Win or Die

I stood up and it was 3:05 A.M. as the alarm clock flies. I listened to my heart beat in quadraphonic and thought about the good times, as time permitted, most memorably the waitress in Barney Oldfield's who, not eight hours earlier, asked, did I have an opinion as to silicone?

I said I leaned toward Thousand Island.

As I looked at the headlight, which appeared to have momentum, a voice said, "The flight to the pearly gates with intermediate stops in the ghetto and intensive care is preparing to board. You need not fasten your seat belt."

I thought of other things, including how I could get from Barney Oldfield's to this condition in a mere eight hours, assuming this was Saturday morning, because with the exceptions of signing strange names to drink tickets and not turning in a man from Oklahoma City who spelled Boomer Sooner in script by urinating on the rest-room wall. I could think of nothing in my immediate past that warranted execution, with the exception of telling a man from Austin that the only good Stetson is a dead Stetson.

If for some reason I was to be only maimed--I remembered reading somewhere that a 1969 Chrysler ran over an ancient woman, flattening a tire and causing multiple abrasions--I planned to repent by sending my daughter to Oral Roberts University in 1985, as opposed to the University of Oklahoma, beat the hell out of Texas, amen.

I began singing "Don't send your son to Texas," and my wife turned on an overhead light and asked, did I need the hotel doctor or a good puke, which?

I momentarily mistook a 100-watt light bulb for angels. Then it became obvious that I was standing in the center of my room in the Sheraton Inn-Mockingbird, Dallas, so named because of Mockingbird Lane, not because the room was laid out to accommodate two mockingbirds and their wives.

The motif of this Sheraton is the automobile, and my room was decorated with yellow racing stripes along one wall and the picture of an automobile headlight on another.

What can Sheraton do for me today?

Call AAA and AA, the auto club to remove the headlight, Alcoholics Anonymous to pump my stomach.

I called the night clerk and said God was coming to get me. And from where I was standing. He did not plan to yield, nor would He dim His brights.

She asked if this were the J. C. Penney party.

I asked if there was supposed to be a headlight on the wall, next to my bed, the size of a pond.

"Yes, sir."

"Then there is no chance a station wagon full of hamburgers from Conroe is driving through my room at this very minute?"

"No, sir."

"Is this, in fact, Saturday, morning of the day of the Oklahoma-Texas football game?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'll give you Texas and fourteen points for the rent."

I went to the bathroom, shifted into second and fell off the bucket seat when somebody took a turn too fast.

•

Oklahoma and Texas began playing football against each other in 1900, when Texas won, 28--2, and the good thing about that game is that almost everybody who remembers it is dead. Although Oklahoma extinguished the Chilocco Indians 27--0 in the next game, beating the Chilocco Indians does not make your scalp tingle from the inside.

Oklahoma-Texas is a collegiate football rivalry equivalent to those of Alabama-Auburn, Michigan-Michigan State, Notre Dame-Purdue, USC-UCLA, Army-Navy, Ohio State-God.

•

The Oklahoma-Texas game distinguishes itself from other football games because while the Auburns and Alabamas may eventually bury the hatchet because they are from the same state, and Army and Navy may bury the nuclear hatchet because they are from the same Government, Oklahoma and Texas do not have to agree on anything, because the Red River is a full-time moderator.

The Oklahoma-Texas game is a lot of things:

It is a diversion from the everyday routine of growing up.

It is a source of power to those who played alternate right trombone in high school.

It is entertainment.

It is a laxative.

Why else would a man from Ardmore, Oklahoma, buy 12 rolls of Go Big Red toilet paper?

•

I have been to the Oklahoma-Texas football game 12 of the past 18 years, first in 1957, with my father, who was sports editor of The Daily Oklahoman of Oklahoma City. That year, on Friday night, somebody threw an easy chair out of the Adolphus Hotel and it landed 20 yards from us, and nobody seemed to notice, I suppose because the chair was made in Texas.

Friday night before the game is one of the charms of OU-Texas football. Policemen set up barricades to protect unwary pedestrians.

Drunks, those unfortunate few who are trying to find the road to Denton, and cops and robbers all mingle to form a mass of flesh that, for various reasons, is about to throw up.

Generally, 200 or so of approximately 10,000 applicants are arrested.

In 1966, when I was a senior at Oklahoma, where I played second base for a baseball team that carved its name into the record book by losing three in a row to Colorado to finish second in the conference behind the Oklahoma State Cow Chips, I went to the Oklahoma-Texas game with an organized date.

She was a tall one, of fine bone and auburn hair, but her most notable characteristic was her enrollment card, which proclaimed her to be a freshman. You must teach a freshman the ropes, the final knot being a pregame or postgame celebration in the relative privacy of a motel bed that shakes if you can hot-wire the box that takes quarters.

She wanted to stay in Norman and take an English midterm.

I said that as there is no sound without ears, there cannot be an English test without students, and since everybody was going to Dallas, what the hell were we doing standing there?

I used complex sentences until I got her into the car, then, 20 miles south of Norman, I stopped to check the rear left tire, and when I inspected the spare, found that somebody had put 18 Coors beers into the trunk. It was me was who.

Between Paoli, which is a town in Oklahoma, and Dallas, I disposed of 11 awesome beers.

We slid into Dallas, and as I pulled my cleansed 1964 black Chevrolet up to a light on Commerce Street, a person in a pink Ford rolled down his window and said, "Screw you, pinhead."

I told my date that it must be her bouffant hairdo, and she removed approximately two dozen hairpins. I then said to the person in the pink Ford, "Hey, pal, you smell like goats."

My companion praised my attempt at simile.

The pink Ford said, "Screw you, Oklahoma, and the spick you got sitting shotgun." My date began swaying as a preliminary to fainting and inquiring as to bus schedules, Dallas-Norman.

I explained that I was about to be detained for from five minutes to eternity, due to an altercation. I looked at my knuckles and drained the remains of a Coors of the quart variety. I made a fist and pounded it on the padded dash, and she went ohmyGod, caught up in the fever of it all.

We go to the curb.

Since Oklahoma's colors are crimson and cream, otherwise known as red and white, I am in red and white, and this other person is in orange of Texas. And as we get out of appropriate cars, mobs of red and orange and white form as seconds for the contestants, one of whom is me.

Kill him, my newly found friends are telling me. Smash him, rip him, plow him, gouge him, spit on him, hurt him.

Yes, I said, I have that.

I overhear the other side telling my opponent roughly the same, except that one of them said, "Don't use the switchblade unless you have to."

Policemen stood around, waiting to arrest a murderer.

During the Oklahoma-Texas weekend, policemen try not to arrest people except in the cases of personal injury--theirs.

My date planted an exclamation point on my cheek and I flinched.

I am in a $105 herringbone sports coat, which, in 1966, is daring. Needless to say, I do not want blood on this coat, especially in contrast to the cream lining. I take my coat off and hang it on a parking meter.

I prepare to get hit.

There is activity behind me, horn honking and gagging, and there goes a genius in orange with my sports coat, $105, sparkling in the headlights.

My date looks at me and says, "Key-ryest, the wool has just been pulled over (continued on page 181) Win or Die (continued from page 150) your bloodshot eyes." I say it only seems that way, there is a time bomb in the inner pocket and I will gladly pay $105 per Texan, whereupon I passed out in the gutter.

The next day, we took Texas for the first time in nine years, 18--9.

It was deserved, for I had not crossed the midriff mark on Friday night.

•

You cannot win them all, which is why Texas has won 42 of them. Oklahoma 25. Between 1958 and 1970, Texas won 11 of 12 games played in the Cotton Bowl in the middle of the Texas State Fair, which occupies a part of near-downtown Dallas that has never heard of Bab-O.

The best way to reach the Cotton Bowl is to parachute in. but if you must drive, parking is available in a lot. if you do not mind a parker who asks what the two pedals are for, or parking is available on the street, if you have wooden tires.

As I parked nine blocks from the stadium on game Saturday 1965, a small boy said. "Dolla."

I told him to tell his mother I was infected.

He said, "Dolla to park."

"Dolla's ass," I said. "Whereas this is a public street and whereas I am public. I can park this car right here, free of charge. It is in the Constitution."

The small boy began cleaning his fingernails with a razor blade.

"Dolla to watch the car," he said, "and a dolla to see it is not eaten."

The remarkable thing about the 1965 game was that it seemed to last 48 hours, perhaps because Oklahoma held Texas to 19 points while holding itself to no points. Nobody leaves early, because there is always the chance Oklahoma will score three touchdowns in 38 seconds or God will send the Goodyear blimp into section four, taking away Texas' headlines.

I walked out of the Cotton Bowl, through the gauntlet, as hundreds of Texans seemed to form nose-thumbing lines. Unless you leave the Cotton Bowl with three minutes left in the first quarter, you are going to be in a traffic jam similar to that of 1965.

After you have been snuffed, you are primarily concerned with removing the bumper sticker and moving north. I was sitting in a line of traffic, telling a stalled Oklahoman to my left that it is not who wins or loses that matters, it's how you play the game. He said it was a shame we played like horseshit. I said nice guys finish last and he said well, maybe. Then a person in a cowboy hat ran onto the hood of my automobile.

He was one of the most coordinated Texans I had ever seen, spelling an obscenity on my windshield so I could read it.

Then he went to the bathroom on my car.

All I could do was honk the horn and turn on the windshield wipers.

Such are the spoils of big-time-college-football victory.

•

There are two ways to get tickets for the Oklahoma-Texas football game. You may buy them or you may steal them, which is easier.

There are two ways to sell tickets, legally or illegally, but I am of the opinion that the rules of free enterprise afford me the right to sell tickets for whatever somebody is willing to pay.

This process is known down at the precinct as scalping, although the process of making a shirt for three dollars and selling it for $21.95 is known in the executive washroom as brilliant.

And while they will let you throw footballs with gout at tiny tires at a booth at the fair, they will not let you scalp near the Cotton Bowl.

Detectives let their beards grow and then try to purchase tickets, posing as hangover citizens, and if you make scalping gestures, they say something similar to "Sorry, buddy, we got to crack down on scalpers and rapists" and your posterior is hauled off to jail, and only heaven and the captain of detectives know what happens to the tickets.

The best way to scalp, I discovered in 1968, is to check the newspaper for ads that request Texas tickets, with things such as lake-front property as barter.

I called a man who said he lived just outside Oklahoma City, by Bethany, and I spoke through sweat socks.

"Got...Texas...tickets."

"Perfect," he said. "I'll give you fifty dollars apiece for them."

"No...shit?"

I said maybe he would hear from me, maybe he wouldn't, and in 30 minutes I was at his door, delivering the paper, with four Texas tickets stapled to the comics.

He, a doctor, wrote me a check for $200 and I ran off through the bushes.

The doctor said that if I scored again next year, the girl of my choice could have herself checked on the house.

That left me with no Texas tickets.

If you have no tickets, you may still attend the Oklahoma-Texas football game, and this is achieved by sneaking in. I snuck in with the Oklahoma band, which practiced on the field the morning of the game.

I got into a crooked line, which said a lot for our band, and introduced myself to a horn, asking if he were up for the game.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"New flute. Been out with a harelip."

The people on the Cotton Bowl gate at ten A.M. would not know musician from iceman, so I marched in and watched people make popcorn for two hours, horrified to learn that the woman in charge of quadruple salting did not give a damn who won. I went to the bathroom for an hour, then, a half hour before the game, I selected a choice seat in the student section, because each year there are many dozens of student tickets sold to unsuspecting and unqualified adults by criminally inclined students.

My doctor friend and my horn friend and my popcorn friend and I watched Texas scrape us 26--20.

•

People do strange things, such as bet on football games.

In 1969, while living in the Park Royal Hotel in New York City, which is better than dying in the Park Royal Hotel in New York City, I took Oklahoma plus ten points with a bookmaker, who put his pants on one leg at a time, even if his were hand-tooled.

I was studying to become a stockbroker, and that week we were on margins.

Here is the way you bet football:

You get the line, see, one team plus points, or the other team minus points. You take season records, injury reports, tradition and weather reports and flush all that down the toilet and take Oklahoma, come hell or high water, because you are loyal.

Here is the way you get a bookmaker in New York:

You ask any elevator operator what is happening and he will give you half a dozen phone numbers and you dial until a man answers, because very few bookmakers are women, and very few hookers are men.

Then you ask for the line. The line is established in Las Vegas.

On the day in question, the man said, "Yeah," and I said good afternoon and the man hung up. I called back and the man said, "Yeah, asshole," and I said Oklahoma-Texas, and the man said, "Oklahoma plus ten," and I said Oklahoma for a bet, which means Oklahoma plus ten points for $100, and the man said to come to his place so he could memorize my face.

When you bet in Oklahoma, the barber doesn't care if you pay off two weeks from next Monday, but when you bet in New York, you can get hurt.

I was down for $100.

One thing led to another, and it was 20--17, Texas, in the fourth of four quarters, which is why Oklahoma fumbled a punt in the general vicinity of Oklahoma's 20-yard line, which Texas recovered and converted into 27--17 for the exact spread of ten, which is a middle and all bets are off. "Only assholes and people who have had lobotomies bet Oklahoma-Texas," says the bookmaker.

•

The telephone rang to announce game day 1974, or else my brains were shifting.

"Good morning, sir, it is eight-o-two."

"Fried egg."

"No, sir, it is Saturday."

I went to the bathroom and turned the top of the childproof aspirin bottle left and right, then I sat down on the side of the bathtub and wondered what a child with a hangover would do. Then I held a book of matches to the plastic top of the aspirin bottle; then I had four aspirins.

The desk clerk buzzed to say a call had been left for me at four A.M.

Perhaps it was the president of the Dallas Press Club, because the night before I had snuck into the mannerly establishment, signing guest chits as grand dragon of the Tulsa Press Club.

Perhaps it was my ex-wife, who lives in Dallas, to tell me to forget next month's child support.

Due to bad odds, I opted for scrambled eggs in Barney Oldfield's, hold the 10W-40.

I sat next to girls in Oklahoma red, who were doing their best imitation of girls who had spent the night before with a sorority sister; then I carried the fight to God, going outside.

A van of vigorous old women was parked next to my car and a sign on their machine said, Tuck Fexas (if it did not say that, there was no use going to the football game).

"Are we going to win?" I asked.

"Yeah, tuck the bastards," the driver said.

The traffic to the Texas State Fair is the only funeral procession in which corpses are permitted to drive, and after only one hour and 25 minutes, I pulled into a parking lot, gave a woman two dollars and watched her spin my radial tires in gravel.

Everybody was a kid again.

Even me.

After riding a cart around the fairgrounds, leaning next to a man who smelled remotely of dead bodies and cherry vodka, I stepped up to a game booth next to the chili-dog booth to win a Teddy bear, because the wind was carrying chili-dog odors south, into a tree that was vomiting leaves.

"A winner every time, handsome," is what the woman with big forearms said, and she was correct, because after four throws, she had won my dollar.

I had an Orange Julius, a mystical drink of oranges and ices and thumbs, guaranteed to soothe the demon hangover. The waitress reminded me of a girl I had met in downtown Dallas in 1971, who claimed to have just been raped by a junior college basketball team. That was also the Friday night I had met a man from Muskogee who planned to sky-dive into the Texas huddle five minutes before game time, singing the Oklahoma chant.

I drank my 1974 Orange Julius underneath a tree and a woman carrying a red purse creatively shaped as an Oklahoma football helmet sat next to me and said, "You have to wonder why Texas hates blacks."

A man in orange chaps said he heard Oklahoma had a potential halfback staked out in Leavenworth, except all the kid could run over was hills.

I went to assume my seat in the Cotton Bowl, which was on the goal line, next to last row.

My neighbor to the left was a woman chewing her fingernails and drinking warm whiskey, and when she asked what I thought, I said it was only a paper moon hanging over an artificial turf, and she said with that attitude, I could kiss her ass, except if I were an Okie, in which case I could share in the festivities of getting redrunk.

I had a pull of bourbon and was reborn.

Men came up the aisle, clutching their bald spots.

Wives and ladyfriends said, "For a big shot, these are some kind of lousy seats."

The game was preceded by a prayer, and when Oklahoma went out onto the field, "Those red ants are Sooners." our section cheered, and when Texas went onto the field, our section pissed and moaned.

Oklahoma was an 18-to-85-point favorite, depending on which side of the Red River your bread was buttered on.

In the first quarter. Oklahoma fumbled twice inside Texas' ten-yard line, and it was the consensus of our row that the Oklahoma coach would get to like coaching junior varsity in Amarillo.

At the half-time recess, it was but 7--3 Oklahoma. The man at the second urinal said it was already a moral victory for Texas. And, as the man on the second stool, who we thought was dead, said, "What's morals got to do with the first half?"

By the fourth quarter, Texas had discovered that it was nowhere near as awful as Las Vegas had guessed.

With the score 13 all, Texas fumbled on fourth down with several hairs to go and Oklahoma recovered near mid-field, and pretty soon, on this October 12th, 69th of a series, to be continued next year, but next year counts only if you get beat this year, matters were reduced to an attempted field goal from the Texas 27-yard line, with 5:25 left in the game.

Everybody stood to see if Tony De-Soto, DiRavachi--who the hell is number three?--DiRienzo would kick the football through the goal posts to win the game or if he would kick the rears of some 35,000 potential godparents.

Red banners waved, as if Tony could see 60 rows up.

Old hearts went on overtime.

The woman next to me said, "Pass, you sons of bitches."

The football was hiked to Oklahoma's Baptist-minister quarterback, who blessed it and put it on a kicking tee, and Tony DiRienzo kicked the football to death, and everybody squinted to see who had been good boys and girls that year.

The kick was good, perfect, highly illuminating and better late than never.

Oklahoma got its fourth consecutive gold star.

As our section sang a medley affirming loyalty to Oklahoma, America and deceased alumni, time ran out on the Scoreboard but continued elsewhere.

Three, two, one, Wall Street, convenience payments, taxes, kids, crab grass, rent, alimony, car keys.