Scary Monsters Visit the Real World
How I ended up having Beaver Stadium to myself, in a college town with more than 32,000 students, isn�t a pleasant story. It started when I told my apartmentmates I was �going for a walk.� Truly, it started the weekend before with the diamond ring no longer a secret and her answer not what I expected. Somehow I got through the week, made all my classes, even wrote a paper as one final. It didn�t come out too horrible, but like everything else I did that week, it wrote itself. I became someone watching me do things, rather than the one doing them. I always scare myself when I get like this, like it�s the second to last step to mental breakdown. But when I wrote that maudlin poem, they were coming out of hiding, so I knew I needed to confront the monsters or they would take me away. That�s why I went for a walk, starting the walk after midnight.
The two I shared the apartment with looked at me as I put on my jacket at the door.
�Are you all right?�
�I don�t know.�
�Want us to go with you?� Since Mary turned down my offer, they didn�t know how to be with me. And I was still keeping in all the bile.
�Nah.�
When I got down to front porch, I was glad I put on the jacket. Even though it was May, the night breeze off the mountains sent a late spring chill swirling around Happy Valley. I headed away from all the student apartments and campus, afraid to pass places we knew. I wasn�t ready to see Mary�s apartment building, or the neon of the nearby Sheraton Inn. So I turned toward the normal housing in State College�where, though I still find this hard to believe, people lived indefinitely and raised families.
That�s what I wanted, and what I thought Mary wanted too. Then she said no. That�s how I interpreted it, though for the record, she didn�t officially say, �No.� She said wait. That was reasonable. After all, we both had senior year to go. Perhaps I was rushing things. But that marquise seemed like the perfect present for her twenty-first birthday. Instead, it gave her the first tough choice of her adult life. So she said wait. The �wait� was clear enough, it was her reason for wanting us to wait that agitated me every time I started to think about it. It wasn�t that she wasn�t ready, but that she thought I wasn�t.
I turned left onto Prospect, intending to go right at Burrowes and continue away from campus, then pulled out my joint and lit up. The greatest thing for me about walking around State College alone was I always felt I was the most dangerous thing on the street. That isn�t a feeling I had much in my hometown. It wasn�t a good idea to wander aimlessly alone through neighborhoods in the City of Brotherly Love. But I could in State College. Of course, this particular walk had a purpose, if no direction. There were scary monsters I needed to tire out, so my better angels could carry me through.
But the monsters, with justifications I would have considered flimsy and weak any other time, were winning. I assured myself the family and friends who loved me would get over it in time. Even Mary would come to see it wasn�t her fault. Her rejection merely made clear my utter aimlessness.
�Owww!� The roach burned the tip of my finger, and I flicked it out into the middle of street. Why do I smoke this shit? It�s better to be straight and miserable than high and miserable. I should remember that. But I didn�t even feel high, just slightly disoriented until I found Easterly Drive and headed, appropriately enough, east.
But Easterly broke up just as Burrowes had, and I soon found myself on Oak Ridge Avenue. Then I ran out of Oak Ridge before running out of the need to walk, and arrived at a mess of road construction. Looking down at my running shoes, I judged they could manage the dirt and hills to come. We moved northward through soft tannish orange construction dirt on unlighted roadways. I was guessing north would get me back to familiar territory. Although I wasn�t in a mood to get back just yet, I figured if I didn�t start heading that way soon I wouldn�t be close when I was. Besides, I�d run out of normal streets to prowl and was starting to feel lost in the pragmatic sense.
It wasn�t until I reached the lights of Mountainview Hospital that I realized what I�d just come through was the last of the construction on the 322 By-pass. Consulting the map in my head, I reckoned campus had to be directly west of me, about two or three inches behind the hospital. That, of course, was as it looked on the map. In the dark of night, it looked like woods rethickening for summer. My first thought was �You may be the most dangerous animal on asphalt, but in the woods behind the hospital you�d be a feast for many.� Realizing why I came out here initially, and unwilling to get too lost continuing along the by-pass, I started into the woods.
The mountain lions that gave the school its mascot came to mind. I wondered if any had been spotted recently and if I�d see one before it saw me. That�d be an awesome way to go, mauled to death by a puma. A little more dramatic than what I had in mind, but it would certainly do. Certain nothing that dramatic was in my cards, I continued straight on, careful not to be turned around by the oaks, sycamores, and evergreens. Their new spring greenery filled my nose as I watched my feet. The only sound as I trudged through was the crinkle of fallen leaves and an occasional twig snap. I didn�t see any animal life, not even owls or raccoons. In fact, glad for the first time to be concentrating on my here-and-now, it was a disappointingly short stint before I finally felt the woods thinning and saw a huge structure in the distance.
I didn�t know what it was right away, but I knew I knew it. So I set a direct course for the growth, and with my legs now on autopilot, I again had time to think. It occurred to me I hadn�t thought of Mary since entering the construction zone. But a street light shining in the distance, even beyond the big building, reminded me of the diamond and there she was again.
Knowing I would ask her in May, I bought the ring in September when the money from my summer job made me feel rich and ready. I hid it in the light fixture, in case our apartment ever got robbed, but every once in a while I�d take the rock down with the pretense of checking on it. Actually, just to gaze at it. Especially in bright sunshine, it was a thrill to stare into that crushed coal. Her giving it back wasn�t one of the previews playing in my dreamy head.
Then I got close enough to realize the huge structure was Beaver Stadium. I slowed my pace while I decided what to do. The stadium held a lot of good memories for me and one bad one. Ed, one of my apartmentmates, and I liked to brag we saw State undefeated at home last season. Although the only two games they lost were home games, we walked out on the Nebraska game in the first half and gave our season tickets to Mary�s apartmentmates for the Pitt game. Pitt was the last game of the season, and over the Thanksgiving weekend; two of Mary�s apartmentmates, because they were from Pittsburgh, intended to return early for the game. Ed and I knew we wouldn�t return from Philly until Sunday. So we avoided seeing the loss to the Panthers. The Cornhuskers game remained the only blot on the season for me and Ed.
Both teams were ranked in the top ten at the time and, we don�t know this for fact, but it seemed the athletic department sold about three thousand more tickets than Beaver Stadium could realistically seat. We spent the whole first quarter trying to get to two benches in the Junior section, but never succeeded. At one point the crowd got excited by a long punt return, and the aluminum the lost throng was searching from started bouncing in a structurally ominous way. I remember looking down at it, thinking it might collapse, then looking at Ed�s face full of fear. The throng at once decided they were missing something and filled the tunnel to the seats. I�ve been in crowded elevators many times, but that experience was nothing to this. With a person crushed into my chest and another tight against my back, it was an effort to turn to and find Ed. �Let�s get the fuck out of here!�
Including a couple car accidents, that was the closest I�ve come to death. So the pleasant thought came to me as I got close enough to Beaver Stadium to make out its gates and shadows: I could have it to myself. When the stadium was open, it had turnstiles and guards everywhere. I suppose their thinking was �Who in their right mind would want to steal into an empty stadium?� Because with the football field closed, getting in was merely a matter of climbing an eight-foot cyclone fence. So I did, realizing if the cops caught me on the way in, this would be too dopey to explain. But once I was in, no one would know.
I scaled the fence fairly easily and took the first available entry tunnel onto the field, which brought me out at the end zone that put the student seating to my right and the alumni stands to my left. Instead of heading up to the seats, though, for the first time I went down to the field. Again I was glad I put on my jacket before leaving the apartment because the wind whirled so quickly around the bowl benches I could hear it howl. Then I was on the astroturf, which looked especially fake in the end zone where it was painted blue and white.
I stood at the goal line and took in as much as my eyes could in the dark. The field looked so much larger empty, and the stands seemed huge. I gave some thought to the microscope/magnifying glass effect as I stood there. At games, the players looked like normal sized human beings, especially compared to each other. But when you saw them around campus or in class, you had to wonder how they reached their hair to comb it and when was the last time they could button the top button of any dress shirt.
I could make out the opposite goal posts in the distance, and even a hundred yards seemed long. But I went for it. Before I could talk myself out of it, I glanced at my wrist watch�s second hand and took off. By the fifty yard line had my breathing rhythm down and could feel the wind billowing my jacket. I thought I was moving fast and felt my hair straight back and bouncing. I crossed the opposite end zone looking at my watch.
Seventeen seconds! Pathetic! Guys weighing almost a hundred pounds more than I do, wearing thirty pounds of pads and tape, ran it in ten. Oh well. Guess I�ll never make the football or track teams. At least I made it down the field. Guess I was lucky not to have a heart attack and croak right at the thirty.
Then I knew I had to get back. I left the poem open on my desk and wouldn�t want my apartmentmates to find it and think I was being somber. It was more maudlin than melancholy. It just came out:
DON�T YOU HATE TO LEAVE?
For all your grief. . .
an empty bottle�
For all your pain. . .
an empty vial�
For all our love. . .
an empty letter.
But don�t you hate to leave us this way?
Heading back across the fake grass, I heard a scraping noise behind me and panicked. It wasn�t the fear of being mugged, or just plain clobbered and left for dead, that I walked with constantly in Philly. This scare harkened to my earliest days of childhood, in the long minutes between going to bed and falling asleep. I�d conjure big slimy attackers with huge mouths full of sharp teeth and fingernails as long as my five year old back. They were always waiting in the dark, as quietly as they could, for any morsels to pop out of the blanket. I always fell asleep well protected, though, so I guess they found their meals elsewhere.
I turned quickly to see a wax coated cup scuffling across the field. Suddenly I felt more than the relief of the moment, in fact, more upbeat than I had in weeks. Not only did the scare let me know I�d get over her rejection, it also proved�in some convoluted and arcane way�surviving without Mary was right for me.
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