Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (24 page)

"They don't seem to care about their grades. They don't seem
to care about each other. Thev seem to care about having a
good time, but don't know how to define good. I don't know what young kids are about. I can't get in their minds. I used
to..."

Like others, Jane Franks looked around for people and
things to blame. But sitting in the teacher's lounge one day, her
voice soft and weary, she decided the fault might be with herself. A fundamental change had taken place in the classroom.
It wasn't a place to learn anymore, but a way station, and maybe
she was responsible for that. "I'm tired. I think I'm tired of
being ineffective. I must not be doing it right because I don't
have a sense of satisfaction. I don't have the close friendships
with the kids I used to.

"I used to encourage my good students to be teachers because it was so rewarding. I don't do that anymore. When I first
started teaching I felt, My God, this must be like being a pro
ball player, getting paid for something I love. It was where I
was supposed to be."

If school was boring, Don Billingsley nevertheless did his best
to get through it. When the food science teacher made the fatal
mistake of asking the class if it knew the meaning of the word
condiment, Don immediately answered with "lambskin, sheepskin." All joking aside, Don was becoming something of a food
science scholar. He had scored a superb 99 on the fill-in-the
blank worksheet on cakes and frostings, not to mention a 96 on
his poultry worksheet. The "preparation and service" worksheet was coming a little more slowly; he had gotten only a 60,
but there seemed little doubt that Don would eventually get a
handle on it. And, of course, when the occasion arose to write
out a menu for a black-tie dinner party in Odessa, he would
know exactly what to do.

In English, where one of the blackboard panels had a list of
questions about Macbeth and another a reminder to bring a
flashlight to the pep rally, Don had uncovered one of the great
secrets of the class with the discovery that if he angled his chair
in a certain way behind the other students, the teacher could not see him fall asleep. "Do you like to sleep? This is where I
sleep," he said just before he entered the classroom.

A worksheet was due that day deciphering the meaning of
some lines from Macbeth, and Don was handed a copy of the
homework by someone else so he could copy down the answers.
The class time was supposed to be spent doing a little crossword
puzzle on the play, but Don didn't do much of it and it didn't
seem to matter. The instructor for her part believed that the
text the students used, Adventures in English Literature, which
contained selected works by Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser,
and Daniel Defoe among others, was too hard for them. She
said also that they absolutely hated any assignment in which
they had to interpret what they had read. If they had to think
about anything, make critical judgments and deliberations, the
cause was hopeless. The best they could be expected to do was
regurgitate.

In sociology, Don generously passed around his bag of cookies. He and the other students watched eagerly as accounts of
one gruesome murder after another passed over the tiny VCR
screen, accompanied by the hushed melodrama of Geraldo Rivera. The teacher gave no instruction the entire period, except
to applaud the actions of a man who, in broad daylight at an
airport, killed a manacled criminal suspect accused of molesting the man's son.

Don, of course, was a football player, which gave him special
status among his peers regardless of how he performed in class.
In the hierarchy of the school, where girls and partying and
clothes and fancy cars were as important as academics, being a
football player opened doors that other students could only
dream of. All other achievements seemed to pale in the face
of it.

Eddie Driscoll, a wonderfully articulate student ranked number two in the senior class, loved to read and debate and throw
out ideas. He stood out in class like a sore thumb. There were
some who admired him and others who considered him a pompous windbag. Despite all his academic accomplishments,
Eddie himself often wondered what it would be like to sit in
those two rows at the front of the pep rally each Friday in a
brotherhood as supremely elite as Skull and Bones at Yale or
the Porcellian Club at Harvard. Such musings didn't make him
resentful of the football players; he liked them. He just felt a
little envious. No matter how many books he read, no matter
how exquisite his arguments in government class about gun
control or the Sandinistas or the death penalty, he never got
the latest scoop on who was having the weekend parties. Only
the football players were privy to that sacred knowledge.

"The football identity is so glorious," he said. "I always wondered what it would have been like if I had been a football
player. I think it would be great to be in the limelight and be
part of the team, have a geisha girl bring me candy three times
a day."

Roqui Pearce, who had graduated from Permian in 1988 and
was going out with starting defensive cornerback Coddi Dean,
said there was definitely a mystique in the school about dating
a Permian football player. "Everybody's into football. Football
is the sport. I wouldn't say it's an honor or anything but it's
looked up to: `Wow, you're going out with a football player, a
Permian football player.'"

Roqui had been chosen a Pepette her senior year. Lots were
drawn to see which player each Pepette would be assigned to
for the season. Some of the players were obnoxious and egotistical, but Roqui didn't really mind as long as it was a football
player she got and not one of the student trainers. "Nobody
wants a trainer. You want a football player."

She had ended up being assigned to Coddi, who was then a
junior. At the Watermelon Feed that year, she hadn't worn his
number on her jersey, which angered him. But they hit it off
well. "I liked him, plus I wanted to be a real good Pepette. I
didn't want him to think I was a bad Pepette. I wanted to be a
good Pepette." She brought Coddi an ice cream cake in the
shape of a football field from Baskin-Robbins. She baked him cakes and brownies. She got him a black trash can and filled it
with popcorn balls. She gave him a towel and pillowcase decorated with the insignia of Mojo and Texas. After several months
they went on a date and then started going out steadily.

From time to time the role of the Pepette became controversial. A stinging editorial in the school newspaper, the Permian
Press, applauded a new rule prohibiting Pepettes from placing
candy in players' lockers every Friday. "Though losing a tradition, Pepettes have gained much respect," said the editorial.
"No longer will a member be the personal Geisha girl of a
player. Instead, she can focus more on the organization's original purpose, boosting morale. And in so doing she will carry
the image of professionalism she deserves for her work bolstering the famous Mojo spirit." But the Pepettes still spent time
baking players cookies and making them signs. Since they could
no longer put goodies in the lockers of the players, they just
handed the stuff to them instead or dropped it off at their
houses.

Their role was symptomatic of the role all girls played at
Permian. "You hate to admit it in this day and time, but a lot of
girls are conditioned towards liberal arts courses rather than
engineering and science," said Callie Tave, who found herself
perpetually buried under a blizzard of forms and recommendation requests since she was the only college counselor for the
seven-hundred-member senior class.

The attitude that girls at Permian seemed to have about
themselves was reflected during an economics class one day
when Dorothy Fowler, a spirited and marvelous teacher, tried
to wake students up to the realities of the world in West Texas
where the days of the fat-paying blue-collar job were over.

"Think about your jobs. Where do you want to be in five
years?" asked Fowler of a female student.

"Rich," the student replied.

"How are you going to achieve that?"

"Marry someone."

On the SAT exam, boys who took the test during 1988-89 at Permian had a combined average score of 915 (433 verbal, 482
mathematical), 19 points below the national average for boys.
Girls had a combined score of 840 (404 verbal, 436 mathematical), 75 points below their male counterparts at Permian and 35
points below the national average for girls. Of the 132 girls who
took the test during the 1988-89 school year, there wasn't one
who got above a 650 in either the math or verbal portions of
the exam.

"It's very revered to be a Pepette or a cheerleader," said Julie
Gardner, who had come to Odessa from a small college town in
Montana as a sophomore. "It's the closest they can get to being
a football player." Gardner found the transition to Permian
enormously difficult. She was utterly unprepared for her first
pep rally, for all those fanatical cheers, all those arms pumping
so frantically up and down, and she found the girls cliquey and
obsessed with appearance. At first she dressed up like everyone
else, but then she began to reject it. And because she was intelligent (she graduated from Permian in 1986 and went on to
become an honors English major at Swarthmore College), she
also felt ostracized.

"It was very important to have a boyfriend and look a certain
way. You couldn't be too smart. You had to act silly or they put
you in a category right away. It was the end of your social life if
you were an intelligent girl." The pressure to conform was so
intense, said Gardner, that she knew girls who privately were
quite intelligent and articulate, but were afraid to show it publicly because of the effect it would have on their social lives.

Her father, H. Warren Gardner, vice president of the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, a branch of the University of Texas system located in Odessa, believed the disparities
in performance between boys and girls were a result of the social hierarchy of the school. Gardner said it was clear to him
that girls had to "dumb down" at Permian or else run the risk
of being excluded from dating and parties because the boys
considered them too smart. "It's not appropriate [for a girl] to
be intelligent," he concluded. "It's not popular to be bright."

And being a Pepette, despite the restriction making candy
off-limits to the locker room, still carried status. "I hate football players, especially at Permian," said senior Shauna Moody.
"They're the most egotistical ... they think they're God's gift."
But for a girl at Permian, the only thing worse than being a
Pepette was not being one. Or as Moody explained her own
reasoning for having joined, "Well, everybody's a Pepette."

Cheerleading had a special cachet for girls at Permian as well.
Just as the football players walked down the school halls in their
game jersies on Fridays, so did the cheerleaders in their uniforms. There were five girls on the cheerleading squad, all of
them white, and they had enormous visibility.

The most popular of them was Bridgitte Vandeventer, who
had always wanted to be a cheerleader. "Everyone knew who
Permian was and who Mojo was, and I thought it would be neat
to be a Permian cheerleader," said Bridgitte, who had lived with
her grandparents since she was eight.

The most wonderful moment of her life, she said, was being
crowned Homecoming Queen, and she had vivid memories
of it-changing from her cheerleading uniform into a black
velvet dress, wearing a fantastic spread of mums adorned with
black and white streamers and trinkets in the shape of little
footballs that one of the players had given her, dutifully waiting in line with the other finalists at halftime and then hearing
her name called, holding the hand of her best friend as she
walked around the oval of the stadium with tears in her eyes,
receiving four dozen red roses afterward from admirers. Because of her status at school and her friendliness, she had no
lack of them.

For a while she went out with Brian Chavez, and it was hard
not to feel proud when she saw him on the football field. "It
was neat to say, that's my boyfriend out there, that's who I'm
dating. The time Brian scored a touchdown, I was never so
excited...."

Brian was Hispanic, but that didn't make her uncomfortable.
"My grandmother says, `whites are for whites, Hispanics are for Hispanics, blacks are for blacks.' I don't think blacks are for
whites, whites for blacks. I think Hispanics are fine because
they're as close to whites as you can get."

She had many ambitions for her life. She wanted to go into
the medical field. She wanted to be Miss Universe. She wanted
to open a dance studio. She wanted to be famous. She wanted
to write a book about her life.

But for the immediate future, her plans included going to
the junior college in town, Odessa College. A main reason she
was going there was her failure to take the college hoards, a
requirement for admission at most four-year schools. Bridgitte
said she had been advised by a teacher at Permian not to take
the SAT exam until after the football season because of her
myriad duties as a cheerleader. But she didn't seem upset about
it, and one thing was obvious-her popularity at school was
unrivaled. Not only was she crowned Homecoming Queen, she
was also voted Miss PHS by her classmates. Clearly she was a
role model.

"I just want to be known," said Bridgitte in summing up her
hopes in life. "I want everybody to know me, but not in a bad
way. My dream is to be known, to be successful, and to help
people. I love to help people.

"I look forward to getting out on my own and tryin' the
world. They say it's a real rat race and I hope to win it."

With his dark, pouty looks, it was hard not to think of Don
Biiiingsley as a movie star when he walked down the halls of
Permian, gently fending off female admirers in his black football jersey, except for those two or three or four or five who
seemed to have a certain special something. The way he talked
to them, with his head ducked low and the words coming out
in a sweet, playful cadence, suggested a certain self-recognition
of his aura. Sophomore girls fantasized over having him in the
same class so they could catch a glimpse of his buttocks in a
tight-fitting pair of jeans. He received inquiries about his avail ability for stripteases. The characterization used by girl after
girl to describe him was the same, said with the wistfulness of
irrepressible infatuation: "He's so fine!"