Oreo wondered about the relative funk quotient after three-quarters of play of the New York Jets as compared with the New York Knicks. Was football basically smellier than basketball? On the one hand, basketball uniforms did not have sleeves and the players therefore got a chance to air their pits during the game. Football players, on the other hand, were padded and wrapped. No chance for pit airing there. But — and it was a considerable but — they played outdoors. There were no proximate brick-and-mortar barriers to funk dissipation. Another consideration: although football involved intense periodic effort, it was so specialized that every mother’s son got a chance to rest between bits. Oreo doubted whether dedicated linebackers dared risk their concentration by taking time out to apply spray, cream, or roll-on deodorant during their rest periods. Basketball, with its continual stampede up and down the court — and with its big stars playing virtually the full forty-eight minutes — seemed to offer little chance for deodorant application, even in the face (or pit) of desire or necessity. And what of hockey? Did ice absorb funk? The parameters were tricky.
Footbalclass="underline" a subway reverie
Picture this, sports fans. It is the Super Bowl. A woman in full football gear (custom-made) runs onto the field. (Some spectators at first think that the shoulder pads of a demented 120-pound lad have slipped to the front.) This poor woman loves football with a doomed and touching passion. Every man who has longed for the field as he sat rooted to the stands was at least informed with possibility, however faint. If he were but fifty pounds heavier, but five seconds fleeter… But this is a woman. Imagine what astrodomes of nature and nurture she has had to friedan in order to test that artificial turf. She has reached the line of scrimmage. She ducks under a ham-haunched center and scoops up the ball. She starts to run a down-and-out pattern. What happens next? This is the Super Bowl, folks. Bon appétit! They Eat Her. Yes, fans, one crackback block and opposing players join in the gorge. They tear that cheeky female apart, devour her, uniform and all. Watch as a tattered leftover (part of the lower dexter curve of the number 8, the hip of that most feminine number, the number she wore in all her fantasy games) escapes and skitters across the field toward the tumescence-red first-down marker, one of the many totems of the male klan that kuklux the field. (The marker is a circle with a center pee/sperm-hole bullet above a vertex-down isosceles triangle, representing the penis in cross section above a Lindau wedge, or vagina — the missionary position.) Back home at setside, male viewers lick their lips and burp. Nielsen women feel a frisson of fear, shame, and guilt. The President’s eyes glaze over. And the game resumes with a ferocity and joy unequaled in the history of sports. The next day, the newspapers insist that a high-school student (male) ran onto the field and was escorted off. Everyone, especially the players (who all have a touch of salmonella), agrees that that is what happened. The text of the President’s ecstatic telephone calls to both coaches and each and every player is released to the public. He has proclaimed football henceforth and forevermore the national sport (and diet).
Oreo on the number 5 bus
Within a few minutes after she got on, Oreo realized she was riding the famed crazy ladies’ bus. She had heard about it in Philadelphia. She was in luck. There were two meshuggenes aboard. One was tall, sharp-boned, and sharp-tongued. Her dark-blue dress with white polka dots snagged on her like a rag on a splinter, tail ends of sentences shredded from her mouth. “… away from me!… shit hell alone!” she raged as she pushed her way to the back, where she stood blocking the aisle. To Oreo, she looked like a Penelope.
The other was a short, gray-haired woman sitting near the front of the bus. She showed one broken middle tooth when she smiled (a curable smile). There was an unremitting smell of aluminum chlorhydroxide about her. Oreo guessed that the woman always washed and dressed as if she were going for a thorough physical after which she would be run over by a car and strangers would see her underwear. If true, she was as normal as the rest of the people on the bus, and there was no hope — except, of course, for the smile. She wore a crisp dress of green, white, and blue stripes and had elastic bands on her wrists. Her shoes were white, with a small bas-relief floral design in pale green and pink on the toe. A Sophie, perhaps? The conversation piece of her outfit was her shopping bag. It was kraft with five thin red wave-design lines across the top. On it floated a message printed neatly in red crayon, beginning on the top wave:
WHO IS USING ME AS SOME KIND OF A SCREEN AND EVERYONE THAT IS OPPRESSED I HAVE TO LOOK AT BECAUSE PEOPLE WANT THEIR AILMENTS ON THE SCREEN. I CAN’T TALK TO ANYONE BUT IT’S HEARD. MY ONLY BROTHER IS 71 YEARS OF AGE AND VERY SICK AND IF I VISIT AND TALK ON THE PHONE THE CONVERSATION IS HEARD. ISN’T THAT INFRINGING ON MY PRIVACY??? I’M NEAR 64 YEARS OF AGE AND IT’S VERY NERVE RACKING. NO ONE EVER EXPLAINED TO ME WHAT IT IS.
She seemed generally in good spirits, but occasionally she would clutch her wrists and cry, “Ow, ow,” or look as if she were about to weep. But the cry of pain, the mask of sorrow were momentary. An instant later, she was smiling again. She had a well-developed social consciousness. She talked to the air space in front of her about poor people, Vietnam, and unemployment.
Between Sophie and Penelope the bus passengers did not know where not to look. Some tried surreptitious eyeball rolls from side to side, most stared straight ahead and pretended the two women were not there. Penelope was too involved with extending her sovereignty to be aware of the effect she was having on the socially conscious Sophie, who was amused by Penelope’s preoccupation with manifest destiny, particularly whenever Pen delivered herself of a choice piece of verbal territorial incursion. Sophie had obviously diagnosed Penelope’s trouble as fallen arches. Several times Sophie obliquely addressed her with the same words. “I didn’t work today,” she would say to the air space. “I just rode around the city. You can have my seat.”
“… out of here!” said Penelope. “… off me!”
At which, Sophie would cut short a giggle to renew her comments on society’s unfortunates. “The hoi polloi,” she said. (Oh, Oreo thought, sympathetically noting the repetition of the article, she just stammered in two languages.) “All that education, and what good is it? Now they can’t find jobs.” She clucked in sympathy. “I don’t give to churches, but if I have a spare dollar, I give to veterans’ organizations.” She read aloud a headline across the aisle about a bank robbery, then said, “They weren’t educated, but they had their omens and their voodoo. They had the right answers. They knew, they knew. Tea leaves. Believe me, I hit four seventy-eight for a couple hundred dollars. They knew, they knew. Ben Franklin said, ‘Early to bed, early to rise.’ They don’t even know how to say that today.”
As the bus passed Sixty-second and Broadway, someone said approvingly, “Look at that. The Jewish Guild for the Blind doesn’t have to wash its windows — nobody has to see out.”
The man to Oreo’s left was reading the front page of the Daily News. When he flipped the paper to scan the back sports page, Sophie read the front-page banner headline aloud. Oreo remembered that the headline had been set up like this:
Porno Paneclass="underline"
END ALL BANS
ON ADULT SMUT
To Oreo, this headline was a comment on itself. Sophie seemed reluctant to add anything to her reading of the banner head. It was not one of her subjects. More to her taste was the headline over a story about two starved, skull-fractured children whose mother was under observation at Bellevue: