Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (33 page)

What do Dukakis and panty hose have in common?

They both irritate Bush.

"What's twelve inches long and hangs in front of an asshole?

Dukakis's necktie.

During the election season a so-called Michael Dukakis Fact
Sheet started making the rounds in Odessa. The pamphlet,
drawn up by a group called the League of Prayer in Montgomery, Alabama, and handed out at a local doctor's office, brutally
condemned Dukakis as a pro-choice, pro-homosexual advocate of sodomy who was soft on defense and soft on criminals and
who sought "to rid America of its Godly heritage." The pamphlet described him as a "card-carrying member of the ACLU,"
which it said was the equivalent of being "against everything
moral, ethical, righteous, holy, Christian, Godly and patriotic."
Homosexuals, the pamphlet said, were nothing more than a
"minuscule band of sexual perverts."

In the Permian locker room, players old enough to vote for
the first time talked about Dukakis as the "homo" president and
depicted a world with him as president in which it would no
longer be possible to exercise the inalienable right of taking a
forty-four magnum to blow the brains out of a criminal robbing
or physically assaulting you.

The comments about him depicted a man who would not
simply take the country in a different direction but would
threaten its very sanctity, its very core. They translated into an
almost irrational fear-fear that Dukakis would shut down the
military, fear that he would take away the right of people to
protect themselves against violent intruders, fear that he would
ruin the economy, fear that the only people who would benefit
from his administration would be the poor, while they, the
hardworking guts of the country, got sold down the river.

"Boy, I think he would be the worst thing that could ever
happen to this country," said city councilman Dub Kennedy,
who found Dukakis's membership in the ACLU abhorrent.

"I think he's the biggest liberal I know running for president," said Ken Scates, who had lived in West `Texas for almost
forty years and had built up his own oil field service company
from scratch. "All I know is what I have read in Reader's Digest
and other things. I think he's too liberal. He'd shut the military
down. Inflation would be bad. The only person that I see voting
for him are other liberals and welfare recipients."

"First of all I'm a gun collector," said former city councilman
Vern Foreman. "You tell me I can't have any guns, you're gonna
see a helluva fight. I don't see how anybody could vote for Dukakis. The son-of-a-bitch is too damn liberal."

Certainly it would have been hard for Dukakis ever to play
well in this part of the country. West Texas had a history of
staunch conservatism, not to mention a virulent dislike of government as practiced by Democrats. In the fifties and sixties
the John Birch Society had had a significant membership in
Odessa. The last time the county had voted for a Democratic
presidential candidate was in 1948, when it went for Harry
Truman. If the politics was conservative, so obviously were the
attitudes.

In 1982, the mayor of Odessa proclaimed Decency Awareness Week and asked citizens "to give appropriate recognition
to this week by suitable observances and prayer and supplication to Almighty God to deliver our City, State and Nation from
the threat of public decadence and crimes of indecency."

In the early eighties, a group called Odessans for Decency
had been formed. The group avowed a four-point platformstamping out abortion, pornography, and homosexuality, and
establishing prayer in the schools. For a time it was quite popular and quite effective. It engineered a successful campaign to
force an adult bookstore out of the downtown. It successfully
lobbied the city council to block a cable company from offering a sexually explicit program called Escapade. It also led a
spirited campaign to prevent Ozzy Osbourne from playing a
concert in Odessa in 1983 because of the British rock star's outlandish behavior, which had included biting the head off a bat
as well as performing songs that allegedly encouraged Satan
worship, but a federal judge ruled that Osbourne had a contractual right to play here.

Joe Seay, one of the founders of Odessans for Decency, said
the group then asked its followers, who he said numbered
twelve thousand, "to pray that God himself would prevent Ozzy
Osbourne from coming to Odessa, Texas." Osbourne ended up
canceling because he had the flu.

In 1987 Seay stepped down as president of Odessans for Decency to found a group called the Christian Voting Bloc, an
organization aiming to promote political candidates with Chris tian values. During election time he sent out a list of endorsements to a secret mailing list of twelve hundred registered
voters. Influential Democrats in town, much to their chagrin,
believed the group had significant influence. The platform of
the Christian Voting Bloc was much the same as that of Odessans for Decency-fighting pornography and working to curtail any special rights for homosexuals.

In the latter part of 1988, when a state district judge from
Dallas said he gave a murderer a lighter sentence because the
two victims were homosexual, Seay was one of the few to support him publicly.

"We'd work to keep him in office," Seay told members of the
press. "We need more like him."

When George Bush came to Midland-Odessa he didn't go
quite as far, but it was the family and school prayer and allegiance to the flag that he highlighted over and over. As historian Garry Wills pointed out, he seemed as closely linked to Pat
Robertson as he did to Ronald Reagan, and it was a strategy
that worked brilliantly.

Dukakis forces in Texas had thought they could win the state
on the basis of the economy. They thought that the issues of
gun control and the Pledge of Allegiance were emotional fads
that would quickly die out. They never thought that Bush's
rhetoric, a kinder, gentler version of the "Morton Downey
Show," would have much lasting effect. They patiently waited
for the campaign to get back to the greater good of forging
practical solutions to massive problems, but that shift never
took place.

Perhaps just once Dukakis should have left the rarefied atmosphere of Boston and Harvard that seemed to entrap him
no matter where he was, hopped in a car by himself, and taken
a drive down one of those lonely, flat-as-a-pancake roads to the
gleaming lights of a Friday night football game. As in ancient
Rome, any road he chose would have gotten him there. He
could have pulled down his tie and unbuttoned his collar. He
could have gone to the concession stand to eat a frito pie and a chili dog and then wash it all down with one of those dill pickles
that came carefully wrapped in silver foil. Instead of keeping
track of the score, he could have sat in a corner of the stands to
listen to the conversations around him as well as take note of
the prayers both before the game and after. He could have seen
what people were wearing, observed how they interacted with
their children, listened to the songs the bands were playing,
watched those balloons float into the air like doves of peace,
and let the perfume of the Pepettes and the Golden Girls flow
sweetly into his nostrils. He could have counted how many
blacks were there, and how many Hispanics.

There was a heartbeat in those stands that dotted the Friday
nights of Texas and Oklahoma and Ohio and Pennsylvania and
Florida and all of America like a galaxy of stars, a giant, lurking
heartbeat.

Michael Dukakis never heard that sound, and even if he had
he probably would have dismissed it as some silly tribal rite
practiced in the American boondocks by people who made no
difference. But his opponent didn't make the same mistake. He
had been down the lonely road to those games, where the
heartbeat had resonated more spectacularly than in the healthiest newborn. He knew it was still as strong as ever. He knew
what kind of values these people had.

In his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination for
president Bush reminded an entire nation, an entire world, of
where he had been and what he believed in, his echo of the past
a reaffirmation of the present:

Now we moved to West Texas forty years ago, forty years ago this
year. And the war was over, and we wanted to get out and make it on
our own. Those were exciting days. We lived in a little shotgun house,
one room for the three of us, worked in the oil business, and then started
my own.

And in time, we had six children; moved from the shotgun to a
duplex apartment to a house, and lived the dream-high school football
on Friday nights....

I

WHEN BOOBIE MILES RETURNED TO THE FOOTBALL FIELD, NO
one called out his name with those bellowing chants that had
rocked the Watermelon Feed in a moment that seemed like
a millennium before. There were no bursts of applause, no
coach's speech comparing him to the great Permian runners of
the past, no take-your-sweet-time walk down the aisle of the
crowded high school cafeteria. In the space of five weeks he
had become an afterthought whose past performance earned
no special privilege and seemed largely forgotten.

Had there been a waiver wire in the world of high school
football, a place to dump former stars, he would have been on
it, dangled at a bargain-basement price to Andrews or Kermit
or Wink or maybe Seminole or any other town that might be
willing to take a chance on a once-hot prospect with a bum knee
for the stretch run to make the playoffs. Or maybe he could
just be traded for a reserve defensive tackle and a player to be
named later.

"In a week or two the fans will think he already graduated,"
said Trapper. "They'll be saying, `Boobie who?'"

Boobie who?

The only thing to herald his return was the shame and ignominy of a white shirt. There were dozens of other players wearing them as well, and together they blended into the dry heat
of the practice field like lingering cattle waiting to be herded in this or that direction. There were a select few who didn't look
that way and clearly stood out, but Boobie didn't merit that distinction anymore.

As part of a long-standing tradition, the Permian starters
wore black shirts during practice and the subs wore white. In
the life of a player few single moments were more stirring than
to open up the locker one day and find a black practice jersey
hanging there like a gilded, sacred robe in the middle of a foulsmelling pile of pads and pants and shoes and jocks. Conversely, few single moments were more humbling than to have
that black shirt taken away and given to someone else.

Boobie had worn a black shirt his junior season. Up until the
knee injury, he had worn one his senior year without a remote
thought of change. But in his absence Chris Comer had come
to own the black shirt at fullback. He had rushed for a hundred
yards or more in each of Permian's five games, and it was becoming the general consensus of the coaches that he was better
than Boobie ever had been or ever would be. For one thing, he
worked harder in the weight room than Boobie and didn't coast
on his natural strength. For another, he didn't try all those
pretty-boy spin moves all day long like he was some damn ballerina or something but knew that the best way sometimes to
get by someone was to lower the shoulder and punish the living
shit out of him, use that stupendously strong body of his as the
weapon God had clearly intended it to be. Boobie might have
been able to run like that, but it was difficult to get him to try
it. In the past all that was a necessary part of coaching him. But
now it didn't matter nearly so much. If he wanted to show off
his fancy spins and jukes, he could do it at home in his backyard
in between the broken-down cars and the little pieces of trash
that swirled in the wind. He wasn't a black shirt anymore, just
another white shirt trying to work his way back into the starting
lineup.