Tarnishing the Dome: A Three Act Adventure in South Bend

Part I - Mauled by a Cougar

So I was out drinking Friday night with my cousins in Mishawaka, Indiana. Even though it’s 90 miles from Chicago, it might as well be a lower rent Naperville, as it has the same places – meaning we wound up at a Bar Louie.
 
This one was populated with the usual suspects you’d find at a Bar Louie – Polish mobsters, muscle heads in disco shirts or tight sweaters, a drunk guy talking about how his first trip to Wrigley Field last year made him cry, sexy lady bartenders with painful to look at lip piercings and plenty of cougars.
 
This particular subspecies had a nice gym body, the face of Barbra Streisand, and a Native American’s tolerance for alcohol. She had been drinking something called a Pink Pussy, a shot with goldschlager and rumplemintz and suitable for a night when the temperature was 12.
 
She also had a thing for bald guys with goatees. One kept pulling on her thong underwear, which would get most guys slapped. But this mook was my evil, stronger, blue collar twin, Don the Plumber.
 
Don had trouble written all over his handsome face – or was it in the stitching on his jeans pockets? He wound up leaving with a woman with one of those two-tone dye jobs that looks like a Pepe Le Pew or a badger did her hair. There was a guy there who may have been jealous - of her, not him. Mr. Tight Sweater with Pooka Shell Necklace had been touching his pal's bald head. A lot.
 
Anyway, the cougar in question, before she left, noticed me. I was standing by a Golden Tee game, minding my own business when she came over and told me how sexy she thinks bald guys are. Then I made a cougar noise and she grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled down my cranium and licked my dome. And I say dome because it was a weekend going to a Notre Dame game.
 
In retrospect, I think she had mistaken me for one of those Australian toads you lick to get high.
 
Either way, I had a story that left my female coworkers unsettled come Monday morning.
 
But back to Mishawaka. We made sure the cougar got to her Avalon ok – not an easy task for her on an icy parking lot while wearing shoes with pointy heels. She wanted us to go to a strip club with her, in Fort Wayne, 90 miles away, but we took a pass.
 
On the way home I found out from my cousins a bit of the back story on the cast of characters. Divorces. Teenaged children. Marriages on the rocks. I felt like an asshole for finding it all so funny, but then I remembered what a fuck-up I can be, too. We're all those crying on the inside kind of clowns and bars are those tiny cars we all spill out of exposing our foibles.

Part 2 - Kid N Play

I didn’t need an alarm clock to wake up the next morning. My cousin Dan’s five-year-old son took care of that. Grant plopped onto the edge of the bed at about 6 a.m. which was 5 a.m. Chicago time – and he showed up every half hour or so until I did get out of bed around 8:30 his time.
 
Still learning math basics, he wasn’t quite sure when or what 8:30 was and kept coming to tell me that 8:30 had past.
 
I didn’t mind. In fact, I thought it was amusing. Things like this might piss parents off if they have to deal with it all the time. Having no kids of my own and being basically insecure, I found it flattering that someone would actually want me to get my sorry ass out of bed to play with me.
 
So eventually I got up, went down in the basement, rode a Figure 8-shaped scooter, played some floor hockey, watched some cartoons, arranged some toy trucks in a simulated traffic jam, ate some breakfast then went to Grant’s soccer game.
 
Grant is pretty fast, and scored the only goal of the game. He almost had another off a shot he tried to make after falling down – a shot kicking the ball while laying on his side, like something you might see a lazy fat guy do to avoid standing or to get the dog away from his bag of potato chips.
 
Grant plays hockey, too, which he did Sunday. Watching a bunch of five year olds play either sport is entertaining for the varieties of falls they all take – even more so on ice, which adds sliding, sticks and harder collisions to the mix.
 
At 5, kids don’t seem to get caught up in winning or losing yet. It’s more about looking for parents and fans in the crowd and starting a conversation – or in the case of one lad, smiling and waving after he let a puck pass him into the net.
 
Ever seen a parent dress a kid for hockey? How can you not feel like a king or queen if your dad or mom is layering you up in places where you never even knew you needed layers?

Part 3 - Game Day and a Heart Attack on a Very Hot Plate

Watching five year olds in any sport is preferable to watching Notre Dame play football. People still come to the games out of ritual, like disbelieving Catholics who hedge their bets by still going to Mass.

All of this is a polite way of either saying that God is dead or the team sucks. Suck is defined as losing to Syracuse, the worst team in the Big East, which is a basketball conference. Notre Dame is good in basketball and just about every other sport, but for football, the sport that made the school what it is. But hey, nothing is as it seems it was these days.

Still, there was the NBC hospitality tent to enjoy before the game - all that free food and booze. Hamburgers, chili, bloody marys, Bud, Guinness, Irished up hot chocolate, all of which which left me warm and sleepy during a dull first half. Or maybe it was the squirrel lined pants I was wearing to keep warm on a day when local ponds were freezing over.

Since my cousins are part of the local medical community we warmed up at halftime in one of three triage areas they have in Nude Rockne stadium where one of their colleagues was on duty. Sure, we are wimps, but the way they shoveled the stadium, there your feet were planted on snow. That wasn't such a smart thing, as the students were making snowballs and tossing them in the crowd and mostly toward the sidelines, aiming for cops, cheerleaders, the IT department being introduced during one of the endless TV timeouts (but a smart enough bunch to move out of range), and, best of all, the home team. The announcer scolded, but what he should have said was "Your parents shell out more than $40,000 a year for you to come to this school. They must be really proud." Or "Effective immediately, any more snowballs thrown, any student at the game will immediately be transferred to Michigan State."

We left during the third quarter with the Fighting Irish had yet to fall flatter than a drunken fat alumni on the ice outside Linebackers.

There was still steak to eat that night at Ruth's Chris, where they slather marbled meat in butter and serve it on a scalding hot plate.

I figured eating a lot was good practice for Thanksgiving, so the 22-ounce strip came after a bowl of gumbo, a few beers, some bread and a handful of shoestring french fried. But it took all my energy to finish my meal. I felt like python must after eating a rabbit. One of my cousins told me I was off my A-game.

Maybe I was frazzled by seeing another twin - this one beefier then me, with reddish goatee and sitting with a wimpier version of my cousin Kevin. It was like Back to the Future and are doppelgangers were on the other side of the room. We couldn't get any closer or let them spot us, less we risk altering the time-space continuum. The future us may have been life partners, and since we are related, even though this was Indiana (where you can still smoke in a bar), this was disturbing.

See what cholesterol can do to your brain? (Better that, than what it did to my GI tract. Let's just say, buttery in, buttery out.)

As I fell into a food coma, a friend of Kevin's came in, whom Kevin promptly tried to set up with a waitress. Then another waitress who waited on us my last football trip to South Bend came by to say hello.

She's still in school, hoping to be a doctor, working her way through school Same as when we saw her out and about on our last set of adventures.

I can't believe it's been a year, she said.

Who can believe anything anymore, I thought. It was probably the food talking, the fat going right to my head.