This story is completely factual. Since it happened over 3 decades ago, some of the details are a little hazy, but the overall "thing" itself is still crystal clear in recollection.
November, 1980. I was 22 years old, living in an apartment with a couple buddies in my hometown. I would be moving to Texas in 4 months, but didn't know it at the time. What I did know, what I lived and breathed for, centered around partying and sports.
It was the 6th year in a row that I had season tickets to the Cleveland Browns games. I lived 90 minutes from there, on the Pennsylvania side of the Ohio border, but the majority of my relatives were from the Cleveland area, so I was a fan. Huge fan. So were many of my friends, 3 in particular who had season tickets with me. The 4 of us rode together, partied together, watched the games, partied some more, drove back together, usually late in the evening. Good times.
Our tickets were in the top row of the stadium at the 30 yard line. Behind our row, circling the stadium was a 4-ft tall concrete retaining wall. Glancing over the wall, one would be looking at the vast expanse of Lake Erie.
We liked our seats for several reasons. We could stand whenever we wanted, with no concern of obstructing the view of someone behind us. No one was behind us, except for the seagulls. They usually weren't into the games, just the crumbs and morsels left behind.
It was the 70s, the 80s, it was a different, looser time. We smoked joints during most of the games, sitting above the crowd of 80,000 fans. We blew the smoke behind us, but the breeze often came in from the lake, which blew our smoke down over the crowd below us. Not once in the 6 years we had season tickets did anyone say anything about us and what we were obviously doing.
We were much more into smoking than drinking, but we usually each had a flask for the games too. If nature called and we didn't feel like (or were too stoned to) making the long trip down and up the steps to the restroom, we would mount the retaining wall and relieve ourselves right over and out of the stadium. That wasn't a frequent ritual but it happened often enough that it was spoken as a perk to the location of our seats.
The game that is the focus of this event was a Monday Night Football affair. This was pre-cable, pre-satellite, pre-social media, and Monday Night games were still a huge attraction, the most watched game every week. Howard Cosell and Don Meredith called the games for ABC. Cult-legends.
The Browns were poised to take on the Bears in a hotly contested matchup. We all looked forward to it. A week or so before the game, one of my ticket buddies told us that he had family coming into town and they were going to the game too. They had endzone seats, which in those days were on long, wooden benches that were numbered and marked off for butt width. Close to the action, but the angle was poor and the seats were uncomfortable. He asked if we would consider swapping our season ticket seats for their endzone seats, just for that game. Sure, why not, so we agreed.
We left our hometown around 5:00pm and smoked our way to Cleveland, knowing it would be much more challenging to light up in the middle of the bleachers compared to our regular crow's nest. The temp was in the low 70s when we departed, and none of us checked the Cleveland weather. A front was coming in from the lake, bringing light rain and a chilly wind. We weren't prepared with the right clothing, but we each had a flask of killer homemade elderberry brandy.
We made our way to the endzone seats, just about right in the middle, surrounded by a raucous crowd spurred by a good season in progress by the Browns and the spectacle of Monday Night Football. It started getting much colder before kickoff, the wind kicking up, rain swirling and blowing around the stadium.
Sitting directly in front of us were 4 women, seemingly right around our age. They had blankets, lots of them. We had flasks filled with something that helped take the chill away. They asked us first, "What's in the flasks?"
