January 2020

Meat Squad

by Peter Stine

I was relaxing in my brother’s kitchen over in Palmer Woods, waiting for him to return from the hospital, when Jack came in from a night class down at Wayne State. Last weekend he’d shaved his head again to make the hair grow back thicker. He sighed heavily and took a place at the table under a large round Faygo clock that glowed purple on the wall.

“Peter, I need a change, and not the minor things. New job, new pussy, the whole thing across the board.”
My sister-in-law walked in with a pile of laundry. “Hi, Jack. How was teaching tonight?”
“Betsy, I walk in there and they haven’t put the chairs around in a circle. Why do I have to ask them every class to put the chairs in a circle? I mean I’m a consistent person.”
Betsy chuckled and went to the cabinet to get some chips. I rolled a couple joints and placed them in the middle of the table. “This is what they would have preferred down at the soup kitchen today.”
“How’s that article coming?” she asked. “For Metropolitan Detroit, right?”
“Sister Mary Watson is a cool lady, Bets. She runs a remarkable shelter. I just hope to draw a little more attention and money her way.”

At that moment Pat arrived back from the hospital. Still thin as a rail after Vietnam, he grabbed a Lowenbrau and joined us at the table. His face was red from exertion.
“Patrick . . .” Jack said, reaching for a joint. “How’s it going?”
“A little busy in the ER,” he said, without elaboration, that mysteriously benign blankness on his face. “There was some basketball practice afterwards. Henry Ford has a team, mostly blacks from the ER. For a completely useless team member, I have quite a following.”

We passed the joint around, and talk meandered from the Boy Scouts to past summer jobs to what we might do with a videotape of Ronald Reagan butt-fucking a chimp, if we uncovered one. The three of us had been meeting regularly for mid-week bull sessions for a year now. This night Pat led us back to sports and some memories of his career as a half-miler in high school.

“I remember the Flint meet best,” he began. “I ran the first 440 in sixty, coasted the next 220, and then waited to see what I had left. Dad had the movie camera rolling. With about a hundred yards to go I started my kick. You knew it was time because these guys with long strides all around me were stretching it out, pulling away. But I had nothing left. Zilch. You feel the legs go rubbery, the vision blurs, and your body stiffens into some hysterical hunchback gasping for air. Your teammates are no help, standing along the track waving towels at you, yelling at you to pump your arms, as more runners are passing you, now pouring over the finish line, the camera recording all . . . On the ride home everybody’s horsing around, while I’m in the back of the bus, a wet towel over my head, puking my cookies into a pail . . . Christ, I remember after the Clio meet I went blind, simply lost my vision for half an hour.”

Maybe it was just dope profundity, but it struck me sitting there that over time jock humiliations like Pat’s became silver trophies, far more precious than memories of victory. It is the losing that unites us. “Buzz, as I remember you had some problems at the Huron Relays too.”

“Yeah, that was my first race on an indoor track, a medley relay, in Ypsilanti. I remember Jim Cooley ran the first 220 and handed me the baton with a thirty-yard lead. I jumped out and ran, entirely alone, just the tic-tic-tic of my shoes on the track. I lost a little ground by the second lap, but was still way ahead. I was really flying. But on the third lap, I went into the curve under the balcony in first place, and came out of the turn in fifth! Teammates on the infield were screaming and waving at me. I had run the whole race in my outside lane . . . It never occurred to me to merge.”

“You were taught as a kid to color inside the lines,” I reminded him. “So what do you expect?”

Jack popped a third of a joint in his mouth, and then leaned back, rubbing his shaven head.

“Pat, we had a defensive football coach in high school who believed that the way you proved you had guts was by spear-tackling, with your head. But at 130 pounds I didn’t want any of that. I remember once I went down to cover a kickoff and cut through traffic to the middle of the field, doing a good job of avoiding people. Suddenly there was a parting of bodies and a guy with the ball was galloping straight toward me. We ran full speed into each other in a straight-up position. I fell back and down as a knee went squarely into my nuts. Then I rolled over and passed out . . .”

“Jack . . . ” Betsy groaned, back at the sink.

“After that I made it clear to the coach: no defense. But it seemed to follow me. In lacrosse, I think it was a Rutgers-Princeton game, I got into an even worse collision. That was enough. I got up and just walked off the field, some guy clubbing me with a lacrosse stick all the way to the sidelines . . .”

Pat put a helmet of hands over his head in sympathy.

“Jack,” he said, “that’s what freshman football at Rumson High in New Jersey was like with my brother at quarterback. The first play of any game Peter would always call my number, 23-halfback dive, you know, just to feel out the defensive line.  And every fucking time I would get creamed, swallowed up in a grunting pile of bodies and choking dust. To this day I remember no pain, just stars, like in the cartoons.”

“Jack, why is he complaining? This was the days of standard T-formation football. Remember that? The end-run option was worse for Patrick. I’d get in trouble, after a few ineffectual fakes on the defensive end, and had to lateral to him as the secondary came charging in full speed. Right as my brother grabbed the ball, about eye level, they’d run his ass over.”

“Then they’d grab my jersey and shoulder pads and whirl me into the yardsticks.”

“You guys,” Betsy said. “These experiences are so violent.”

“Self-inflicted wounds,” Jack said with fatuous solemnity. “Self-inflicted wounds.”

“Look here, Bets.” I pulled up the front of my alligator pullover and pointed to a smooth disc of skin the size of a dime in the middle of my breastbone. “Our locker room at Rumson was about as ventilated as a dungeon. Everything stank. Shoulder pads were always caked with mud or soaked with sweat, rank and stiffening. I was fourteen with acne all over my shoulders, back and chest, and pulling on that equipment was like feeding a fire. So one day I’m sitting on a bench in front of my locker and pop this huge inflamed pimple. I keep pressing the skin around it until there’s a stream of yellow pus running down to my stomach, pooling at my hip, then, no lie, running down the inside of my thigh until it reached my knee! When I wiped away the pus there was a wound in my chest that looked like a bullet hole.”

“That was our assignment on the meat squad,” my brother said, redirecting the conversation. “We were road kill for the varsity during practices. Freshmen or sophomores, totally outsized, in worn-out equipment, yellow tank tops, unnumbered jerseys, battered cleats. Our heads poked out of those oversized shoulder pads like wary turtles… We were pitiful.”

“No,” I said, “we were sacrificial… ”

“I wised up about meat squads long before my brother,” Pat said. “He’s still on the meat squad. After that freshman year I switched to golf.”

***

Elizabeth and our son Alex were asleep when I returned home that night. One remark from the bull session kept sticking in my mind. He’s still on the meat squad. It was therapeutic to linger a while on the sofa, my Labrador beside me, and go back 20-odd years to those first two seasons of football at Rumson High.  How my gut used to fill up with anxiety each day as last period ticked down in study hall. Whether rain or fall sunlight was at the tall auditorium windows, I felt the lassitude of someone about to be ordered to walk in formation across open terrain toward woods alive with the crack of rifle fire. Every afternoon, I watched two rows below me our starting senior guard, a muscular pockmarked gnome named Earl Scholl, hold a cigarette lighter to the seat in front of him and char the wood with fierce concentration. He was just getting ready for practice. Up front the faculty proctor seemed too distracted trying to locate who was arcing pennies high into the air to notice Earl’s work. When the pennies came down with a metallic clank around the auditorium, like toy grenades, a ripple of laughter went up. Anything was possible, even permissible. When the final bell rang, while students flooded out of noisy corridors into airy freedom, I would file down to the locker room.

This was the late Fifties and locker rooms were a logical command post for preparing young American boys to be fed into the meat grinder of an inevitable war with Soviet Russia. They were cramped, filled with a gray din, like a crowded holding cell in some county jail. Despite the chorus of curses and jokes, slamming metal doors, the mood was somber among the meat squad. I would file out with the others into the slant light of afternoon, cleats clicking on the asphalt as we walked across a parking lot to the practice field. The distant goalposts stuck into the sky like lances. There the team loitered on a grassy knoll to await the arrival of Coach Rosotti. The meat squad stayed apart, like orphans. I remember how the woods beyond the field stood silent and remote, autumn leaves a lovely quilt of red and yellow, almost mystical, having nothing to do with football.

Memories of the meat squad kept surfacing in my mind, causing a quick, unexpected anxiety. I got up to pour myself a glass of bourbon, and then went back to the sofa.

When practice started, the team operated as a unit, stretching, doing jumping jacks, running laps, going though formational drills. It was like a wholesome boot camp. But soon the drills became violent. There were no facemasks on the helmets then, and I dreaded in particular the tackling drill. Two dummies were set up about four yards apart, and two lines faced each other on either side of the opening. At the sound of the whistle, a player at the head of one line ran with the football between the dummies. The player at the head of the other line did a somersault and met the charging runner in the opening. One afternoon I came out of a somersault late and rose up to catch a knee square in the face. I got up groggy and went to the back of the other line, where Mr. Early, the high school principal, who had stopped by to watch practice, started talking to me long enough to recognize I was standing up but out cold. I had a cracked cheekbone and concussion, and the next two days were a permanent hole in my memory. But meat was not expected to think.

In the second half of practice the meat squad scrimmaged the varsity. On offense I played the quarterback of the next opponent, Matawan or Point Pleasant, and whether handing off to a running back, running the option, or dropping back to pass, I was leveled. Every play was the same play: the signal count, then soft crunch of shoulder pads, confused yells and grunts, then contact like the rush of a train, a distant whistle, and the quiet weight of bodies piled on top of me. It wasn’t much different on defense, where I played cornerback. Billy Lewis, with a gang of blockers, was always breaking through a giant hole in the line and stampeding toward me. Maybe 5-10 and 140 pounds at the time, I just toppled over backwards and reached up to grab feet and legs as they ran over my body. Scrimmage offered the meat squad the pure experience of enduring blows.

When it grew dark, the team would huddle around the coaches for strategy sessions, the meat squad on the margins, a ghostly irrelevance now. But sometimes we were summoned to take more. Once, when the varsity was ordered back on the field to return kickoffs, I jogged down in coverage and was blind-sided by John Kunce, our best lineman and 240 pounds. I lay on my back in the torn grass, never wanting to move, feeling the relief of the dead. When I opened my eyes, there was the towering figure of Coach Rosotti staring down at me. On his mafia face was a look of the most exquisite compassion. John was staring down as well, innocent and uncomprehending. It was the closest I have ever come to being welcomed into heaven.

Once practice was over, back in the locker room, all the pain was replaced by the deepest sense of solidarity I had known. For the meat squad, the challenge had been met and we were still alive. Even the varsity players seemed to treat us like comrades-in-arms. The shower room, with its broken nozzles, chipped tiles, billows of steam, was abuzz with jokes and horseplay. Earl stood under a shower talking with the team captain, Paul Dobrowski, a James Dean look-a-like whose attentions kept the fawning lineman from realizing that the captain was pissing on his leg. For the meat squad, this was a restoration of justice. When he looked down, Earl jumped back, went berserk, and everyone broke up. We were inside the magic circle.

At the varsity games on Saturday afternoons, I recorded all the plays on a clipboard from the sidelines. I also tended to the injured. When Bobby Clark went down with a torn-up knee against Red Bank Catholic, I was a crutch, helping him to the bench, where he wept in pain in a litter of plastic cups, chewed orange rinds, and ultimate neglect. In a brutal away game against Sayreville, played on a field that storms had turned into a prairie of mud and standing water, I watched as our backup defensive end, Rob Hamilton, entered the game in the second half wearing a clean uniform – a splash of Technicolor in a world of indistinguishable brown shapes. But this was no mark of transcendence, rather an irresistible target for the Sayreville linemen. They jeered as Rob crouched into position. He came off the field a play later with his two upper front teeth knocked out. On the bus ride home, I sat next to him as he clamped his mouth into a blood-soaked towel.

I never played varsity football at Rumson High. My family moved to Michigan my junior year, where I quarterbacked another high school team, pretty well, until late in my senior season my career ended the way John Kunce started it – a blind-side hit after the whistle, blowing out my knee. But that seemed fated too. I was still on the meat squad. Nothing matched the existential edge of being aligned with a hopeless cause, the voluntary martyrdom of joining it, the complexity of surviving it. This was formative, and left me with an irrepressible, if distorted way of viewing events outside the chalk lines.

“I was an awful dope when I went into the last war,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. “I can remember just thinking that we were the home team and the Austrians were the visiting team.” This classical analogy between war and sport, a tragic confusion of realms, was drowned in carnage. A British captain, W. P. Nevill, led his men at the Somme attack by dribbling a soccer ball up to the German front lines. He was killed instantly, as was the spirit he embodied, by an engagement that cost the British 60,000 killed and wounded that day, for an advance of a hundred yards – the length of a football field. General Haig declared the battle a success.

The same sentiment resurfaced in my twenties, during the civil rights struggle in the South. Meridian, Selma, Orangeburg. I was drawn down there upon reading in Paris, in The International Herald Tribune, of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodwin, an early meat squad of the Congress of Racial Equality, being murdered by the Klan in Mississippi. The moral rightness of this struggle was self-evident, with a clear underdog, an engagement no more complicated than wanting to beat Sayerville. Only one injunction here: put your body on the line. Passive but resistant meat, something I understood. Beaten by whites in a Meridian bus station, only to be rescued by two black Vietnam vets returning home on leave. On the back steps of Brown’s chapel in Selma, keeping watch against marauding whites, an unloaded rifle on my lap. On the streets of Montgomery, arrested after being thrown through the window of a department store. On the sidewalks of Orangeburg, the first white guy to teach at South Carolina State College, blocked by a giant barber with a razor, a Klansman without his hood, eyes glinting from two cups of flab. None of this matched the terror of a Mississippi summer. But I suspect its leader, Bob Moses, put an end to the strategy when it became clear that someone on the meat squad, especially when white, became a far more useful symbol when dead. Yet what I remembered was the holy sense of community.

Over those years I watched the U.S. military in Vietnam prove less merciful with their “search and destroy” missions. Dump teenage grunts into the trap-laden, mine-filled, guerrilla-controlled jungle, and once they were ambushed, call in the napalm. An anti-war activist in the South, it was my shame to recognize only later that the grunts of Vietnam were the tragic meat squad of my generation: brothers sacrificed for nothing, 58,000 of them, including Earl Scholl, one way or another wasted, greased, iced, their poetic language for death a reminder of their physical mortality, an antidote to the Orwellian lies that justified the war. As I saw it, the war came to an end only when the nation woke up to white middle-class KIAs coming back in body bags, while the meat squads in-country mutinied through drugs and fragging. And as for the returning vets, twice as many committed suicide after the war as those killed in Vietnam itself, as if in loyalty to fallen comrades, as if survival guilt could be purged by death alone.

Afterwards a member of any meat squad carries off a dangerous respect for loss, for what could success possibly mean now? Lethargy settles in that in my case bordered on immobilization. An absence that is really loyalty to what has passed. Across the room from me, on the shelf of a bookcase was a framed picture of my mother. Last year I had leaned over her casket in Florida and kissed her cheek, firm and cold as marble. I had been away a year and a half, failed to reach her side in time. The same mother who, rightly fearful of meat squads, failed to see how her own open heart had inspired her children to volunteer. The same mother who, after dinner was over and my homework done, would apply sulfur compresses to the acne on my back and shoulders. The same mother who, every morning for the three months of the football season, was always there to help me out of bed I was so sore.

Peter Stine is the author of The Art of Survival (Rocky Shore Books), a collection of literary essays on Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. Regent Press published a collection of his short stories in 2019. His fiction, poetry, nonfiction and journalism have appeared in many publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Boulevard, The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Chicago Quarterly Review, Sport Literate, The New York Times, and Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. He is the editor of four books: The Sixties (Wayne State University Press), On Nature’s Terms (Texas A&M University Press), Sports in America (Wayne State University Press), and The Best of Witness: 1987-2007 (Michigan State University Press).