If you watched the Sugar Bowl game between Florida and Louisville, you can understand why my mind started to wander.
Almost every time I watch the Sugar Bowl - particularly if my mind wanders - I think back to a guy I knew in college named Allan.
I won't use his last name out of fairness to him and the hope that he's living a good life somewhere. But anybody in my circle of friends at the University of Georgia back in the day will probably remember him.
I don't see how they couldn't.
If there was ever a classic case of 'two sides to every story,' Allan was it. I'll get to that in a minute.
But in 1976, Georgia, as the Southeastern Conference champion and ranked No. 2, played a No. 1-ranked Pittsburgh team that had Tony Dorsett and was coached by Johnny Majors.
It was a big game, needless to say. Everyone wanted to get in. No one that I knew was able - except Allan.
Here's how he did it:
Allan bought a pair of black pants and had someone sew a red stripe down the outside of either pants leg. Then he went to the UGA book store and bought a University of Georgia RedCoat Marching Band T-shirt.
Then he found an old drum and a pair of drum sticks.
Then, when the Georgia band marched into New Orleans' Super Dome, Allan marched in right behind the band.
Incredible.
But then, Allan had a knack for stuff like this.
If there was a parade through downtown Athens, we almost came to expect Allan to crash it. Either he'd be sitting on the back end of a float, waving and smiling like he belonged; or he'd get his drum and march along behind a band, again waving and smiling like he was supposed to be there. (He never was).
The Allan stories were legendary. There was the time he posted an ad for a roommate at this house he was living in. It was an incredible house in a very nice section of Athens, and Allan wanted next to nothing for rent. Later, we found out why: the house was owned by someone who was apparently out of the country for the year, and Allan had found a way in, taken up residence, and decided he was lonely and wanted a roommate. Fortunately, no one ever took him up on the ad. Eventually the police found out and Allan was, of course, removed.
There is more, but you get the picture. This would be hilarious stuff, like something out of the movie "Catch Me If You Can," if you didn't know the other side of the story.
Allan lived in a fantasy world. It's hard to explain and hard to believe, but Allan created this world for himself, committed to it, and could suck people in (for awhile, anyway). We were college kids, and had no reason to believe this guy who carried around a arm-full of college text books, who wore a name tag with Greek letters that were supposed to be his fraternity, that told us all these stories of his travels was, well, "disturbed."
I was president of a student religious organization on campus where Allan wandered in one day and, for a time, found a home. It made sense, because everyone is welcome in a religious organization, right?
Allan spent a good deal of time at my apartment. My roommates (who had much bigger and kinder hearts than I) would take him him, give him rides, feed him, show him true friendship, while I tolerated Allan, probably because it was the "Christian" thing to do.
The truth started coming out when one of my roommates gave Allan a ride home one weekend. When they got to Allan's house, Allan's mother came out and told my roommate that while she appreciated his effort, Allan wasn't welcome there and he'd have to take Allan somewhere else. She didn't care where.
It turned out that Allan was not a college student; he'd picked up some text books somewhere along the way and carried them around campus to fit in.
He was not in a fraternity, although he did manage to work his way into a frat house and just kind of hang out for awhile, refusing to not come back.
Obviously he was not in the band, but he believed he was. Whenever Allan got "caught,'' it would somehow come back to us. One day, we got a call from the director of the Red Coat band, asking us to "do something" about Allan. Apparently every afternoon when the band was practicing, Allan had his drum and was marching along the top of a small hill overlooking the band's practice field, playing along (more or less) with the band.
I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist, so I don't know the workings of the mind here. But Allan was truly the first homeless person I'd ever met, and by homeless I don't mean just that he had no place to live (that I know of), but that he had no place where he belonged. And he had such a need to belong to something (don't we all?) that he convinced himself he was in a fraternity, that he was a college student, that he was in the band, that he was in the parade, that he was an actor, that he was ... Somebody (with a capitol S).
As the depth of Allan's issues became more obvious, we went to the school's mental health clinic. Because Allan wasn't a student, they couldn't see him. However, someone there agreed that Allan needed help, and we made a deal: if Allan would go to his regular appointments at the clinic, he could continue to hang around with us and we'd help him all we could.
Allan chose not to.
And I didn't see much of Allan anymore after that. This was 1977, and we didn't know a lot about mental illness or homelessness or any of the stuff that causes people to be out there, on their own, like Allan.
Later that year, there was a story about him in the Athens' newspaper, about how he was going off somewhere to make a movie and he was going to come back famous.
The next year, I think it was, I got a call from a friend who was the president of the same religious organization at Georgia Tech, asking if I knew Allan because Allan had "transferred' to Georgia Tech and was using our names as a reference with this group at Tech.
I continue to be amazed at how Allan travelled - how he got to New Orleans from Athens, or even to Atlanta to start hanging around Georgia Tech.
The other day, one of my sons asked me if I had any real regrets. I told him not really, but that there were a few, and I told him about one or two.
I didn't tell him about Allan.
Sometimes Allan is a funny story - at least, the parts of breaking into a house and taking on a roommate, or of getting into the Sugar Bowl by dressing up and marching in with the band, or of riding on a float in the parade through downtown Athens.
If Allan had been - for lack of a better word - "sane," then it would have been funny. Imagine the guts and ingenuity it took to do all that.
Instead, of course, it's a tragic story. Allan lived in a world of his own making. He'd been rejected by his parents. And, as I said, this was back in the days when we didn't really understand being homeless. We knew about mental illness, but nobody talked about it. We were just college kids who had friends who got 'mental' smoking dope or dropping acid or taking LSD ... but genuine mental illness? We had no clue.
I will always wonder what we should have done for Allan.
There are things in my life that I'm sorry that I did, that I regret, that I wish I could change, but that don't haunt me. For some reason, Allan does.
I remember how easily I dismissed him. He was a freshman (supposedly) and I was a senior. He was 'different' and I fit in. Later, it was that he was crazy and I was supposedly sane.
But I wonder if there wasn't more. I wonder if Allan didn't represent things I saw in myself that I hoped no one else saw: my insecurities, my wanting to belong, my efforts to 'be somebody' by my own interpretation or even exaggeration of the truth. I wonder if my efforts to 'help' him weren't just as self-serving as my dismissal of him.
My guess is a lot of us are quick to dismiss people who make us uncomfortable because they are 'different.'
Over the years, I've become quite good at that.
I have no idea of what happened to Allan. As much as I doubt it, I hope he found someone that could help him, and he accepted their help, and maybe he's doing OK.
Funny, isn't it? I hope the same thing for myself.
As I said, I guess we really weren't that different after all.
