Couch Burning Season

“The university as it should be — serious, studious, and earnest.”

Untitled, Kit Knuppel

Theodore Gary is a 22-year-old senior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying English and History. He is an Assistant Editor of The New Critic.

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I got an email from my landlord last Wednesday informing us that we were to remove any and all furniture from our lawns and porches or else be fined by the city. The subject line read, “It’s Couch Burning Season.” You see, I have a couch on my porch, and I’ve received an email like this before. They don’t have teeth. My couch remains, and nothing happened. But now the city, and my landlord, had to be seen doing something since the Illinois men’s basketball team was in the Sweet 16, and the potential for post-game mayhem was unusually high. Tell the kids to move their couches and their chairs. If things go wrong, they can’t blame us; our asses are covered.

I had never considered burning a couch before. Though the practice intrigued me — the emotion of fire, the specter of death — the moment in my life had not yet come when dousing a couch in lighter fluid and setting it on fire felt quite like the thing to do. Contrarian that I am, though, I began to picture it: How would I keep the fire burning? Would a leather couch burn quicker than a polyester one? How quickly could I get a couch out onto the street? I began to scheme. I wanted to see the couches burn. I wanted to see the fire catch, and I wanted to watch the couch turn to ash. I didn’t want to do this by myself, however. Burning a couch has to be a general sort of thing. Being the only one burning their couch is stupid. You want others to see, to be excited, to stand and gawk. When one guy does something dumb, it’s a crime. When everybody’s doing it, that’s just fun.

The game was slated to tip at 9:05 on Thursday, leaving plenty of time for drunken shenanigans, weather permitting, that afternoon. I had woken up in a sweat that morning — too many blankets. It was 80 degrees outside, one of those central Illinois days that begins like Florida and ends as the apocalypse. It had been 70 degrees out the day before, and 50 the day before that. A huge stormfront was set to roll through Champaign and had sent ahead of it an advance force of unseasonably warm days. Rather than exultation at the oncoming of summer, the arrival of a balmy spring day at UIUC brings with it a palpable sort of unease. Unseasonably warm weather means wild storms, and wild storms mean one thing: a tornado was coming.

The storm was due at 6, and we started drinking at 3. There were beers on the couch, beers on the porch, beers on the lawn. The frat house across the street started their pulsing EDM. By 5, the block swarmed with orange-clad sorority sisters, friends of friends, and frat boys. Clouds of solid black stood on the horizon — portents of evil. We kept at it as the wind picked up. The temperature dropped, the atmosphere changed, and the cold wind swept away that balmy afternoon. The sky went from blue to black in ten minutes, the birds and squirrels disappeared into their burrows and nests, but here we were, wind swirling and clouds onrushing, shotgunning beers barefoot in the grass.

It was a tense afternoon. Only once in the last 20 years had Illinois made the Sweet 16 of March Madness, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. That game was two years ago, when I was a sophomore. My memories of that night are hazy, aside from a single moment: up two with less than a minute to play, Terrence Shannon Jr., the star guard (now a Minnesota Timberwolf), stole the ball clean from his man on the left wing. The camera panned: there was no one ahead of him. Shannon tucked the ball into the hoop. The Illini went up four. The game was won. The bar was madness.

What I recall is the celebration, the ecstasy of the unified, screaming crowd. When the Illini win a game like this, students come screaming out of the bars and onto the street, running to a statue at the center of campus — the alma mater— around which a tremendous crowd rapidly gathers. Somewhere online, there is a picture of me, arms folded, cigar in mouth, standing atop it.

When I arrive at the bar this time around, packed chest-to-chest with about 300 other strangers, I’m thinking about the game, and I’m worried. The Houston team that Illinois will play in two hours is a powerhouse. They were a fairly unanimous championship pick in the preseason, and though they’ve failed to meet those expectations (being merely very good rather than generationally great), they play with an aggression and physicality that the Illini often seem to lack. Illinois’s strength is its offense, one of the best ever if you listen to the advanced stats. In the ways that Houston is a throwback operation built on hustle, defense, and under-recruited gems, the Illini are starkly modern: of the eight guys who play consistent minutes, only four are Americans; the rest are Balkans — 7-foot brothers Tomislav and Zvonimir Ivisic (Croatians), David Mirkovic (Montenegrin), and Andrej Stojakovic (Greek, son of Peja), lured halfway across the world by a mass TV audience and Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) dollars.

It’s full house tonight, standing room only, a line out the door. I’m glad we started early because ordering a drink means wading through a thick, angry crowd. As the TVs kick from the pregame show to the game, and the music in the bar stops, the March Madness theme begins, and a cheer rumbles out of the crowd. The game starts, and surprisingly it is Illinois whose defense takes control. Bothered by the Illini’s length and size, the Cougars force too many tough midrange jumpers. They look confused. It’s a grind to watch — a slow, methodical strangulation. By the midway point of the second half, the outcome is never in doubt. As Illinois stacks winning play atop winning play, as Houston over and over again fails to capture momentum of any kind, as victory goes from potentiality to certainty, a bellow rises up out of the steamy, sweaty crowd, gathering depth and energy until the buzzer sounds, and the music starts again, and the win becomes official. Kids begin knocking over tables or standing atop them. Liquid rains down from on high. Outside, cars honk. The street fills. The storm has broken: Illinois 65, Houston 55.

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The following afternoon, I drove up to the University of Chicago for a party organized by campus lit mag The Harper Review, held in a building called “The Cloisters” where elevators open directly onto each apartment’s mudroom. The event was dressy, the furniture tastefully arranged. The bar was substantial and well-organized. On it, a case of Modelos had been removed from their box and arranged on a white tablecloth in a two-by-two formation. There was wine, vodka, mixers. I felt fancy. I felt put upon, a jet-lagged traveler adjusting to his foreign country. I could see on my phone that Duke was down to St. Johns, that UConn was about to tip against Michigan State. Where was the basketball? Where was the TV? It took me a moment to realize that there were none.

The windows in the apartment faced west. The last gasp of a purple-and-orange sunset filled the horizon, while on the soccer field down below, a throng of bundled-up parents and fans cheered on UChicago’s Division 3 women’s soccer team. Out of the elevator came trundling a host of young-people dressed in button-downs and blouses, matching suits and satin skirts, play-acting their futures of prosperous importance. Today, Harper Review, tomorrow, Harper’s Magazine. These people looked you in the eye when speaking and never stopped. One I spoke with dismissed the University of Michigan as if it were a community college. “More Nobel Prize winners have lived in this building than anywhere on earth,” another bragged. “I think you’re the first person to ever come from U of I to UChicago for a party,” someone else said. I think he was right.

As the party wound down, we moved to a new apartment. Here, a somber man gave a disorganized presentation on beauty that moved me, though I’m not quite sure why, since I don’t remember what he said, which artist he presented on, or what the paintings he spoke about looked like. But I recall the mood of that room, the sincere and devoted attention. To have spoken out of turn, or looked at your phone, or laughed as the speaker fumbled with his slides, seemed to fall somewhere near blasphemy. He was to be treated seriously, this man — a courtesy the others in attendance would doubtless expect in return.

In the morning, I made good conversation with dear friends over pancakes and bacon ordered from a crotchety man with a thick Chicago accent at a diner advertising itself as “Obama’s favorite.” We walked through the quad afterward and settled on a bench, taking in the crisp spring day. I found it easy, at that moment, to admire the place: an island of peace and calm, the university as it should be — serious, studious, and earnest.

Much the same way the children of basketball players are overrepresented in the NBA, the children of professors, writers, and bureaucrats are overrepresented at UChicago. The trouble is, they are all more or less deserving. Being around them is a fairly forceful reminder of why I never bothered to apply. Not only would these people never set a couch on fire, but it would not even occur to them to do so. If they are play-acting, then it is only in the sense that they are rehearsing for roles in which they have already been cast. The majority trait I encountered on that campus seemed not to be exceptional wisdom, grace, or even intelligence but rather a certain kind of serious-mindedness. What a waste of energy all this nonsense at the University of Illinois must appear if your goal is to understand Hegel or become a managing editor at The New York Times. In certain light, it appears that way to me, too: If only I could unwatch all those games, I think sometimes, retake all those tests, shake my 14-year-old self by the shoulders and force him to understand what he was missing, where he could have gone had he applied himself, had he considered the future seriously. I’m in the apartment, I’ve been invited to the party, but what a feeling it must be to live here, not only visit.

Three hours later, I was back in Champaign, in another bar, watching Illinois play Iowa for a spot in the Final Four, a place the Illini had not been in 20 years. Iowa took a lead early, but by half-time the Illini had pulled the game even. It remained close until mid-way through the second half, as Keaton Wagler, Illinois’s still-boyish 18-year-old freshman — a shoo-in top-10 NBA draft pick — contorted his lanky body around the manly strength of Iowa’s grizzled 24-year-olds. Deep in the second half, with the Illini down by one, Wagler drove right, spun left, and stepped back to the top of the arc in a motion so fluid his defender stumbled backward all the way to the baseline. Wagler buried the three, and Illinois never trailed again.

We stood pressed up against the wall at the end of the game, and we were banging on it now. Liquid dripped from the ceiling onto strangers embracing strangers as “Chelsea Dagger” played over the loudspeakers, and a wave of students crashed onto the street in a dead sprint toward the alma mater. The crowd they formed was gigantic, but the couches never burned, and the mayhem never really arrived.

In me, there is something that craves this sort of intensity, this ecstatic experience, and I was disappointed that it never came. But it did for one moment in the bar, during the celebration, when a stranger grabbed me and hugged me, which was not something I thought actually happened between strangers. I will tell you there is only one equivalent rush to that, one which I am sure even the most serious UChicago students can understand. That is the rush of writing a perfect sentence, one that needs no revision, something I celebrate in much the same way as I do a made basket, by standing up and pumping my fist.

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