And . . . Exhale

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Dark City

Maybe this image will make sense to you after you read the contents of this post. Then again, maybe not. Hell, I don't know.

It is my birthday on Monday, the 17^th of October in the year of The Great Willie Young 2011, and as a gift the universe decided to piss on my face and then shit on my soul. This isn’t just because the Lions lost – after all, I kind of saw this coming – but because it was the turd on top of the shit sundae that was my sports weekend. In order to truly understand where I’m coming from you have to . . . well, you’d have to be me, which I fear would be too terrifying a thing for most of you – hell, it’s too terrifying for me a lot of the time – but I think you can at least get the gist of it if you understand some basic concepts.

First of all, it is no secret that I am a huge fan of the Michigan Wolverines. Always have been. And for the most part that’s been great. But the last few years have, uh, been a little rough and nothing has been rougher than having to sit here and watch Mark Dantonio and his gang of heathen Spartans rise like some terrible Leviathan from a den of flaming couches. (I kid, my Spartan brothers and sisters, because I love. Well, not so much right now, but you know what I mean, right? At the end of the day we are all friends so just take whatever vile slings and arrows I hurl your way here with a grain of salt. Okay, you fucking degenerates? No, wait, where are you going? Come back. I . . . I didn’t mean it. Fuckers. Okay, I’m done now.) while my team shits its pants over and over and over again. But this season has been different. Or at least I thought. My Wolverines were 6-0 and while they had also been undefeated coming into the game against Michigan St. the last two seasons, those seasons were marred by the fact that my Wolverines had a defense so abominably bad that there was a real chance that Rich Rodriguez and Greg “Gerg” Robinson were going to be brought up on War Crimes for conspiring with the enemy to allow their own people to be mercilessly slaughtered. This season, though, Brady Hoke took over (instead of everyone’s Plan A, Jim Harbaugh, but we’ll get to that later.), he brought Baltimore Ravens Defensive Coordinator Greg Mattison with him and the defense seemed to be at least something resembling respectable. So . . . yeah, I foolishly got my hopes up and desperately wanted this year to be the one in which cosmic order was restored to the Big 10 and to my Michigan loving heart. Cut to about 3:30 yesterday afternoon and I was on my hands and knees like some broken fool ranting and raving to the football gods. It’s possible that I even compared myself to Prometheus. (Both our livers are constantly gnawed upon, although the only gods gnawing on mine are the ones who live at the bottom of a Southern Comfort bottle. Then again, maybe the bird who ate Prometheus’ liver wasn’t an eagle at all but a tiny demon that lived at the bottom of a bottle of Thunderbird. Think about it. Also, yes, I recognize that this is proof that my mind has been broken. Let’s just move on before things get really weird.)

Anyway, that was a bad way to start the weekend. At least for me. I understand that I probably just lost half of you and another quarter of you don’t give a fuck about college football either way, so to my reduced audience, I say thanks for hanging in there. We’ll get to the Lions game shortly.

It’s also no big secret from my ravings on Twitter or the blog Baseball Feelings (where I have generally taken a more minimalist approach to blogging which I know is almost impossible to believe given the absurd level of sheer gibberish on display here week after week.) and other assorted Internet hives of scum and general villainy that I am a pretty big fan of the Detroit Tigers, which is something that for years was kind of like being a fan of taking a blowtorch to the genitals while a beaver gnawed away at whatever was left over. But a few years ago the Tigers actually rose from the dead and have been chasing that elusive World Series triumph ever since. This year finally seemed like it might be the year. I wouldn’t allow myself to believe it for most of the year but starting in September those fuckers made me start to believe. And then when they put away those heathen Yankees, whatever resistance I had left – whatever was hanging around looking after my mental well-being – broke and I began to believe in the impossible, that my Detroit Tigers could win it all. And while that took some blows in the series against the Rangers, the Tigers managed to stay alive in Game 5 and then took a 2-0 lead in Game 6. Holy shit, they’re gonna do it! Yeah . . . about that.

A half inning later, I was gibbering like a fool, Jim Leyland was hanging naked from a cross, Nelson Cruz was burning that wrinkled old naked body with Jimmy’s own Winstons, and everyone on Twitter was consoling me. So much for that dream.

And it’s with that as the background – the destruction of multiple sports dreams which I had been fiercely clinging to for the last couple of months – that my 5-0 Detroit Lions took the field to face off against the 4-1 49ers and Jim Harbaugh, the man who had famously spurned my – and his – Michigan Wolverines back in January, leaving them to scramble for a replacement. In retrospect, this confluence of events was rather obvious, the symmetrical work of Fate and if I were a smarter man I would have seen something like this coming.

But I was moony eyed with pixie dust and dreams and so I went into this weekend full of hope, ready to claim all that which lived already in the most hidden parts of my heart. It was with that joyous pomp and with the memory of the Lions consuming Jay Cutler’s soul on Monday Night still fresh in my head that I decided that this week would be an okay one for the Lions to lose. No . . . okay isn’t the right word. I guess “tolerable” is closer. I really, really didn’t want them to lose but I guess I felt like if they were going to – and let’s face it, we all knew they were going to eventually – I would rather it come now, while my heart was glad and my soul was filled with the light of a billion stars. (Don’t get all worked up. I still really, really wanted them to win this week. It just didn’t feel as life and death as it did, say, last week. That’s all I’m saying.)

But then all of the above nonsense happened and suddenly this Lions game took on a new importance. At least for me. I’m not speaking for anyone else here. I’m not saying this had epic consequences or that we were collectively standing on some sort of brink staring into doom or any other hyperbolic horseshit like that. I’m just saying that I was sad and I wanted my favorite football team, the Detroit Lions, to make me happy.

And that’s what everyone told me on Twitter last night too. Unfathomably, the Detroit Lions had become my savior, my shining light that I looked to in dark times. In retrospect this is a hilarious concept. Hell, at the time it seemed ridiculous, but this is how far the Lions have come and honestly, just the fact that I could honestly say and believe something like that makes me happy. Maybe this actually is, as my twitter pal Nick (@iamfakenick) said to me last night, the future.

Then again, maybe not. For the weekend, I’m pretty sure my teams’ quarterbacks were sacked a combined 168 times. That actually may be a low estimate. I’m not sure. I heard the voice of that that lizard fiend Mike Pereira penetrate my wounded consciousness another 4 or 5 times like the voice of the devil taunting me while I burned. I watched the refs call a throw away a safety, make up some new rules in order to justify their own interpretations of whatever acid-induced reality they were living in and then my Lions gave up the lead and the game by a single inch on a 4^th down play, much like the fortunes of my Michigan Wolverines turned yesterday on a single inch on a 4^th down play late in the 4^th quarter of their game. And so it goes.

The universe decided it hated me again. At least for one weekend and while I will no doubt recover and remember that my Lions are 5-1, my Wolverines are 6-1 and my Tigers won 95 games and almost made the World Series this year, for now all I know is that on Friday my dreams seemed limitless and beautiful and by Sunday at about 4:30 PM my heart was filled with sorrow and my blurred vision was only capable of picking out Jim Harbaugh - the same man who famously walked away from the pleading wails of the Michigan faithful and broke my heart in the process - strutting off the field, victorious, his arms raised and the whole thing just felt like some cruel game, a jape played at my own idiot expense.

Rarely do I feel as much like just some pathetic zoo animal as I do today, like I’m just here to amuse the sports gods, my happiness and my despair mere playthings at their disposal. Shit, I even watched Dark City late last night. How much more evidence do you need that this whole damn weekend was cosmically engineered? Let’s not forget that it’s also my birthday so of course this all happened.

Naturally, when it was all over, the only thing that my spirit could do was rise up from my fractured shell of a body, drift screaming on the wind to Ford Field, temporarily possess the body of Jim Schwartz and then try to beat the shit out of Jim Harbaugh. I’m just assuming that was what happened. It makes sense. At least to me anyway. Then again, my perspective has been skewed by the fact that my brain just melted and by the fact that I just spent the last hour painting my face and wandering around in the woods like Colonel Kurtz. So who’s to say what’s sensible?

All I know is that I don’t want to be Whiouxsie’s slave (Read the preview piece from Friday if this doesn’t make any sense to you. Hell, there’s a good chance that it still won’t make sense after you read it but if you really expect me of all people to make sense, then perhaps you are the insane one, my friend.) and that I really, really wanted – needed – my Lions to win today. I know I haven’t talked that much about what actually happened in the game but that is because I can’t without drinking the blood of a small dog to satiate the wild rage that I know such descriptions would cause and I don’t want to drink the blood of a small dog. After all, I am a vegan.

It’s simply enough to know right now that the whole thing happened about as cruelly as it could. Inches man. Inches. That’s the difference between me sitting here and writing this dirge and me sitting here and telling you about the redemption of my sports loving soul. And in those inches lie infinite screams and the shredded remains of my heart. This is all very ridiculous and I know that and like I said, tomorrow I will sit down and remember that my Lions are 5-1 and that I even predicted that something like this might happen and that I should just chill out. But today I just feel sad, okay?

The Lions losing is not that big a deal all on its own, but in the context of my entire weekend, of this weekend’s existence and promise as the culmination of everything that I dared to hope and believe in as a sports fan, it is something else entirely. I’m still not exactly sure what, but my sports world suddenly feels a little grayer, a little colder than it did a couple of days ago and the ridiculous part of me which writes these damn things can’t help but notice the confluence of events, the almost unbelievable symmetry and synchronicity of it all. The fact that it is my birthday weekend just seems somehow too, I don’t know . . . too . . . perfect. Like, really? Come on, man.

Happy birthday, Neil.

Love, the Universe (P.S. for your present we got you this box full of bees. Their stingers are all tipped with failure, horror and AIDS. Congrats!)

Yes, I know I have spun out of control here and no one reading this feels even a fraction of my sports pain but goddammit, sometimes these things just feel personal and this is one of those times, strange and terrible as it is. The totality of the terrible failure of this weekend is something which doesn’t exist to everyone reading this – or even to the majority of people reading this – but I suspect that it exists to a select few, those intrepid spirit warriors who dare to fire walk with me down the same dark paths I call my own. And it doesn’t exist to anyone as uniquely as it does to me, at least not in quite so bizarre a way. So, even though this has been horribly self-indulgent, I don’t apologize for any of it. I have made an ass out of myself, but I feel like an ass so it’s appropriate. Fate and the universe have made a colossal ass out of the sports fan in me this weekend and this is just what happens in its wake.

The Lions lost and they lost in a way that ate the last crumbs of my sports soul, but to hell with all that, they’ll be back. They’re okay and they’ll be okay going forward. They’re 5-1, they just had to suffer through the indignity of the hangover from Monday night, so they shit their pants and now it’s time to go to their room, heads hung low and in shame and change those fucking drawers. I don’t want to make more of this than it is. (A little late for that shit, dude.) I mean, at least as far as the Lions go. The rest of this has just been the bitter ravings of a broken man, a sports fan who had his ass kicked one too many times in one too many ways this weekend. Unfortunately, the Lions were a part of that and, well, here we are.

I just wish that my spirit wouldn’t have been forced out of Jim Schwartz’s body before it got a punch at Harbaugh off. That would have made me feel better, I think. But enough of this gibberish. It is unbecoming and I am shaming myself now. It’s time to move on, and it’s time to start remembering that this was just a blip, the shot we all knew was coming, even if we didn’t want to admit it to ourselves. And now we – you, me, the Lions themselves - can all move on. So that’s just what I am going to do. And that’s that.

The Ballad of Jimmy and Jeffery

They’d been driving all night and even though Jim was tired, he promised himself that he was going to see this thing through to the end and if he stopped he knew he’d lose his nerve. After all, he loved the big fella. Always had. It didn’t matter that everyone else told him things like “Goddammit, Jim, the boy’s flat out retarded.” He saw something in him, something that made him want to love the big man. Jim had been around long enough, done enough, seen enough, that he knew how rare that truly was in the world. But things had . . . gone bad. Just like everyone said they would and so here they were, screaming down a Highway to Hell, speeding through the night, oblivion and regret their only destinations. Jim always knew it would come to this – he wasn’t a fool – but still, that didn’t make it any easier. He tried to avoid looking at the big man and turned the radio dial up all the way. Motorhead. That would keep him going until at least morning.

Jim thumped his head, forward, relentless, thundering away in rhythm to the beat, eyes on the road, always on the road, dry, cracked, all out of tears. He heard a soft groan beside him and felt his breath catch in his chest. He was awake. Not now, Jim thought. Not now.

“Jimmy, what’s . . . what’s going on? Where are we?”

Jim swallowed. He tasted bile and had to fight the urge to vomit. He couldn’t believe that the big man had forgotten. Again. He sighed. “Jeffery, I told you we were going to my daddy’s farm.” His father didn’t have a farm.

Jeffery’s face lit up as recognition trickled from the back of his peanut brain to the surface. “We gonna pet the rabbits, Jimmy?”

Jim gritted his teeth. God, why did this have to be so hard? He forced a smile on his face. It hurt. “Sure thing, Jeff. Sure thing.”

The big man clapped. His joy was infectious. But that only twisted the dagger all the more into Jim’s already wounded heart. They still had a couple of hours driving ahead of them, and things like this threatened to derail the whole damn thing. He couldn’t do it. No. Not after all the big man had been through. The man had been through hell, had seen things no man should ever have to see and through it all he had somehow maintained at least a semblance of his humanity. By the time Jim met him, the man had already been beaten and left for dead and from day one people had whispered in his ear that it would a mercy to put the big man out of his misery, but Jim was stubborn. Always had been. After all, you don’t rise to the heights he had risen without doing things your way, without tuning out the incessant chatter of the geeks and pimps who, more than anything, wanted what he had. No. This was his show to run and he was going to do things his way.

It was hard. There was no doubt about that. But Jim liked a challenge. He knew that the hours upon hours of struggle, the desperate days of despair, the weeks and months and, hell, years of backbreaking work would make the reward at the end of the line taste that much sweeter. And they’d almost made it. Almost. Damn it. Jim punched the steering wheel and instantly regretted it.

“What’s goin’ on, Jimmy?” the big man wailed. He then began to moan, panicked, terrified by the outburst.

Jim sighed, and immediately pulled the car off to the side of the road. This was going to be a Herculean task. He knew that going in, but he had hoped that he’d at least be able to keep the big man calm, to keep him from freaking out before they reached the end of the line. Shit. The thought frightened Jim. They were all alone, the two of them trapped together in this little car, and if things went wrong . . . well, Jim didn’t want to think about what the big man could do with that freakish strength he didn’t even know he had.

It was ironic, Jim knew, that his inability to properly channel that strength was one of the reasons why they were in the car right now. But Jim also knew that he didn’t have time to muse on such things. He had a potentially berserk monster on his hands and if he didn’t do something to calm the big man soon, chances were that Old Man Ford would be giving a tearful press conference the next day and that all the plans of a whole city, all of its dreams, would be lost. That was what was at stake here and so Jim stuffed everything else down, into a place black and foul, a place he knew he’d have to pay for someday, a place he knew would eventually kill him, or at least what was human inside of him, and he reached over and slapped the big man, flush across the face.

“Goddammit, Jeffery,” Jim hissed, “calm yourself.” The big man just stared at him, mouth hanging open, catching flies, eyes wide and terrified and Jim had to bite his own lip until he felt the blood flow to keep from screaming with the sorrow inside of his own heart.

“Jimmy,” the big man drawled, his voice quivering along with an oversized lip. “Jimmy, you . . . you hit me, boss.”

The sheer simplicity of the pain in the big man’s voice broke Jim’s heart but he swallowed it and pressed on. “You’re goddamn right I did, Jeffery, and I’ll do it again if you don’t control yourself.”

Controlling his emotions had never been the big man’s forte. Of course, he wasn’t as bad in that regard as his comrades, the ever volatile Dom and the infantile and infuriating Gosder, but they didn’t have the world howling for their blood. At least not like Jeffery did. And that brought Jim’s mind back to the harsh reality facing them both: Jeffery had to pay. It wasn’t what he wanted. Lord only knows how much he had tried to avoid this day, but the big man had always been hanging on a precipice, dangling by a malformed string, and Jim just didn’t have the strength anymore to hold back those greedy pigs with their scissors made of hate, just waiting to cut that string and send the big man to his doom. Goddamn them, Jim thought. Goddamn you, Jeff, he thought only a second later. Why couldn’t he have just held on? Why couldn’t he have just . . . just . . . succeeded? Instead, he made Jim look like a fool.

The big man held Jim’s gaze for a half second longer than was comfortable and Jim’s eyes flicked away. It was a mistake. The big man immediately began to growl, enraged and Jim had no choice but to scramble away before things got too out of control. He pushed at the big man’s chest even as he kicked at the door. He felt it open behind him and then relaxed his body, waiting for the giant eruption he knew was about to come. He closed his eyes and he thought of home, of his wife, of Matthew and Calvin and Gunther and then his life flashed before his eyes, just like it always did when the big man lost his cool. The big man’s growl grew louder, louder, louder and then Jim felt his massive bear paws on his chest and then he was flying backwards, through the open door and onto the grass and dirt below. He hit the ground with a savage thud, felt something crack inside of him and then allowed one terrible groan before the world went black and consciousness left him.

The dreams were savage, terrible, raw – ugly things that pulled Jim’s mind through a labyrinth of despair and terror. In one dream, he was chased through a cornfield by a naked old man wielding a hatchet who called himself Mr. Dick. The old man was furious and was accompanied by a lumbering manservant he called Lynch. Jim thought he recognized the duo but he was too terrified to think straight and so he did the only thing he could do and he ran and he ran and he ran until he found himself alone in a house of mirrors, mirrors of all shapes and sizes, mirrors which distorted reality, distorted the very truths Jim had spent an entire life accumulating, and in these mirrors Jim saw terrible things. He saw a fat man eating spaghetti, he saw an old balding fool with a wild, feral look in his eyes and this old balding fool was clad in only a diaper, gibbering about pad level. Jim turned away only to be met by the reflection of a middle aged fool with a terrible mustache and failure in his eyes. It was the worst one of all the reflections, those terrible apparitions haunting his nightmares, and it almost broke Jim’s mind completely. The reflection was rank with failure, brutalized and beaten by its own utter incompetence. It looked like the ghost of a man stuck in another time, a tired old substitute teacher or a broken down used car salesman. Jesus . . . please, make it stop, Jim thought, and then the world rushed back to greet him, the early haze of a newborn day tumbling down to him from over the horizon, and with it came the pain and the memory of what had gone down before he slipped into his savage nightmares.

“Jeffery,” he groaned and turned his head. There, sitting next to the car, weeping into his ham sized hands, was the big man. Jim tried to move but was racked with pain, both physically and emotionally. “Jeffery,” he said again.

“Aw, Jimmy,” the big man blubbered. “I . . . I didn’t mean to hurt no one.”

Jim just closed his eyes, searching for a peace that he knew he’d never find again. “It’s . . . it’s alright, Jeffery,” he said. “I know.” He exhaled, a ragged breath fraught with pain. “I know.”

“Jimmy, you think people gon’ be mad at me for what I done?”

Jim managed to prop himself up on an elbow. The effort was overwhelming. “It will be . . .” Jim paused. He couldn’t do this anymore. He couldn’t lie to the big man. “It’s bad, Jeffery,” he said. “It’s bad.”

The big man began to weep. “We ain’t goin’ to pet no rabbits, is we, Jimmy?”

Jim’s whole sense of self collapsed at that moment and he just lay in the grass and stared at the gray sky above. “Jeffery, the world is . . .” His voice trailed off. There were no words.

“Tell Matty I’m sorry,” the big man blubbered.

“He knows, Jeffery. He knows.”

“Jimmy?”

“Yeah?”

“When you all is standin’ there, talkin’ to Sheriff Goodell and cheerin’ on that stage, remember me for a minute. That’s all I want. I just want ya’ll to remember me.”

Jim propped himself up on his elbows again, and the effort almost made him pass out again. But there was something inside of him that overpowered that pain, that fought back against the weary despair and the ragged sense of loss he realized he’d already let take over his heart. “Goddammit, Jeffery,” he said between clenched teeth. “I’m not gonna let it happen like this. You get your fat ass in that car. We’re going back home.” Goddammit. He knew that everyone would be upset, that they’d scream at him, call him names, beat him with their vicious slander, not understanding that each assault only made his resolve grow stronger. “How hard is it to just leave the fool in a cornfield in Indiana?” they’d ask him, but fuck them, they weren’t the ones who would have to look into the big man’s eyes. They weren’t the ones who would have to avoid looking in the rear view mirror while the big man blubbered and tried in vain to chase down the car as it sped away. Fuck them, Jim thought. Fuck them all.

“Jeffery,” Jim moaned.

“Yeah, boss?”

“Help me get back into the car, would ya?”

The big man clambered over and lifted Jim off the ground, cradling him in his massive arms. The big man could be surprisingly gentle, which perhaps, Jim mused, was part of the problem. He knew that when they got back they’d have to spend countless hours trying to get the big man to learn when and how to use that frightening power. Already the big man was squeezing, harder and harder, as if he had forgotten that he was carrying Jim. Goddammit, Jim thought, trying to ignore the sharp pain in his ribs, this is going to be a pain in the ass.

Once they were safely back in the car, Jim took a deep breath and tried to ignore the pain which accompanied it. He probably had a broken rib or two. But that just made him think of Romo and that made him smile and he decided to hang onto that thought and use it to get through the ride home. Yes, Jim thought, things were already looking up again. And hey, at least Jared Allen wouldn’t be around this week so maybe things would go better for the big man too. Maybe some of those howling voices would calm down a bit once things got back to normal. After all, it wasn’t like the big man was fucking up every week. Shit. Jimmy realized that the big man would have to deal with that freak DeMarcus this week and instantly he began to feel the pain again. Goddammit, why did there have to be so many of them? If it wasn’t Jared Allen, it was DeMarcus. If it wasn’t DeMarcus it was Matthews or Peppers or . . . did it ever end?

Get a grip on yourself, Jim told himself. He looked at Jeffery and the big man looked back at him with a beatific smile. No, it wasn’t all bad. After all, they’d made it through worse before. He just thought they were done with all that. That was it. He thought they’d finally triumphed over all the bullshit they’d had to go through back when the big man was abused by Peppers. He could still remember that day like it was yesterday. By the time they all got back to the locker room, Jeffrey’s pants were smeared with his own shit and he was blubbering like Rainman, repeating the name Peppers over and over and over again. But they had gotten through that and after that Jeffery had held up against all comers. He had managed to keep the Grit Merchants clean and so far this season, he hadn’t let Matthew even get touched. God damn that Jared Allen, Jim thought. The asshole had terrified Jeffery, had rattled him with bizarre hoots and grunts near the point of attack, had caused the big man’s peanut brain to turn to peanut butter. Fuck him, Jim thought. Fuck him.

“Jimmy?”

Jim sighed and chanced a look at the big man. It almost broke his heart. “I love you, Jimmy.”

Jim looked away, stared out the window at the empty fields hurtling by and sniffed back a tear. “I know, buddy,” he said. “I know.”