Semi-Tough Read online

Big Ed said Big Barb would be home in a minute and then we would all talk about our futures. Big Ed then left us alone in the den. I think he went to phone up Wall Street and sell Libya.

  Barbara Jane said her mother was probably at a meeting of the Daughters of the Intimate Friends of the Dumb-Asses who stayed at the Alamo, or something.

  Shake called his daddy at the store they owned, Tiller Electric, and told him what had happened and where he was.

  I remember that listening to Shake on the phone I got the impression that his daddy didn't think any of it was a very big deal.

  I remember hearing Shake saying, "Yeah, really, Dad. For singing dirty. Yeah, an old song about Mr. Turner. With a bad word or two in it. Yeah. Yeah. No, sir, it was mainly because Barbara Jane was doing it with us and she's a girl and all. Yes, sir. I'll tell her. Him, too. Yes, sir. O.K. Bye."

  I would have called Uncle Kenneth but I knew there weren't any phones on the fifteenth green at Rockwood Muny. Anyhow, he'd have only been interested in whether we would get back in school in time for the dashes and the broad jump.

  Big Barb finally came in wearing big round yellow sunglasses, pants, rings on every finger, her hair pulled straight back like a Flamenco dancer, a short drink in her hand and a long cigarette.

  "Well," she said. "This is certainly a new experience for the Bookman family. I'm so ashamed of you three that I'm actually numb."

  Shake said, "It was my fault, Miz Bookman."

  "Was not," Barbara Jane said.

  Big Ed said that if it hadn't been for him we'd all be out for the semester.

  Shake said he sure did thank Mr. Bookman for saving us, and he mainly wanted to apologize for getting Barbara Jane in trouble.

  I said me too.

  Shake said, "My daddy says he feels real bad about Barbara Jane being involved."

  "Your father's a very nice man," said Big Barb. "I've shopped in his little store many times. I think that fixture in the hallway came from there."

  Shake said it could have.

  Barbara Jane said it probably did.

  I said I didn't know.

  "Is his little store still in the same place, over there by the bridge where the Mexicans have started moving in?" Big Barb asked.

  Barbara Jane said, "Oh, terrific, Mom."

  "Yes, Ma'am," said Shake. "Over there on Nelson Avenue is where it's still at."

  I said that's right. Over on Nelson Avenue.

  Big Barb said, "Barbara, I only meant that the town's changing faster than we can keep up with it."

  "Sure," Barbara Jane said.

  Shake cleared his throat.

  So did I.

  Nobody said anything for a minute or two, and then Big Barb said, "As a matter of fact, I think those two carriage lamps on the front door came from Tiller Electric."

  Might have, said Shake.

  Probably did, I said.

  Barbara Jane sighed and put her elbows on her knees and put her chin in the cups of her hands and closed her eyes.

  Big Ed said, "Uh, honey, these boys and your daughter have promised me that their behavior in the future will be A-O.K. I think these three days out of school will teach them a pretty good lesson."

  "Of course, it will be talked about at River Crest," Big Barb said.

  "I wouldn't worry much about that," said Big Ed.

  "I'm sure you won't," Big Barb said. "You'll be in Houston."

  Big Ed said, "River Crest don't talk about a goddamn thing that I don't tell 'em to talk about, so that's that."

  Big Barb looked away and smoked.

  Shake and me glanced at each other and Barbara Jane blinked.

  Big Ed said, "This isn't exactly the end of the goddamn world. It isn't anything that intelligent white people can't handle."

  Barbara Jane said, "I wonder how unintelligent black people handle it."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" said Big Ed.

  "I was just thinking out loud," Barbara Jane said.

  "That wasn't very funny, Barbara," said Big Barb.

  Me and Shake looked at each other.

  "Let's wrap this up," Big Ed said. "Jake Ealey's gonna stop by in a minute and we've got to talk about what we're gonna do with that goddamn Alaska property."

  We stood up.

  "Be sure and tell your father hello," said Big Barb.

  "He's a goddamn nice fellow," Big Ed said.

  Shake said thank you. He would.

  Big Barb looked at me and said, "How's your, uh, your Uncle Kermit these days?"

  "Kenneth," I said.

  "Yes, of course," she said. "Is he getting along fine?"

  I guess so, I said. He still plays at scratch.

  Big Ed said, "Kenneth Puckett was one hell of a golfer around here a few years ago."

  Must have been, I said.

  "There was a time when some of us at the club thought seriously about putting him on the goddamn pro tour," said Big Ed. "Probably should have. He'd have probably made us a ton."

  "And him, too," Shake said.

  "Damn right he would have," Big Ed said. "Well, listen, you hot shots. Mind your damned old singing now. And keep my daughter out of trouble, all right?"

  Shake and me smiled and said we would.

  We were walking out the front door when Big Ed said, "What the hell's Kenneth doing these days?"

  Shake said, "Near as me and Billy C. can figure out, he's got some kind of position in the Fort Worth underworld."

  Big Ed and Big Barb managed a nervous laugh.

  Then Big Barb said, "You boys don't be strangers now. You know you're welcome here any time."

  "See you, Barb," said Shake.

  "Later," I said.

  We jogged off through the big yard but before we crossed the circular driveway, right at the iron gates, Shake stopped and looked back.

  "Hey, Mrs. Bookman," he hollered. "Next time you're over at the store, don't mind all those Mexicans. All they ever do is go to sleep in the dirt. You can just step over 'em."

  We heard Barbara Jane howling as we turned and trotted off. Even then, she had that great laugh.

  Jim Tom Pinch has said that there ought to be something in the book about the life that me and Shake lead when we're not playing ball. Something about what we do during the off-season. And as he put it, "Something about your aptitudes and attitudes, other than football."

  I think this is a lot of boring crap, Jim Tom, but I'll try to cover it quickly, if aptitude means what I think it does.

  Actually, when I stop to think about this, it makes me kind of hot. Not you, Jim Tom, but the fact that there are those people who don't think a ball player is anything but a go-rilla.

  I'd like to make it clear that me and Shake lead a very quiet and decent life in the off-season. We pretty much stay in New York through the winter and spring. And by that time, of course, it's getting near the start of another training camp.

  Maybe a day or two a week we'll go off somewhere and make a speech at a luncheon or banquet. We get anywhere from three hundred to five hundred a pop, depending on how much the Sioux Falls Quarterback Club — or some such thing — can afford.

  A lot of studs hold down steady jobs in the off-season because they have to in order to feed their families. We're lucky, I think. We make good money and don't have to do that. Work, I mean.

  Now and then you have to spend the night somewhere on the banquet circuit. But this doesn't have to be total agony if some of the guys who've invited you out there will lay a kindhearted secretary on you, or maybe even some of their private stock.

  I've been known to have me some good times in some surprising places. Akron wore my ass out once, and so did Omaha. And Shake Tiller always speaks fondly of Terre Haute and Oklahoma City.

  When it warms up around New York, we try to play some golf.

  I suppose that I ought to confess that the only thing I'd ever be interested in doing besides playing ball would be to run my own restaurant or bar.

  That might be all right somet
ime, after I'm crippled.

  I know the kind of place I'd want. It would have to be located in the Fifties on the near East Side so the clientele wouldn't have to worry about getting shot or stabbed. It would serve a big drink and stay open late and there wouldn't be any Frenchmen waiting tables.

  I'd encourage a lot of wool to hang around for set decoration. There'd be comfortable chairs and round tables, and none of them very close together so the customers wouldn't have to bore each other with their talk about business or clothes or kids.

  Nobody would wear a tie. Elroy Blunt would be on the juke box. And you'd be able to get decent things to eat like chili, real barbecue and black-eyed peas.

  I'd probably call it something like the Triple Option and hang some pictures on the wall of Shake Tiller.

  But that's a few years off.

  As for Shake Tiller, his interests run a little wider than mine.

  For one thing, he likes to jack around in the stock market with our money. He likes the action. "There's a new ball game every day," he says.

  He does O.K., by the way, which he says is not surprising because most everybody in real-life business is a dunce.

  He likes to say, "I never knew a chairman of the board of anything that I'd let run an elevator for me."

  Shake says one of his great ambitions is to meet a smart guy who's the boss of something.

  I've heard him say, "Every time I'm introduced to somebody who's supposed to know all about television or politics or Wall Street, he's a goddamn drop case."

  He's said, "So far as I can figure out, the only three ways to get to the top in business is to get born rich, marry it, or be so fuckin' dumb they can't do anything but promote you to get you out of the way."

  We do a couple of other things during the off-season that have helped Shake form this opinion. We have lunch a lot with dumb-asses who are "friends" of the Giants, and we spend a few random nights in places like "Twenty-one" talking to other dumb-asses.

  I guess we like to drink and laugh at the drop cases or we wouldn't do it.

  In fact, Shake once said he'd be perfectly happy if the whole world was semi-dark and indoors. That's a pretty funny line that's been quoted by a lot of other people around Clarke's and Manuche's.

  Maybe if Shake wasn't a ball player he'd be a stud in public relations because he's handsome, a dude dresser, and has the gift of bullshit. I think he'd be good in television, if he wanted to do it, and from the money he's made for us in investments, I know damn well he could run a curl pattern on Wall Street.

  Our apartment is pretty much known as a landmark around town.

  It's the penthouse on the eighteenth floor of a semi-new building at Sixty-fifth and First. We've got a big living room and a bar, two big bedrooms, a kitchen with a bar, and a terrace. Shake has done it up pretty neat with thick carpet all over and comfortable furniture. And we've got a couple of fireplaces.

  We've got stereo coming out of everywhere and color TV's built in here and there. We've got some paintings on the walls that Shake likes because you can make them out to be whatever you want them to be. There are a few blown-up photographs of us around, scoring touchdowns and getting our dicks knocked off.

  There's a great big photograph of Puddin Patterson's little cousins, Albert and Bowie, sitting on our bench on a cold day at Yankee Stadium, sitting between me and Shake.

  Oh, yeah, and we've got a Siamese cat named Martha Nell who's a rotten, surly bitch that hates us and tries to eat up all of our cashmere sweaters.

  Mainly, our apartment is known as a landmark because we have a considerable number of parties there, some planned and some not. We always have one after a home game. Most of the guys on the team come up to see if we've discovered any new stewardesses in the building, or if Barbara Jane has any new model friends who might be half-horny.

  When we first got up to New York we instituted the regular Monday afternoon all-skate during the fall. This was a thing where we got a few friends and a few light hooks to come in, get drunk, take naked, and have what we called an Eastern Regional Eat-Off.

  Some of our TV friends that we met learned how to drop by for lunch, take part in the skate, and still make the old five forty-seven to Greenwich.

  T.J. Lambert still holds the record for having performed the most formidable deed at a Monday all-skate.

  One time there were these three spade hooks in attendance. They were hard-hitters and really good-natured. They let T.J. get them defrocked and boost them up on the mantel over the fireplace in the living room.

  I can still see them sitting up there with their legs spread, singing like the Supremes, while T.J. took turns eating all three.

  T.J. still refers to our apartment as "Sperm City."

  Well, I got to go off to the bright lights of Beverly Hills now. Probably ought to just stay here in our palatial suite and drink milk shakes since the dog-ass Jets are coming up for us Sunday.

  But like Shake is prone to say at times, "Can't a man ever unwind? Is it all just work and worry?" That's his way of excusing a few young Scotches and a couple of drags on those anti-God cigarettes that a man gets handed to him now and then.

  Might be some of that tonight, in fact.

  So this is Billy Clyde Puckett's last mercy message of the evening. The port side is starting to list. Clear the rafts. Hymn singers and female impersonators over the side first.

  Hope I don't need my I.D. card to get a drink in the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  Which suddenly reminds me of what Shake Tiller used to say when we were kids and somebody would ask our age before selling us a cold Pearl.

  Shake would have the collar turned up on his khaki shirt and he'd have his shades on and a cigarette in his teeth, and he'd say:

  "Nobody ever asked us how old we were in the Mekong Delta."

  PART TWO

  The Wool Market

  When I think of all the men you must have killed

  With those looks that you go lookin' at 'em with,

  When I think of all the good homes that you've broke

  With those promises you've whispered and you've spoke

  Then I wonder why the Lord has gone and willed

  That a Hard-hittin' Woman ain't no myth.

  — from "Hard-hittin' Woman,"

  a song by Elroy Blunt

  AN APPROPRIATE TUNE TO BE FURNISHING back-glound music right now would be "Wore Out Mother," one of Elroy Blunt's first big ones.

  The point is, I'm just a little bit tired after last night. It might have to be a wrap so far as my night life is concerned until after we've dough-popped the dog-ass Jets.

  That place we were at, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, was what you might call semi-O.K. if what a man has on his mind is drinking and smoking and fooling around with goddess women.

  Cissy Walford ran about eighth and even Barbara lane would have been caught in a photo finish. That's how me and Shake gauged it at the peak hour in terms of sheer physical legs, lungs, asses, ankles and faces.

  Now if you think that's not stronger than T.J. Lambert's underwear, then you can bust me.

  Only the Old Skipper in the great beauty pageant in the sky could have known who most of these young things were. Or how they came up so glorious. It was just a whole pile of have bosoms, will travel; of long, tough legs; of extra-long, serious hair; and of soulful eyes.

  Barbara Jane said they were what you call your southern California witches.

  There isn't much to them, really, except physical stupendousness. They just sort of slouch around and toss their serious hair and do these slow dances by themselves, or with fags, with not too many clothes on. And if they speak at all, it is only something like, "Oh, hi. Didn't we meet at Screen Gems?"

  We asked around who some of them were. We asked whether they were movie stars or semi-starlets or models, but you can't get any straight answers from people who live out here.

  For instance, one of the persons we asked was the Western TV star, Boke Kellum, who sat with us, much to Cis
sy Walford's delight.

  And all Boke Kellum said was, "They're all a bunch of silly pussies with hideous make-up."

  Our general view was that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was a fairly nifty place, take away a few fags.

  When you walk in, you go down some steps into a trench up to your waist and you begin to hear the muffled sounds of explosions and gunfire. And it seemed like we also heard some kind of serious voice reciting the Declaration of Independence off in the distance.

  A fag spook in black pajamas comes up to you and asks if you're a member or anybody important. Then he leads you to a bunker where people are laying around on sandbags. The trench winds all around the place, to other bunkers, and other people. Everybody has to look up to the dance floor where the southern California witches are.

  There are mosquito nets draped all around and everything is camouflaged in brown and yellow and green. It is sort of dark and there's a small spotlight that stays pointed at a portrait on the wall of Ho Chi Minh.

  You don't hear the music so much in the bunkers because of the muffled gunfire and explosions and the Declaration of Independence. But up on the dance floor, you can hear it because it comes down out of the ceiling, out of guns mounted on the wing of an American jet fighter plane that seems to be halfway poked through the ceiling.

  We thought the whole place smelled somewhat like grass.

  This might have been because Boke Kellum didn't see anything wrong with lighting up a few times and passing the little darlings around. The waitresses didn't seem to mind taking a hit or two, which tended to have some effect on the service.

  When I got to the bunker where my pals were, I couldn't tell for the dark who all was there at first. The first thing I saw was Boke Kellum sitting next to Cissy Walford. He stuck out his hand and said, "A real pleasure to meet a fellow athlete. I played a little football myself at Indiana State."

  Like shit, I thought.

  He had a real tough handshake like he was testing the stud hoss's grip, or trying to cover up the dicks he's swallowed.

  Shake was propped up on a sandbag with his arm around Barbara Jane.