Cleveland Municipal Stadium
Cleveland, OH
Cleveland Municipal Stadium was a cavernous, 80,000 seat stadium built in the 1930s on the shores of Lake Erie. It was built as part of a bid to win the Summer Olympics. When I think of the peak moment of American optimism, I do not think of the moon landing. No, I think the most optimistic act in American history was Cleveland building a giant stadium next to the most polluted lake in the world, thinking it could land the Olympics.
If only the Olympic bid had worked! What a sight those Games would have been! Municipal Stadium— which would go on to be home to both the Cleveland Indians and the Browns—was so close to the lake that swarms of mayflies and midges would descend into the venue every summer like some kind of London fog, often affecting the outcome of games. Cleveland always seemed to win those games and visiting press came to think ofit as a home field advantage; that Cleveland players were more accustomed to playing inside a blight of insects. I never bought that. I don’t think anyone becomes used to having a cloud of bugs around them, and it’s not like the players on Cleveland’s roster grew up near Lake Erie and thus developed a tolerance. Most of the players came from sunny, southern places. No, instead, I think when someone moves to Cleveland and lives there for a decent period of time, they just start to believe something will always go wrong. When they begin their day, they assume they will end up inside a car that won’t start or get stuck in a broken elevator, or that a flying soup of ticks will engulf them and, because they have already made peace with this, they are less bothered by the problem; minor disasters become normalized.
Visiting players did not find it normal. Seattle pitcher Jim Bounton once said: “If you are going to die in a plane crash, have it be on an inbound flight to Cleveland.” Opposing players began calling the stadium “The Mistake By The Lake’’ and, to them, it must have seemed like some terrible accident of architecture or even nature was responsible for these playing conditions, particularly during Mayfly Season.
Mayflies emerge from Lake Erie by the cloud; billions of what appear to be large, ugly butterflies landing everywhere. Near the lake, they blanket the ground so thoroughly—deeper than snow—that your car sounds like it’s driving on top of peanuts as it advances over them. And mayflies only live a few minutes in the air. So imagine the oddity of these visiting players not only being engulfed in a gathering of the world’s ugliest butterflies but also learning that, as you swat them away, most of them are choosing to land on you to die. Even the bugs in Cleveland are despondent.
All the same, the local fans were not bothered. Not so much because they were used to the flies or the humidity or, during the winter months, the freezing, whipping winds off the lake. No, they were too drunk to care. I have never seen drinking like that at Municipal Stadium: She seated 81,000 persons and I don’t think a soul ever entered it sober. 81,000 people! When I was growing up, Cleveland only had 400,000 adults living in the city which meant twenty percent of the city’s population was at the game drunk. Attending a game was less 40 like attending a sporting event and more like entering a living, breathing painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
Parties I Wish I had Attended:
Ten Cent Beer Night
There have been 139 forfeits in Major League Baseball history and all but ten of them took place before the advent of night lighting. The first forfeit of the modern era that was not due to an inability to light or officiate the game was when the city of Cleveland decided to sell beers for ten cents.
In 1974, the Cleveland Indians were a losing team averaging around 10,000 fans a game in a stadium designed to hold 80,000 people. To boost ticket sales for their game against the Texas Rangers, the Indians announced that drafts of beer would sell for only ten cents. Almost 30,000 people showed up; 20,000 more than their average attendance and you have a pretty good idea what brought them. And the key thing to remember here is not just that they attracted twenty thousand people who were only there to drink beers for ten cents; it’s that they attracted twenty thousand people who could drink ten cent beers on a Tuesday night with no discernible impact on their schedules.
Believe it or not, Ten Cent Beer Nights were common to baseball in the 1970s. Several cities—Milwaukee, Arlington, and others— regularly staged them to improve attendance. It was one of those traditions—like smoking on airplanes or the way zoos used to have lions in cages that you could reach into—that no one had questioned yet. And just as we needed Ralph Nader to come along and show us that seatbelts in cars are a good idea, we needed the city of Cleveland to show us, yes, if you sell beer for ten cents, you will get a riot.
All drunken debacles end terribly but Ten Cent Beer Night is unique in that it also started horrifically. There was never a moment during the entire fiasco where the crowd, the baseball players, the press, or the police thought this plan could work. Twenty thousand extra fans arrived, many carrying firecrackers. Smoke covered large swaths of the stadium before the first pitch. Sensing a rowdy crowd, the Indians decided to impose a beer limit: you could buy as many drafts as you like, but no more than six beers at a time.
That limit is an amazing indicator of what the city of Cleveland considers safe, versus what the rest of the world considers safe. Doctors define binge drinking as five drinks in one day. The city of Cleveland was not willing to limit a round of beer as aggressively as the medical community defines a whole day of unhealthy drinking.
The six-beer limit was useless. The beer was being served from Stroh’s trucks near the outfield and the crowd was so drunk, so menacing that the staff tending the trucks decided the aggression wasn’t really worth whatever pittance they were being paid and abandoned their posts. Fans were left to pour their own beers, now for free.
That’s right. Ten Cent Beer Night, an already bad idea with an equally ill-conceived six beer limit, was now: All-You-Can-Drink Free Beer at the Stroh’s Truck Night.
Dan Coughlin, a hilarious, legendary Cleveland sports reporter, covered the Indians beat back then and the most definitive summary of the game comes from him:
2ND INNING: A woman jumps over the wall and runs to the batter’s on-deck circle. She takes her shirt off, flashes the crowd and then tries to kiss the umpire who refuses.
3RD INNING: A father and son—baseball has always been about dads and sons—descend the outfield wall, run to centerfield and moon the bleachers together.
4TH INNING (top): Texas pitcher Fergie Jenkins is hit in the stomach by a line drive and as he is being attended to by training staff the fans start cheering, “HIT HIM AGAIN, HARDER!”
4TH INNING (bottom): Tom Grieve of the Texas Rangers hits a home run. As he is rounding the bases, a naked fan bounces on the field. The naked fan slides into second base before Grieve.
5TH INNING: Fans are throwing tennis and golf balls on the field to distract players.
6TH INNING: Fans throw firecrackers into the Texas Rangers bullpen and it is evacuated.
9TH INNING: The seventh and eighth innings are interrupted by a continued stream of fans running on the field, but the crowd is getting no worse than it was in the previous innings. The game is nearly over; it looks like the teams will be able to leave mostly unscathed.
Then the Indians did the unthinkable, particularly for a team this talentless: they tied the game.
After the tying run scored, a young fan rushed to centerfield and tipped the cap off Rangers centerfielder Jeff Burroughs. Burroughs spun to confront him, lost his balance and fell, and this was misread by the Rangers dugout as him being attacked. The Texas Rangers left their dugout, armed with bats, to confront the man they believed assaulted their teammate.
In a normal city, this fan would explain the misunderstanding and apologize to the wave of professional athletes who are descending upon him with baseball bats. But this being Cleveland, he signaled for help and a mob of other fans armed with knives and chains and broken steel chairs descended to the field to confront the Rangers. The motto of the actual Texas Rangers, the legendary law enforcement agency, is “one riot, one ranger”; fate, having a great sense of humor, now decreed that all twenty-five Texas Ranger baseball players would find themselves fighting a single riot with the city of Cleveland.
Luckily the Texas players, who were assisted by Cleveland players in their exit, were all able to leave the field with nothing more than minor injuries. In photos almost every starting player had some visible wound from the game with the worst injuries sustained by Umpire Nestor Chylak. Chylak, who was bleeding badly from being hit in the head by both a chair and rock, called a forfeit after fans ran away with all the bases.
Chylak’s post-game interview is hilarious and, as a man who grew up in Cleveland, one of the more spot-on descriptions of how the city parties:
“They were uncontrollable beasts! I’ve never seen anything like it except in a zoo. Fucking animals! You can’t pull back a pack of animals. When uncontrolled beasts are out there, you gotta do something. I saw two guys with knives and I got hit with a chair. If the fucking war is on tomorrow, I’m gonna join the other side and fight Cleveland!”
I have always felt Cleveland should adapt that into a mural at the airport for visitors to read after they land:
“WELCOME TO CLEVELAND: I’ve never seen anything like it except in a zoo.”
WHAT THE HELL AM I READING HERE?
Hi. My name is Sean Bair-Flannery. I live in Oak Park, Illinois, with my wife Jessica and our three kids. I perform standup comedy at night and during the day I fix computers.
This is chapter from my book, “Places I Can’t Return To”.
Each week, I release a new chapter (the current one completes below). If you enjoy the stories, you can buy the full book below or, next week, you can come back and read the subsequent chapter.
Purchase Full Book:
Digital
$4.99
Paperback
$14.99
Audio
$19.99This book is true stories, but it is not a memoir. It is a more an illustration — maybe a warning — of what your life will look like if you decide to live everyday like it’s your last. I actually followed that advice. I followed it for a good fifteen years.
I can’t re-enter most the places I visited in that time.
—S. B-F
My first memory of Cleveland Municipal Stadium was tailgating before a Browns game. We were drinking beer and eating venison. My cousin’s drinking buddy, Ern, provided the venison. People would ask Ern where he could possibly hunt deer in Cleveland. “I got a special system,” he’d reply.
“Discovered it by accident,” Ern would explain. “I got drunk and lit off some fireworks too close to the forest preserve one night; all of sudden a herd of deer bolt out of the woods and run straight into the highway. ‘Bout five of them died: Hit by cars immediately. I figured, Hell, those commuters and truck drivers ain’t gonna want ‘em, so...I made some chili.”
I once read that humans may have supplanted Neanderthals because humans were able to hunt larger game due to our intelligence. One such example is the “special system” humans used to hunt mammoths at night: Early humans would light torches and scare mammoths to run off cliffs. Scientists, I’m sure, assumed it was the geniuses in those early groups of humans who developed the plan to scare mammoths with fire, but, as I ate venison in the parking lot of Municipal Stadium, I wondered: maybe it was the jackasses? What if it was two morons, drunk from rotten peaches, screwing around with fire who accidentally stumbled into a way to kill whole herds of mammoths.
“Hey Ugg! Hold me fermented fruit broth! Me making an idea!”
Perhaps we displaced the Neanderthals not because humans had more brains in our group but because we had more jackasses—more Erns—who were stumbling into new foods, new hunting methods, new inventions, purely off drunk horseplay.
As I drank in the parking lot of the Cleveland Municipal Stadium surrounded by grown men dressed as dogs for a Browns game, the following conclusion dawned on me: We are not a race of adventurers and tinkerers but of jackasses. And Cleveland is our capital.
We drank and ate until almost kickoff before starting for the stadium. During football season there were always two games being played simultaneously at Cleveland Municipal Stadium: One was the Browns, on the field against their opponent; the other was the Browns’ fans against stadium security, trying to sneak as much booze as possible into the venue.
This was the golden age of Municipal Stadium booze smuggling; it was the early days of The Dawg Pound and decades before terrorism-related security checks. Fans started dressing up like junkyard dogs for games and every aspect of those costumes was chosen with the end goal of surreptitiously ferrying outside alcohol into the stadium. One group would always bring a doghouse into the game and raise it into the air after touchdowns. Unbeknownst to security, this doghouse was filled with beer, a sort of drunkard Trojan horse. My buddy’s group would attend with his uncle, who was older. They would put him in a wheelchair, cover him in blankets—like FDR doing a fireside chat—and push him past security. Under the blankets, the man was actually sitting on a keg of beer.
Architects have a term, a word dating back to the Romans, for the repeating tunnel-like exits below seating areas: “vomitoria.” What a perfect word to describe both the architecture and the aroma of Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The catering staff could have served the fans raw meat and I don’t think it would have induced more vomiting than was being induced by alcohol. Turns out the number one method of slipping booze into Municipal Stadium was to hide it in your stomach.
Today, it is impossible for me to return to Cleveland Municipal Stadium because, like all places of great, natural lawlessness, America paved something fancier over it. The Indians left Municipal Stadium for a small, glassy field in 1994 and the Browns departed for Baltimore shortly after. Four years later, football returned to Cleveland but only after the city agreed to bulldoze Municipal Stadium and build a trimmer, more elegant venue in its place. Cleveland Municipal Stadium sits at the bottom of Lake Erie, demolished to an artificial reef.
Worse yet, the dashing complexes that replaced Municipal Stadium were financed by a sin tax! The horror! Not only did we replace one of the rowdiest, good-timing stadiums in America, but we agreed to raise the cost of a beer while doing it! Most people prefer the newer, sleeker venues, but not me. I believe the story of Cleveland Municipal Stadium is more a story on the taming of the American drunk.
Cleveland Municipal Stadium was built after voters, in the 1920s, approved $2.5 million in bond financing to construct it. It was called Municipal Stadium because the public owned it; they paid for it cleanly, via bonds. Do you know what would have happened if you suggested to voters, in the 1920s: “Rather than all of us paying for this stadium evenly, how about we just raise the cost of cigarettes?” City Hall would have been burnt down before the mayor’s press conference ended.
Drunks in America used to show amazing levels of organization. Politicians used to fear drunks as a voting bloc the way current ones fear the gun lobby or evangelicals. The surest way to see a riot in your town was to suggest that alcohol should cost more.
A (Brief) History of Politically Active Drunks:
The Whiskey Rebellion (1791): How determined were the drunks in the 18th century? Well, they formed an actual militia rather than agree to pay more for whiskey.
Laden with huge debt from The Revolutionary War, Congress enacted a six to eighteen cents tax on every gallon of distilled spirits. The western half of Pennsylvania more or less tried to secede, and George Washington himself—the fucking president, no less—had to leave the Oval Office and lead an army against a huge militia forming outside Pittsburgh. It remains the only time a sitting U.S. President has led troops into battle. That’s right. The only time we forced a president to get off his ass and actually lead a war was not to fight a foreign adversary but something much scarier: our own drunks.
The Whiskey Rebellion is often taught in elementary schools in America due to its historical importance: It was an early test of the Federal Government’s will and ability to collect countrywide taxes. Washington’s response showed that the Government is going to get its money. But I also enjoy the secondary effect of teaching kids: Man, adults do like their whiskey.
Eggnog Riot (1826): The only riot in West Point history occurred when a keg of eggnog was smuggled into a dormitory on Christmas Eve. Not only is The Eggnog Riot the greatest name of a riot, it is also the best example of how truly explosive alcohol is: A single keg of spiked holiday punch turned the greatest, most-disciplined fighting force in the world into an aimless, two-day-long donnybrook. Outside of a bomb, alcohol is probably the most destructive thing an enemy can hope to land in its opponents’ barracks.
The riot started when cadets were told the eggnog at their holiday party would be alcohol-free due to recent drinking infractions. Rather than face Christmas sober, the cadets rowed to nearby taverns, purchased whiskey and rum to spike their eggnog and then proceeded to riot for two days.
Nineteen cadets were expelled for their participation in the riot which, at its height, involved a third of all cadets. Interestingly three “heroes” of the Confederacy—Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis and eventual Supreme Court Justice John Archibald Campbell— were all in the barracks that rioted but none were disciplined as they did not participate. I can’t help but wonder if, in an alternate timeline where those three party, does the Civil War last half as long? Could we have made the war shorter by making better eggnog?
The Lager Riots (Chicago, 1855): In 1855 Chicago elected as their mayor Levi Boone, an avowed racist and member of the Know Nothing Party. He closed taverns on Sundays and raised the cost of a liquor license six fold, from $50 to $300 a year. It was seen as an attack on German and Irish immigrants and they immediately rioted.
They formed such a frightening mob—-it had its own fife and pipe band—that the city of Chicago raised its drawbridge while the rioters were on it, to prevent them from storming the Court House. The rioters and police battled until cannons were finally deployed by police to disperse the crowd.
I once calculated at a bar that Boone’s licensing increase probably made the average beer about two cents more expensive.
Portland Rum Riot (1855): Maine became a dry state in 1851 and four years later—about a month after Chicago’s Beer Lager riot in fact—the city of Portland, Maine, which had not had a drink in almost half a decade, heard the mayor was hiding his own personal stash of rum and they straight-up lost it.
The riot was said to be particularly fueled by Portland’s large population of Irish immigrants. That is a sentence you encounter over and over when reading about these incidents. Mass public disobedience over the price of alcohol is almost always explained as: “Bear in mind a bunch of Irish people recently moved to the city so we kind of didn’t have a chance at passing these alcohol taxes.”
I love that historians, even today, talk about the Irish of the 19th century as a roaming bacchanalia that devours your town’s liquor the way locusts eat wheat. I remember reading a book in a sociology class (“Beyond The Melting Pot” by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer) where the authors argue—after sharing the statistic that over a quarter of all Irish people reported being drunk enough to hallucinate at least once in their life (the next highest race was Scandinavians at 7.6 percent)—that organized Irish crime probably collapsed because the Irish were too drunk to do it effectively:
“Bookmaking, policy-making and drugs are complex, serious, exacting trades. They are not jobs for heavy drinkers.”
That is, by far, the most hilarious backhanded compliment a race could receive: you are too drunk to be dishonest.
I must mention: Cleveland has a lot of Irish people.
So to me, seeing the old stadium replaced via a new one, financed by a sin tax, was particularly dispiriting; not only would we lose that giant, splurging rumpus we called a stadium but, also, it showed the politicians didn’t fear us anymore. The drunks, as a political bloc, have gone the way of the Whigs.
In modern America, big bills are paid by small sinners.
But, for a short time before Municipal Stadium was razed, I did see fear and consternation from politicians. In the winter of 1995 the owner of the Cleveland Browns, Art Modell, blindsided the city by announcing he would relocate the football team to Baltimore. The people of Cleveland threatened to expel or rip apart anyone who helped Modell move the team. Fans cataloged every company that advertised with the Browns and stopped shopping there; it was the most effective boycott I have seen. Within a few days McDonald’s pulled their ads from Browns games, citing declining sales. Do you know how mad the average American needs to get in order to quit eating McDonald’s?
Soon, all sponsors left. The boycott was so effective, no commercials were aired during the remaining games. Instead the announcers would either remain on air kibitzing loosely where commercial breaks would normally appear or, better yet, stations would air government-produced public service announcements. It was an odd sensation: To go from the loud, often-idiotic clamor of a NFL game to a speaker in a mid-Atlantic accent reminding you to look both ways before crossing train tracks; or to hear instructions on how to safely install a car seat, where once a man was screaming for you to buy a bigger television.
The boycott grew so large it started swallowing incidental businesses. My buddy Tyson and I drove down to Columbus to visit friends at Ohio State shortly after Modell announced the Browns were moving. We went to a small, family-run liquor store off High Street. There was no parking so I was sent inside to grab a case of cheap beer while Tyson idled in the street. As I approached the entrance, I noticed a customer exiting violently. The customer opened the door with a punch, lingered for a moment, then yelled, “You’re never gonna see us again!” before walking off. A second customer, a friend of the first, followed, stopping to scream “ASSHOLES!” back into the store.
I entered the liquor store and quickly saw the problem: there was a giant display of Dog Pound Beer greeting customers. The customers were upset because they were Browns fans and, by seeing this giant display of Cleveland Browns-affiliated beer, they felt this store was stabbing them in the back by not honoring this giant, state-wide boycott of Browns merchandise.
Behind the registers, I heard the owner, thin and defeated, complaining, “These people are so angry. What a disaster! I just bought two pallets of this beer. How am I going to get rid of it?”
This moment—me entering the store the exact instant the owner was lamenting about needing someone to finish all the beer—seemed preordained. I knew I was going to be part of something special, like in those Western movies, where the owner of a saloon asks, “How are we ever going to clean up this town?” just as John Wayne saunters in.
“I’m your gunslinger,” I said to the owner.
“What?” he asked.
“What’s the cheapest you can sell all that beer to me?”
“Where would you fit it?”
“That will be my problem”.
“If you can take it all, I’ll sell it to you for state minimum”.
“What would that be?”
“$1.88 a case”
I ran back to the car. Tyson, who had been idling on the street the whole time, asked, “Where’s the beer?” “We’re gonna need a bigger car,” I replied.
We went to a hardware store to rent a large work truck. Hardware stores always rent big trucks for super-low rates, but the catch is you have to return it within an hour, and what job can you complete in under an hour? We had such a job.
We returned to the liquor store with the truck and purchased every last container of Dog Pound Beer. The owner thanked me like I had just saved the store from marauding gangs. They threw in the eight-foot-tall cardboard cutout of a dog in shoulder pads.
Tyson and I drove the van to meet two close friends at Ohio State. Our visit was unplanned—a surprise—and we were denied entry. Ohio State was on quarters at the time, not semesters, and it turned out that Tyson and I were visiting during their Finals week. When our friends saw us arrive with a commercial vehicle full of Dog Pound Beer, the day before they were to start their final exams, they locked the doors and more or less pretended to not be home.
“Where do we go now?” Tyson asked.
“Ya know,” I answered, “I worked a factory job last summer with this guy called Frank. He goes to Ohio State. He’s a lot of fun. Let’s see if he answers.”
We looked up Frank in the student directory, drove to his place, and I reminded him that we worked together last summer. Frank invited us in. We mentioned that we brought some beer and started what was to be the craziest twenty-four-hour bender of my life. When the Lotto hits a huge jackpot, say $300 million, and people around me speculate about what they would do with the money, I always counter: “Purchasing a stack of Dog Pound beer at $1.88 a case nearly killed me, so I’m not positive I want three hundred million dollars.”
Tyson and I thought it was great that Frank let us enter, when our two closest friends at Ohio State treated us like barbarians at the gate.
“Do you have finals this week, Frank?” I asked, trying to understand if he was under a different schedule. “Doesn’t everyone?” he answered, popping open a Dog Pound.
That is, very closely, the last coherent sentence I remembered before waking up, two days later in an unfurnished apartment above an auto body repair shop. As I woke up, I felt a terrible soreness along my forehead. Reaching up, I discovered I was wearing a hat. I pulled it off and took a look. It did not belong to me; I’d never seen it before; and it was way too small to fit my head.
I heard Tyson grunting from another corner of the apartment as he began to move.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Kent State, dude!” Frank answered confidently from what sounded like a separate room.
I turned to Tyson, “I must have fallen asleep with some hat that doesn’t fit me. Man, you’d be surprised how sore it’s made my forehead.”
At this point Tyson turned and looked at me for the first time and opined, “I don’t think a hat did that to you, dude.”
“What?”
“You need to find a mirror, bro.”
I found the bathroom, flipped the lights and that’s when I saw I had a grapefruit sized bruise in the exact middle of my forehead. It looked like someone batted a softball as hard as they could and, rather than catch it, I headbutted it back to the batter.
“How did we get up here?” I asked.
“I think my girlfriend drove us up here,” Frank answered, “but she and her friends split pretty quickly after they saw how much Dog Pound beer we had in the trunk”.
“OK, well, I gotta get out of here,” I explained. “I have to work in Akron later today.”
“Yeah, me too,” Tyson agreed and we started to locate our shoes and wallets when we heard, from whatever room Frank was in:
“You’re not gonna believe this. I can’t find my leg.”
It’s here that I should point out that Frank only had one leg. He was born with one and he used a prosthetic leg on the other side.
“What?” we asked.
“I can’t find my leg,” he repeated. “Normally I put it right next to my bed.”
“Is it possible you left it at the bar?”
“I’ve never done that before.”
“Well,” Tyson added, “we did drink two pallets of Dog Pound beer last night.” It was said in such a way as to suggest that, having consumed such a high quantity of such low-quality alcohol, one could not expect the normal rules governing life and limb to apply.
Frank entered the room we were in, hopping on one leg while holding his jeans in the air, like a magician trying to prove the top hat is indeed empty: “Look...no leg!”
“Fuck,” I moaned. “I don’t even know what bars we were at last night.”
Tyson walked into Frank’s room to verify, as though someone—no matter the hangover—could miss an unattached leg inside an unfurnished room.
“Yep,” he concurred. “There is definitely no leg in here.”
“Fuck!” I yelled again and bolted up from the chair.
I was wearing a shirt, a winter jacket, a baseball cap that didn’t fit me, socks and underwear...no pants. I stormed about the place looking for my own pants while yelling for the guys to “get serious.”
I found my pants in the bathtub, grabbed them forcefully and tried to put them on in one move while still yelling at the guys, like a fireman who’d been woken up by all five alarms:
“We gotta find this leg! That’s priority one, and then...what the hell?!”
As I shoved my leg into the pants they just bounced right off me. Frank’s leg was inside them. Apparently he had taken his pants off in the bathroom; I had thrown mine in the hallway and he mistook my pants for his.
Despite a ninety-minute search for our car, the guys got me to work on time, whereupon my boss promptly fired me.
As it turns out, I was supposed to have been working all of the previous day and that morning. I had actually arrived (to get fired) as my day off was officially starting. I told them I had no idea and I think they believed me. But I think they also felt pretty confident about firing a guy with a huge welt on his head.
I was fired so quickly that Frank and Tyson, who drove me there, were still in the parking lot, returning to the car with two coffees as I left the building. “Well,” I thought, “at least I won’t need to call for a ride home.”
“I thought you were working?” Tyson asked, upon seeing me at the car.
“They fired me.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” I replied, waving my hands in the air, as though the absurdity of the last twenty-four hours had not hit them.
“You want a coffee?” they asked.
“I need something stronger than a coffee.” I got a Dog Pound Beer out of the glove compartment.
We sipped our drinks against Frank’s car and, as I pulled my can down, I noticed—for the first time—how peculiar the can was. What initially caught my attention was that it was spelled “Dog Pound” beer, and not-as Browns fans spell it—“Dawg Pound.” Then I further noticed that the football uniform on the dog—each can had a dog wearing shoulder-pads and holding a foot- ball above a pile of bones—was oddly generic. The dog’s uniform did not have, as you would expect, the number of a famous Browns player, like 32 or 19, or even a valid NFL number; rather, it said “DP,” as if to avoid any purposeful likeness to a real player. I turned the can over and read the small print that said:“Brewed in Indiana and not affiliated with the NFL or any of its teams.”
I began laughing at the top of my lungs.
“What’s so funny?” Frank asked.
“This beer had nothing to do with the Browns,” I said, “it’s a fraud.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at it. It’s spelled wrong. The images are purposefully vague.”
“So?”
“Yep. We rented a commercial truck to buy two pallets of a beer that, technically speaking, never needed to be boycotted.”
“Doesn’t that just make us lucky?”
I was holding the beer against my forehead because it made the bruise feel better, outside the store that just fired me.
“I don’t know that I feel lucky,” I answered. “But,” I continued, starting to laugh, “there’s something kind of perfect about even the beer being meaningless this weekend.”
We sipped on our drinks a bit longer, laughing, until Frank announced, “All right, let’s go.”
“Hold on, we don’t want an open container in the car,” I said, pointing to the empty can, “I’ll have to throw this out.” I hustled to the nearest trashcan I was familiar with, which happened to be inside the Famous Footwear store I’d just been let go from.
One of the sales associates greeted me, a bit confused, saying “Hey, Sean?” After I had been fired, she and I had a brief, but nice, conversation on how much we enjoyed working together, and were disappointed to probably not see too much of each other again.
“Hey, I just need to use your trash can,” I explained, showing her the can of Dog Pound Beer.
She gave out a kind of hiss, a loud, judgmental inhale of air.
“Oh, no,” I assured her as I threw the can in the trash bin, “it’s not what it looks like.”
It was 10 a.m.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“It’s a fraud beer. It’s not really sponsored by the Browns.”
I turned and began to exit.
“It’s some swindler out of Indiana, if you can believe it.”
Those were my last words at that store.