#12: Devil Town

I am evangelical about the greatest depiction of football America has produced: Friday Night Lights, both the book by H.G. Bissinger as well as the movie and TV series inspired by Bissinger’s chronicle of a high school football team in Odessa, Texas and the team’s pursuit of a state championship in 1988. 

Named after the flood lights that illuminate Friday night football games, Friday Night Lights is long-form journalism at its finest: relentless in its efforts to honor the obligation of capturing a people, and their place, in a span of time. I say obligation, because I do believe that’s what journalists incur when they call themselves journalists. But obligation is not necessarily a mandate for flattery, nor should it be. We owe each other truth: a harsher kindness.

Although neither of my parents were raised in West Texas, their hometowns in Ohio and New York bear resemblances to the Odessa of the book, and particularly to the Odessa on screen; and especially my mother’s, which was once the epicenter of the opioid epidemic. Sam Quinones’ Dreamland captures the Portsmouth I remember visiting: a sliding incline towards despair, mingled with Appalachian pride. It is our town. Outsiders judge us—but we love us, even as we mourn. Especially as we mourn.

(Credit: IMDb)

The rhythms of small towns in America, at least I have understood them, hum on high school sports: those epics of talent and their economy of dreams. A ball barreling towards the end zone could be your youth, the stratosphere since pierced by what life has thrown in your path. It is heartbreaking, that hope, but it might just be proof that God is in the lights tonight.

My parents left their hometowns for several reasons, one of which was the alienation they felt, and that others inflicted upon them; people used to throw trash at my mother out the windows of their cars. My parents were reflections of other ambitions: their own. And while that was not a crime, it was a difference. Owning it violated the organizing principle of their communities. 

Sometimes my mother couldn’t watch Friday Night Lights—several scenes reminded her too much of what she moved away from, and why. My father wouldn’t watch it. My sister, meanwhile, inhaled every aspect: she wanted that tight knot of community, the wild heat of proximity. And I watched it because she watched it, and I wondered when and where I would feel that longing, if I were capable of feeling it all.

The diner my mother’s grandparents ran in Portsmouth. (Credit: Joe Schumacher)

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, a cottage industry of op-eds exploded, as bands of scorched liberals took to the Washington Post and New York Times to excoriate not their stupidity at having missed what was happening in their country, but their shortsighted-ness at living inside a bubble, the artist formerly known as where you lived. 

I’m not sure who first landed upon The Bubble as the defining metaphor for Those Times, but I hope they made a ton from royalties. The idea of The Bubble is appealing, I think, because it implies that even in your isolation from Real America, you are not alone; there are others, in fact millions, breathing in stale carbon dioxide beside you. 

But The Bubble was also a stand-in for an understanding, if not necessarily an articulation, of an archetype, the way that Lululemon, in the mid 2010s, did for its ideal customer prototype: Ocean, “a 32-year-old professional single woman…who makes $100,000 a year and…[is] engaged, has her own condo, is traveling, fashionable, has an hour and a half to work out a day.” 

Duke, Ocean’s 35-year-old male counterpart, is an “athletic opportunist,” which is a great, albeit unintended, lesson about why sentence structure matters: whereas the intended Duke is meant to be an opportunistic athlete—meaning he’ll do any sport or athletic activity—the actual Duke is a crypto-swilling, Ponzi-scheme-dreaming finance bro.

Duke and Ocean probably lived in The Bubble, or maybe on its outskirts; their politics, though unknown, were almost besides the point. (Or purposefully unmentioned.) In The Bubble, the only people who existed were city-dwelling, college-educated liberals—some of whom occasionally fogged up the glass as progressive—who ranged from upper middle class to wealthy, with their full-time job and benefits ($100K a year!); who in their spare time were probably on Twitter or shouting in an opinion page somewhere (CRYPTO IS LEGIT)—somewhere, often, being Brooklyn. 

Fruit hangs low, for a reason: it’s the easiest to stomp on. 

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I’m don’t know where I’m going with this, in an newsletter called and about small good things, as The Bubble was neither good nor small, nor a thing; it was a delusion, although some confused it for atonement: if I just shout loudly enough about my shortcomings, I will feel better! (For anybody who has been in therapy, that might be an all-too familiar belief. It is for me.)

In America, we’re less than a month away from the midterm elections, which means when I watched Atlanta sweep the Mets last weekend (WHICH WAS BEAUTIFUL), I saw two political ads: one calling Stacey Abrams “Celebrity Stacey,” another defending her. Then ESPN decided fuck it, let’s play the 3AM infomericals: YUMMY CAN POTATO COOKER! A FOOT ROCKER! SHIPPING AND HANDLING INCLUDED! 

Anybody can make a political ad—as we are too often forced to experience—but not just anybody can create a YUMMY CAN POTATO COOKER business, then go out of business, but not before buying ad time on ESPN during the most important pre-playoff series in baseball to tell the nation that you’re going out of business, so stock up now. Will I buy it? No. I don’t need to. It’s already bought my brain.

Did you really think I would leave you hanging? (Credit: BulbHead)

In college, for a class about persuasive writing, I read J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, about how his Kentucky family’s Appalchian roots affected them, even though he grew up in Ohio. Published in June 2016, Hillbilly Elegy became Miss America’s Guide To Why Trump Won; in the aftermath of the election, a memoir written by a Yale graduate fit The Bubble bill. It didn’t hurt that he called himself a never-Trumper and wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic calling Trump’s political platform the “opioid of the masses.” 

According to the CDC, in 2016 Kentucky had the fifth-highest rate in the country of fatal drug overdoses; in 2020, the second-highest rate. Ohio, in 2016, had the second-highest rate; in 2020, the fourth-highest. Meanwhile, the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy estimates that in 2021, 90% of fatal overdoses involved an opioid. Now, in 2022, the Washington Post wonders at “the radicalization of J.D. Vance,” and Vance is Ohio’s Republican nominee for the US Senate, endorsed by—who else?—Trump. 

The cruelty of irony isn’t that it has a good memory (it does), but that it has a sense of humor. 

When I read Hillbilly Elegy, I was 21 and terrified. I wanted somebody to explain politics to me; I wanted to understand the people who were my relatives, who I rarely ever saw. But what I read was a memoir, and not a particularly good one. It was just somebody’s life—to which, after all, there never can be one grand unified theory.

Baseball has ruined—or saved?—me. (Credit: my phone, also a fever)

One of my favorite songs from Friday Night Lights’s soundtrack is Tony Lucca’s “Devil Town.” Underscored by handclaps, it grows into a rolling three-minute knot of fury, even though Lucca’s singing is jarringly monotone. The instruments tell the story his voice won’t, or can’t: 

All my friends were vampires

Didn’t know they were vampires

Turns out I was a vampire myself

In the devil town

I was living in a devil town

Didn’t know it was a devil town

Oh Lord, it really brings me down

About the devil town

Recently, I read Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. Broadly, the unifying points are less about freedom in a political sense (although she does touch on that briefly, in regards to Trump) and more about what we lose—what Nelson argues we must lose—in entering relationships, including but not limited to those with works of art, say, or each other. Freedom isn’t about letting go; it’s about committing, everyday, to ambivalence, and imbuing it with attention.

Because one of Nelson’s favorite words is indeterminacy, she muses that maybe none of us can ever be free, at least not in a spiritual sense: we are too glued to each other to ever achieve that release. For her, that’s a good thing. 

And I don’t know if I agree. Admittedly, I am biased: I am estranged from my family, which was a choice that didn’t feel like one. 

But then, I’m not looking for release; I’m seeking relief. It’s why I love “Devil Town” so much. To know, as true, that the places we live imprint themselves into us, and that we have no control over that? For me, that is peace; it has to be peace. Knowing where we came from, and how it helped make us who we are, doesn’t have to mean fate. It’s just a coordinate. Just a couple of people looking to figure out who, exactly, they can be.

What’s your small good thing of the week?

Let Me Tell You About Gidget

While I’m pretty sure I had a fever dream yesterday, in which I was actually lucid, I did manage to produce a masterpiece: this.

A Continual Note of Gratitude

Like everything I write these days, this was written during sessions of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.