Anthem

I tried to sell this story, but nobody wanted it, so here it is for free. About a month ago, I was working game support for the women’s lacrosse team. It’s a simple job, really. You set up pylons, you play the anthem, you sit in the press box and turn on the music during timeouts and at halftime. You can study during the game if you want. I watch shit on my phone. Sometimes, I read the news, which is always a fucking mistake, because that day I saw something about federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana. A guard there had killed one of the inmates and then received a presidential pardon, and somebody was posting pictures of him in, like, the Caymans, or wherever, and I guess it pissed me off. I was hungover. We were playing this religious school from the suburbs. Billy Graham’s old outfit, and he’s a pretty complicated guy if you ever get the chance to read about it, but I can’t well say what got into me. Instead of the recorded version of Whitney Houston, I plugged in my phone and played this other lady singing “Oh, Canada.” From Game 3 of the 1992 World Series. She belted out the first notes, and I watched the crowd laugh. Then start to freak. Somebody threw a Pepsi bottle at the window in front of me while this old dude gave me the finger and called me a fucking foreskin-faced bum. I could hear every word because I was situated behind the speakers, and there were maybe forty people in attendance. Still, they looked like they could riot about as well as eighty or a hundred. The athletic director started sprinting up the steps to the press box. I locked the door before he could get there, but that wasn’t much use, in the end. All he had to do was run and get the key, and it only took that traitorous prick Andy about two minutes to go ahead and grab it for him, seeing as how he made nationals in the 800 last year. So, they unlocked the door. I stayed put. Cranked the volume, but they’d already pulled the plug. They had to call public safety to drag me away, and the crowd cheered themselves hoarse while watching. I closed my eyes and pretended I was dead and being carried off to heaven by subsidiary angels. The athletic director played Whitney as a way of restoring order. Then, the game started, and everything went on as usual.

The next day, they fired me from game support. Suspended me from spring football. I didn’t much give a shit because I was ready to quit school anyway, and I wrote to the student newspaper to explain and also tender my resignation from college life henceforth and forever, but they didn’t print my editorial. People sent me shit on social media. Most of them thought the whole stunt was funny or stupid or else disrespectful or misguided. Of all the fucking dirt in the world, my asshole roommate said, you get mad over this sick terrorist prick who deserved to get murdered outside the federal bureaucracy, to which I did not have a strong response. I moved in with my parents. They didn’t get too upset, really. Almost like they were expecting it. I’m slinging custard at the Culver’s now, and, honestly, it ain’t half bad. Be a manager someday, I bet, long as I don’t change the house music to “Cop Killer” or some shit, and I might have to do that at forty. Just to prove I still can. To prove how I don’t want to grow up and climb the fast-food ladder, and who gives a fuck about retirement and economic security, and I know none of this matters even the slightest bit. I’ll have to figure something out eventually. I bet I’ll never learn. I guess I just thought there’d be more support for clever youthful rebellion, and I suppose you’ll tell me that’s where it all went wrong.