by Lorraine Ray
On a night when the sky was a black expanse of terror the huge stadium lights dimmed even the pinpricks of stars light-years away, and we kids sat on icy bleachers at the southern end of the field in the Knot Hole Club. A teeny set of bleachers with the whole concrete stadium around us in the night, only the north end showing the darkness place. There I sat with strangers, my brother and sister always left me. I found a place near any other little girl. And one night I was hit in the head with a candied apple, it was red candy. It hit hard, leaving candy in my hair, but bouncing off to hit some other kid's head. Other times people put chewed gum in your coat pocket. You had to ask to go to the bathroom. You walked across the edge of the field when the monitors thought it was safe, there being no team near the end zone. You had to walk under the dirty stadium to an old stinky bathroom for kids only.
We watched Johnny Lee, the diminutive son of the band director as he did various dances and twirled a baton. His blonde hair tossed about and he had very tanned skin that presented a high contrast with his white uniform. The uniform had a V-shape to the chest that made his waist seem unusually thin even for a skinny boy. He would throw off his hat. The hat had a chin strap and stood up like a white bloom of fuzzy yeast. He strutted around the stadium under the bright lights.
Johnny Lee scampered to the sideline and the stadium roared to greet the school wildcat inside its cage. Back then, back in those long gone times, my childhood in the desert, the university kept a live bobcat, a little tufted-eared cat with a snarl that never faded in a cage; the song leaders hoisted the cage on their shoulders with a litter and carried it around the football stadium at halftime. One of those song leaders got the job of jabbing the cat with a stick to make it snarl and the commentator held the mike up to hear the snarl good and loud, and the crowd roared even louder. Somehow that showed our Arizona fighting spirit.
Girls shot pencils around as they tried to twirl batons, too.
I had to walk slowly to get down or up the stadium seats. The crowd shouted ARIZONA! BEAR DOWN! Louder and louder.
