Malik and howling in his face like a bunch of Vikings, as players from Bloomington lay scattered on the grass, collapsed with exhaustion or doubled over and head-butting the ground in frustration.
In the stands at the opposite sideline, where the collection of Bloomington fans were either sulking or politely clapping in appreciation of our perseverance, I spotted two familiar faces. Special Agents Carla Rosetti and Demetri Meadows, dressed like they were on the job, stood side by side, intently watching something. But it wasn’t Malik.
Rosetti raised her arm and pointed while Meadows raised his phone and tilted it sideways to take a picture of our team’s bench. I figured our bench had cleared the second Malik had scored, but I was wrong. There were two players standing in front of it. Frozen.
The backs of their jerseys read WIE and cox. But there was a gap between them, an open space. Scanning the remaining players on the field, I realized I had missed my moment. So had Agent Meadows. Because a few seconds before, Perry Love had been standing in that open space.
WIE LOVE COX.
Terrible, terrible joke. I can’t believe I thought it would be funny, or suitable revenge. But whatever it was, it would never happen again. Because Perry Love was now splattered all over their jerseys.
and wouldn’t you know it?
Perry Love was gay.
Not the going-on-Grindr-and-meeting-some-businessman-for-a-midnight-tryst-in-the-dark-corner-of-a-Panera-parking-lot variety of gay. Not even the get-drunk-at-a-party-and-make-out-with-Kylton-Connors-on-a-pile-of-coats-because-Kylton-Connors-almost-looks-like-a-girl-and-Kylton-Connors-is-discreet variety of gay.
No, Perry Love was the variety of gay where his parents probably sat around every Christmas, scratching their chins and saying, “What should we get for our gay son, Perry, this year? He’s not into those typical gay things like pocket squares and Pomeranians, but that boy of ours is as gay as they come. Let’s at least get him a gift certificate to a coffee shop and maybe he can finally meet a nice fella and take him out for a chai. He deserves a nice fella . . . and a chai, don’t you think?”
Perry Love was out, in other words. So out that you didn’t even know he was out. Well, other people did, obviously. Just not me. The football team knew it and was cool with it. To be clear, there was never some big coming-out in the locker room, never an inspiring video online about how a young man’s bravery is supported by progressive teammates who look beyond the petty prejudices, and simply see another comrade in the noble pursuit of concussions, no shared links saying: Your Faith in Humanity Will Be Restored as Soon as You Find Out What Happened When This High School Football Player Told His Teammates That, Yeah, He Probably Has the Hots for at Least a Couple of Them.
Perry was nothing more and nothing less than a mediocre and gay football player and he had been so since day one of high school. Apparently he came out in the summer after eighth grade to a handful of friends, Harper Wie included. Impeccable timing, it turns out. We were all redefining ourselves that summer, adding or stripping off layers before we plunged into high school. So when Perry slipped quietly into the deep end of gay teendom, it didn’t make a splash. I suppose I was too busy gossiping about obvious transformations. Back then, I was discussing Greyson Hobbs’s shrinking waistline and Diet Dr Pepper addiction, Poul Dawes’s sudden skater-dude awakening, and Tammy Hartwell’s shift from a bog of dour and frump to a volcano of smiles and cleavage.
Perry was never flamboyant, never had a boyfriend. He might never have even kissed a guy, but he was out and he was white and his last name was Love, which is a good American name and makes for especially sad headlines, such as, HOPES DASHED BY THE DEATH OF LOVE. (Those words actually graced the home page of JerseyReport.com the morning after his demise.) And because of all these factors, discussions of the spontaneous combustions took a sudden turn. If there were no bombs and foreign-flavored folks to blame, then what the fuck were we dealing with here?
what we were dealing with
It’s been covered ad nauseum, but I think it helps to go back to the moments after the latest spontaneous combustion. What had been a private phenomenon, experienced and recounted by a few unlucky kids, was now a public event, experienced and, more importantly, recorded by many.
When the flood of videos were uploaded to YouTube that night, there may have been an ethical dilemma among the bleary-eyed gatekeepers who have to sift through all the gore, porn, and adorable hedgehogs. Was this exploitative? Nothing but snuff? Or was it news, a necessary document to help us understand this fucked-up world, like images of burning buildings and rhinos with their horns cut off?
The official verdict was “News! Glorious and bloody news!” Yes, we are a world of Zapruders offering up death from a variety of angles and aspect ratios.
What’s remarkable about the videos is the lack of awareness on display. It didn’t go down at a string quartet, after all. Since the place was full-on pandemonium already, most didn’t notice what happened, including many with their phones pointed at the field. Chances are, some of them even drove home minutes later, saw the stream of police cars headed the other way, and wondered, “What’s all the hubbub?” as their images of Perry Love’s exploding body finished uploading to the cloud.
I’ll spare you the details of the scene because you can watch the videos and, frankly, it’s hard to know whether my perspective is an honest one. Ecstatic flailing and terrified flailing are actually pretty similar, and depending how I’ve felt on particular days, I’ve pictured the atmosphere differently. I do remember Rosetti and Meadows fighting their way through the crowd and rushing the field with everyone else. I remember the hollering and the whooping. I remember Meadows diving on Steve Cox and I remember Harper Wie fainting. And, of course, I remember Dylan whispering in my ear.
“Did something happen?” he asked. “Did everything happen?”
My response was to grab his hand and lead him to the side of the bleachers. An older couple, who had chosen not to enter the fray, noticed us holding hands, and smiled the smile of approval as we slipped by.
Like that, we were a couple. So said the elders.
We slid off the bleachers and I pulled Dylan away from the field, in the opposite direction of the kids who had heard the booming announcement of “TOUCHDOWN!” and emerged from their cocoons of cuddling and parking-lot hot-boxing to become one with the tribe.
“We need to be there!” Dylan shouted. “We need to experience this!”
“We need to go!” I shouted back. “We need to get the fuck out!”
I sped up and our hands broke apart. I was in the wide open—past the reach of the lights, past the throb and the thump— sprinting, the chill of the autumn cutting through my shirt, my cardigan flapping and threatening to break free.
“Slow down!” Dylan shouted.
I did the opposite. I put my arms out and head down and I charged toward the patch of woods near East Campus. The leaves had all turned and even in the moonlight I could see the brilliant yellows, oranges, and reds. I ran my hands across the first few trees I passed, feeling the grizzled landscapes of bark, and I imagined this was a haunted forest, a forest that would eat you if it could, that would chew you with its mouth open and swallow half of you in a big gulp, but let your legs writhe in the foggy air.
When I reached a little hill where the trees weren’t so thick, I stopped, turned, fell to my butt, fell to my back, looked up at the web of branches and the blanket of
