The other manner in which social media very nearly proved helpful was when I received the following direct message from a stranger in regards to Item No. 6: get an Eagles fan to perform black magic with me.
Hi, my cousin’s husband is at the game, what would count as black magic
As it turned out, I did not need that person’s cousin’s husband to join hands with me in league with Satan; while I was finishing up my third hot dog, a woman in an Eagles coat approached my standing table and asked if I wouldn’t mind watching her drink while she went back to the bar to get another for her husband, because they would only sell her one at a time.
“I’ll do it if you perform a spell to curse Tom Brady with me when you get back,” I said.
“Fine, then,” she agreed in a heavy Southern drawl. (She later told me that she was from South Carolina, married to a Philly native.)
True to her word, when she returned, she chanted the following words with me over a pile of, basically, trash that I had made:
Good luck go, Go away. But bring all of the bad to stay. And for this spell, I must pay a price. With something dear, As well as nice. This is my will, So Mote It Be!
Item No. 6: Get an Eagles fan to perform black magic with me. COMPLETE. Five to go.
The Dead Bird Omen
* * *
One helpful but not terribly well-publicized amenity the venue offered was free charging stations. It was at one of these that I saw a white-haired man from Philadelphia folding bills into his wallet.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “I’m doing a scavenger hunt to win a mini-fridge with the Eagles logo on it. One of the things on my list is ‘earn money.’ If you wouldn’t mind giving me a dollar, it would be a huge help.”
“Sure,” he said, and peeled off a dollar.
Item No. 7: Earn money. COMPLETE. Four to go.
“What else is on your list?” he asked.
I pulled up the list on my phone. “You haven’t met Beyoncé, have you?” I asked. (Item No. 4: A personal story or previously unknown fact about Beyoncé.) He hadn’t.
“I could have helped you with that one earlier,” he said, pointing at Item No. 25: “Dead bird.”
“You saw a dead bird?” I asked. This item was on the list because a friend had informed me that huge numbers of birds keep flying into the beautiful reflective glass of the stadium and dying.
He nodded silently.
“Where?”
“Outside my hotel.”
“What hotel?”
“The LivINN,” he said. “L-I-V-I-N-N. It was just lyin’ there, outside the door.”
“Do you know what kind of bird it was?” I asked. (Why did I ask that?)
“No,” he said.
“Will you give me your email address to sign up for delivery.com?” I asked. “It’s not a scam. You can unsubscribe as soon as you get the first email.”
“Sure,” he said. This man helped me complete two tasks in about 60 seconds, which makes him the official second MVP of the night, after Nick Foles.
Item No. 9: Sign someone up for delivery.com using my promo code so we both save $7. COMPLETE. Three to go.
The Baby of a Lifetime
* * *
Although I’d made decent progress, by the fourth quarter, I was growing despondent. The game was nearly over, the Patriots were now in the lead, and the remaining items on the list were proving impossible to find or accomplish. My evil spell had backfired, possibly due to my own use of substitute ingredients. What’s worse, I had doubled its cursed impact and sacrificed the innocent soul of a woman from South Carolina who loved alcohol. I saw many men who appeared to be over 80 (Item No. 16), but they were all cordoned off in elite areas, and even if I could get to them, I was reluctant to interrupt their watching of the game to explain to these uniformed World War II veterans that I, a grown woman in a gold lamé Eagles jacket, needed their help on a scavenger hunt of my own devising. I was reduced to wandering around the main concourse asking random strangers, “Excuse me, have you or anyone you know ever met Beyoncé?” No one had. Most people seemed baffled by my question, which suggests to me that Beyoncé needs to get out and meet more people. A few folks seemed to think I was some sort of hidden-camera game show they had no interest in playing.
I was in the midst of ascending and descending stairs and escalators in random order, haphazardly traversing concourses with no direction or purpose, when I found myself next to a glass-walled studio filled with dozens of TV monitors, each blaring a different oscillating graphic (“FIIIiiirrSSSTttt DOOoooWWWnnNN!”), and decided to rest. I was soon joined there by a woman in Philadelphia gear, her arms laden with food and drink she intended to bring back to her family in the stands. She and I chatted as we watched the game on TV, unable to tear ourselves away from the screens even though we were just a few feet away from where we could watch the game live. Our mood was low when suddenly, with just over two minutes left, the Eagles appeared to score another touchdown. She threw herself into my arms. “I’m gonna cry!” she screamed into my chest. I hugged her as we both jumped up and down.
A man from behind us dismissed our joy. “They’re not gonna give it to them,” he said. And, indeed, when we looked back, the catch was under review. The three of us, the man, the woman, and I, pressed our faces to the glass as the action was rewound and replayed dozens of times. Catch-bobble-catch; catch-bobble-catch; catch-bobble-catch. Finally, the touchdown call was upheld. “You just won the Super Bowl,” the man said. The woman and I hugged each other again, and ran off to make it to our respective seats before the final seconds of the game.
As soon as green confetti fell like beautiful acid rain, I lunged out of my seat and ran four levels through empty, echoing back tunnels to the ground, hoping that the clear “NO FIELD ACCESS” stamp on my media badge didn’t matter anymore now that the Eagles had won. The first rule of Philadelphia is that there are no rules that cannot be set on fire and hurled through a storefront window in celebration. Turns out the first rule of Minneapolis is that you must respect all rules. I was stopped just a few feet from the field and forced to turn back around, which is when I saw Kevin Hart, looking dour, perhaps because he had just been forcibly removed from TV for swearing during a live broadcast, making his way down the tunnel with his entourage.
“What’s up, Kev?!” I yelled. He ignored me.
Item No. 24: Greet a celebrity like I know them. COMPLETED. Two to go.
Forced back upstairs to join the disgusting ranks of the other people without field access, I bumped into another opportunity to score a last-minute scavenger hunt point: My coworker A.J. Earlier in the evening, I had jokingly given him my Eagles baseball cap to wear, and despite the greenhouse-like temperature inside the stadium, he still had it on, in addition to his suede trench and cashmere turtleneck. The result was that A.J. no longer looked simply like a well-dressed man; he looked like a well-dressed man so full of affection and respect for the Philadelphia Eagles, he was willing to ruin a fantastic outfit by wearing a dirty old baseball cap advertising his support for them.
“I’m going to pretend to interview you,” I said, holding up my phone like a recorder. A few people clapped at him as they walked by. Emboldened, A.J. started pointing at people as he gave me a pretend interview. He began saying “thank you” to Eagles fans unprompted. The more he thanked them, the more they congratulated him. He shrugged and nodded when they expressed excitement. I put my phone in my pocket, ran a few yards down the concourse, and doubled back to him.
“I hate to do this,” I said for the benefit of the crowd now making its way toward him. I pulled out my small notebook. “Would you mind signing?” After seeing A.J. sign an autograph for me, people began forming small lines to give him high-fives. Wary of attempting our charade for too long in one location, he and I decided to move around. He confidently began strolling around a few various elite club levels, while I rushed along a few paces behind him, in the manner of a harried assistant. A.J. continued to s
mile and nod at well-wishers and awed children. At some point, he decided internally that he was a retired former Eagles player and mused aloud to me, “I wish it could have been in my day, but I’m happy they finally got it.” We finally stopped wandering, not because he got caught slipping seamlessly between club levels, but because it was so easy as to be unexciting. At 10 p.m. on Sunday night in U.S. Bank Stadium, it was assumed that a six-foot-six black man in a fur-lined coat and Eagles cap was supposed to be anywhere he was.
Item No. 13: Make people think GQ employee A. J. Gibbson is more famous than Jessica Biel. COMPLETE. No offense, Jessica. One to go. No time left.
As fans surged out of the stadium on a current of dazed emotion, I was forced to confront the barren reality of my fate, with no officially licensed Philadelphia Eagles personal Refrigerated Beverage Center on the horizon. My drinks would forever be room temperature, or located in a non–Philadelphia Eagles brand regular-size refrigerator far away from my cubicle. My afternoons would be filled not with the gentle hum of drinks being continuously cooled, but the booming silence of a distinct LACK of electricity. I had lost, but at least the Eagles had won.
But then.
A few feet ahead of me, I saw her—a symbol of hope for the future, specifically my future, specifically my future filled with up to 20 chilled beverages at a time: a very, very young baby. (Item No. 15.) By far the youngest I had seen all night.
As if pulled by an invisible string wrapped around that baby’s finger, I glided silently away from extremely famous retired NFL player GQ’s A. J. Gibbson. I peered at the baby’s little face, smushed delicately between enormous pink baby earphones. She was wearing an infant-size knit Eagles cap and crying softly to herself.
“How old is your daughter?” I asked the woman bouncing her lightly in her arms.
“She’s my granddaughter, actually,” said the smiling lady, clad in matching Eagles gear. “Two months.” My heart sank. Why couldn’t this baby have been brand newer? “I think she’s ready for these headphones to come off,” she added.
“Maybe she’s crying because she’s so happy they won,” I said. The grandmother and I wished each other a good night and I walked back to collect my things. As I prepared to leave the stadium, I glanced back at the baby in time to see her being handed off to her mother. It was then that I noticed the word on the back of the beanie, spelled out in gleaming Swarovski crystals: D‑A‑D. My eyes flew to her mother’s jersey, adorned with matching crystals: GOODE 52. Then to her grandmother’s: GOODE 52. Everyone in their party was wearing the same jersey. My fingers opened Instagram so fast, my iPhone glass threatened to melt in my hands. There was the baby, on her mom’s Instagram, in the arms of a beaming linebacker—Najee Goode, #52, Philadelphia Eagles.
Item No. 22: Meet member of a player’s immediate family.
Like the Philadelphia Eagles, I had achieved the impossible. The mini-fridge was mine.
SUPER BOWL REVIEW: 8/10; GO EAGLES; would not go back.
Jeff MacGregor
Taming the Lionfish
from Smithsonian
Friday
* * *
We were somewhere around Pensacola Pass, on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, when the over-the-counter drugs failed to take hold.
Just after sunrise the seas are running two or four or six feet and at the mouth of the Gulf where the bay opens up and the tide meets the wind from the east and the west and the north and the south is a washing machine of razorback crests and sub-basement troughs, waves running horizon to horizon, some as big as houses, whitecaps peeling off the long rollers, the water every blue and every green, the rise and fall of our little boat a series of silences, groans, engine noises, and cymbal crashes as we pitch and roll and the whole boatload of gear works itself loose from the fittings, the tanks and the spears and the wet suits and the vests and the fins and the buckets and the coolers and computers and the compasses and regulators and the backups to the backups to the backups, every dive system three times redundant now soaked and streaming, bobbing in the bilges, and the waves coming over the side, the top, the stern, the bow, all of us pitching and yawing and rolling and moaning and swearing and all that gear floating at our ankles with the bags of white cheddar popcorn and the wasabi and the Red Vines, all of us grabbing for the gunwales or the rails or each other, Captain Andy at the wheel calm as a vicar, Barry with his feet planted, singing at the top of his lungs, “Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends,” and the planetary surge of 500 quadrillion gallons of angry water pouring through the tiny nautilus of my inner ear on its way to my stomach. I lean over the side and throw up again. Doubled over the transom, John casually does likewise. The motion-sickness tablets do nothing.
We all laugh.
We’re here to hunt lionfish.
* * *
Before we get to the marine biology, this has to be said: the lionfish is one of the most beautiful animals alive. With its bold stripes and extravagant fins, its regal bearing and magisterial stillness, every lionfish is a hand-lacquered 11th-century Japanese fan. It is a diva, a glamour-puss, a show-off. If you ran a hedge fund in Greenwich or Geneva or Tokyo, the first fish you’d buy for that 100,000-gallon aquarium in your lobby would be a lionfish. It is in every respect spectacular. And in this hemisphere it is an eco-killer, a destroyer of worlds.
Four-hundred-twenty-two words of marine biology boilerplate, a NOAA crib sheet, and a warning:
In the southeast U.S. and Caribbean coastal waters the lionfish is an invasive species. It competes for food and space with overfished native populations. Scientists fear lionfish will kill off helpful locals such as algae-eating parrotfish, allowing seaweed to overtake coral reefs already stressed by rising water temperatures and bleaching. Lionfish kill off other small cleaner-fish too, which increases the risk of infection and disease among sport fish and cash fishery populations. In U.S. waters, lionfish stocks continue to grow and increase in range. Lionfish have no known predators here and reproduce all year long; a mature female lionfish releases roughly two million eggs a year, which are then widely dispersed by ocean currents.
Two million eggs a year.
Scientific Name: Pterois volitans (red lionfish)
Unscientific, badass nickname: devil firefish
Identification: Lionfish have distinctive brown and white or maroon and white stripes covering the head and body. Tentacles protrude above the eyes and below the mouth. They have fanlike pectoral fins and long dorsal spines. An adult lionfish can grow as large as 18 inches.
Native Range: The South Pacific and Indian Oceans, where natural predators, including grouper, keep their population in check.
Habitat: Lionfish are found in the tropics, in warm water, and in most marine habitats. Lionfish have been found in or on hard-bottom ocean floor, mangrove, sea grass, coral, and artificial reefs at depths from one to 1,000 feet.
Non-native Range: Since the 1980s, lionfish have been reported in growing numbers along the southeastern United States coast from Texas to North Carolina. Juvenile lionfish have been collected in waters as far north as Long Island, New York.
Lionfish are eating machines. They are active hunters that ambush their prey by using their outstretched pectoral fins to corner them. If lionfish are unable to adapt to declines in their prey, their population might decrease. In the short term, however, they will turn to cannibalism.
Warning! Lionfish spines deliver a venomous sting that can last for days and cause extreme pain. Also sweating, respiratory distress, and even paralysis. Lionfish venom glands are located in the spines on the top and the sides and the bottom of the fish. They can sting you even after the fish is dead. The venom is a neurotoxin. Once the spine punctures the skin, the venom enters the wound through grooves in the spine. If stung, seek medical attention immediately.
The guys on the dock will tell you that the sting of a lionfish is like “getting hit hard by a hammer, then injecting the bruise with hot sauce.” Wear gloves.
/> How they got here no one really knows. Like giant shoulder pads and the music of Frank Stallone, some things about the 1980s remain inexplicable. The arrival in American waters of the lionfish is one of these mysteries. There are a couple of recurring stories, but they don’t really add up to a truth. The first is that some home aquarium owner emptied a few of them into the ocean one night—the narrative equivalent of the New York City alligator-down-the-toilet story. Another story suggests a big resort hotel in the Caribbean mishandled the filtration setup on its giant destination aquarium and pumped them out into the sea. Or that a breeding pair escaped during Hurricane Andrew. Maybe they arrived here in the water ballast of big cargo ships from the Pacific.
Now they’re everywhere. Like locust. That’s the bad news. The lionfish has Florida in a noose, and from Mobile, Alabama, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, the lionfish is a blight, a plague, an epidemic. A perfect evolutionary machine for eating and ruin, every lionfish is the lace-collared cutthroat in your underwater Elizabethan costume drama.
The good news? Lionfish is delicious.
* * *
All this I learned at the Smithsonian Marine Station in Fort Pierce, Florida. They have a team of molecular scientists and marine biologists there, and benthic ecologists and visiting zoologists and doctoral candidates and postdocs and technicians and reef experts. They have a research laboratory and a public aquarium where a couple of times a day you can watch a little lionfish get fed. This is out on Seaway Drive, and on a hot spring morning the light here is like the aftermath of a blast. In fact, when you drive from here to Pensacola, all of Florida feels like a trick of the light. Overbright or too dark, at once too soft and too sharp, underwater or above it, you’re never sure what you’re seeing. At noon the asphalt shimmers and the sand dazzles and at midnight the stars swim in an ink-black heaven above the cypress and the slash pine. Is that a Disney castle rising in the distant murk, or just a jet of swamp gas? From Daytona to the Everglades to the Keys, from Universal Studios to the Fountain of Youth, Florida is a fever dream, an unreliable narrator. Florida is a fiction. It is an impossible place.
The Best American Sports Writing 2019 Page 19
