Horns Cage the Cards in a Dive

“To flourish in the face of absurdity we have to become absurd ourselves.” –Albert Camus

A friend called, waking me from an afternoon siesta, and asked me if I wanted to go to a “saloon” to watch the game. This place looked like something straight out of the 19th century and had a Saints helmet on the roof which was essentially the husk of a VW bug painted gold with the famous fleur-de-lis added. We grabbed a few beers (noting the interesting bouquet of Pine-Sol and urinal cakes) and watched the end of the game in which the house favorite lost to their rivals, the Atlanta Falcons.

The clientele was already drunk so they drowned their disappointment on the dance floor, twisting, jerking, and swerving like intoxicated apes and spilling a bit of their drinks with every random undulation. A woman walked up to me and pointed an extended claw in the general direction of the cigarette machine, her perfume so dense it was making me dizzy. I had no idea what she was saying (cajun accent) but nodded my head and that seemed to pacify her for the moment as she smiled and pirouetted back to the now booze-slicked dance floor. 

The Horns dominated the Cards in the game I popped in to watch as Kyren Williams gave me Todd Gurley flashbacks and gained more yards than the entire Arizona team after 3 quarters. The young man from the Catholic school with the Golden Dome ran with a perfect balance of grace, power, and violence and paced the team with 204 total yards and 2 touchdowns. Matthew Stafford absolutely owns the team from the desert with a 5-1 record and had obviously bathed in the fountain of youth before the contest. The good guys win 37-14. 

As the game was coming to a close a clearly intoxicated woman asked me to dance, and I tend to follow the momentum of poor choices, so I agreed. She was an old-school scumbag in a way that she’s never had an e-mail address and she yearns for the original recipe for meth. We danced and slipped to “Hot Blooded” by Foreigner as my friend laughed uncontrollably in my peripheral vision. Of course, the Rams shirt I was wearing didn’t escape unscathed by the random and ongoing dance floor drink spillage as I disappeared into the sea of baseball caps advertising beer or heavy equipment.

We pulled out of the gravel parking lot in an area of town that had never even heard of the term gentrification, where the structures knew only a world of beige, rust, and shit-brown. There were two guys smoking cigarettes, wearing cowboy hats and matching flannels arguing about their favorite truck manufacturer. 

 “I’m sorry, man. I guess I expected that place to be something different.”

“Are you kidding me, I loved that place!”

The SOB’s Beat Us Yet Again

Breaking records!

“I don’t give a shit about no goddamn Rams”–my grandfather

If you don’t think the Rams/49ers rivalry is real then you haven’t been watching football for very long and I must petition you to read the above quote again. My grandfather was a die-hard 49ers fan and absolutely hated the Rams. For years, I would beg him to take me to a Rams game (The “Big A” was a mere 15-minute drive) and he outright refused until my grandmother finally demanded that he take me. It turned out to be a pre-season game against the Packers and we had terrible seats behind the goalpost. You couldn’t see anything if teams were driving on the opposite side of the field. The Rams won 16-13, in a butt-numbing affair and I believe the Packers QB was Don Majkowski (say that 3 times fast) slightly before the “Brett Favre Era.” 

My grandfather descended into eternal darkness in that same city where we saw that football game a little over a decade later. My family had called me in Sacramento and told me to hop on the next train because he wasn’t long for this earth. He died a few days later. I miss him, even though typically when someone has been gone for a long period of time they seem more like an abstract idea than an actual person. You only seem to remember quips and flashes of moments. He still oddly never speaks to me when he materializes in my dreams and his appearances are becoming lesser and lesser.

A friend came over to watch the game and I told him we could drink beer and, “re-organize my record collection,” with a wink and a nudge. Of course, that’s if you want to call two lousy milk crates a record collection. He asked me if I had anything that wasn’t over 20 years old, but I didn’t. Most of what I owned was gritty, stripped-down rock and roll and punk from the wilder reaches of the 70’s and 80’s–admittedly not very nuanced. 

 This time the game was played not in Anaheim but in Los Angeles proper, the city that lends itself to noir, from Skid Row to the Sunset Strip–that sex-fueled, quasi-paradise with a lobotomy where numbness is a virtue. The field was about as fake as half the vocations and breasts filling the crowd, (complete with cancer-causing rubber granules) but it sure did look nice on television!

Rams lose 30-23. This was a contest that seemed to be about the team of today versus the team of tomorrow. These squads have caused each other’s collective fan base so much trauma and dissonance as the Niners have beaten us 9 straight regular-season times even though we broke their decrepit hearts (and made Deebo Samuel cry on national television) in the 2021 NFC Championship. But today the heartbreak belonged to us…once again. 

When it was all said and done, I wasn’t angry. Nothing was broken or thrown and I was glad that we had hope, an optimistic outlook on the season and the future of this team. It was a thrilling, visceral time despite the loss, and isn’t that what sports are all about? If my grandfather were here today, (probably smoking a Marlboro and trash-talking) I would delightedly tell him, “I don’t give a shit about no goddamn 49ers.”

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