The Weapon of Young Gods #14: Concussions

I’m locking my bike to the Rec Center rack when I hear Roy call my name. He rides up clutching a soccer ball under his left arm. It’s only ten minutes to game time, but he’s the only other person from my team here so far, and the other team is nowhere to be seen. Out on the field, the previous hour’s intramural games are wrapping up, the players slouching off to the locker room through the warm, dry October evening. I stand up and scan the darkening campus, searching the bike paths and sidewallks for any signs of teammates, and casually ignore Roy’s happy chatter. He’s just leaned his bike against the fence without locking it, and I briefly wonder if he’s sober.

Previous Episode

Soundtrack (mp3): ‘Concussions’ by Low Tide

“Derreckh, me lad,” he says, in a horribly fake Irish accent. “Ow’s ya bin?”

“Not the accents, man. Not tonight. We’ve got shit to do.”

“Ah, bet oi jes’ looovem, me bai!” His eyes google with delight, but he drops the brogue. “Fine, no big deal. I can play it straight. You know that. I always did for AYSO, remember?” We’d been on several teams together as kids. My family was one of the first connections his parents had made when they moved to California. “Right,” I say, starting to stretch a little. “All those shitty little teams…except,” I correct myself, “except for those two years with Vandemark, huh?” Roy smirks. “I hated that crazy Dutch bastard. He just used to fucking butcher my name, man.” I laugh for the first time in days. “Oh, come on. You just said you loved accents.”

“Not Vandemark’s. I could definitely have done without the twenty hoarse croaks of ‘Hhhghrrrouy!’ every night. You know, like he was horking phlegm from-”

“Okay, okay, I remember. Don’t elaborate.” In fact, that ‘crazy Dutch bastard’ knew his stuff, and led our team of pee-wee Peles to two regional championship games in two years- one won, one lost. “Anyway,” I continue, “he was way better than those dumbfucks who ran my high school team into the ground later on.” Roy says nothing, and I recall that he was cut in the first round of high school soccer tryouts for the three straight years. “Don’t get bent about that team,” I say. “You really didn’t miss much, you know.”

He grunts in disbelief, but starts talking about something else much more unremarkable, and my attention wanders. Thanks to my time on the UCSB team last year, I’m one of only two players with any real skills or experience in this lineup. When I came back to school I still wanted to play, so I joined the co-ed intramural league and organized a team. The general level of their ability wasn’t terrible, but I wasn’t prepared for an epidemic of apathy that hit everyone surprisingly fast once school started, after only a few practices. We’d barely had enough people to play the first two games, so I’d had to do mildly unpleasant things like play goalie or ask the opposing team for a few players to even things out. Roy had ended up on my team, and I’d forgotten what a royal pain he could be. He’d just never shut up. “Can you still do that thing where you front-flip on a throw-in, man?” he’d asked, like a puppy about to piss on my leg. I usually stuck him back on defense while I was up forward, and I’d banish him up front, where I knew he’d tire quickly, when I was marooned in goal.

Other than these practices and games, I actually hadn’t seen Roy since the day he graduated, back at the beginning of a long, grinding summer of stupid work and lackluster suburban parties. I’d made a few friends at my summer job- all younger guys about Roy’s age who’d laughed at my dumb jokes about life in Isla Vista (even though I’d never actually lived there), all people who I knew I’d never see again if I didn’t come back to this junior-college bookstore gig next summer. We’d shamelessly check out the devastatingly gorgeous 24-year-old Chilean accountant, whose name was Paulina, and when she put us in our place we’d revert to leering at the hottest girls all day when they came in for their summer school books. We hit on them carelessly until the boss banished us to the dungeon of Receiving, where we processed all the fall semester’s books as they were shipped in, palatte by endless palatte.

My life fell into a fairly brutal routine that summer. I’d work a 2pm-10pm shift, either on the register or in the dungeon, be home and showered by 11, and out again to whatever low-key slushfest happened to be infecting the sea of endless South OC tract homes that night. Each party ended up being a pretty nasty slog in itself, peppering stupidity over a summmer already highlighted by a few truly depraved incidents in which I totally failed to live up to my UCSB Gauchoholic reputation. I guess I was finally making up for all the dumb college behavior I didn’t get mired in as a freshman, especially on the night when I was cornered in a Mission Viejo backyard bash by Paulina (who had already ambushed me to neck in the bookstore parking lot) her twin sister Genevieve, and just enough of their violently pink jungle juice to make me puke on anything within a fifteen-foot radius for the rest of the night, including the twins.

I tried to endure, but it only got worse. After a few weeks of staggering into work the like a retarded phoenix, sprinkled in the ashes of the previous night’s alcoholic idiocy, I finally exerted some self-control, to the general relief of my mother and various other do-goody family meddlers. I got my shit together just in time to come back to my sophomore year at UCSB, but I never assumed that I’d be a permanent teetotaler. Isla Vista always reminded me of “Pleasure Island” in Pinocchio, where all the little boys and girls go to eat candy and play, but instead painfully transform into braying jackasses. All of this is on my mind as I wait for my team, especially after I recognize a momentary lull in Roy’s cheerful banter, and I finally realize he’d asked me a question that I’d completely missed.

“Say what?”

“Dude, I was just asking if you know anything going on tonight. I heard that you could always find all the parties, man.” Oh, Christ. If Roy had heard about my wretched summer, then everyone had. “Roy, it’s only Wednesday,” I say. “There’s nothing going on ’til this weekend.”

“Oh.” He sounds slightly deflated, and I’m about to take it back (because hey, there’s always shit going on), but he lightens up almost immediately when he looks over my shoulder. “Hey, it’s Ali and the guys!” I glance behind me. A tall red-headed girl is walking up the bikepath, trailed by three of our other male teammates. In my reverie I’d also missed the arrival of our opposition, who were already out on the field stretching.

“Well hello, boys,” says Allison Eaves, our linchpin and, as much as one can be in the Intramural league, our star striker. “Looks like slim pickins out there tonight.” She waves vaguely at the other team, who as I now notice, only have five people on the field. Roy gets blessedly tongue-tied as I make a quick count of our people: Ali, Troy, Darren, Rob, another girl named Jaimie who’s just now crossing the street, Roy, and myself.

“Shit,” I say softly. “It’s already twenty minutes past game time. If no one else shows up for those guys, we’ll have to give them someone.” The intramural rules mandated it, and now here it was, already knee-capping our third game. “No worries,” says Ali. “I’ll just go talk to them about it.” She turns on the spot and jogs onto the field. We all follow slowly, knowing exactly what will happen, and before we even stretch, Ali comes back sporting a maniacal grin, confirming that we are doomed.

“Okay, well, I just volunteered to play for them to balance the numbers. The refs haven’t shown up, so I guess it won’t really count.” The field was nearly deserted by now, but the massive lights still shone down on us all with blinding authority. “Thanks a lot, bitch,” says Jaimie sweetly, tossing her short blond ponytail.”Your ass is mine.”

“Sweet!” yelps Troy, but since I’m technically the manager I act fast and try to focus everybody. It works for the duration that it takes us, and then Ali and her new team, to get into position. I set up a 2-2-1 lineup, imprisoning myself in goal again, and hope that we’ll avoid another massacre like last game, but tonight quickly becomes one of the most dismal episodes of my already-checkered soccer career. Ali just demolishes us, scoring goal after goal, seeming to really relish faking me out each time.

Jaimie is actually doing well tonight, and manages to move play up to the far penalty box, but her eighteen-yard shot on goal is high, bouncing off the crossbar and falling onto Ali’s perfect chest before floating down to her right foot. Ali begins tearing back down the field, stopping only to double back and avoid the dust cloud of Troy’s missed tackle, and then to beat Darren in a footrace to the ball. She regains control like a fucking pro, and I almost forget what I’m supposed to be doing in favor of simply observing the elegant way this girl is taking apart what used to be her team. Suddenly she breaks straight toward the goal and I snap out of it just in time to see Roy abandon his position to help, to keep at her and slow her down a little as they zigzag inexorably in my direction.

When Ali finally shakes him off she looks up and fucking winks at me before charging the goal again. I take a few steps out of the goal box and get ready to tackle her instead of the ball- another goal is probably worth that- when Roy comes out of nowhere and almost steals it again, forcing Ali to my right, where she’d have to make a parallel shot to score. Roy overcompensates, careening out of bounds, but the next thing I know is Ali is almost on top of me and she must hear him coming back again or something, because I see her do this immaculate little scissor-step over the ball and tap it out of his reach as he runs right at her, right at me, and we collide, bent to the will of intertia and physics and all of space-time.

I hear the hit before I feel it- a sonorous, metallic clang, and feel the first radial waves of pain crash down on my skull for a hellish instant before the universe shows something that, in my last synapses of consciousness, appears to be mercy, and I expend all remaining effort in accepting it.