There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  The Yale defense, half of us sophomore leaders of the coup, was pinned in the northwest end of the Yale Bowl field. Princeton had just scored a touchdown to almost close a deficit that had been so large earlier in the day that even the insufferable Princeton band had hushed for a while. Now all that was left was a short kick to add on an extra point—a play, like some events in life, that is so routine, so dull, that you notice the smallest difference with the kind of shock reserved for mass atrocities.

  From my position on the right edge of the defense, I had the best view to watch the play unfold: ball snapped from center, caught by a small Princeton player kneeling on the ground to hold it for the kicker. I loafed from my edge toward this boy. Then I saw it: his eyes bulged, as if a mug of scalding coffee had just slipped out of his hands. Instead of holding the ball for the kicker, this selfish bastard kept it for himself. Shot up from his knees and started running. Shit. I got my ass low and turned my loaf into a sprint just as he tried to scamper around me into the end zone. We crashed into each other, my arms wrapped around him, my hand between his back and the tall muddy grass. We fell. The thousands of Princeton blots in the stands shut up. The blots in blue let out a wail. Princeton 20, Yale 28.

  We eleven Yale defenders fled the field, accepting hind and helmet slaps, searching for water and a seat on the bench. I found both, and looked down at the hand on my right thigh. I felt it then: not pain, but curiosity. Tried to jam the thumb into the socket. Turns out, thumbs don’t have sockets. Mine cracked and begged me to leave it alone. Coach Reno came yelling for the defense to go back on the field, so I rushed to present my hand to one of the trainers, who wrapped tape around it like a mummy paw and made the thumb keep still if not quiet. This worked for a few plays, but I eventually just let the whole arm dangle at my side. It surprised me—how personal the pain felt, how it turned my thoughts and feelings and words into wow. Ecstasy . . . Maybe that’s what it was.

  While I winced on the field and downed aspirin on the bench, Princeton scored points: 34 to our 31, in the end. Tens of thousands of Yale fans, still stunned by the day’s reversal, emptied the Bowl slowly. Many men and more than a couple children walked through the tunnels to their cars and looked back over their shoulders every few steps, back down at the field. Some of them felt, even if they did not admit, that their Yale men had a better chance of winning this already finished game than beating Harvard the following Saturday in Cambridge. It wasn’t that the Harvard team was that good; inferiority complexes often produce this kind of irrational pre-doom. This pre-doom was now on the minds of these men as they walked through the tunnels to their cars. It was on the minds of many of the players, who hid in the showers for a long time. And it was on the mind of the team doctor, himself a former Yale football captain, when he looked at an X-ray of my right hand.

  Well, Casey. He sighed. It doesn’t look too good.

  He snapped the X-ray into a light box outside the locker room. Used his pen to show the first metacarpal floating alone, ligaments shredded in the void.

  We’re gonna send you to a specialist on Monday. But I’ll warn you now . . . I’m not sure you’re gonna be able to play next week.

  I would have cried if I had not then felt a strange relief.

  On Monday morning, I walked up Science Hill to the campus hospital, my right hand in a make-do cast. Coach Reno met me there and stood next to the exam table like I imagine parents do when they go to the doctor with their sons. The specialist was an old man who was said to have invented thumb surgery or something. He had his own light box and snapped my X-rays into it, squinting at the image for a moment before a chuckle snuck out of his closed mouth. He shook his head and turned to me and Coach Reno.

  See this thumb? The bone is broken off. Your ligaments are all torn. You need to be in surgery right now. Any delay could cause irreparable damage, I’m afraid.

  A day passed, it seemed.

  We got a big game next week though, sir. Harvard. For the championship.

  Ha! Well you won’t be able to play with pins in your hand. It’s impossible.

  The room was silent.

  We really need you, Case.

  If Coach Reno said much more than this, I don’t remember. It was all I needed to hear. And maybe it was all the doctor needed to hear, because he suddenly specialized in things that seemed impossible.

  Would you like for me to give you something that will calm you down and make you play like a champion?

  That’s what he asked. Not this doctor but the man who found my father right before the 1977 Orange Bowl. You’ve got the basic facts—Daddy was a sophomore . . . twenty years old . . . had been sidelined with a broken back for the last four games . . . Woody calls him off the bench . . . Comeback, legend, etc. etc. But what you do not know, what I did not know until recently, is that prior to that call from the bench, Woody had called Daddy into his office as the team prepared to face the University of Colorado.

  Roderic, we need you.

  And before the game, when meeting Woody’s need still seemed too hard a task, an Ohio State alumnus showed up with an envelope for my father. Inside, Daddy found cocaine. He had never tried it. He would not play again without it. And when he was done playing he still needed it, and when he couldn’t afford it, there were cheaper substitutes, and . . . you know the rest of the story.

  He wrote of that 1977 day—

  The events of the next few hours are clear and cloudy at the same time. I remember the bus ride to the stadium, the pre-game taping, Woody’s pep talk, things I had come to know so well, but this time everything was different. Everything seemed magnified out of proportion to reality. I felt like I was watching some kind of drama from the outside, as if I was there, but I wasn’t really there.

  He was there, as we know—present enough to bring the Buckeyes back and to be named Most Valuable Player and to receive two mementos: that scarlet felt banner that hung in the living room of our Columbus apartment, and a heavy gold ring with an amber stone and his name engraved on the side. Coach Reno handed me a similar ring during a ceremony at Payne Whitney Gym, after we beat Harvard to win the 2006 Ivy League championship.

  But instead of offering me cocaine—which, if I had known as little as my daddy had known, I might have taken to step on that field in Cambridge—the surgeon and our team doctor offered to deaden the nerves in my hand so that I could endure a full game.

  It’s still gonna hurt like hell, Casey. But once we’re done with the injections, we’ll put your hand in a big cast and give you as much Tylenol as we can to help you make it through.

  I remember the bus ride to Harvard Stadium, the pregame taping, Coach Reno’s pep talk, things I had come to know so well. But aside from one good play I made at the beginning of the game, the rest of the day is lost to me. So the ring I have—silver with a blue stone Y and my name engraved on the side—helps me to remember what I did.

  It also replaced my daddy’s ring, which he had given to me just after he got it back. For not long after Woody handed him that Orange Bowl ring, Daddy pawned it. A pharmacist bought it in a Dallas pawnshop around 1980 and held on to it for nearly twenty-five years, until he died. The man’s widow found the ring in his personal effects and asked her pastor to track down its rightful owner, who welcomed the pastor (and the Dallas Morning News, of course) to his Dallas County office for a reunion ceremony, in 2002.

  As the News put it:

  The return of the ring, representing [Rod Gerald’s] greatest gridiron moment, seems an irresistible symbol of renewal and redemption, of a life coming full circle, bent but unbroken—like a ring itself.

  You’re kind of a miracle . . . the pastor said.

  The circle kept going: Daddy gave his ring to me, still bent but unbroken and, finally, stolen one afternoon out of the car I brought to New Haven for my sophomore year. I lived all those years in the American ghetto but had to wait until I was
a student at Yale to be robbed.

  Daddy wasn’t mad, though. He still remembered what he’d accomplished at the Orange Bowl. So did loyal Buckeye fans. It was a group of alumni who, almost forty years after his heroics, raised enough money to pay for surgery to repair his spine. The nerves were pinched, his disks had disintegrated, his foot dragged, his leg went numb, and he ached. A bit like my thumb aches when I hold this pen too long. But I still have my ring and more: at the Yale Bowl, in a rooftop lounge called the Champions Room, which is off-limits to anyone who has not snuck in or contributed at least $1,500, canvases adorn the walls—images of all the great teams in the great history of Yale football, going back nearly a hundred and fifty years. The latest canvas is of the 2006 Yale team in white on a late afternoon in Cambridge, the sun climbing down the back side of Harvard Stadium. A few minutes have passed since these Yale men were crowned champions. There, in the center of the canvas, the camera has focused on one boy: me—facing the camera but looking beyond it to the stands, my left fist raised in triumph, my right arm hanging at my side. Another hand is grabbing my right shoulder. It’s Elijah. He was a freshman then. Now he’s gone, and Daddy’s worn, and I am left here holding the bag and the story. But all I wanted was to hold your hand.

  Well, the truth is that I was nineteen, so can’t be too sure what exactly I wanted. Not even Jesus knew what He wanted when He was nineteen, which may be why there’s nothing in the Bible about that time in His youth. Hard to give your life to save the world until you know deep down you want to do it, I bet. Should probably be just as hard to give your life for a game, but it’s not.

  Around eight years old, your daddy drops you off at Little League football tryouts without you even asking. He sits on the hood of his car to watch you, claps when you do something right, shouts C’mon, Scooter! when you do something wrong, and even when he’s gone there is somebody, kin or stranger, there to clap and shout for you. This arrangement holds, and by the time you can legally drink, you have played thousands of plays and watched hundreds of hours of film and eaten extra meals to stay fat and taken extra medicine to stay healthy and had the support and attention of countless coaches and scouts and fans and newspaper articles and television shows and cheerleaders and water bottles and strips of tape and fight songs, all designed to help you in your epic quest to do something you were never even sure you wanted to do. You do it anyhow—you put that powder in your nose, put those pins in your hand, you make whatever sacrifice is asked of you, and in return you get some rings that people steal and felt banners that you lose, and in a room you can’t afford to enter, you get a picture of you and your friend, whom you’d rather see again in real life. But when it comes to the things you want deep down, the things you need to live, like love, or to become, like yourself—where is all the sacrifice? Where is the instruction? I’m not complaining, just trying to understand.

  I gave so much to win a football game for a team I had not even known existed two years prior. But the winter of 2006 came and for the first time I got something—someone—that I had wanted, perhaps more than anything, with little if any doubt whatever. And if I had been willing to make one iota of sacrifice or been given one hour of instruction, then maybe I would not have made such a mess of it, of him, of us.

  chapter FIFTEEN

  It all started when he made me wait.

  Well, some of it started when he sent his first message.

  Sup?

  I’d kept that message open for a long time, though it didn’t take long to read. Kept it open until Joan walked toward my station at the back of the South Oak Cliff computer lab, almost in time to see his message on a dating portal that also sold pornography. I later learned that this was called synergy, a great thing that exists because two lesser things combine. I wish I had known that then. I would have said: River, we could be a synergy, baby. But I didn’t know.

  So there was his short message and his face that resembled my mother’s, at least in tone and peculiar beauty, and his eyebrows. Each brow looked like one half of an old ice-block tong, made of wool. I wondered if they came naturally like that, if he came naturally like that. I wondered if this was what they called love at first sight, though now I know it was not love. It was just the birth of my want for this boy—not to lie with him, not to speak with him, but . . . to be the only survivor of a nuclear holocaust, with him. No one else would ever see or touch him again. And we’d both have a natural glow, forever.

  It took only a few months of phone calls and online chats for this want to grow into, or maybe from, a need to pour myself freely and fully into something or someone—or, at least, into River. And the need was so great that it was as if I tried to channel all the Big Bang’s noise through a single small speaker, through him. This, I understand, is not healthy, for a speaker or a teenager, nor did it make much sense. But I figure we all have a person in our lives who takes up more space than good sense would allow, than we ourselves want to allow. So there they are, there he was, in the space beyond reason, where I wanted to be.

  But then he’d made me wait.

  Sure, he had a good reason: At sixteen I was illegal, according to the state of Texas. But I’d never met a boy who made me wait, and had never met a nineteen-year-old who was afraid of the law. So either because I was intrigued or because I was insulted, I waited.

  Two more years passed. Red came, and others. And in that time River became, for me, less of a person, more of a mission unaccomplished, never failed. Maybe that’s what love is. Probably not.

  Whatever the case, I turned eighteen and went—was allowed to go—to see him in the flesh. He was my prom date, I guess you could say.

  I had to do a lot to get to him that night. Had to stay up late, and plan, and lie. None of this was out of the ordinary. But I also had to steal a car. That was new. Steal might be too strong. Let’s say I had to disappear in a car that was not mine. A town car Tashia had rented, just like the one Daddy used to drive. By midnight, long before the prom was over, I was on I-35 headed south to a town called Carson, driving fast. I worried that my prom suit made me look ridiculous, all orange and pinstripey, with that clownish paisley tie I borrowed or bought cheap. I worried that my eyes were puffy. I would not have worried about any of this if I had known how dark Carson would be, nothing but long strips of dimmed shopping centers, small shadowed churches, a 7-Eleven, an old high school, a park, a few hills, and River. I’ve been all over America since then and I have come to believe that some towns exist solely to create beautiful strange boys. I am thankful.

  I pulled up to his parents’ two-story house, on the corner, in the dark. Took that walk I came to know so well: from my car across the street to the front door, no porch light, no light inside the foyer, to the wooden bannister guarding the stairs, up four steps to a landing, left, up four more to the upstairs hallway where there was no light, turn right, walk softly, door’s right there. He had to guide me that first night but by the end I could handle it with my eyes closed.

  In his presence for the first time I was afraid, of what, I do not know. Under the ceiling fan light he stood taller than me, but that would not have frightened me. Maybe it was his voice: despite having lived in this small town his whole life he sounded like he might be from the Bronx, even when he was tired or angry. Maybe it was those tattoos covering his veined forearms. Maybe I was just insecure.

  He sat on a chair in a small lofted space, where a desk and some shoe boxes and a television were, separated from the larger lower space where his bed was. I sat on the bed, looking up. We sat like this for a long time. I thought I might be sick, so I just stared at him, said stupid stuff like Dang, you live far. He laughed and looked away. When he looked back, I was still staring, so he turned off the light and told me to come up to where he was. I reached out to grab his arm and climbed the two little altar steps, ducking so I wouldn’t hit the ceiling, keeping my eyes open so I could see as best I could and know that it was rea
l.

  When it was finished, I had to leave. That’s what he said. It was nearly five a.m. and he had a flight to Los Angeles in a few hours, so I had to go and he had to go and we had to pretend this did not happen because he had a boyfriend.

  Oh, aight. That’s all I said.

  And all I said later that morning when Tashia barged into my room demanding an explanation—Where have you been?—was: I went to a party, Tash. She replied, softly, You could have called. Closed the door to let me get some sleep. She’s good at keeping words trapped inside her head, too.

  And all I said later that summer before I left for college, when River appeared in Dallas without any notice, was Where do you want me to pick you up? And when we were done, lying there watching some boring anime cartoon, when I accidentally held him and he asked What are you doing? like I was taking money from his wallet, all I said was Nothing, and scooted over to the other side of the bed. I wonder if that’s what he came to love—that’s not the word, I know—about me. How well I kept my mouth shut. I wonder how I came to believe that silence was better than uncomfortable words.

  How about we blame that on my daddy? Not to pile more on the poor man. It’s just that he forgot my nineteenth birthday. Perhaps he did not forget—nonetheless, I did not hear from him, and this bothered me. It also bothered me that my father could still bother me, and now it bothers me that I wrote in a journal I kept at the time: I guess when you’re a man you don’t need a daddy no ways, like I was Tupac or something. Anyway, I was on the phone with River that night, at the exact moment of my birth. I knew the time because I had been told it repeatedly as a child (Granny was certain it was yet another sign I was the Antichrist); he knew because I told him, repeatedly. I wanted to see if he remembered.

  What time is it, River?