As the one o’clock kickoff approaches, men file into the stadium concealing hacksaws and pocketknives, wrenches and wire cutters. The local news has reported that any fans attempting to leave the Met with stolen property will be arrested and charged with a crime, but it’s a hollow threat against 41,110 potential suspects. Larceny is in the air as the game gets under way. FOR YOUR PROTECTION, the scoreboard pleads, PLEASE HAVE MERCY ON THE MET.
For the last time, I stride past the fans and through the employees’ entrance with the hauteur of a professional athlete. Whatever impulse toward kleptomania those fans may be feeling, the commissary workers are reminded of our sacred duty to inventory every hot dog bun and wax cup. But by the start of the second half, some fans have already set about loosening the bolts that anchor their own seats to the stadium floor. Northwestern Bell, anticipating today, has already denuded the Met of its pay phones. In the fourth quarter, fans in the bleachers pull down the U.S. flag, which has flown over center field forever. I can’t help but think of them as stagehands striking a set. Those of us who grew up here will all go on to other roles. But the curtain is ringing down on a long-running production that will never be revived.
With five minutes left in the game, a man in a gorilla suit breaches security and appears on the field. With fifteen seconds left in the fourth quarter, the Vikings have fourth and goal at the Chiefs three-yard line, trailing 10–6. Quarterback Tommy Kramer throws in the flat to tight end Joe Senser, but the pass is batted away by Chiefs safety Gary Barbaro. The Chiefs take a knee on the next play and fans begin to pour over the walls around the field—a drunken, adrenalized waterfall of humanity. Instantly, one goalpost is scaled and felled, then the other. Both are covered in fans, like ants on a Popsicle stick. They’re marching an upright into the stands and down a tunnel and out into the parking lot while a lone spectator with a hacksaw works at removing the remaining yellow stump of one felled goalpost.
Many of the fans who remain in their seats are trying to uproot them. There is, in the words of Tribune columnist Joe Soucheray, “a terrible rending…the stomping of thousands of boot heels on chairs, the cracking of wood, pounding and tearing and pulling.”
Men with knives are sawing up segments of the frozen turf. Two men punch each other in the face, fighting over a stadium loudspeaker that one of them has torn from its moorings. Did the Beatles play “Ticket to Ride” through that speaker here in 1965? Had that speaker throbbed with “Hotel California” in 1978? There is no question that many of the souvenirs being spirited out of the Met with impunity lack any sentimental value whatsoever—metal folding chairs, ancient handrails, trash cans, toilet seats. It’s as if the people who have stormed the field—almost all of them men in their late teens and twenties—require some token of a dying age, something to remember their childhood by. I stash a swatch of field-goal netting in my coat pocket simply because it’s there, where I’m standing in silence on the frozen fringe of the field. The lighted message on the scoreboard reads FAREWELL TO THE MET—THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES.
The news will say there are only nine arrests. The prevailing attitude of police seems to be “We get it.”
A handful of bozos have scaled the scoreboard, an Everest of lights, letters, and numbers, with billboards near the top for Marlboro, Union 76, and Dial Sports, whose phone number—1-976-1313—is the portal to a modern miracle: instant scores of games in progress, accessible from your wall-mounted telephone. At the summit of the scoreboard is an analog Longines clock. As these drunken mountaineers continue their ascent of the scoreboard, they begin popping bulbs and pulling wires. The clock stops with the big hand on the three and the little hand on the two. “It was frozen at 3:10,” the front page of the Trib notes the next day, “and will be forever.”
I am too, in a way. As the mischief turns to mayhem, police loose a few bursts of tear gas or Mace or some other chemical disincentive to vandalism. Then my math-anxiety dreams come to life. A fan is picking apart the out-of-town scoreboard and tossing its contents to the wind. Letters and numbers are raining down from above exactly as they do in my night terrors. I can’t know it yet, but from this day forward, I will never again have those algebraic nightmares. Seeing them made real in the dying light of a December day somehow extinguishes those dreams. In their place will come the waking nightmare of migraine headaches, so that I’ll be metaphorically chased to the nurse’s office from Algebra I, with its malign letters and numbers and not-equal-to signs rendered in chalk. The migraines will also excuse me from football practice, until I tell Dad—a year from now—that I no longer want to play the sport. He won’t call me a pansy or ask me to reconsider. My fear of telling him—as with so many of my fears—are unfounded. But I am powerless to alter the worry gene passed down from Mom. I watch the mayhem at the Met now with a growing desire to get the hell out of here before it gets any worse.
The apocalyptic images playing out at the ballpark, Bloomington’s curtain call on the national stage, are being broadcast over the NBC television network. The announcers are silent. Over scenes of destruction, NBC is playing its planned tribute, a maudlin soundtrack backed by strings: Frank Sinatra singing “There used to be a ballpark right here…”
Tom drives me home from the Met one last time. I ride shotgun in the powder-blue Honda Accord that Mom has downsized into, now that she no longer has reason to drive five children at the same time. We pull into the South Brook driveway that I’ve shoveled countless times, in which I’ve shot innumerable hoops, from which I’ve thrown an infinite number of tennis balls against the garage door. At the top of the driveway is the single arborvitae around which Dad still strings a single strand of Christmas lights. Midway down its gentle slope is the backboard and hoop mounted on the pole that we used as home base—known in Bloomington as “gool”—in games of tag and Starlight Moonlight. It was on this driveway that we waited, one fateful Thanksgiving, for the high school fool that TP’d our house to make one more admiring pass, at which time Jim, Tom, John, and I caught up with his car on foot and ripped off his antenna as he sped away.
On this driveway, I waited in vain for hours on summer days for something to happen. Here, Jim and Tom posed in their prom tuxedoes and Mom chatted with passing neighbors after retrieving the mail. At the sound of Dad’s tires traversing this curb in the evening, she applied lipstick prior to kissing her husband in the hallway. I know every dimple and divot of this driveway. The kickstands that melted into its blacktop surface have left a topographical map of childhood.