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outpost of the Great Depression at the edge of Lake Erie’s polluted, gunmetal waters. My dad had a spare pair of galoshes in the back of the truck, surveyor’s boots. Before we locked up and started our walk to the stadium, he told me to put them on, but I refused. They didn’t look cool. I was wearing my black, high-top Chuck Taylors, and there was no way I’d be seen in front of eighty thousand people sporting those hideous boots.
    I’d never been to a Browns game before. I had no idea that the entire crowd would be dressed like some hybrid of a Dickens backstreet throng and a postapocalyptic hunting party. Here, camouflage was the mark of a Sunday dandy. These fans, three abreast on the sidewalk, shuffling toward Cleveland Municipal Stadium, were a cattle call of dull parkas topped with bulbous, oversize jerseys; fatsos in earflaps; drunks with double-layered blankets wrapped crooked around their torsos. Meaty men layered in flannel with two-week beards and stretched-out stocking caps. Women in mismatched gloves and padded hunting pants. They looked like a rogue regiment of Michelin Men. We joined them in the long, slow walk up East Ninth Street toward the colorless, hulking stadium, its countless tons of dumped concrete tracked with wooden seats.
    I, still clinging to the potential street credibility of my footwear, was a decided outsider. I was casually interested in the Browns, in football, in sports. But as family dynamics go, I was a rank amateur. While I was reading Sherlock Holmes stories, my brother Ralph was memorizing the Browns media guide. His favorite pastime was being quizzed on arcane roster details:
    Brian Sipe?
    Quarterback! Number seventeen! San Diego State!
    Major?
    Architecture!
    Dave Logan?
    Receiver! Number eighty-five! University of Colorado!
    Hometown?
    Fargo! North Dakota!
    And so on.
    Not until we approached the stadium gates did I begin to feel something of the upsweep. And then there it was, as sudden and profound as the olfactory poignancy of a hog pen: the spirit of thousands, roughing out their ardor. The city smelled of barrel fires and roasted hot dogs and cold wool: the aluminum tang of a Cleveland January. But the sound is what defined the day, spontaneous group cheers delivered in bellowing choruses:
    Here we go, Brownies, here we go! Whoo! Whoo!
    We made our way through the gate and entered the immense, creaky, old concourse, pigeons roosting in the rafters above, paint cracked and peeling from the supports, piss trickling from the restroom troughs. The sound here intensified, like a freight train in a tunnel.
    Let’s go, Browns!
    Let’s go, Browns!
    Let’s go, Browns!
    They cared, but even with something as overt as football, it wasn’t entirely clear what they cared about. It seemed to be more than just the outcome of the game. We climbed the cement stairs to the bleachers, entering a vast, roaring stadium, ungodly cold. There was a rancid spice of hot chocolate and cigar smoke. From our seats behind the goalpost, I could see mounds of snow plowed along the sidelines, where the players, all with long sleeves under their jerseys, danced in place, blowing thick steam into their hands, waiting for the game to start. They seemed to move in slow motion. The playing surface looked different from how it did on television, and my dad explained to me that it was mostly dirt, but the groundskeepers painted it green to look better on camera.
    Three men behind us were passing a thermos back and forth, and when the game began and the Raiders quarterback, Jim Plunkett, took the field, one of them started hooting out, “Ya fuckin’ Indian!”
    The reference was loose at best. Plunkett’s parents were Mexican American. But that mattered little. As the game went on, “fuckin’ Indian” rolled from the trio of thermos drinkers behind us nearly as often as the deafening, hair-raising roar of “DEE-FENSE” overtook the stadium. If I