15. The Tailgaters

As he and his family rolled into the Clarence Beale Parking Arbor in their Lincoln Navigator, a lawyer from Pittsburgh named Archer Miles got his first glimpse of the Bowl through the big old sycamores that stood in rows on the parking lot’s landscaped dividers. The noonday sun was so strong, Archer had to squint. Would you believe it? More than four decades had elapsed, but it sure looked the same…an hour and forty-five minutes before the game, and already cars were pouring onto this vast arboreally umbrellaed asphalt plain and heading for…the Charlie Bowl…When was the last time he’d been to a game here? Must have been just three or four years after he graduated. Not one of Dupont’s architectural gems, the Bowl, but awesome nonetheless…a stupendous tub of concrete, the equivalent of twenty stories high…officially named the Dupont Bowl…but back when Yale became the Bulldogs, and Princeton became the Tigers, Dupont, like Harvard, stood aloof from this cute vogue of naming athletic teams after animals with big teeth or sharp beaks. The students called them the Charlies, in jolly if ironic reference to the first name of the founder, Charles Dupont, and this became the Charlie Bowl.

Oh lore! Oh traditions! Oh Dupont! Who would have thought it would get to him like this, returning after all these years for a tailgate before a football game? I guess it’s sort of like coming home to my youth, he thought. Although Archer could be profound and incisive before the bar, that was just about as deep as his powers of self-analysis ever got. Whatever, he wasn’t going to express any such sentiment to Debby, his blond, twenty-two-years-younger, and—as he had noticed a lot recently—sharp-tongued second wife, who was sitting in the Navigator’s other lofty leather-upholstered front seat. Debby was already bored and, in fact, had been bored ever since he thought up this trip. Nor was there any use sharing his tender thoughts with their two boys, Tyson and Porter, who sat right behind them in the Navigator’s middle seats. They were Archer’s second set of children and paragons of contemporary teenage cynicism. They enjoyed setting fire to the tails of tender thoughts.

“You sure you want to park here?” said Debby. “They all look like students to me.”

That they did. From here to way over there you could see SUVs and pickup trucks parked in rows, with boys and girls milling about.

“Well, that’s the whole idea, sweetheart,” said Archer. “I want Tyson to see a little student life, too. These tailgates are always really fun.”

Tyson was in his junior year at Hotchkiss. To Archer it was crucial that his boys go to Dupont. It had somehow become part of his conception of his own worth.

Archer gazed upon the great tableau again. It was a bit…odd. As far as you could see, the asphalt was littered with plastic cups, they looked like. They were even in the grass in the dividers beneath the sycamore trees. And the students…He knew, of course, that students were more casual these days, but the ones he was looking at—shorts, T-shirts, flip-flops—and pickup trucks? Things change, of course, but he couldn’t get out of his mind the old picture of Ford and Buick station wagons with students—Dupont was all male then—hanging around the tailgates wearing button-downs, neckties, and tweed jackets or blazers.

Just in case—he wasn’t sure of what—he parked the Navigator at the end of a row of spaces, three spaces from the nearest vehicle—an SUV with a bunch of students huddled about something at its back end.

Archer turned off the ventilation system and opened his window. A low garble of music was in the air, apparently from the radios of God knew how many vehicles, and a heavy, rich, sour, rancid odor. Archer could have sworn there were two odors…beer…and great fluffy fumes of human piss.

“Yuckamamie,” said the younger boy, Porter, with a whine, “what’s that smell?”

“Oh ho! I can tell you what it is,” said Debby. “It’s plain old—”

Archer nudged her thigh with his hand and cut her off. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. He gestured grandly out the window. “Now, that’s a Dupont tailgate.”

You could see quite a lot from up here in the high seats of the Navigator. Curious, but all across the great panorama of vehicles and students…things were bobbing up and down…bubbling…the way bubbles pop up on the surface of boiling soup, all over the place but in no discernible order. Archer squinted again. They weren’t bubbles, they were…heads, shoulders, elbows, going up and down, up and down, on the asphalt by the SUVs and on the truck beds of the pickups. Why? From all over the place you could hear shouts of “Yo something!”…but Yo-what?…and high keening wails that went Woooooo-ooooooo!

From the huddle of students behind the SUV three spaces away came paroxysmal laughs. Then the huddle broke, and you could see a huge aluminum container standing on end in a plastic tub. One boy was furiously pumping a handle on top of it. Another had hold of the end of a sickly green hose that came from it, trying to fill a jumbo plastic cup, but something came foaming up out of the cap uncontrollably and went all over the boy’s shorts.

“Fuck, Mark!” said the boy with the hose. “Lay off! Whattya think you’re pumping, premium crude?”

The others were doubled over, spastic with merriment.

“A beer keg!” Archer announced, ignoring the word fuck. “I didn’t know what it was! When I was here, they were all horizontal.”

They descended from the heights of the Navigator. Archer stretched and then said, “Tyson, Porter, come here.” Dutifully the two boys went there. He pointed. “See between those branches? That’s the Charlie Bowl. It seats seventy thousand people. It used to be the biggest college football stadium in the country. When I was here, it was packed for every game. More than packed.” He chuckled, smiled, and shook his head over what a wild time “more than packed” alluded to.

Tyson, the sixteen-year-old, couldn’t have looked more bored, and the human capacity to look bored peaks at sixteen. Porter, the thirteen-year-old, feigned an interest by staring at the thing for a few seconds.

Turning toward Debby in hopes of getting some good old times going, Archer said, “Mommy, did I ever tell you? We used to bring our dates over here the night before the game for a little…what you might call…nocturnal tailgating.”

“Yo, Dad!” said Tyson. “What kind of tail?”

It genuinely annoyed Archer when Tyson acted as if he were now old enough to share off-color double entendres with adults. Of course, he himself had walked right into that one with his choice of words.

“Oh, fudge!” said Debby, who had not been listening to either one of them. Sweating, several wisps of hair pasted to her forehead, she was inspecting a tawny peach fingernail she had just broken trying to drag a wicker picnic basket out of the Navigator’s cargo area and onto the tailgate.

“You can say the real word,” said Tyson. “Everybody’s heard it before, even the Hulk.”

Tyson had taken to calling his brother, Porter, the Hulk, since he was skinny, reedy, small for his age, and wouldn’t take his shirt off because his ribs showed. With a look of patient disdain, Porter changed the subject. In the best of whines—and, as opposed to looking bored, the human ability to whine peaks at thirteen—Porter said, “If the game starts at one o’clock, why are we here at eleven-fifteen?”

“Because I spent four hours stuffing these baskets full of food,” said Mommy, “and you’re going to have lunch right here. While Dad has his drinks and dreams about the old days, you can come back here and help me drag these things out there instead of standing around whining and complaining. Okay?”

“Yuckamamie,” whined Porter. “I wasn’t complaining, I was asking a question. I mean, yuck—a—mamie.”