001.
The Season Opener / CHAPTER ONE
PLAYING . . . Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears
CEDRIC LAUREN is five years old, and he doesn't know how to tie his shoes.
Objectively, yes, he knows how it's done— he knows that you cross right over left and pull the shoelace underneath and pull it tight, that the right lace forms a loop between thumb and forefinger, that the left lace curls around the spot where those fingers are pinched together before being plucked through and pulled tight, tucked away so that Eric can run free from the fear of tripping over his own two feet— but he doesn't feel like he's doing it right. One loop always ends up a bit bigger than the other, or he tightens the laces so much that the tops of his feet are crisscrossed with angry red indentations when he removes his shoes at the end of the day. No matter how many times he ties and reties the laces, there's always an unequal pressure, an imbalance in the lace-to-lace ratio.
His grandma buys him a pair of velcro sneakers. They're cool shoes, really— but Eric's chest hurts a little when he thinks about his lace-up shoes sitting by the front door; shoes that were a pristine white when his mother bought them two months ago but have now adopted a hue reminiscent of the dirty rainwater that collects in the empty flowerpot on the back lawn, the laces speckled with dried brown blood from the times he tied them and untied them again and again until they didn't feel so foreign on his feet.
The velcro shoes are great, really, they are— and Eric shoves the unopened box under his bed because the thought of giving up on tying his shoes perfectly, of never achieving that wonderfully balanced pressure, of never getting identical twin loops and even-ended aglets makes his head spin and heart clench because who is he to abandon the shoes waiting for him by the front door before he's mastered their laces?
Two days later, he finally gets it right. He caresses his fingers, picks at chipped fingernails, hisses through his teeth when he washes his hands with hot soapy water, tender and uncalloused skin unfamiliar with the sting, sweeps his thumb across the reddened expanse of his palm, the skin rubbed raw where the laces cut into him over and over again.
Eric grins and wonders if triumph always tastes this heady.
He ends up forgetting about those shoes.
Eric pulled the shoebox with the velcro shoes out from under his bed pretty much the moment he was sure he'd mastered the method of tying his dirty white lace-up shoes. Because the moment he was able to run across the playground at school without feeling like the Earth was tilted wrong on its axis, or that time had decided to start moving backward, or that the one larger loop on his right shoe was threatening to wrap around both of his toothpick ankles and topple him to the ground, the moment he felt like he achieved something close to perfection, he fell out of love with those shoes and was ready for something new and unfamiliar.
Fascination turns to apathy the way milk curdles and sours as it sits abandoned in the back corner of the refrigerator; obsession turns to indifference the way caterpillars emerge from cocoons as butterflies when humid spring bleeds into blistering summer.
Here's the thing about the shoes:
Eric loves things intensely, relentlessly, ardently. He loves the incomplete, the halfway-there, the diamond in the rough. Eric Lauren finds works-in-progress and holds them impossibly close to his chest; he welcomes the misshapen and the jagged into his life with open arms, commits to refining them, polishing them until they're virtually unrecognizable. He kneels in the grass on the vernal equinox, lets sickly green caterpillars climb up his fingers and into his palm, watches them spin cocoons in the thaw of April, and dreams and dreams of what could be.
Here's the thing about the shoes:
When calendar pages turn from April to May, and the air becomes thick with rain, the caterpillars who slept under Eric's loving and watchful eyes grow wings— and what can Eric do but watch them test their speckled wings, flap them curiously, before slowly lifting away from his palm, into the air, up, up, up, and away?
Here's the thing about the shoes, his signature, the piano, the whistling, and every other thing Eric finds unpolished, unbalanced, incomplete: he holds it in his palm and doesn't look away until he knows he's made it his:
He loves it until it's perfect— and then he lets it go. Up, up, up, and away.
Eric Lauren is seven years old when he makes his peace with never being the first choice.
It's not like he gets picked last— no, he's never the last man standing, never told he couldn't play this time around. He's a fast runner, and when you're seven years old, that's all anyone cares about when forming a kickball team during recess. But he's not the fastest nor the tallest, and sometimes when it's his turn to kick, he gets so excited that he takes a running start at the ball and misses it completely. He's a little too loud, a little aggressive, a little too much. So no, he's never anyone's first choice.
He doesn't ask any of his friends why no one ever picks him first; not because he already knows the answer, but because he's afraid he wouldn't like the answer if he was ever brave enough to ask. Maybe the team captains don't like his high-pitched voice, his booming laugh, his messy hair. No, the voice in the back of his head assures him, it's not because of your voice or your hair. It's because the other kids are better than you.
Eric is not the worst kickball player on the playground, sure, but he's also not the best. He's ordinary, and ordinary people just don't get picked first. He doesn't understand why this revelation makes him feel hollowed out.
Eric Lauren is nine years old, and he can't find his class.
His teacher has brought the students from Eric's class to the aquarium a town or two away for the day, and Eric has had a lot of fun. When the day is almost over and Eric begins the walk back to the atrium with his friends and the chaperone, he's distracted by the spotted seal and knows he can't leave without saying goodbye.
It's only for a moment, but when he bids the seal adieu and turns back around to face his group, they aren't there. He walks around the bottom level once, twice, three times, and cannot find a single face he recognizes. His breath quickens, and he pleads with himself not to panic, but he's worried he'll have to sleep in this cavernous place because no one is coming to look for him. He goes to the atrium and plops down on a bench and waits— eventually, someone would have to come looking for him.
Half an hour passes, and no one stops to ask Eric where his mom is or if he's here with a grownup or if he's okay; and the feeling of being forgotten, of being so ordinary and invisible, hurts his chest. His heart squeezes in an ugly, desperate sort of way, and the pressure constricts his lungs, and a sob is just about to pry its way up into his throat when the lady from the desk in the lobby comes to ask him where his mommy is.
An hour later, the teacher and Eric's mother step into the atrium, and Eric can breathe again. His teacher frantically apologizes to everyone involved before turning to Eric, saying, "We didn't even notice you weren't on the bus until we got back to the school!"
Years later, Eric will know that the teacher didn't mean anything cruel or mean-spirited when he said that. But that feeling from before, the feeling of being so unimportant that your absence goes completely unnoticed, returns to Eric full force and threatens to swallow him whole, and he swears to himself that he can become unforgettable.
People think that Eric Lauren came into this world as a spotlight-stealer, that he exploded into this life loudly, proudly, unapologetically. But the truth is that Eric Lauren is, above all else, an adaptable creature. He grows up competitive because when you're too big for your own body, you have to be. He grows up loud because he can't be sure he's still here if he goes too long without hearing his own voice. He jumps because grownups overlooked his presence completely sometimes, and if seeing is believing, he can't afford to be out of anyone's sightlines. He can't afford to disappear.
Eric Lauren is thirteen years old when he resigns himself to desperation.
Sure, he'd already made his peace with never being the first choice, but he didn't know he'd have to beg people to believe in him. He hadn't yet experienced how it felt to plead with someone, anyone, to ask and ask that they throw the ball into the air and let him fly. He gets told 'no' a lot, but he brandishes puppy dog eyes like a secret power, and grovels like the word 'shame' has no place in his vocabulary. He wields his unyielding enthusiasm like a sword, learns that bright eyes and flattery can break someone's resistance far more efficiently than demands ever could. Anyone willing and able to throw for Eric is good enough for him. Skill and precision mean nothing to someone who laughs in the face of gravity: as long as the ball is in the air, he will jump for it.
Eric's sister finally breaks one winter afternoon: with many of his friends on vacation, and the rest unwilling to spend hours out in the cold, Eric has spent days cooped up inside with no one to throw for him. When she finally tires of watching as he tries, again and again, to make a football bounce off the side of the house high enough for him to catch it, she sighs, resigning herself to the task. Eric's face breaks into a grin when she steps outside and asks if he'd like her to try and throw for him. "I have no idea how to do this," She says, tugging a hat onto her head to keep the tips of her ears safe from the blistering cold, "but I'll do my best, okay?"
She takes the ball from him and lobs it gently through the air ahead of them. Eric bends his knees and starts running. She cranes her neck to catch a glimpse of his wild eyes and brilliant smile, seemingly miles and miles away from her.
Louisa Lauren does not have as many age-defining moments as Eric, but that afternoon, she learned that her brother grew wings without telling her and that he could touch the clouds if he wanted to. Maybe he could even touch the sun.
The thing about Eric Lauren is that he doesn't know how to doubt himself: this is still the case. Eric believes that he can fly, and so he does. That's all there is to it. And if the world around him demands he flies higher, then what can he do but find a way to soar?
SUMMER WAS, and Eric Lauren tried to be with it. He tried not to live in only the past tense. He is trying to remember he is present continuous, a being, being, being, all visible seams and recurring collapse. He had a summer reading on spiders which he never got around to, but he sees cobwebs in every corner— his life an antique, untouched. His grandmother's home was filled with spiders, and he has learned their way of weaving, of silk and story. He knows what it is like to be a jointed thing, appearing as though something taken apart just to be assembled again, fissures running along every surface. He knows what it is like to have so many eyes yet see nothing at all. He once learned that they had an open circulatory system— what this means is that they have no veins, no arteries, nothing to carry their lifeblood but in the hollow of their bodies. No tributaries, only the vastness of an ocean contained in something so small, so unnerving in its existence. Sometimes the very fact that something is alive is enough to terrify us. Summer, he buries the spiders. He ignores the crawling under his skin. He wakes up, and he wakes up, and he wakes up. Arachnid gaze of his, time gone gossamer, and this ache he never sheds. The spider's chrysalis is one of consumption, unlike those of the butterflies. Still, he will devour, he will become something bigger than his own skin.
In other words: summer is over, fall has begun, football season is near, and he's running out of time.
In the beginning, on a normal Tuesday at the start of fall when the Southern California heat has congealed in the sky, the very first official day of practice marking the dawn of a new team, a new year, a new season, there are only stirrings of dreams. A little after six in the morning, the coaches begin to trickle into the Eastside High School fieldhouse. The streets of Julian are empty, with no signs of life except the perpetual glare of the convenience store lights on one corner after another— but inside the fieldhouse, a small structure behind the main school building, the life of this town sprouts.
About a half an hour later, the players arrive.
Coach Frank Healy stands in front of fifty-two boys dressed in identical black-and-teal accented shirts and shorts, sitting on identical metal benches, staring into his eyes. They all listen, or at least try to. Healy's quiet words wash over the room, and in hundreds of other California towns celebrating the start of football practice that September day, there were similar sounds of intimacy and welcome— and while these were Healy's words, they could have come from any high school coach renewing the ritual of sport. Opening the gates of Eden's Garden in front of boys who'd rather spend their days walking in the desert instead; throat parched, hands cracked, knowing that the mirages of what they want will always be sweeter than what any garden has to offer. Sport has never been anything more than want— there is a reason, Coach Healy says, there are a thousand other boys in this school, and only a fraction of you are here. We have a tradition.
That tradition is enshrined on a wall of the field house, where virtually every player who had made All-State during the past thirty years was carefully immortalized within the dimensions of a four-by-six-inch picture frame. It was enshrined in the proclamation from the city council that hung on a bulletin board, honoring one of Eastside's state championship teams. It was enshrined in the black carpet, and the black-and-white cabinets, and the black-and-teal rug in the shape of a castle. It was enshrined in the county library, where the 235-page history that had been written about Eastside football was more detailed than any of the histories about the town itself. Of all the legends of Julian, that of high school football was the most enduring. It has a deep and abiding sense of place and history, so unlike the town, where not even the origin of the name itself could be vouched for with any confidence. The only thing that can be said for sure: at times, Julian has a feel of lingering sadness that many isolated places have, a sense of the world orbiting around it at a dizzying speed while it stood stuck in time— sixty miles from the nearest big city, and a lot more from anywhere worthwhile— still fixed in an era in which it was inappropriate for high school girls to be smarter than their boyfriends, in which kids spent their Saturday nights making the endless circles of the drag in their cars along the wide swathes of 42nd Street and Andrews Highway, in which teenage honor was measured not by how much cocaine you snorted, but how much beer you drank.
But, Julian also evoked the kind of America that many presidents always seemed to have in mind during their terms, a place still rooted in the sweet nostalgia of the twentieth century— unsophisticated, basic, raw— a place where anybody could be somebody, a place still clinging to all the tenets of the American Dream, however wobbly they had become.
In the summer twilight, against the backdrop of the enormous sky where braids of orange and purple and red and blue as delicately hued as a butterfly wing stretched into eternity, young girls with ponytails and freckles went up and down neighborhood streets on their roller skates. As the cool breeze of night set in, neighboring families pulled up plastic lawn chairs to conduct 'chair committee' and casually meander over the day's events without rancor or argument or constant one-upmanship. On other nights, parents gently roused their children from bed near the stroke of midnight so they could sit together by the garage to watch a thunderstorm roll in from the north, gliding across the sky with its shimmering madness, those angular streaks of light cutting through the night in a spectacle almost as exciting as an Eastside High School football game.
Across the country, there were thousands of places just like Julian, places that were not only isolated but insulated, places that had gone through the growing pains of America without anyone paying attention, places that existed as islands unto themselves with no link to the great cities except that they all sang the same national anthem to the same flag at sporting events. They were the same kind of places that you saw from a plane on a clear night if you happened to look out the window, a concentration of little beaded dots breaking up the empty landscape with several veins leading in and out, and then bleak emptiness once again. It was a view every traveler had seen a million times before, and maybe if you were a passenger on a plane dissecting the night, you looked down and saw those lights and wondered what it would be like to live in a place like Julian, to inhabit one of those infinitesimal dots, to be in a place that seemed so painfully far away from everything, so completely out of the mainstream of life.
When Coach Healy spoke to the players that very first time, he told them to ignore the outside pressure that would inevitably swirl around them during the thick of the season. You're gonna get criticism and I'm gonna get criticism, he said, but it don't mean anything, because the only people that matter are in this room. It doesn't make a difference, except for the people here.
In the solitude of the fieldhouse on that beautiful September morning, it was hard to believe that anyone else did matter. But the feeling was only temporary. In just about a week, the team would officially be unveiled to the public. And from that moment on, it would become the property of those so desperately devoted to it. It would become the helpless insects stuck in the spiderweb of Julian, examined under arachnid eyes that carry nothing behind them.
THERE ARE certain events in Julian that had become time-honored traditions, essential elements in the biological clock of the town. There was the annual downtown Christmas tree-lighting ceremony sponsored by one of the banks, when people gathered on bleachers in front of the city hall and sipped on free hot chocolate while waiting for Santa to arrive on a flatbed truck. There was the biennial Oil Show, which out-of-town hookers always marked on their calendars in red because of the tantalizing possibility of having thousands of out-of-towners stuck in Julian for what might possibly be the three longest days of their life. And, of course, in early September, there was the Eastside booster club's Season Opening.
The faithful sat on little stools of silver and blue under the merciless lights of the high school cafeteria, but the setting didn't bother them a bit. Had the Season Opening been held inside the county jail, or on a sinking ship, or on the side of a mountain, they would have still flocked to attend.
Outside, the September night was sweetly cool and serene with just a wisp of Southern California wind. Inside, there was a teeming sense of excitement, and also relief, for the waiting was basically over; there would be no more sighs of longing, no more awkward attempts to fill up the empty spaces of time with golf games and thoroughly unsatisfying talk about baseball. Tonight, as if it was a beauty pageant, the boys of Eastside would come introduced. And after that, in less than two weeks, would come the glorious start of the season on the third Friday night of September.
Each of those little stools in each of those rows, about four hundred seats in all, were occupied well before the scheduled starting time of seven-thirty. It didn't take long before the open area in the back of the room had filled up with several hundred other people who hardly minded standing as long as they were inside. Eventually, it got so crowded that those who came late didn't even bother to try to get in, but stayed in the hallway and watched with their faces pressed up against a long window, like out-of-luck shoppers peering into a store during Black Friday.
A concession stand in the corner had a brisk business in hats and t-shirts and jackets and flags, while another one sold decals and little good-luck charms. And each devotee, as they walked in, carried a special program about as thick as a city phone book. Many had their kids with them, for it was clear they thought it was important for children to see this spectacle at a young age so they could begin to understand what it all meant. People had come dressed up for the event, too. Not fancily or anything outlandish, but just in black and teal— hats and shirts and pants and jackets and shoes. There were about eight hundred people crammed into the Eastside High School cafeteria by the time the Season Opener began, and fans clutched in their hands the 2017 Eastside football yearbook, published annually by the booster club to help generate funds for the program. It ran 224 pages, had 513 individual advertisements, and raised about twenty thousand dollars. Virtually every lawyer, doctor, insurance firm, car dealer, restaurant, and oil field supply business in town had taken out an ad, both as a show of support for Eastside football and, perhaps, as a form of protection. The grand dukes of Julian, men in their fifties and sixties who had become as dependent on the Executioners as they were on their jobs and children and wives and treated the memory of each game as a crystal prism that looked more beautiful and intricate every time it was lifted to the light, were there in full force, of course.
Friday nights under a full moon that filled the black satin sky with a light as soft and delicate as the flickering of a candle. The road trips to Irving and Tucson and Albuquerque in that endless caravan of RVs and Suburbans and plain old sedans rising forth so proudly from the deep of Southern California. The family reunion atmosphere of each practice where they knew everyone and everyone knew them. They could hardly wait.
Because playing for Eastside, and supporting Eastside, means you learn one important lesson: no pain, no gain. It has an irresistible pull. In seasons past, playing for Eastside had meant routinely vomiting during the grueling off-season workouts inside the hot and sweaty weight room, and it had meant playing with broken ankles and hands that weren't x-rayed because, if it had been known that it was broken, the player would have had to sit out the next game. It had meant a shot of novocaine during halftime to mask the pain of a deep ankle sprain or an ACL tear, it had meant popping painkillers and getting shots of Valium.
But few in the community blanched at any of these things, or even questioned them. Because of such an attitude, Eastside had established itself as perhaps the most successful football dynasty in the country. Julian was hardly the only town that nurtured football and cherished it and went crazy over it, but no one came close to matching the performance of Eastside. Since 1970, they had won five state championships, been to the state finals a record nine times, and made the playoffs well over fifteen times. And all of this wasn't accomplished with kids who weighed 250 pounds and were automatic major-college prospects, but with kids who often weighed 160 or 170 or even less. Kids with no special athletic prowess. Kids who weren't especially fast or especially strong. But with kids who were fearless and relentlessly coached from the time they were able to walk, they had only one certain goal in their lives in Julian, California. Whatever it took, they would play for Eastside.
Behind the rows of stools stood the stars of the show, the members of the 2018 Eastside Executioners high school football team. Dressed in their black game jerseys, they laughed and teased one another like privileged children of royalty. Directly in front of them, dressed in white jerseys and forming a little protective barrier, were the Duchesses, a select group of senior girls who made up the school spirit squad. The number on the white jersey each girl wore corresponded to that of the player she had been assigned for the football season, and with that assignment came various responsibilities. As part of the tradition, each Duchess brought some type of treat for her player every week before the game. She didn't necessarily have to make something from scratch, but there was an indirect pressure to because of not-so-private complaining from players who tired quickly of bags of candy— if she had to buy something store-bought, it might as well be a six-pack of beer. In addition, each Duchess also had to make a large sign for her player that went in his front yard and stayed there the entire season as a notice to the community that he played football for Eastside. The making of these yard signs, which looked like miniature Broadway marquees, had become quite competitive— some of the Duchesses spent as much as a hundred dollars of their own money to make an individual sign, decorating it with twinkling lights and other attention-grabbing trinkets. These were some of the basic Duchess requirements, but some girls went beyond in their show of spirit.
The Season Opener began with a prayer by one of the pastors at Temple Baptist Church, the largest church in Julian. We thank you for the joy the athletes bring to our hearts and lives, he said. Following the prayer, a video was shown of the highlights from the past season in 2017. Since the team had gone to the semi-finals of the state playoffs before losing to the eventual champion, Anaheim, it had been considered not a great year, but at the very least, a good one. There were some sporadic yells, but the crowd in the cafeteria didn't become animated until the screen showed the one-and-only star quarterback, Manny Leahan. The oil economy could go to hell. The country could go to hell. But, thanks to Manny Leahan, never, ever Eastside football.
The next burst of applause at the Season Opener came when it was time to introduce the members of the Eastside football team individually. When their names were called, they walked down a narrow aisle separating the cafeteria in half.
As A.J. Garcia took his stride, he was reminiscent of a bride at her wedding, each step slow and measured, luxuriating in the applause and the hundreds of eyes beckoning to him. He could've spent hours moving down that thirty-foot aisle, for this was the part of the game he truly did love, the attention, the adulation, as far removed as possible from the grit and relentless routine of the practice field. But, not everyone was so eager. Junior Rusher walked with his head cocked toward the floor, those furtive, brooding eyes burning holes somewhere, wishing he could be anyplace but here, in the midst of all this outlandish noise and attention. More than anything in his life, he hated crowds. Manny Leahan, of course, garners the loudest applause of them all— but the underclassmen of the team bring some stiff competition as they follow behind, especially in the case of trio Eric Lauren, Luca Reuben-James, and Zero Barlowe.
Because this year would mark something special for the Eastside Executioners, and everyone knew it. Coach Healy knew it as he introduced the three boys, citing them as his "triple-punch offense" with a pride reserved for his star players. The crowd knew it as they chanted their names, showcasing gear and merch with their respective jersey numbers. The team knew it as they watched their youngest talents take the stage, finally shiny and polished after an off-season of blood, sweat, and tears.
And for a moment, the world belonged to them.
The only thing sports ever promise us is a few small moments of transcendence. And what the hell else is life made of, if not for moments?
AUTHOR'S NOTE
hey! *loud boos sound from the comments, tomatoes are launched my way* OKAY OKAY i'm sorry. i am. i've been BUSY for lack of a better word - but i am BACK. for now at least. i'm not gonna write a bunch explaining where i've been and what i plan on doing for the future with my stories and such but just know this chapter is dedicated to hannah who has been on her knees begging for an update. no matter how much it seems like im not, i really am so excited for this story its just a matter of time and inspiration!!! but for now please take this shorter update and i willl see yall hopefully soon :)