Super Bowl Sunday

Hunter Thompson, from "Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl"

“There is some kind of back-door connection in my head between Super Bowls and the Allman Brothers—a strange kind of theme-sound that haunts these goddamn stories no matter where I’m finally forced into a corner to write them. The Allman sound, and rain. There was heavy rain, last year, on the balcony of my dim-lit hotel room just down from the Sunset Strip in Hollywood…And more rain through the windows of the San Francisco office building where I finally typed out “the story.”

And now, almost exactly a year later, my main memory of Super Bowl VIII in Houston is rain and grey mist outside another hotel window, with the same strung-out sound of the Allman Brothers booming out of the same portable speakers that I had, last year, in Los Angeles.”

From "A Fan's Notes" - Frederick Exley

"I tried a number of places in Watertown before settling on The Parrot; though it was not exactly the cathedral I would have wished for, it was--like certain old limestone churches scattered throughout the north country--not without its quaint charms. It was ideally located on a hill above the city; sitting at the bar I was seldom aware of the city's presence, and when I was, I could think of it as a nostalgic place beneath me, a place with elm trees and church towers and bone-clean streets; sitting at the bar, the city could be thought of as a place remembered, and remembered as if from a great distance….

Sunday afternoons, with the music stilled and the blinds thrown open allowing the golden autumn sunlight to diffuse and warm the room, I would stand at the bar and sip my Budweiser, my 'tapering-off' device; munch popcorn from wooden bowls; and in league with the bartender Freddy, whose allegiance to the Giants was only somewhat less feverish than mine, cheer my team home. Invariably and desperately I wished that the afternoon, the game, the light would never end.”  

   - Frederick Exley, 1968

A Fan's Notes

"I tried a number of places in Watertown before settling on The Parrot; though it was not exactly the cathedral I would have wished for, it was--like certain old limestone churches scattered throughout the north country--not without its quaint charms. It was ideally located on a hill above the city; sitting at the bar I was seldom aware of the city's presence, and when I was, I could think of it as a nostalgic place beneath me, a place with elm trees and church towers and bone-clean streets; sitting at the bar, the city could be thought of as a place remembered, and remembered as if from a great distance….Sunday afternoons, with the music stilled and the blinds thrown open allowing the golden autumn sunlight to diffuse and warm the room, I would stand at the bar and sip my Budweiser, my "tapering-off" device; munch popcorn from wooden bowls; and in league with the bartender Freddy, whose allegiance to the Giants was only somewhat less feverish than mine, cheer my team home. Invariably and desperately I wished that the afternoon, the game, the light would never end."

- Frederick Exley, from "A Fan's Notes"