Scott T. Hutchison

            When my mother dropped me off at college to begin my freshman year, the last thing she did wasn’t a kiss or tears — she removed a silver medallion from around her neck, then hung the loop around mine. “St. Christopher will help you against storms and lightning, toothache, and pestilence. Truthfully, I’m scared for you, boy…young man…whatever you are. I imagine you’ll travel through some rough, wild weather in this place. You’ll need to find your way.”

            Both parents then turned heels and left, shaking their heads.

            The old TV they’d given me got pawned within the hour. Cash in hand, I flagged down a guy going into the local liquor store. I requested something bottom-shelf, hoping to have a few bucks left over for a flag-bearing place two doors down hocking clothes and mugs all broadcasting our school colors. I needed proper attire for blending in with the pack.
            The purchase only took the guy a couple of minutes. On the shady side of the building, he handed me the first solo bottle of my life and said, “Have you a bless-ed ass day. Go Team.”

In a toast to my new empire, we clinked Romulus and Remus. I even had enough cash left over to buy mascot-decorated sweatpants off the Clearance rack. We were Wolves.
            Three days of classes and the new madness of dorm life spun and circled with rites-of-passage delights. Classes grounded, we hit our first weekend and my first big stadium game. I dove headfirst into a legendary football smashup: I pre-gamed up and down the halls, swigged Kentucky Tavern coffee, danced to music pumped at jet-decibel bass, snapped around like a rabid fox, pulled by the tug of something warm and blood-filled moving indistinctly in my crazed purview. Me and my primed-up, brand-new friends grabbed our tickets, left the littered dorm, and bolted across campus to join the lines.

            I smelled the arena as soon as we arrived: paint and cut grass, musky odors of gridiron prey and conquest. The stadium seated over 70,000 faithful, roaring, and grunting like sea lions. The howling would come soon enough. We pups climbed the steps. I felt almost grown-up in my new sweatpants: everyone entering the South Gate arrived colorfully dressed in the same two colors. We gathered on the rocks of our staggered, elevated island of Section 230, Row 4L.

            When a game officially roars to life at one and you start at ten AM with caffeine and low-count nips of bourbon beforehand, you get to yipping well before kickoff. I shifted the pint flasks in my crotch so I could sit down. I’d smuggled them in my new pants, the ones with the mascot doing goofy dance poses all over them. The over-priced icy soda for mixing felt right, felt prodigious. I found myself open to a belief that the congregation in attendance – most of them stadium-bartending just like us — could coalesce in a fever-pitched communal allegiance that would, indubitably, help the team win. Everybody elbowed one another, chanting We’re/gonna cheer/Our Team/to Vic-to-ree, bellowing enunciation on the finish: in/doob/it/a/blee!

            I could hardly even see the second half against those damnable Blue Devils — my smile had grown so big it curled up, exposed my canines, smudged my eyes half-closed. Even so, I noticed the wobble of a skinny drunk guy stumbling up the concrete stairs. He wore a blue pocket t-shirt and jeans, both splattered with relish, onions, and mustard. I smelled roller-grilled, lightly scored skinless hot dog. He looked shaky and out of place.

            Bouncing down the stairway toward him came a little girl with blonde curls, maybe eight or nine-years-old, decked out in a pom-pom cheering outfit that mimicked our high kickers and aerial flyers down on the sidelines. Coyote-thin and hungry looking, the guy reached out a hand, placing his scabrous palm on that child’s bare arm, saying, “Ain’t you just the prettiest thing?”

            Growling rolled out of me faster than the girl’s eyes went wide and scared. “Get your hands off that girl.”

            Everything in Section 230, Rows 4K through 4M, froze; attention turned away from the game. Coming out of me was a new, aggressive noise that cut through muscled contact-snorts and the linemen’s pad-hitting din. Maybe the football game continued, maybe the loudspeakers still bellowed play-by-play, but our little den of the social hierarchy became silent witnesses to a strange and aberrant wrongness.

            Coyote did not take his paw off the child. Her mouth trembled, conflicted with scream and a need to escape. He squeezed hard and looked up at me. Testosterone dripped off the tip of his hot-dog tongue. “What did you…”

            I don’t know how I leaped over the top and to the left of the people packed below me. I don’t know how I got my back in front of that innocent little girl, inserting my flushed mug into the man’s face, but once I got between them, I crunch-peeled his fingers off the delicate arm and introduced myself with a quick headbutt.

            The interloper plummeted back down the stairs, head over heels – a sort of lazy hill-roll over concrete. People in the lower 230 who didn’t see the genesis-incident suddenly became distracted from the Triple-Option, confused by the human tumbleweed bumping and thumping ass-over-teakettle in their hard and grey periphery.

            I’d knocked my noggin right into his stubbly kisser while my arms made sure he didn’t take the girl with him. I released her quickly, spoke softly and reassuring. “Are you okay?”

            The girl blinked at our crazed lupine mascot doing all sorts of manic poses across my sweatpants, then looked up with something close to adulation in her eyes. She beamed. The fans all around us leaped up, howl-keening and applauding, even though the football field itself had lost energy to a TV timeout; players wandered around with hands on hips, little beetle-dudes and dudettes squirting water into thirsty face masks. But we’d drawn attention during the lull. The Jumbotron camera operator tightened in and focused on our show, displaying head-butted Coyote’s finale for all to see: even though his descent began from our high elevation section, he’d picked up momentum and rolled the full decline, finally somersaulting over the railing, flopping a good twelve feet earthward and landing head-first in an open-topped Gatorade cooler, erupting in a fountain of displaced ice and lime-green squirt bottles.

            The stadium detonated in vibrant yowls of dreadful awe and mirth.

            Then two police officers, dressed in the same colors as Coyote, came storming up from Section 210 — they’d seen me perpetrate, but missed the newly-devoted reason.

            Meanwhile, a blonde lady wearing oversized-foam Big College sunglasses -- I took her to be Alumnus -- came racing down to our little rah-rah, flustered, and grateful to the young fool in his pride and sweatpants. “Thank you, thank you, oh God bless you!” She about hugged the cheer right out of that little girl.

            Everybody around us seemed to get all the scene pieces figured out fast — endangered child, mascot-wannabe-hero with a red developing goose egg on his forehead, an inert blue fellow stretched out bellow behind the bench with a big orange container jammed over his head and shoulders, a relieved mama, and cops cranking up the stairs to enforce some kind of societal rule.

            I clutched my mother’s pendant, fairly sure that trouble was heading my way.

            That’s when I really started learning what Big College had to teach me.

            While other defenders of the law stood over the barreled man on the field, people down below Row 4L closed ranks and bodies, fitting themselves shoulder to unmoving shoulder, holding the mountain of goat-climbing police at bay with a singular wall of color. Then the fanatics sitting in the stands directly behind my thunderstruck self suddenly remembered their own mothers’ faces and concerns; they felt their loyalties gush up in game-day hot springs -- drawing upon powers brimming with superheated fluids, they placed their hands upon me. I flew into the air.

            Lifted high above their heads, I was hand-over-hand passed along, row to higher row, devoted to devoted. Dearly holding on to St. Christopher, I trusted nameless, familiar people, felt harmony humming in my veins. We were beautiful, united. Strangers reached for me, determined that no harm would come my way for the wolfish choices I’d made. They sent me traveling – loyal guides and protectors of children, all aiming me toward nosebleed heaven and safety, baptizing me with beer and cheers. The blues were left far behind, and I suddenly felt virtuous. The Jumbotron broadcast my beatific face to both stadium and home audience, clutching at the gift I wore.

            I rose as close to sunlight as anyone earth-bound can get, and warmth and focus came shining down in my eyes; released, I hoped that my mother, watching from a distance, might yet be proud of her wayward son who had bonded with something bigger than himself.