start up again with a few slivers of pine and wadded up pages of the only newspaper she has ever taken, the Jacksonville News. It is a fine newspaper, she tells everyone, and good kindling. My son used to work there, she tells them. Maybe you remember him? He wrote about the ball games. He works in New York now, but I ain’t real sure what he does. They don’t sell it here. And he don’t say.
I watched the news at eleven, and the window for a while after that. I knew that across town, near the United Nations, the homeless would be spreading their blankets over the hot steam from the sewer grates, retiring for the evening. On Madison Avenue they would pull cardboard into the recessed foyers of the stores, and lie down just inches from the wealth that glinted on the other side of the glass. Down in the Meat Packing District, transvestite hookers would prance from car to car, nearly naked, their skin turning bone white in the cold.
I picked up the phone and called my girlfriend in Florida. I asked her to tell me that, where she was, it was warm. She said no, it was cold down there, too. They were afraid the orange trees would freeze.
17
Saturdays in October
In the beginning, I almost never wrote about killing, about misery. I wrote about violence, yes, about huge men trying to pound each other into mush and scattered teeth. What I wrote was football, which was short of killing, usually, even in the South. People have said it is what we do now instead of dueling. That is untrue. It is not so refined a violence as that. It is what we do instead of rioting.
I miss it, when I am away. Before the hot, wet air even begins to give way to the odd cool breeze, before the oaks and maples have begun to turn even the slightest bit red and gold, football banishes summer and announces, with crashing cymbals and an earth-quaking “Roll Tide,” that it is now, officially, fall.
In that hurried season, on rectangles of ragged grass and wild onions and on the unnatural welcome mat of Astroturf, I have seen some things.
In Birmingham, I saw Charles White run for what seemed like a thousand yards against the Crimson Tide, helping USC beat Alabama like an ugly redheaded stepchild on a lovely fall Saturday in 1978. ABC telegraphed our shame to the entire nation, and grown men and women cried. To this day, I blame Charlie White for edging Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant a little closer to the grave.
In Athens, I watched Herschel Walker hammer the Auburn defense between the historic hedges, and then soar like some great red bird on third-and-short, the big men down below reaching for him like fat children leaping for a fist full of Sugar Daddies. Georgia fans, obnoxious in the first place, were unbearable for a long, long time because of Herschel.
In Auburn, the Loveliest Village on the Plain, I watched Bo
Jackson run over pretty much everybody. He didn’t do Bear much good either, I suspect.
But the greatest running back I ever saw was Boyce Callahan, number 33, listed at 160 pounds in the program at Jacksonville State University. He may have gone 145, with a pound of butterbeans in each pocket. He ran like a worm and got the mortal hell beat out of him almost every game, but he made Little All-American. My uncle John would take me to the home games once or twice a year, to see him put on a show. He would sweep the corner and get murdered. He would sweep the other corner and someone would knock his helmet off his head. Then they would run him up the middle and he would be stopped dead, and you would think it was time to call the ambulance. Then, all of a sudden you would see a single red jersey squirt out of the pile, free and clear. He would cock his head back, and everyone in the crowd would shout “It’s Boyce!” and he was gone. He couldn’t keep his socks pulled up and he had the scraggliest set of sideburns I have ever seen outside of prison, but he was a runnin’ son of a gun. We would even go to see him in the rain. People in front of us would raise their umbrellas and blot out the field, and Uncle John would grumble disgustedly that “we would see some football, if wasn’t for all these doggone parasols.”
My whole life I have wanted to believe that what I wrote about was important. I was not smart enough, as I drove from game to game in my native South, to recognize that I was doing precisely that. I sat in a thousand press boxes, ate a million bad hot dogs. On Fridays, it was high school football, under the lights. A poor boy was just as good as a rich one out there, as long as he could knock the tailback’s front teeth out, and in the stands deacons shared space with men with beer on their breath. Men came straight from work in shirts that had their first name over the breast pocket. Women and men held their breath on every play, waiting for their sons to get up when bodies collided with a sound like banging two-by-fours.
I watched it all, night after night, on fields named for town doctors and dead coaches and benefactors, where parking cost a dollar and benefited the March of Dimes. “Press,” I told the ol’ boys at the ticket gate, and they let me in as if I had intoned, “Opennnnn Sesssaaaaammmmeeee.” I watched it all from the press box, mostly, but that did not mean I had a seat. The press box was really reserved for the announcer, always a homer, and the announcer’s buddy, and the buddy’s feeble uncle, and the band director, whom they all secretly regarded as a sissy, and the band director’s buddy, who was, the ol’ boys believed, most definitely so. Either way, it was hard to find any room for the press in the press box. At Ranburne, I sat on a plastic bucket. At Vincent, I sat on a two-by-four. I shivered in warped plywood boxes and plugged my ears as fat boys with tubas wedged around the middle labored through a rendition of, well, something. I think it might have been “Saturday in the Park.” I quoted coaches whose only comments were, week after week, “We gave 110 percent,” and I never thought to ask how that was possible. I kept terrible statistics, causing coaches the next morning to shake their heads and go, “125 yards rushing, my ass.” In the rush of deadline I misspelled the names of linemen who recovered fumbles, boys who would never, ever get their name in the paper again, unless they got married or died.
On Saturdays, after a few hours sleep, it was college game day. I flew a million miles in single-engine planes with pilots who learned to soar in Vietnam but were prone to doze at the controls in the boredom of a Mississippi sky. I got food poisoning from a box lunch in Starkville, got run over on the sideline on an end-around in Tuscaloosa. I stood like a jackass and waited for some nineteen-year-old to speak a truth that I could include in my story, which would have been unbearable if I had been much older than nineteen myself. I was deafened by that damn cannon they shot off after every touchdown in Mississippi, and strained to hear Bryant mumble out of his post-game press conferences to a small army of reporters who would cut their wrists before they would ever write one negative word about that old man or the institution he represented. We worked eighteen-hour days, got paid twenty-one cents a mile to drive our cars to Martin, Tennessee, and Philadelphia, Mississippi, and stayed in hotels where you found palmetto bugs belly-up in the bathtub and Cheetos on the bedspread.
God, I would love to do it all over again.
Football is a cliché, down here. I do not believe that sport is the very essence of Southern life—I know God and work and family precede football, except perhaps on Alabama-Auburn game day—but what it really is, is the grandest of escapes from that life. For me, that escape took on a whole other meaning.
I would never have been a writer if not for it. I never, ever would have gotten into a journalism school, what with me having a C average and all. I am sure I would never have gotten a job. Some newspapers see sports as the toy factory, not serious journalism, so it can be trusted to those who did not go to Harvard, or even to the dentist regularly. All I know is, it was my way in, and looking back I realize that I never realized how lucky and blessed I was.
I wrote of heroes. The most popular man in Alabama most of my young life was not George Wallace but Bear Bryant (or, if you lived in the flatland to the south, Shug Jordan of Auburn). Even now, if you go to a bar or restaurant in Birmingham, you will eventually hear the water joke:
Saint Peter welcomes a man into heaven. The new arrival spots an old man in a houndstooth hat walking on water. “Is that Bear Bryant?” he reverently asks.
“No, that’s God,” Saint Peter says. “He only thinks He’s Bear Bryant.”
He had his own television show, sponsored by Coke and Golden Flake potato chips. You knew that because at the beginning of every show he opened up a bag of potato chips and set an open bottle of Coke on the table in front of him. He would mumble about how proud he was of this boy or that boy and what fine parents his momma and daddy were down there in Opp or Enterprise or Sylacauga as the game highlight film played across the screen. Then, in mid-mumble, one of his linebackers would separate some ball carrier from his spine and Bryant would shout out “Bingo!” like someone had jabbed him with a fork.
He was one of our legacies that we could be proud of, in a state hurting for them. What he died, my newspaper sent me to interview the man who dug his grave.
Until I was twenty-three, at progressively larger papers that never reached more than 30,000 in circulation, I wrote of sports. I dropped out of college because I had accomplished what I wanted from it—a coat-and-tie job—and lent my meager talents to the Talladega Daily Home and then the Anniston Star. They did not care that I did not have a college degree. I could spell, sort of. I worked cheap. I needed the work and loved the work too much to ask for overtime.
At nineteen, working for the Talladega Daily Home, I went on a road-trip to Atlanta to cover a stock car race with the immortal Tommy Hornsby, who was the sports editor and a drummer in a country rock band. He took me to my first topless bar. The dancer—there were only two and one was drunk—had long, pink scars on her wrists, and her breath smelled like Marlboros. I learned a lot from Tommy.
At twenty, I was working full-time for the best small newspaper in Alabama and one of the best in the country, the Anniston Star. The sports editor was a talented writer named Wayne Hester, who told me once that I could write some, and let me. I came to work the first day in a white pair of pants, a white shirt and a white slip-on tie. I looked like I was selling ice cream.
I wrote about everything from high school wrestling to country club golf, but what I loved was racing. Our newspaper office was a twenty-minute drive from Talladega International Motor Speedway, the world’s fastest enclosed speedway, but the spirit of the sport then was strictly backwoods. Most of the drivers had learned it running likker in the mountains of the Carolinas, or had learned it from people who did. I wrote about Fireball Roberts, Richard Petty, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, Buddy Baker, Junior Johnson. Even the names were grand. Coo Coo Marlin. Lake Speed. And, of course, my all-time favorite, Jimmy “Smut” Means, the one who was prone to hit the wall at Talladega, and live.
They would be, unless they were famous, only a footnote in the story, because the race was what was important, and the winning of it. We always wrote them the same way, those stories. In the third or fourth paragraph would be: “The race was overshadowed by the death of (insert name here).” I didn’t know any better. I should have done better. I should have written, in the first paragraph: “A man died here today, and a race was run.”
But Lord, it was thrilling. The sound alone would rock you, like a billion angry hornets in a giant bucket, and every time the cars flashed around the track, death was just a twitch away.
I was slowly beginning to realize that the only thing that was worth writing about was living and dying and the trembling membrane in between. I have never been a ghoul. I have been so sickened by killing and dying that sleep was just one more dream in bed at 4 A.M. But even then, I was drawn to those stories. There was something about the rich darkness of it, of that struggle by people at risk, people in trouble, that made all other stories seem trivial. They were the most important stories in the newspaper. I wanted to write them, only them.