Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger Read Free Book Online Page A

always seemed to have in mind during his presidency,
a place still rooted in the sweet nostalgia of the fiftiesunsophisticated, basic, raw-a place where anybody could be
somebody, a place still clinging to all the tenets of the American
Dream, however wobbly they had become.
    In the summer twilight, against the backdrop of the enormous sky where braids of orange and purple and red and blue
as delicately hued as a butterfly wing stretched into eternity,
young girls with ponytails and freckles went up and down
neighborhood streets on their roller skates. As the cool breeze
of night set in, neighboring families pulled up plastic lawn
chairs to conduct "chair committee" and casually meander over
the day's events without rancor or argument or constant one-
up►nanship. On other nights, parents gently roused their children from bed near the stroke of midnight so they could sit
together by the garage to watch a thunderstorm roll in from
Big Spring, gliding across the sky with its shimmering madness, those angular fingers of light cutting through the night
in a spectacle almost as exciting as a Permian High School foothall game.
    There were many people in Odessa who, after the initial shock, had slowly fallen in love with the town. They found
something endearing about it, something tender; it was the
scorned mutt that no one else wanted. They had come to grips
with the numbing vacantness of the surroundings, broken only
by the black horses' heads of oil pumpjacks moving up and
down with maniacal monotony through heat and wind and dust
and economic ruin.

    There were also those who had grown weary of it and the
oft-repeated phrase that what made it. special was the quality of
its people. "Odessa has an unspeakable ability to bullshit itself,"
said Warren Burnett, a loquacious, liberal-minded lawyer who
after roughly thirty years had Hed the place like a refugee for
the coastal waters near Houston. "Nothing could be sillier than
we got good people here. We got the same cross-section of assholes as anywhere."
    There were those who found it insufferably racist and those
who didn't find it racist at all, but used the word nigger as effortlessly as one would sprinkle salt on a slab of rib eye and
worried about the Mexicans who seemed to be overtaking the
place. There were those who had been made rich by it, and
many more who had gone broke from it in recent times. But
they seemed gratified, as Mayor Don Carter, who was one of
those to go big-time belly up, put it, to have taken a "chance in
the free enterprise market."
    There were a few who found its conservatism maddening
and dangerous and many more who found it the essence of
what America should be, an America built on strength and the
spirit of individualism, not an America built on handouts and
food stamps. There were those who found solace in the strong
doses of religion poured out every Wednesday evening and
Sunday morning by its sixty-two Baptist churches, nineteen
Church of Christ churches, twelve Assembly of God churches,
eleven Methodist churches, seven Catholic churches, and five
Pentecostal churches. And there were those like Burnett, who
saw religion in Odessa used not to reinforce religious beliefs at
all but as an excuse for people to come together and be made comfortable with their own social beliefs in racial and gender
bigotry.

    Across the country there were thousands of places just like it,
places that were not only isolated but insulated, places that had
gone through the growing pains of America without anyone
paying attention, places that existed as islands unto themselves
with no link to the great cities except that they all sang the same
national anthem to the same flag at sporting events. They were
the kind of places that you saw from a plane on a clear night if
you happened to look out the window, a concentration of little
beaded dots breaking up the empty landscape with several
veins leading in and out, and