End Zone Read Free

“It’s Gary Harkness, your new roommate. Let’s shake hands and be friends.”
    “We’re roommates,” he said. “Why do we have to be friends?”
    “It’s just an expression. I didn’t mean undying comrades. Just friends as opposed to enemies. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
    “I wasn’t asleep.”
    “You were snoring,” I said.
    “That’s the way I breathe when I’m on my stomach. What happened to my original roommate?”
    “John Billy? John Billy’s been moved.”
    “Was that his name?”
    “He’s been moved. I hope you’re not tense about myshowing up. All I want to do is get off to a good start and avoid all possible tension.”
    “Who in your opinion was the greater man?” Bloomberg said. “Edward Gibbon or Archimedes?”
    “Archimedes.”
    “Correct,” he said.
    In the morning Creed sent us into an all-out scrimmage with a brief inspirational message that summed up everything we knew or had to know.
    “It’s only a game,” he said, “but it’s the only game.”
    Taft Robinson and I were the setbacks. Taft caught a flare pass, evaded two men and went racing down the sideline. Bobby Iselin, a cornerback, gave up the chase at the 25. Bobby used to be the team’s fastest man.

4
    T HROUGH ALL OUR DAYS together my father returned time and again to a favorite saying.
    “Suck in that gut and go harder.”
    He never suggested that this saying of his ranked with the maxims of Teddy Roosevelt. Still, he was dedicated to it. He believed in the idea that a simple but lasting reward, something just short of a presidential handshake, awaited the extra effort, the persevering act of a tired man. Backbone, will, mental toughness, desire — these were his themes, the qualities that insured success. He was a pharmaceutical salesman with a lazy son.
    It seems that wherever I went I was hounded by people urging me to suck in my gut and go harder. They would never give up on me — my father, my teachers, my coaches, even a girl friend or two. I was a challenge, I guess: a piece of string that does not wish to be knotted. My father was by far the most tireless of those who tried to give me direction, to sharpen my initiative, to piece togethersome collective memory of hard-won land or dusty struggles in the sun. He put a sign in my room.
    WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH
THE TOUGH GET GOING
    I looked at this sign for three years (roughly from ages fourteen to seventeen) before I began to perceive a certain beauty in it. The sentiment of course had small appeal but it seemed that beauty flew from the words themselves, the letters, consonants swallowing vowels, aggression and tenderness, a semi-self-re-creation from line to line, word to word, letter to letter. All meaning faded. The words became pictures. It was a sinister thing to discover at such an age, that words can escape their meanings. A strange beauty that sign began to express.
    My father had a territory and a company car. He sold vitamins, nutritional supplements, mineral preparations and antibiotics. His customers included about fifty doctors and dentists, about a dozen pharmacies, a few hospitals, some drug wholesalers. He had specific goals, both geographic and economic, each linked with the other, and perhaps because of this he hated waste of any kind, of shoe leather, talent, irretrievable time. (Get cracking. Straighten out. Hang in.) It paid, in his view, to follow the simplest, most pioneer of rhythms — the eternal work cycle, the blood-hunt for bear and deer, the mellow rocking of chairs as screen doors swing open and bang shut in the gathering fragments of summer’s sulky dusk. Beyond these honest latitudes lay nothing but chaos.
    He had played football at Michigan State. He had ambitions on my behalf and more or less at my expense. This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.He had spent his autumn Saturdays on the sidelines, watching others fall in battle and rise