they built the original field in 1923 and called it park hughes, moved it over a block and renamed it park de young in 1928, and rebuilt it and renamed it taylor field in 1948. i can't find any references to park hughes and park de young outside of brief mentions in orange and brown photocopied coilbound histories of sports in regina and official saskatchewan roughriders websites.
taylor field is named after neil taylor. his nickname was piffles. he played rugby, soccer and football, and fought in the first world war. he got taken prisoner, got released, went to england, went back to the war, got his eye bayonetted out and then came home and organized a football league and became a city councillor and died in 1947 and got a stadium named after him. right now i guess it looks like any modern football stadium and it's surrounded by the slummest slums in the whole city, easily some of the worst in the country, in north america, i don't know. (right now regina is in a neck and neck race with i believe saskatoon and winnipeg to reclaim the murder capital of canada title it lost in the late 1990s [we don't have the most murders by far, the number actually seems pretty low, but it's a relatively small city and it's all per capita]). it's old tiny shitty beige and green houses that have been there forever mixed with bombedout apartment blocks and bars/offsales with neon signs and chinese grocery stores and abandoned transmission repair places and old-ass brown brick buildings that got built in like 1910 and have heritage whatever signs in front of them. eastern europeans and everyone else that worked in the factories and warehouses or the cp railyard across albert lived in them until they moved away whenever they all got enough money to move away and the government let natives move around and move into ghettoes and force poor white people into separate ones. on nights when they have games the place is fucking crazy. those big spotlights light up like ten blocks in every direction, daylight. and big speakers rumbling first down announcements and tinny country music over the whole city. every street all around the place lined with dodge caravans and crvs and saturn vues (you can make a lot of money charging people to park in your frontyard). the whole neighborhood is drunk and outside, doors wide open, barbecuing hamburgers on their lawn. they do this thing at the field where they open the big gates on the north side after the first half is done, you can just walk right in and stand between the two temporary cheap seat stands, where the pep band and the guys painted green are (when losing games start to wind down and people begin filing out the drunk green guys abuse them with "fairweather fan! fairweather fan!" chants and "you don't deserve to wear that fuckin jersey"/"you leave then they lose, that makes you fuckin loser!" calls). lean right up against the fence and the field is right there. it's mostly tough boys from the neighborhood who don't have to be home early and lean over the fence smoking in shiny jackets with their band and reservation stitched on the back. and old drunk men with braids that bum cigarettes off the tough boys and scary little girls in pyjamas and lipstick standing under the bleachers with cracked sunflower seeds falling into their hair. (Tamra Jewel Keepness was last seen Monday night, July 5, 2004. Regina police and volunteers combed the city and surrounding area, but ended their search a week after she was last seen. Police then refocused their investigation on Tamra's family. Aboriginal leaders vowed to continue their own search for Tamra. Police are asking anyone who can provide leads to Tamra's whereabouts to call 1-866-80-TAMRA). and people who bought tickets and started leaving when the score got scary but stand around when they come back with a quick touchdown and get the extra point and there might be time to win but not to walk back up to their seats way up there near the spotlights. at the very end, when the play is way down there at the other end, the tough boys have a game over going over the fence in teams, dodging the first group of event staff and security guards until everyone cheers and they're finally tackled or they fly back over the chainlink, under the bleachers and into the parking lot, which always makes everyone cheer even louder.
the parking lot is full of shuttle buses, tour buses, handicap buses, clouds of japanese tourists, boys cruising around in white monte carlos or green cherokees.
boys go there to rob people and samantha and robert and i watch a boy in camouflage grab a purse from a lady in a green roughriders jacket, her husband with a baby in a baby backpack on his chest shouting you fucking fucking you fucking goddamn.

samantha.
her favorite songs: into you by fabolous, bad boyz by shyne, and thru the wire by kanye west.
the first time i pick her up she's wearing beige velour all over herself, walking right in the middle of the afternoon driving right along my street, shout what's up and she says hey can i get a ride, when she gets in i tell her i wasn't sure if she was working or not (the girls wander big circuits around the hood, blending in, making it look like a walk back from 7-11 to get a pack of smokes. only the old white girls bother dressing like hookers and they usually stay out of this neighborhood and walk one of the downtown strolls in pink shorts flashing their tits at drunk drivers) and she says i guess i don't need to see if you're a cop or not, you're too young to be a cop haha were there any other girls out? nah just one busted white girl (leanne: she let me fuck her without a condom even though i didn't ask and i couldn't go through with it for very long and she gave me a handjob and charged way too much and smelled bad and talked the whole time about how she never got picked up because guys always think she's a cop because she's white and isn't sixteen fucking years old god i hate this neighborhood a cop stops me and says can you tell any young girls you see out here to go home ... what the fuck first of all i'm white and second i'm not going to do that, she says. she's not really that busted really, she looks like a pretty white prostitute).
she's cute and smokes cocaine and says she only works sometimes and her boyfriend is a welder, 'guess how old he is? fifty one, he's away right now, up north.' i give her lots of money and she tells me i look like a guy who breakdances, do i breakdance, no, and we drove out to the edge of nc to the ring road, out through edge of town freshly built umc neighborhoods and. the edges of prairie cities don't slowly reduce into suburb->less suburb->some houses and trees->trees and roads. it's a hard drop-off into flat wasteland. they're like domed cities, kind of. sharp borders because they're new cities, they're all just a few years old and haven't had time to spread out. you hit the edge of town and it's dust roads and fields. she says to me: "is this what farmers grow?" this is less than five kilometers from your street. "yeah. you've never seen this before? the yellow fields, all those yellow flowers: that's canola. it means 'canadian oil.' they make margarine with it and canola oil. the green stuff is wheat." "wheat?" "yeah. it looks like that when it's growing then it sort of dies and turns yellow and they cut it all down and take the tops off."
we ride with windows rolled up, going up and down dirt roads into a field, give traditional wave at farmer in f350 coming our way, airconditioning on full. stop and give her more money and fuck her in the backseat and the airconditioning blows warm when the car is stopped. cum in a kleenex while she pretends to get herself off because she says she needs to go, she's supposed to be meeting her p.o. like right now. i fall in love and tell her while jerking off i love you i want to marry you. and she laughs and goes back to pretending and asking me if i'm ever gonna come.
get all dressed back up. and drive back toward the city. she wipes my forehead with a kleenex while i drive and does the same for herself. stop at a mcdonald's and order her six mcnuggets and a large orange and six mcnuggets for myself, no drink. she writes her name, address and numbers (she says she has five phone numbers because she never sleeps the same place two nights in a row) on the receipt in black pen with hearts around her big SAMANTHA.