Jon Doughboy
Home alone on Monday night with a jelly jar of heavy red zinfandel in one hand, a forkful of baked ziti in the other, I’m a Jet again, a kid devoted to his team of losers, always losing, an industrious factory of failure turning out losses and putting Jersey in a state of prolonged mourning since Namath retired with his rickety knees, but adult me is a reformed Jets fan who’s given up on the Jets, football, sports—haven’t I?—until now, here, watching the 2023 season opener and shooting out of the locker room carrying America’s hopes and dreams like a tactical missile assembled in our heartland: behold, Aaron Rodgers, Quick Draw McGraw of the pocket, guzzling Ivermectin with that girl from those diverging movies, insurging, pledge of allegiant, to Jet Nation, on MetLife field, destined to be dodging blitzers and tossing touchdowns for all the green brethren out there, the green believers still trying to shed the Heidi Curse—Rodgers, rodger, we hear you, Aaron, we believe—and after four plays of an uneventful drive, the damp turf glistening, the left tackle throws a lame chop block and the anything but fleet-footed Rodgers is down like the White House, like a jet crashing into the Andes, not Sullying softly onto the Hudson, then he’s up, then he’s down, up to get down, “get up, get up,” I’m yelling with my wine and my cheesy ziti and astral projections of Rich Kotite and Boomer Esiason’s stupid grin and Vinny Testaverde collapsing in a heap of pain and that little bully Ryan Zempler in 2nd grade, that sneering Giants fan, oh yeah, sticking a wet Slim Jim in my ear, and beefy juicy excitement, beefy juicy dread, as we (I’ll admit my reluctant, unforesakable, belonging), these despondent citizens of Jet Nation, rotten as gang green, as we hear not a hard knock, oh no, but a farewell to the season, and the hopes it had kindled in our gullible hearts, in the piercing snap—snnaaaaaaap—of Aaron Rodger’s forty-year-old Achilles tendon.
JON DOUGHBOY was a Jet from his first cigarette. He’s buried in East Rutherford under the fifty-yard line with Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Namath’s white shoes. Listen to the cries of his ghost haunting these polluted digital meadowlands @doughboywrites