Don DeLillo - End Zone

"How to hit, baby," I told him.

It ended as it had begun, two laps around the goal posts. On the first turn a tackle named Ted Joost, who was Randy King's roommate, bumped John Butler right into the goal post and kept on going. Butler ran after him and jumped on his back. Joost shook him off and they started swinging. I jogged past them and by the time I made the far turn and headed back it was all over. I walked toward Staley Hall with Bing Jackmin.

"I can't take much more of this," he said.

"Of what?"

"The antiquated procedures."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"All the procedures around here are antiquated. Blocking sleds are antiquated whether you know it or not. Agility drills are antiquated. We even have to bend down and touch our toes. Gary, this is the second half of the twentieth century. That stuff went out with the gladiators. We're using antiquated procedures and we don't even know it."

"You said yourself that we hark back. We hark back, you said. You're the one who coined that dumb phrase referring to the connection between then and now."

"Hyperatavistic," he said.

"I don't think that was it."

"Whatever it was, I still think football is antiquated. And you want to know what else it is? I've already given you a hint."

"What else, Bing?"

"It's gladiatorial," he said. "They fatten us up and then put us in the arena together. They tram us to kill, more or less."

"Lead a revolt," I said.

"Coach would break me in half."

Howard Lowry was walking ahead of us. Howard was known as Boxcar. He was a starting tackle on defense and one of the few men on the squad who had normal human flab around his middle. He went about 265, packed low and very wide, and he was considered immovable.

Howard roomed with Billy Mast, a reserve back on defense. Billy was in the process of memorizing Rilke's ninth Duino Elegy in German, a language he did not understand. It was for a course he was taking in the untellable.

Myna Corbett and the responsibilities of beauty were to occupy me on and off for the rest of the year. I don't know exactly what it was I felt for her, or thought about her, or expected to give or receive. There are a thousand kinds of love. The simplest thing to say is that she made me feel comfortable. She created a private balance of nature, a sense of things being right, or almost right, both in themselves and against a larger requirement. So this love in a way was ecological; she made me feel at peace with my environment and maybe on my better days I did the same for her. Since my examinations of life sometimes ended in oblique forms of selfmockery, and since my investigative projects often manifested themselves as parodies of hunger or grief or exile, it was refreshing to seek in this woman a perfect circle whose reality overpowered the examiner's talent for reducing in size and meaning whatever variety of experience he was currently engaged in sampling.

Myna owned half a million dollars and membership in a sciencefiction book club. There, by most standards, her attraction ended. She weighed about 165 pounds. Her face had several blotches of varying size and her hair hung in limp tangled clusters. She bit her nails, she waddled, she never shut up. We had two classes together, Mexican geography and a sort of introduction to exobiology. Myna was the only female in the geography class (traditionally a course for football players) and seemed quite serious about the layout of Mexico. We got along well from the very beginning. I enjoyed listening to her talk and I liked the total liberty of her clothing. There was a sense of cavalcade to the way she dressed. Any number of fashion eras were likely to be represented at a given time. The feeling was warm, colorabundant, distinctly antihistorical.

We had mock picnics behind the Quonset hut- chopped almonds and Gatorade. Myna would usually bring along a sciencefiction novel. She'd eat and read simultaneously, bouncing slightly on the brown grass when she reached a particularly invigorating passage. It was during our third or fourth picnic, on an unseasonably cool day, that we got involved for the first time in the responsibilities of beauty. Myna wore a carved plastic bracelet, meshed gold chains around her neck, and a handembroidered? Victorian shawl over a silk gypsy blouse and floorlength patchwork skirt. Her boots were studded with blue stars."I've just realized what's really curious about you," I said. "Somehow you don't transmit any sense of a personal future."

"I'm a now person, Gary."

"That's good because I'm a then person."

"I know," she said. "That's why I like you. I need some perspective in my life."

"You'll hate me for saying this, Myna, but I think you're one of the prettiest girls I've ever known. Man or boy. Pound for pound."

"People are always telling me that. What a pretty face I have. It's just a thing you say to fat girls. It's supposed to make us guilty so we'll lose weight."

"But it's true," I said.

"I know it's true. All I have to do is lose fifty pounds and go to a skin doctor. But I like myself the way I am. I don't want to be beautiful or desirable. I don't have the strength for that. There are too many responsibilities. Things to live up to. I feel like I'm consistently myself. So many people have someone else stuck inside them. Like inside that big large body of yours there's a scrawny kid with thick glasses. Inside my father there's a vicious police dog, a fascist killer animal. Almost everybody has something stuck inside them. Inside me there's a sloppy emotional overweight girl. I'm the same, Gary, inside and out. It's hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don't think I haven't thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who's to say what's beautiful and what's ugly?"

"There are standards."

"Whose?"

"I don't know. The Greeks. The Etruscans. You can't escape some things. History forces you to listen and to see."

"You have to balance history with science fiction," she said. "It's the only way to keep sane."

"We'll have another picnic tomorrow "

"Jesus, can we?"

"We can do anything we want, Myna."

"Can we bring something besides chopped almonds? Can we bring vegetable pancakes and maybe brownies?"

"We can bring anything we want as long as it's humble and meatless."

"Can we not bring this blanket? Can we bring a different blanket? I don't like this one. It makes me think of dead baby rabbits."

"It's been in my family for generations."

"The way you say some things. I actually believe you. I think you're serious. Then it hits me that something's not right. Can I bring my book again?"

"Of course."

"Can I wear my orange dress that you like so much?"

"You look like an explosion over the desert. Yes, you can wear it."

"Can I bring my tarot cards with me?"

"Of course you can. Absolutely. It's a picnic."

"Thank you, Gary."

Most lives are guided by cliches. They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely accepted sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence. Their menace is hidden with the darker crimes of thought and language. In the face of death, this menace vanishes altogether. Death is the best soil for cliche. The trite saying is never more comforting, more restful, as in times of mourning. Flowers are set about the room; we stand very close to walls, uttering the lush banalities.

Norgene Azamanian's name did not seem ridiculous for long. We knew that nothing is too absurd to happen in America. Norgene, the man and the name, soon became ordinary, no less plausible than refrigerators or bibles or the names for these objects. When he died, of injuries sustained in an automobile accident, we repeated certain phrases to each other and dedicated our next game to his memory. A local minister called him a fallen warrior. An article in the school paper quoted the president, Mrs. Tom Wade, as saying that his untimely death at the age of twentyone would serve as a tragic reminder that our destiny is in the hands of a Being or Force dwelling beyond the scope of man's reason. Norgene wasn't a very good football player. But death had overwhelmed even his mediocrity and we conspired with his passing to make him gigantic. For many of us it was a first experience with death. We beüeved the phrases. He was indeed a fallen warrior; we were unquestionably reminded of our destinies. We took the field on the night of Norgene's memorial game and played like magnificent young gods, not out to avenge death but only to honor the dead, to remake memory as a work of art. That was the first half. In the second half the whole game fell apart. There were fights, broken plays, every kind of penalty. We still won easily. But the last hour left a bad taste (as the saying goes) in everyone's mouth.