Chinaberry Sidewalks (18 page)

A few minutes later, my father was bounding down the steps with reams of paper tucked under each arm. Without expression, he pitched the bundles in the trunk and drove us home.

It was after a supper of grits and fried wieners that he finally spoke. “I’m fixin’ to wake you up early in the mornin,’ so you might as well go on and get in the bed.”

I took the suggestion at face value.

The next morning was Saturday, and true to his word I was awakened before dawn. “Get on outta that bed and start thinkin’ up them songs you been singin.’ We’re fixin’ to deliver some circulars.”

Starting on Lane Street and working my way back home, I hand-delivered 750 “Elect J. R. ‘Booger’ Attenberry, Director of Parks and Recreation” flyers, each one rolled up and stuck in screen-door handles or folded and placed in mailboxes. Creeping along in the Studebaker, my father made sure I sang my heart out with every delivery.

His enthusiasm never sagged. “Come on, boy!” he’d shout from behind the wheel. “Sing that song. You call that singin’? I want you to reach down in there and sing like you do over at that schoolhouse. Don’t make me get outta this car.”

Half a block into the exercise, I was cured. Singing my way past houses where Beverly Drake and Betty Jo Branch lived was enough to ensure I wouldn’t sing so much as “Happy Birthday” even with a gun pointed at my head.

An hour and a half passed before he slackened the pressure. It was a clever mercy. But before I could find comfort in the reprieve, I’d be back warbling the remains of a repertoire in serious stages of decomposition. Eventually, he’d allow a few blocks to pass before cranking the humiliation up again.

The last straw came when I made a right-hand turn off Mercury Drive onto Munn Street. No sooner had it registered that this was the block where LaQuita Freeman lived than I found myself sprinting to the driver’s-side door with what came out sounding like a prepared speech. “I think you’re doing the right thing out here tryin’ to break me from singin’ in class and all. But you’re gonna have to let me off singin’ on this block.”

He spit a Pall Mall shred off the end of his tongue to indicate he was listening.

“I’m never gonna sing in class again as long as I live. I don’t even know why I did it in the first place. I hated them songs. I’ll sing out loud on ever’ block from the next one all the way to Market Street if you want me to, but not on this one. Don’t try to make me do it, because I won’t.”

“All right, son,” he said, squelching a smile. Shoving the Studebaker in low gear, he eased on up the street.

I delivered the last three or four hundred flyers in silence. My days of singing aloud in class, unconscious or otherwise, were history. Hell would sport icicles before I’d tune up again. And that’s the truth if I never told it.

Shotzie Goes Deep

N
ear the end of a particularly rainy summer in 1960, my father signed on as weekend foreman for the Texas Ice and Fuel Company. As far back as the late forties, he’d driven a delivery route for the ice purveyors and had become one of the owner’s drinking buddies. With his sights set on learning carpentry, he’d quit the ice business and gone to work for a slew of construction conglomerates, most notably Brown and Root. Through all this, their friendship lasted, and with it a source for extra cash when outdoor work turned spotty. His first assignment was overseeing the Sunday morning delivery to Jeppesen Stadium, the high school facility where for the first five years of their existence the brand-new Houston Oilers played every home game. On the same turf where six high school teams played their Thursday and Friday night schedule, the Oilers won the American Football League’s first two championships and barely missed a third, losing by three points to the Dallas Texans in a rain-soaked triple overtime.

Icing down a 26,000-seat football stadium was a four-man enterprise. As boss of this operation, my father named me his helper, an act that resulted in his pulling the weight of two men. While I was pretending to make over-the-shoulder catches, he was hauling hundred-pound canvas bags full of crushed ice from the bed of a half-sized pickup built specifically for navigating the narrow ramps leading from the stadium’s field level to the upper deck. In less time than it took his counterparts to finish their half of the undertaking, he single-handedly filled the metal chests lining every concession on ours.

One of the perks of his head-honcho status was that he and I worked the home-team side of the stadium exclusively. And there were two sizeable cherries sitting atop this good fortune: one, delivering two hundred pounds of crushed ice to the home team’s dressing room, and the other, two free tickets in the end-zone bleachers.

We made it our habit to save the task of icing down the Oilers’ locker room for last, which pact increased the chances of rubbing elbows with old-school warriors who’d take the field in the Oilers’ trademark blue and white. One rainy Sunday I glimpsed Billy Cannon, the Heisman Trophy halfback whose receding hairline made him look older than my father, changing his cleats with a pair of pliers. And while my father was pouring ice in the Oilers’ beer trough, George Blanda caught me staring at his massive jaw line. “Whatsa matter, kid?” he grumbled. “You never see a mug this ugly?” Mussing my cowlick with a Promethean throwing hand, the all-pro quarterback smiled. “I’m just kiddin’, son. I’ll tell you what, though. Playin’ in this league, it doesn’t hurt to be ugly.”

I have a clear memory of a whip-thin Jim Norton, the team’s punter and defensive back, clad in a jock strap and flip-flops, squirreling away a six-pack of Nehi grape soda in the bottom of the cooler. And Charlie “the Human Bowling Ball” Tolar, all five foot six and 210 pounds of him, sporting a beaver Stetson and bumming a smoke off the equipment manager. Orville Trask gave me half of his Hershey’s bar, and crew-cut Charlie Hennigan, my favorite Oiler and the record holder for most pass receptions in a single season, patted me on the head and asked if I wanted to play on the team when I grew up. I wonder if he knew that I’d lingered near his locker for that extra twenty seconds in hopes he’d notice a ten-year-old boy who emulated his every move.

With our work completed, my dad and I climbed up to row 26, seats C and D, and settled into enjoying the pregame warm-ups, discussing the finer points of this or that player’s possible contributions. My father was defense-minded and a big Mike Dukes fan. “If Dukes ain’t hungover, we’re fixin’ to put a lid on Denver’s runnin’ game, betcha a buffalo nickel.”

“Yeah, but if Hennigan and Groman don’t haul ’em in—”

“We can’t win if we don’t stop the run.”

“We can’t win if we don’t score points.”

“I’d just as soon see us win seven to six as anything.”

“How about fifty-five to nothin’?”

“Fifty-five to nothin’d do.”

Before profit margins and spectator safety placed a retractable net between the place kicker and the cheap seats, extra points and field goals landed freely in the end-zone bleachers, where the ensuing tussle for a pigskin souvenir at times caused as much bloodshed as the game being played on the field.

One cold Sunday in December, my father got both his hands on a ball that was then sent flying by a wallop to the back of his head. To the hooligans who’d pummeled him from behind, he joked, “Boys, y’all reckon we oughta work together on the next one?” But to me he confided, “I shoulda had it, son. I dang sure shoulda had it.”

Hey, J-Bo, didn’t you practically put me inside the Oilers’ huddle? Screw some Norman Rockwell version of a Boy Scout upbringing, the solidity of its camping trips and merit badges, and screw the guilt-tripping baby boomer who coined the candy-assed axiom “quality time.” We’ve got two championships to dine out on forever.

.  .  .

In the Oilers’ glory years—the bow-and-arrow fad of ’61 notwithstanding—Billy Duncan, Dennis Reed, Marion Clark, Donnie Schott, Dabbo, and I could usually be found playing touch football, a thirty-five-yard strip of Norvic Street between Mrs. Boyd’s driveway and Mr. Carnew’s water meter our field of play. “Two-below”—short for touching the ball carrier with two hands, below the belt—was the nexus of our existence. Oncoming traffic, parked cars, garbage cans, tree branches, and approaching darkness were as much a part of the action as buttonhooks, quick outs, and the stop and go.

Nine out of ten contests pitted Marion, Dennis, and “Dunk” (Billy Duncan) against Dabbo, Donnie, and me. Donnie Schott, whom we affectionately nicknamed “Shotzie” or, depending on the situation, “Shotz-Mo-Dilly-Ack,” suffered from a violent strain of cerebral palsy. In the parlance of the times, he was a total spastic. Flailing arms, spidery legs, misshapen speech—Shotzie didn’t so much talk as bray loudly—and the grandfather of all protruding chests drew attention away from his soulful blue eyes. Together with these afflictions, his close resemblance to a blond Elvis Presley, circa 1954, seemed a cruel joke. Life wasn’t remotely fair for this sensitive soul.

His parents, whom I saw but once, and then from a distance, constructed small living quarters in the back of their garage, where their son, it seemed to his gridiron-crazed cohorts, lived in exile. Cot, sink, commode, desk, chair, and transistor radio gave it the feel of a jail cell. But for his inclusion in our continuing run of fun and games, it seemed that Donnie Schott lived a life void of human interaction.

In the early days Dunk, the oldest and most gifted athlete on the block, instinctively picked Shotzie to play on his team. His own natural size and speed, offset by Shotzie’s disadvantages, made the games more evenly matched. But once I’d nursed our spastic friend through the first of countless epileptic seizures, it was a given that he and I belonged on the same team.

As the unofficial captain and play caller for our trio, I was glad to have him. He was loyal and, in spite of his pretzeled body, a determined defender. Plus, I had the sneaking suspicion that, sooner or later, he was bound to contribute something on offense.

It took him most of the ’62 season to get the hang of hiking the ball. Even then, his accuracy was so sporadic that my chances of hitting Dabbo with a pass while he was still open were, at best, one in five. And what if, God forbid, one of his flubbed hikes was the cause of our team giving up six points? Time to get out the earplugs, because an agitated Shotz-Mo-Dilly-Ack was prone to repeating some seriously deafening blather. After a bad snap, he’d start ranting about me wanting to kick him off the team, until I was forced to yell louder than him, “Shut up and hike the damn ball, Shotzie. You know I’m not gonna kick you off the stupid team.”

By the start of the ’63 season, Shotzie was hiking and blocking well enough that I started drawing up plays with him in mind. Spread over the first half of the season, a sideline pass here and a lateral there—most of them dropped—revealed a weakness in Dunk’s game plan. He and the boys weren’t bothering to defend Shotzie, an oversight that gave me the idea for a onetime shot at hitting him with a long bomb.

In a game nearing the end of the season, behind by six with darkness descending, we had the ball even with Mrs. Boyer’s rear tire, twenty-five yards from the goal line. “Dabbo, line up left, next to the Packard, and come around for a fake reverse,” I said in a low voice, tracing his movements on the asphalt. “Dunk and Dennis’ll follow you and Marion’ll rush me. Shotzie, hike it on two and go long. I’m gonna hit you deep.”

Before barking the signals, I sneaked a glance at Dabbo, who with his fingers crossed behind his back looked every bit the designated receiver. Dunk noticed this and inched closer to the line of scrimmage. Dennis, too, cheated a step in Dabbo’s direction. Marion lined up to the right of Shotzie, arms dangling, head tilted forward, body bent slightly in the middle, like a long-distance runner awaiting a starting gun.

“Ready-down-set, hut one, hut two.” For perhaps the third time in three years, Shotzie hiked a perfect spiral. As predicted, Dunk and Dennis shadowed Dabbo while Marion slid past Shotzie’s brush block and came tearing after me.

I looked up and saw my intended receiver lurching down the middle of the street like some overgrown mantis. Faking the reverse to Dabbo and freezing Dunk and Dennis in their tracks, I lobbed a wobbling pass that landed lazily in Shotzie’s open arms. For a split-second he stood admiring the ball as if it were a treasure fallen from the sky.

“Run, Shotzie!” Dabbo and I yelled in unison. “Run!”

And run he did.

By the time he reached Mrs. Boyd’s driveway, our teammate had a head of steam the likes of which his twisted body had never attained. Remembering his touchdown, I can still see the scoliosis letting go of his spine as he charged through the Kilroy Street intersection. Dabbo and I lit out after him immediately, Dunk, Marion, and Dennis throwing off their dejection and joining in the chase. A third of the way into the next block and still fifty yards behind him, I heard Dunk marvel, “Look at him go. He looks like Crazy Legs Hirsch.”

When Shotzie turned left onto Mercury Drive, Dabbo, Dunk, and I ran home to get our bicycles. When we caught up with him, halfway through the Munn Street intersection, he was bellowing, “Rodney hit me deep! Rodney hit me deep!” in rhythm with his stride. “Whoa, Mo-Dilly-Ack!” I called after him. “You tied the game! Time to back it on off!” But Shotzie kept on chugging and bellowing. Only Dunk’s motioning for the ball changed the cadence of his chant, and then only for a beat. “No, it’s mine!” he bawled, wrapping his arms more tightly around the ball.

And so we rode silently alongside our galloping friend through two more intersections before he collapsed breathless in a vacant lot, seven and a half blocks beyond the goal line.

Letting our bikes fall in the grass, we sat cross-legged while Shotzie sobbed from the pit of his soul. He cried as though wrenching the tears from the very marrow of his elongated bones. When he began to convulse, shuddering like a puppy with distemper, Dabbo and Dunk were moved to dredge unspoken mercies from some shared bottomless quarry, and not until his heart lay parched did I even think of lifting his head from my lap.

By the time we’d resurrected our friend and set out walking him home, it was dark. Pushing our bikes and quietly commemorating his catch, we found a tranquil stride that delivered the four of us back to the Schott residence.

We stood watching that day’s hero move listlessly up the driveway, the sodium luminescence of the corner streetlamp lighting his path. “Hey, Shotz-Mo,” Dunk called after him, tossing a left-handed spiral that flew past his hands and bounced with a hollow thud off his protruding breastbone, “you hold the ball till tomorrow,” and Shotzie retrieved the errant pigskin and disappeared into the black canvas of his family’s backyard.

It wasn’t for lack of trying that Shotzie’s catch stands as his lone shining moment on the asphalt gridiron. In the aftermath of his touchdown we periodically ran the same play, but never successfully. And though he never gave less than an all-out effort, pay dirt came but once to my spastic teammate.

In the weeks that followed, no less than twenty times before the start of a new game, he’d bray for me to hit him deep, that he was on my team. It was as if his memory of hiking the ball to me exclusively for three years had somehow got lost on his marathon run. Reassurances were a waste of breath. If we were lucky, a soothing “Yes, you’re on my team, Shotz-Mo” would halt his barrage for a full ten seconds. A couple of times I lost patience and shouted, “Shotzie, when are you gonna get it through your thick skull that you’re
always
on my team!” But no sooner had these words dissolved into nothingness than he was back ranting his standard theme. “Hit me deep, I’m on your team.”

Only the opening kickoff on a new game of two-below silenced Shotzie’s need to make known his preference to play on my team.