Found this in my old files, sometime in 1977 written at the age of 13 or 14. My best guess is that I had just seen James Caan in Rollerball. Almost 50 years later, the mood is little different.

James Mason, a tall, dark-haired, rather subtle man, wandered aimlessly through the crowd of hopeful spectators, looking for Row W, Seat 42. Two cold hot dogs and a warm coke in his hands, he saw an empty chair and quickly compared it to his ticket number. They matched, and he clambered over the legs and feet of the people between him and the chair and fell down in the aisle as they pushed him out of the way. He managed to save his food by holding the hot dogs above him and the plastic lid prevented the drink from spilling. He got up and stumbled the rest of the way to his seat. He turned around and fell in the seat with a thud. The chair wobbled a bit, but didn’t collapse like some of the others would have. 

Get used to it or you’re dead, he thought. Force yourself to enjoy the food and the game. Force yourself. Get used to it. It’s your way of life.

Another bite of his remaining hot dog, and Mason set up and watched the game.

This kind of competition grew in interest a few years earlier and now was the major worldwide sport. The teams had no names, simply Red versus Blue. There were ten members of each team, and all were on the small field at one time. The game had no time limit. It ended when it ended. Nothing else could be said.

Two rows below, a fight erupted between two of the spectators. One was a short, stubby, fat man in a bright red shirt. The other was a rough looking, bearded fellow with a scar on his arm. From the emblem on his forehead, it was obvious he was a former Game team member. They stood up in their row and started yelling, blocking Mason’s view. It was just as well.

“Excuse me,” started the first man, “but the two gentlemen are blocking my view of the game. Could you do something about it?”

“SHOVE OFF!,” yelled the other.

A small boy of about six turned around and screamed, “Gee, this is better than the game!!!”

The two fighting were now at each other’s throats and bumping into the other fans. 

—

Not much to write in reflection of this piece except it was fairly typical of my subjects and approach in early high school: visceral description (King and Tolkien, Herbert and Niven, were heavy influences), but also some probably less consciously understood strategies. I’m certain I had no sense of what syntax meant, but the bullet-like sentences, melodramatically reminiscent of a noir detective story create tone, and the long punctuation-less sentence near the beginning of Mason stumbling to his seat seems an effective parallel of the event and sentence structure.

Allegory works best, sometimes, when what could be specific becomes a bit more generic (Red and Blue teams, nameless cultures, etc.). Yes, the diagramming of meaning is really heavy-handed (“But this culture was the only way he could survive. He must accept it to live.”), but the dilemma he faces–and my recent uncovering of it, timely–feel like a real echo of Le Guin’s “Omelas” which I am quite sure I had not read by this time (nor, obviously William James, Dostoevsky, or others who presented it). Maybe there are other sf or fantasy writers I had encountered who also wrestled with it? I was definitely still in the “imitation and theft” period of my writing, and movies like Soylent Green and Rollerball were favorites.

Anyway, I certainly could never have imagined at age 13 that I would be looking back on the story 50 years later in any capacity. But then, what did my 13-year-old self imagine? Today, I don’t know that I could ever guess.