First and Goal
My dad and I went to every Chiefs game together from the time I was thirteen until I left for college. I recognize this fact belies a bit of privilege, that going to a Chiefs game was not inexpensive. Still, there were plenty of tickets back then. Throughout the late 70s and early 80s, the Kansas City Chiefs were a dismally bad football team. Plus, my dad and I got along at these games, which was not always the case otherwise, and we implicitly recognized the sanctity of these outings.
After I left for college, and later medical school, I tried to keep this tradition alive by getting back to Kansas City for at least one game a year. This is about what happened after one of those games on a cold November Sunday in the late 1990s. I think we had faced the Broncos and actually won. Steve DeBerg or maybe Rich Gannon was at quarterback, and Marcus Allen was doing that slicing thing where he always seemed to create a few extra yards out of nothing. Neil Smith had spent the season lifting centers off the line of scrimmage, and the late Derrick Thomas devoured everybody in the opposing team’s backfield. It was a season that would by December yield something like a third straight playoff berth, but a loss, yet again, in the first game of the post-season. After so many seasons of watching wretched football, we Kansas City fans consoled ourselves with our usual semi-authentic midwestern complacency. We counted our blessings to have a team to watch at all. We went to our religious services. We ate BBQ on white bread.
My dad and I were driving back from the game along 63rd Street, passing the big drive-in theater that had closed after I had left for college. The post-game show hosted by Len Dawson was on the radio, and he was whining like he always did. I was chuckling and offering my practiced and repetitive observations while we listened. How could such a stalworth and stoic athlete sound like such a baby on the airwaves? It was then we noticed the pick-up truck in front of us swerving like a hooked trout. Eventually, the whole damn thing just skipped over the guardrail, bounced once on its side, and came to rest like a wounded beast on its back, wheels spinning.
I pulled over and readied to get out of the car. My dad asked me why I hadn’t parked closer to the accident. On TV, I explained, cars that crashed always exploded.
The guardrail was cold to my ungloved hands as I climbed over and trotted down the ravine where the truck had stopped. The scents of cannabis and cheap beer swirled in the air, having been aerosolized by the vigorous shaking and unstoppable persistence of entropy. It smelled like a fraternity had burst open on the side of the road.
"Are you guys OK," I called, keeping my distance as I tried to figure out if there was any gasoline in those familiar odors swirling through the autumn air. The gray sky had the dreary quality that made it smell like snow, though none was falling.
“My dad’s gonna kill me,” somebody said from inside the truck. It wasn’t clear if he was responding to my question or simply making an observation. If this were his dad’s truck, he was certainly in deep. That much seemed clear.
“Don’t move,” I shouted, this time raising my voice and taking my cue more from the movies more than anything I’d learned in medical school. I had in mind handsome men and women with square jaws and blue eyes who would soon arrive in emergency vehicles to carefully extract the passengers, apply cervical spine collars, and strap them to stiff boards. My job was to keep the passengers safe until these heroes arrived, at which point they would carry them back to the ambulance and speed off into the dusk, sirens blazing, more lives to save.
The blue-eyed heroes appeared to be running late. Instead, four guys with long stringy beards like members of ZZ Top arrived on Harley Davidson’s and without even acknowledging me reached through the broken driver-side window and grabbed the driver by the shoulders.
“Let’s get these fellas outta the truck,” one said to the other.
“We should wait for an ambulance,” I objected. “They might have broken their backs.”
“Don’t call an ambulance,” one of the passengers shouted. It was the most emotion I’d heard from the truck so far. “The ambulance driver will call my dad, he’s gonna kill me.”
One of the Harley dudes tittered as he nodded for his friend to continue yanking the driver through the window.
“Son,” he said to me, his voice a step shy of disdain, “these boys are already in a heap of fuckin’ trouble. Least we can do is give them the dignity of bein’ upright.”
By this time, my dad had inched his way into the ravine. The two guys in the truck were easily extracted by the Harley dudes, and they were standing next to each other now, looking remarkably healthy for having just rolled their car. Maybe the booze and the drugs had loosened their limbs and masked the pain. They each just had a bit of blood on their faces and rips in their clothing. One of them couldn’t stop giggling and the other one looked like his dog had died.
The Harley guys told us that as long my dad and I were there, they’d be moving on, and ambled up the hill and rode their noisy bikes off into the gray. My dad commenced to act like the doctor he had always been.
He was an intensive care physician, and he followed and at the same time expected others to follow some old-school rules. He still had my friends call him Dr. Schlozman, and he was, at that point in his career, struggling with what he saw as the shameful loss of prestige and respect owed to hard working doctors in the last decade of the 20th century. In a few years he would retire.
He also, for the life of him, could not figure out how he and I could perform such different professional tasks with the same two letters before our names. There was still plenty of psychiatric need in my family, so I don’t think he wasn't doubtful of the utility of my work. It's just that his professional identity was wrapped up in giving orders and contemplating what exact settings on the ventilator would best extend life. Psychiatry, my kind of medicine, seemed beyond his comprehension.
“I’m going to perform a neurological exam,” my dad announced to the two kids who were standing in front of the truck. “Follow my finger with your eyes.”
The giggling one just giggled, and the sullen one stayed sullen.
“No,” the sullen one said.
My father assumed that one or both must have suffered a head injury. It was the only possible explanation for their recalcitrance.
“CAN YOU HEAR ME,” he asked loudly, enunciating his words the way people do when they’re talking to old folks or those who don’t speak English.
“We hear you,” the sullen one said. “We just don’t want to.”
Then the giggling kid spat once onto the ground, a blob of blood landing on the brown grass and steaming in the autumn air.
“Go back to your car, old man,” the sullen one mumbled, then sighed and stared off towards the horizon.
My dad just stood there. I don’t think he’d ever given medical instructions that had been so straightforwardly rejected. He looked unsure of himself. His shoulders slumped.
“Move it before I kick your ass,” the sullen kid added. His buddy burst from giggling into a full-on guffaw.
My dad was paralyzed. A shit-faced kid who’d crashed his father’s pick-up truck had issued an clear threat that dumbstruck my poor old dad. He was in real danger, I realized, of getting the crap beat out of him.
“Dad, get back in the car,” I said, and in a daze he kicked back up the hill and opened the passenger door. I felt sorry for him.
The sullen kid turned his attention to me and growled. He made the full transition from sullen to surly. “You, too. Get the fuck outta here.”
I looked up at my dad in the car and then back at the two kids standing in front of the wrecked truck. I spoke, careful to channel my favorite mentor in residency, who happened to be a psychiatrist as well as a Jesuit Priest.
“Listen,” I said. “Everybody who saw you flip this truck is gonna call an ambulance. That’s already happened. You’re already in a shit-ton of trouble.”
The kids just stared at me. If they were going to murder me, it was going to happen whether or not I went back to my dad’s SUV parked on the side of the road, so I continued.
“It’s just that you rolled your truck…and sure, you look pretty good, but who knows?”
I paused and looked at the two of them. “I’m just going to stand here and wait until the ambulance arrives.”
The three of us stood there on the grass, our breath visible in the air, my fingers growing numb. The beer smelled sweet as it dried on the broken windows.
An ambulance sounded in the distance, and soon the blue-eyed heroes with their patriotic jump suits came trotting down the hillside. They had little American Flags sewed on their right shoulders.
“You shouldn’t have moved them,” one of them said to me, and the two kids and I smiled.
“Yeah, that’s what he said,” the surly one announced, tilting his head in my direction. Then he sighed and gestured to the paramedics. “Lead the way, fellas.”
The paramedics and the kids ambled up and into the ambulance, which flipped its sirens and took it’s time merging into passing traffic. I walked back to the car where my dad was waiting with a look of bewilderment on his face. He had turned up the heat, and I rubbed my hands in front of the vents.
“How’d you know to do that?” My dad asked. He wasn’t quite proud, but he was close. It was like he was looking for the secret to a card trick.
“Do what?”
“How’d you know to just stand there and wait? How’d you know that they’d be OK?”
“I didn’t,” I said, though I kind of did. I mean, they were standing there, a bit worse for the wear but otherwise they looked alright. “Besides, what else was I gonna do?”
“So, you just stood there,” my dad said, like he was seeing something for the first time. “You just stood there and barely said anything.”
“I did what I know how to do,” is all I could think to say, which seemed to satisfy him. He then used a pet name for me I hadn’t heard since at least 9th grade.
“Let’s get home, tiger. I bet your mother has dinner ready by now.”
We had Gates BBQ that night and the meal gave me heartburn.
STEVEN SCHLOZMAN lived until he was 18 about a stone’s throw from Missouri, on the Kansas side of the Kansas City suburbs. Though he lives in Northern New England, he still wears the same socks every time the Chiefs play. He has written two novels and a number of short stories, and he has taught undergraduate courses in film and writing at Harvard and the University of Vermont. He is a physician and serves as chief of child psychiatry at the University of Vermont School of Medicine, and he lives with his family and two dogs near Burlington, Vermont.
Midwest Review 