The Writer's Life 9/26 - Back in the Day

Here's an excerpt from my high school football epic, Adjustments, which is a blend of truth and fiction. All the football incidents actually occurred at but not necessarily within the narrative's time frame. The protagonist's home life both before and during his marriage is entirely fictional. Here he is reminiscing about a game during the 1965 season, my junior year at Lafayette H.S.. We were the laughing stock of the city. We did not score a TD until the last minute of the final game.

“... We dominated the second half but couldn’t score. Toward the end of the game Joe Pascarella, our co-captain, got behind the secondary on the far sideline and caught a bomb. He limped toward the goal line with everything he had. He’d sprained his ankle a few weeks back. His ankles were so thin you could fit your hand around them.” Rick made a small circle with his fingers. “He was caught at about the ten, and their defense held. I ran off the field at the end of the game ahead of everybody else. As I was taking off my shoulder pads in the locker room, Joe came storming in, wailing as if he’d just lost his only child. He was raving, pounding his helmet against a locker. I felt so distant, so detached. It was one of the strangest feelings I ever had. I felt no remorse at all at having lost, at having been shut out again—and there was poor Joe Pasc’,
devastated that he hadn’t scored, as if it would’ve erased our shame as a team. I didn’t know what to say to him, so I kept my mouth shut, even though his eyes met mine with such sorrow.”
“Wow,” said Kelly sadly.
“I don’t think I ever saw anybody in such pain. On the bus ride home he had his head buried in his arms the whole way.”
“I doubt anything anyone would’ve said would’ve appeased him.”
“I’d always liked him before that, but from then on I looked at him as a kid would an adult. We had some great battles our senior year. I was a pulling guard and he was a defensive end. In drills I had to do what’s called a ‘kick-out’ block on him. Christ, he hit hard. I don’t know where he got his power from. He was skin and bones, always moaning about not being able to gain weight. He ignited every nerve in my body the way he uncoiled into a hit. I always wondered if he hated me for that moment in the locker room when I’d caught him at his most vulnerable. I must’ve seemed so pride-less to him. But it wasn’t only that. Maybe he had troubles at home. He might’ve been angrier inside than I was.”

And here are the co-captains of the 1966 team, which lost only one game, two guys for whom I have great respect: to the left Ralph Betesh, who threw the aforementioned pass to Joe Pascarella, who is to the right. I must mention that my comment about Joe's "troubles at home" was pure speculation and turns out not to have been true. That's one of the reason I wrote the book as a novel and not memoir:

And from the high to the low. Here's the subject of an email I received today: "SluttySarah wants to be friends." As much as I was tempted, I wouldn't dare click on the link.

My thanks to Ira, who bought a collection of New Yorker cartoons on money and a humorous pictorial on aging; and to Wolf, who purchased a bio of Israeli pilot Ezer Weizman, and five books in Russian; and to my constant benefactress, who donated a bunch of mostly non-fiction.

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