Vanity On The Gridiron

After I've given you a recitation of the troubles I had to go through to make good in America between 1935 and more or less now, 1967, and although I also know everybody in the world's had his own troubles, you'll understand that my particular form of anguish came from being too sensitive to all the lunkheads I had to deal with just so I could get to be a high school football star, a college student pouring coffee and washing dishes and scrimmaging till dark and reading Homer's Iliad in three days all at the same time and, God help me, a W R I T E R whose very "success," far from being a happy triumph as of old, was the sign of doom Himself. (Insofar as nobody loves my dashes anyway, I'll use regular punctuation for the new illiterate generation.)

Look, furthermore, my anguish, as I call it, arises from the fact that people have changed so much, not only in the past five years, for God's sake, or past ten years as McLuhan says, but in the past thirty years, to such an extent that I don't recognize them as people anymore or recognize myself as a real member of something called the "human race." I can remember in 1935 when full-grown men, hands deep in jacket pockets, used to go whistling down the street unnoticed by anybody and noticing no one themselves. And walking fast too, to work or store or girl friend. Nowadays, tell me, what is this slouching stroll people have? Is it because they're used to walking across, parking lots only? Has the automobile filled them with such vanity that they walk like a bunch of lounging hoodlums to no destination in particular?

Autumn nights in Massachusetts before the war you'd always see a guy going home for supper with his fists buried deep in the side pockets of his jacket, whistling and striding along in his own thoughts, not even looking at anybody else on the sidewalk, and after supper you'd always see the same guy rushing out the same way, headed for the corner candy store, or to see Joe, or to a movie, or to the poolroom, or the deadman's shift in the mills, or to see his girl. You no longer see this in America, not only because everybody drives a car and goes with a stupid erect head guiding the idiot machine through the pitfalls and penalties of traffic, but because nowadays no one walks with unconcern, head down, whistling, everybody looks at everybody else on the sidewalk with guilt and, worse than that, curiosity and faked concern, in some cases "hip" regard based on "Don't miss a thing," while in those days there even used to be movies of Wallace Beery turning over in bed on a rainy morning and saying: "Aw gee, I'm goin' back to sleep, I ain't gonna miss anything anyway." And he never missed a thing. Today we hear of "creative contributions to society" and nobody dares sleep out a whole rainy day or dares think they'll not really miss anything.

That whistling walk I tell you about, that was the way grown-up men used to walk out to Dracut Tigers Field in Lowell, Mass. on Saturdays and Sundays just to go see a kids' sandlot football game. In the cold winds of November, there they are, men and boys, sidelines, some nut's even made a homemade sideline chain with two pegs to measure the downs, that is to say, the gains. In football when your team gains over ten yards they get another four chances to gain ten more. Somebody has to keep tabs by rushing out on the field when it's close and measuring accurately how much ground is left. For that you have to have two guys holding each end of the chain by the two pegs, and they have to know how to run out according to parallel instinct. Today I doubt if anybody in the Mandala Mosaic Meshed-Up world knows what parallel means, except brilliant nuts in college mathematics, surveyors, carpenters, etc.

So here comes this mob of carefree men and boys too, even girls and quite a few mothers, hiking a mile across the meadow of Dracut Tigers Field just to see their boys play football in an up-and-down uneven field with no goalposts, measured off for a hundred yards more or less by a pine tree on one end and a peg on the other.

But in my first sandlot game in 1935, about October, no such crowd: it was early Saturday morning, my gang had challenged the so-and-so team from Rosemont, yes, in fact it was the Dracut Tigers (us) versus the Rosemont Tigers, Tigers everywhere, we'd challenged them in The Lowell Sun newspaper in a little article written in by our team captain Scotcho Boldieu and edited by myself: "The Dracut Tigers, age 13 to 15, challenge any football team age 13 to 15, to a game in Dracut Tigers field or any field Saturday morning." It was no official league or anything, just kids, and yet the bigger fellows showed up to keep measurement of the yardage with their chain and pegs.

In this game, although I was probably the youngest player on the field, I was also the only big one, in the football sense of bigness, i.e., thick legs and heavy body. I scored nine touchdowns and we won 60-0 after missing three points after. I thought, from that morning on, I would be scoring touchdowns like that all my life and never be touched or tackled, but the serious football was coming up that following week when the bigger fellows who hung around my father's pool hall and bowling alley at the Pawtucketville Social Club decided to show us something about bashing heads. Their reason, some of them, to show, was that my father kept throwing them out of the club because they never had a nickel for a Coke or a game of pool or a dime for a string of bowling, and just hung around smoking with their legs stuck out, blocking the passage of the real habitu�s who came there to play. Little I knew of what was coming up, that morning after the nine touchdowns, as I rushed up to my bedroom and wrote down by hand, in neat print, a big newspaper headline and story announcing DULUOZ SCORES 9 TOUCHDOWNS AS DRACUT CLOBBERS ROSEMONT 60-0! This newspaper, the only copy, I sold for 3 cents to Nick Rigolopoulos, my only customer. Nick was a sick man of about 35 who liked to read my newspaper since he had nothing else to do and was soon to be in a wheelchair.

Comes the big game, when, as I say, men with hands-a-pockets came a-whistling and laughing across the field, with wives, daughters, gangs of other men, boys, all to line up along the sidelines, to watch the sensational Dracut Tigers try on a tough team.

Fact is, the "pool hall" team averaged the ages of 16 to 18. But I had some tough boys in my line. I had Iddyboy Bissonnette as my center, who was bigger and older than I was but preferred not to run in the backfield, liked, instead, the bingbang inside the line, to open holes for the runners. He was hard as a rock and would have been one of the greatest linemen in the history of Lowell High football later on if his marks had not averaged E, or D-minus. My quarterback was the clever strong little Scotcho Boldieu who could pass beautifully (and was a wonderful pitcher in baseball later). I had another wiry strong kid called Billy Artaud who could really hit a runner and when he did so, bragged about it for a week. I had others less effectual, like Dicky Hampshire who one morning actually played in his best suit (at right end) because he was on his way to a wedding, and was afraid to get his suit dirty so let nobody touch him and touched no one. I had G.J. Rigolopoulos who was pretty good when he got sore. For the big game I managed to recruit Bong Baudoin from the now-defunct Rosemont Tigers and he was strong. But we were all 13 and 14.

On the kickoff I caught the ball and ran in and got swarmed under by the big boys. In the pileup, with me underneath clutching the ball, suddenly 17-year-old Halmalo, the poolhall kickout, was punching me in the face under cover of the bodies and saying to his pals "Get the little Christ of a Duluoz."