Life Its Ownself Page 2

  After all this, I never had any doubt about Shake accomplishing whatever he might set out to do in life.

  Football came so easy for Shake, he really didn't have much respect for the game. The pros paid him well, which was why he played as long as he did. He was all-pro three years out of his six seasons. But he was always jabbering about wanting to do something more worthwhile, more important, more "meaningful," which is a hard word for me to use without my lip curling up.

  A famous book author was what he wanted to be.

  There were hints of this illness in college when Shake sought out so many movies with sub-titles, watched so much Public Television, and read so many books.

  TCU wasn't Stanford-on-the-Trinity, and Fort Worth wasn't Cambridge, but we did have bookstores and first-run theaters—and a lot more tits. You can't beat Southwest Conference women. Take it from a man who's been in the trenches.

  Shake's books were heavier than Godzilla, written by people with slashes and hyphens in their names.

  Thick God-damn books. Books that told you why life its ownself was a suit that didn't fit, how your soul was apt to get thrown up on a roof where you couldn't get it down, and how nobody knew a fucking thing except some European with a beard who sat in a dark room and played with himself.

  Eventually, Shake decided he knew as much about life as any living American. He said it would be a tragedy not to share his knowledge with mankind. He would become a writer, and why should it be so difficult? All you had to do was sit at a desk and let the Olivetti go down on you.

  Frankly, I thought the best reason to become a writer was because of what Shake told me about scholarly women. He said that if he became a famous book author, he could go out on lecture tours and nail a lot of ladies who wore glasses.

  Many of those ladies were a hidden minefield of delight, Shake said. Their arrogant expressions intrigued him. Their manner of dress—Terrorist Chic—was deceptive. Underneath the fatigues, the plump ones wouldn't be that plump, and the skinny ones wouldn't be that skinny, and the truth was that when you got behind their icy glares and worked your way down to the goal line with one of them, the thing you would have on your hands was a closet treasure—a squealing, back-clawing, lust-ridden, talk-dirty-to-me, won't- spill-a-drop nympho-acrobat.

  "Billy C., we've been severely handicapped all these years because we're nothing but athletes," he explained. "If you'd ever read a novel, you'd know what I mean. What's happened is, you and me have missed out on a whole bunch of literary pussy."

  Shake played one more year of football after our Super Bowl season, but I'm not sure you could have called it football.

  We spent most of our spare time in bars and honky-tonks, holding our Super Bowl rings up to our lips and speaking into them like they were two-way radios.

  The rings were beautiful. They were huge, gold, diamond-encrusted, had a bright blue stone in them, and were fun to talk to.

  "Crippled Chick to Mother Hen, come in, Mother Hen," one of us would say to his ring, usually when ordering another young Scotch or Tequila Suicide.

  We might be in Runyon's, Clarke's, Melon's, Juanita's, McMullen's, even all the way up to Elaine's, hitting every candy store on Second and Third Avenues in search of Christianity.

  Or we might be on the road in a city like Atlanta where they have those after-hours clubs that offer you a little packet of dread with every third drink and don't announce last-call till February.

  Wherever we might be, it was inevitable that somebody would holler at his ring, "Mayday, Mayday!"

  That would be a signal for everyone to look at the young lady coming into the saloon. If the young lady happened to resemble the third runnerup in the Miss Homewrecker Pageant, you'd hear another battle cry from our table.

  "Face mask!"

  That would be the ultimate compliment to the young lady from one of our freelance gynecologists.

  There were evenings when Barbara Jane went out with us. She, too, would get around to speaking into a Super Bowl ring.

  What she most often said was:

  "Leaving now. Bored."

  Our world-championship team broke up pretty fast after Shake Tiller quit to pursue commas and apostrophes.

  The next player to retire was Hose Manning, our laser- vision quarterback. Hose moved back home to Purcell, Oklahoma, to sell front-end-loaders.

  Puddin Patterson, my roadgrader, our best offensive lineman, fell in with Dreamer Tatum of the Jets and tried to organize a players' strike. It never got organized, but that's why the Jets traded Dreamer to Washington and Burt Danby traded Puddin to San Francisco.

  As Burt Danby put it, those cities were perfect for your "mondo, craze-o, leftist derelicts."

  Puddin was pleased about going to the Bay Area. He had always wanted to open a gourmet food store.

  Bobby Styles, our reliable free safety, beat the rape charge, but his heart was never in the game after the scandal. He married the fourteen-year-old girl, settled in Baton Rouge, and became a partner in Shirley's Tree & Stump Removal. Shake always said Bobby wore his I.Q. on his jersey. Bobby was No. 20.

  Rucker McFarland turned queer. He was the first defensive tackle to make a public announcement about his genes. We were all disturbed to hear about his problem, but at least it cleared up the mystery of why he had kept so many rolls of designer fabric in his locker.

  Story Time Mitchell, our all-pro cornerback, was the saddest case. They called it "possession with intent to sell." He was sentenced to fifteen years in a Florida joint.

  He handled it like a trooper. Got pardoned after three. Guys from around the league wrote to him regularly and sent him CARE packages—cakes, cookies, video cassettes, beaver magazines—because he refused to name any of his customers. Story Time was a competitor.

  These guys were the guts of our team, along with me and T.J., of course, so when they left, there was hardly any reason to wonder why the Giants went downhill.

  In the middle of the decline, Shoat Cooper, our coach, dug a deep one&out of his ass one day, spit on the floor, and said, "You know what you jokers look like to me? You look like somebody's done licked all the red off your lollipop."

  Our brain trust, which was Shoat Cooper and Burt Danby, tried to rebuild the dynasty. The record shows how good a job they did. Through our portals swaggered the grandest collection of scum ever perpetrated on a squad room.

  When we didn't welcome a sullen, millionaire rookie who wouldn't learn his plays and traveled with a business manager, we inherited a malcontent who'd been with five other clubs and came to us with a nickname like Dump, Point Spread, or Bail-Out.

  It seemed like the harder I played, the more games we lost. Shake had a good football mind. I asked him one evening in a tavern what he thought our biggest problems were.

  He looked off from his cocktail for a minute, then turned back to me with a sigh. "Billy C., I'd rather try to tell somebody what an oyster tastes like."

  Shake was busy on a novel before his last football season was over. For a time, he flirted with the idea of giving up his penthouse apartment in the high-rise at 56th and First Avenue and buying a loft in SoHo, thinking the artistic environment would stir his creative juices.

  SoHo had become a desirable area of lower Manhattan for reasons that could only be answered by the friends of dissident poets or rabid sculptors. It was the newest place to go watch activist groups eat croissants.

  Shake dismissed the idea of moving after Barbara Jane pointed out to him SoHo had an abundance of vegetarian restaurants with no-smoking areas.

  I wasn't sure what to expect from Shake Tiller the Writer. Maybe I thought he would take to wearing a Lenin cap or something, but his lifestyle didn't change. He did begin to jot things down on napkins, and he grew a short beard, which looked surprisingly good on him.

  The title of his novel was The Grade-B Plot. I have a confession. Like the vast majority of Americans, I didn't read much past the first paragraph either.

  Originally, his first pa
ragraph consisted of three words.

  This said Riley:

  That was it. New paragraph.

  When Shake handed me the manuscript to glance at one night, I said, "You got a semi-colon in there real quick."

  "Colon," he corrected.

  "Well, colon, semi-colon, what the fuck," I said.

  It was the kind of response Shake might have expected from a guy who'd once made an effort to write a book of his own, your typical professional athlete's memoir—why I'm great because I know how to talk to a tape recorder and get a sportswriter to clean up the grammar.

  I had failed in my literary attempt, not because it wasn't art like The Grade-B Plot, but because I took the trouble to read it and thought it sounded like a joke book that had been put into a blender with The Sporting News.

  Unlike I would have done it, Shake re-wrote the first paragraph of The Grade-B Plot sixty times, but when the novel made its way into the bookstores, the only improvement I saw was in the length. The book began:

  The moon was a half-scoop of vanilla that night and Riley had the slab of raw liver strapped to his bare chest when he entered the campus library. He knew Laura would be in there somewhere, screaming at Proust as usual, or mutilating pages of Dostoyevsky. He figured they might as well go over the edge together. Funny how much she had changed since the Okefenokee Swamp.

  Like most first novels, The Grade-B Plot sold extremely well in northeastern Kentucky. The publisher, Wanderjahr Books, a subsidiary of Haver & Giles, ordered a first printing of 2,000 copies. Shake's agent, Silvia Mercer, said this was very good, as did his editor, Maureen Pemberton, a good friend of Silvia Mercer's.

  Shake said literary pussy was overrated, after all. Maybe the better-known authors in Silvia Mercer's stable could appreciate her 187 pounds of energy, her pigtails, and her smock, but Shake had known pulling guards with straighter teeth and more reverence for the written word.

  He was happy to be published, of course, but he wondered how often Thomas Hardy had stooped to "duty fucking."

  The reviews of Shake's novel ranged from vicious to— his word—disorienting.

  A reviewer in The New York Times called it a book for anyone who had "lost faith in the human race."

  The reviewer, a professor of English at the University of Arkansas, went on to condemn the publisher for even sending the novel to the printer and binder. "How long," the man asked, "must serious artists go unrewarded while crude athletes, solely on the strength of their names, are allowed to achieve the permanence of hardcover and sit smugly on bookshelves?"

  Shake said, "That's interesting. I can't find the fucking book anywhere."

  Silvia Mercer got excited because Time magazine reviewed the book.

  "A bad review in Time is very important," she said to Shake. "It's better than being ignored."

  Shake would rather have been ignored.

  The Time critic wrote:

  In The Grade-B Plot, First Novelist Marvin (Shake) Tiller, a former professional football player, devotes 279 pages to the question of inaccessibility. Exactly how far should the writer remove himself from his characters and story? Tiller would have us believe there is no limit.

  "What'd I do wrong?" Shake asked his agent.

  "You didn't take any risks," Sylvia Mercer said. "You didn't stretch yourself."

  "I was too busy typing."

  The commercial failure of Shake's novel drove him straight into non-fiction. He started to work on The Art of Taking Heat, a how-to book designed to help the average person cope with life its ownself, and he took up expose journalism. He started doing pieces for Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, New York, Texas Monthly.

  This in itself wasn't so bad. Who among us doesn't like to know that certain leading men in Hollywood are only five feet tall and stuff washrags into their elastic briefs? Or learn that certain United States Congressmen have fathered dozens of illegitimate children in Latin America who will now blow you up with homemade bombs?

  I think it's fair to say that Shake's journalistic exploits in no small way added to the confusion in our lives after Dreamer Tatum busted my knee.

  About that play.

  We were down on Washington's 6-yard line in the third quarter, behind by 14 points. A touchdown could turn the momentum around. Fourth down came up and I expected us to throw the ball, so you can imagine my surprise when our quarterback called Student Body Left.

  Student Body Left was a power sweep for me, Old 23. The play had been a moneymaker for us when I had Puddin Patterson to block for me. It was the play I'd scored on in the last four seconds to beat the dogass Jets 31-28 in the only Super Bowl that was ever worth a shit.

  The situation wasn't the same, though.

  For one thing, Puddin Patterson was no longer around. He was busily selling rabbit pates in San Francisco. He had been replaced on the left side of our offensive line by Alvin (Point Spread) Powell. Point Spread Powell's idea of a block was to assume the fetus position about one second after the ball was snapped.

  And there was this other thing. Obert (Dreamer) Tatum, The Black Death, was across the line of scrimmage, which was where he had not been in that Super Bowl when we made our game-winning drive.

  Any loyal fan of the Jets would be quick to remind you that Dreamer Tatum had sprained his ankle in the fourth quarter of that Super Bowl. Dreamer had been watching from the sideline when we punched it in.

  Loyal Jets fans were easy to recognize in my day. You just looked for the little old lady being mugged, and there they were.

  Well, Dreamer was not only out there wearing the braid of his five years as an all-pro cornerback, he had something else going for him. I had noticed earlier in the game that Dreamer had fortified himself with a handful of amphetamines.

  Dreamer and I had known and respected each other a long time. We had traded enough licks to be married. And nobody knew better than me that you didn't spend a lot of time running the football at him when his eyes had a maniacal gaze and he chewed his gum so fast, the slobber ran down his chin.

  Dreamer's condition prompted a minor rebellion in our huddle when the quarterback, Floyd (Dump) McKinney, called the running play.

  "Are you crazy?" I said to Dump. "Dreamer's over there!"

  "We'll hit at their strength. Cross 'em up," he said.

  "Who will?"

  "Let's go, Billy Clyde. We'll take his ass to the parking lot."

  "Have you looked at him lately?" I said. "Put the ball in the air!"

  "My hand hurts."

  "Your hand hurts?" I blurted out. "Did you bet Washington?"

  "Fuck, no," Dump said. "They went to ten and a half."

  Now, then. I don't happen to be a person who goes through life looking for signs of impending doom. Even so, I hadn't come in contact with a cross-eyed Mexican that morning. I hadn't seen a red-headed spade, or a gray dog shit on the sidewalk, or a lone goose fly across the marsh.

  All of which was why I shut up in the huddle and took the handoff from Dump McKinney and ran the ball in my normal way—not fast, not slow, not fancy, but sort of in a threading, weaving, determined fashion.

  The blow came while I was in the air.

  I was jumping over Point Spread Powell when Dreamer's shoulder flew into my knee. It wasn't the lick itself that did me in. I landed awkwardly and 2,000 pounds of Redskin stink came down on top of me.

  I didn't hear the tear of the medial collateral ligament and everything else that got cross-threaded. Maybe it did sound like somebody opening an envelope, as a newspaper guy wrote. All I knew was, the inside of my knee was on fire. You couldn't have moved my leg with a tractor-pull.

  Everybody was untangling when I said, "You can turn me over, Dreamer. I'm done on this side."

  "Aw, shit, Clyde, are you hurt bad?" He scrambled to his feet.

  "Yeah," I groaned. "I think your pharmacist finally got me."

  Dreamer made frantic gestures toward our bench. He was genuinely concerned. He helped the trainers lift me onto a stretch
er and he walked all the way to our sideline with me.

  The last thing I saw in the stadium was a fat woman wearing an Indian headdress and a buckskin pant suit. She screamed at me like a psychopath as the trainers carried the stretcher into a tunnel.

  "We got you, Puckett!" she yelled, waving a tomahawk in the air. She glared down at me over a railing. "We got you good! Does it hurt? Oh, I hope it hurts you good! I hope you limp the rest of your life, you slimy bastard!"

  Given a choice, I suppose I'd rather have heard the woman sing a chorus of "Hail to the Redskins."

  We moved through the tunnel beneath the stands, and one of the trainers looked down at me.

  "How'd you like to be married to that, Billy Clyde?"

  "You'd have one problem," I said. "With all those dirty dishes in the sink, there wouldn't be nowhere to piss."

  In the dresing room, the team physician, Dr. Fritz Ma- honey, pushed around on my knee.

  "Won't know til I see the X-rays, old chum, but I'm afraid you've been Dick Butkused," he said with a hum .

  It would have been more accurate if Dr. Fritz Mahoney had said I'd been Gale Sayersed. Sayers had been a running back, Butkus a linebacker. But I got the drift.

  Damage to the medial collateral, a vital ligament in the middle of the knee, had prematurely ended the careers of Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers, two of your legendary Chicago Bears. Overnight, they had become famous medial collateralists.

  I knew enough about the injury to realize that if I ever did go on a football field again, I'd have to wear a knee brace the size of a Toyota Cressida and play with considerable pain, but even though I understood all this, the competitor in me came out. To the doctor, I said, "This ain't the end of my ass!"

  Dr. Fritz Mahoney said, "Spunk helps, Billy Clyde. Never underestimte the value of spunk. We in the medical profession place a great deal of trust in spunk."

  "I'll play again—you want to bet on it?"