Life Among Giants (18 page)

So it wasn't a shock when an anonymous someone sent a small
New Haven Register
clipping via the front office: Kate had driven the newest of Jack's Volvos down a boat ramp at some park east of New Haven and straight out into Long Island Sound—the car floated twenty minutes before she got a window open—then, help not arriving, she
swam
nearly a mile to New Haven, climbing out of the icy water near the summer theater down there, her illness like a furnace to keep her warm. Dripping and naked, she traipsed all the way through the city to her old residence hall, where she was found calmly sitting in her former entranceway, found and gathered in by several kind young Yale women offering blankets and towels.

Jack had asked for help, and I hadn't come through. Guilt's alchemy left me feeling nothing but fury, fury at Kate, fury at whomever had sent the news item, fury at the girls of Yale, fury at the huge new mattress stuffed into my bedroom (five-hundred-dollar sheets), fury even at Jack, who was blameless. He'd used his connections and modest wealth and probably every ounce of his pride and gotten my sister placed in a great in-patient program in Boston.

M
Y NEXT DINNER
with Coach and the owners was postponed, postponed, and then never mentioned again.
Th
e official interest in my family and my personal life faded. Coach Shula didn't have me up to the office. No more hands on the shoulders. No more confidence building. No more queries after my happiness.
Th
e season went on, ten wins, four losses, not bad but no playoff berth, which, of course, eleven and three would have brought. I suited up with the rest, disconnected from them.
Th
e months passed, the off-season unfolded, winter in Florida, spring, a lot of rain.

Th
en, in summer training camp, Bob Griese tore ligaments in his knee. Don Strock took over as the season opened, which meant I was second in line, called on to run a play or two in nearly every game of 1978 and 1979, full quarters in eight games in those seasons, successful quarters, too, including my patented brand of head-on touchdown runs, slowly erasing the memory of my lapse. By 1980 Bob Griese's injuries had taken their toll. Career effectively over, he stepped off the team and toward the Hall of Fame and a stellar career as a sportscaster. Anyway, I saw an opening in the forest where the tree had come down, raced toward the sunlight, saw myself succeeding Strock, who couldn't go on forever.

But in the next year's draft the team picked up a new phenom, LSU helmsman David Woodley. He and Strock alternated starts from his first game: soon the fans were calling them Woodstrock. Strock didn't last long, just as everyone had predicted, and 1982 was my big year, second behind Woodley, a lot of action, scraps of fame, full respect, dinners with Coach, Woodley fading, once again the light ahead of me. But in 1983 Dan Marino came on board, and he'd prove to be one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of the game.

9

Around that time, Carter Jeffries and Lionel Smith let it be known that they were looking to open an upscale soul-food restaurant in the old city, part of a revitalization scheme the city council of Miami had cooked up, all kinds of tax breaks and rent incentives, an endless flow of cruise-ship customers by contract, not to mention a home base for Carter's flashy party scene.
Th
ey only needed a little more money and someone to take the reins—a minor financial partner who'd take a major managerial role.
Th
ey'd be the famous football players, the public face of the place; all that was needed was some poor sap to run the place, or make that a rich sap. I wasn't tempted.

But then one night in the middle of the season I sat up in the enormous bed Kate had bought, her silk sheets rustling, her down comforter sliding to the floor.

Why not?

It wasn't like my last years with the Dolphins were going to keep me very busy, and on my new month-to-month contract (including humiliating pay cut), who knew when the end would come, except soon? My experience cooking with Honey had touched something in me, real pleasure in the handling and transformation of food. Carter just laughed when I told him all that after team meeting one Monday, showing those famous gold inlays. “I suppose she made you
Black,
too!”

I knew nothing about restaurants, even less about business, and nothing about soul food, true, but none of that mattered, or so I argued: all of that stuff could be learned. With me they'd have a tall and memorable presence in the house, David “Lizard” Hochmeyer himself, still Miami's tenth most eligible bachelor.

O
UR TIMING WAS
excellent, as it turned out, downtown enjoying a resurgence, and soul food a long turn as the fad of the moment. Our enterprise, called Soul Train, was a bustling success from opening night forward. Carter signed autographs and hosted big, free-for-all sports discussions at the bar. Lionel acted as dining-room manager, seating his adoring fans, sprinting out dinners in front of the wait staff, a lot of fun for everyone.

But w
ithin a few months of constant crush, the flaws in the restaurant came clear: the kitchen set-up was clumsy, the head chef a nasty lush, the wait staff quirky in a bad way. Two reviewers called the menu stereotypical. One went so far as to say our food was “coarse, gross, loaded with sugar and fat and salt and starch, mistaking volume for quality, fine enough food for the defensive line, maybe.”

Ouch.

Business began to fall off.

Carter knew a real chef, one Etienne LaRoque, an old college acquaintance of his. We flew him in from Mobile, where he ran a health-food kitchen of some kind, not very promising. Carter had warned us about all the tattoos—didn't matter, I was shocked anyway.
Th
e guy was covered, even his scalp, even his face, the Virgin Mary benevolent on his
forehead,
her soulful eyes gazing out over his own.

At Carter's seaside mansion, in his private kitchen, Etienne prepared meals for us through two long days. He was a whirlwind, from the butcher's shop to the fish dock to the farm sheds to Carter's kitchen.

“So it's soul food,” the interviewee said, first lunch.

“Soul food sure enough,” said Carter.

Dish by dish it came out, a perfectly timed progression: red beans and rice and fresh pickles and cornbread and actual chitterlings and thick pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy, collard greens with pig's feet, sweet potato pie with a ginger-pecan crust. We'd brought in our best waiter and the poor guy shuttled back and forth to the pool and the beach with tastes all afternoon, Etienne alone in the kitchen making dinner for twenty but sending out little leek tarts and strange squid sticks and samples of sweet teas, kale-pesto corn fritters, knuckle-jelly “caviar,” an endless stream of riffs on our theme, more and more formal as we came off the beach and dressed and our guests began to arrive: four teammates (more than half a ton in aggregate), also their very lovely wives (barely a quarter ton), also Miami mayor Hector Hernandez and his toothy daughters, also three local chefs we'd gotten to know, also special guests of my own: Benedikta and her husband, the redoubtable Crabtree, not the first time I'd met him, but the first time I'd ever seen her at night. Out of her office she seemed tall and severe, less glamorous despite the dressing up, not the woman I knew.

I helped the waiter serve a potato-and-fatback soup, taking my tastes when I could, unbelievably clean and flavorful given the humble ingredients. Crabtree, a guy who liked to talk, had the mayor's ear, a guy who didn't like to listen. Benedikta closely monitored their conversation. She wanted to bring spiritual healing to government, muttered the appropriate chants under her breath. I hoped she was impressed with me. Etienne had meanwhile gone Cajun, blackening thick cuts from redfish filets (this is before that prep was well known), smoke like a forest fire filling the kitchen, sudden, thrilling food emerging from the conflagration, actual
applause
when Etienne came out to see what we thought. During the first wine break (Etienne's small-plate pairings, a peppery ceviche with a surprising French blush, Vietnamese stuffed baby cabbages with a Malbec of all things, then seven fresh salsas with seven fast whites to put to a vote, then—
what?
—a flight of miniature knishes and blinis with three Polish noodle soups, very small servings, quick visits in his spotless apron for commentary, shots of vodka.

“But is this considered soul food?” the mayor said.

Etienne looked him up and down: “It's all soul food when I make it, baby.”

His rich Jamaican accent morphed as he cooked and visited and joked into a Creole patois, then into a Detroit homeboy street rap, then into stiff-lipped Andover Prep, then just plain earnest New Jersey suburban (his actual heritage), and back to Jamaican.

Benedikta excused herself, wandered onto the deck and then out to the beach, disappeared. I exited through the kitchen, made my way round the dune. She looked more herself in the moonlight, more her own height with the heels kicked off.

“Obviously hire him,” she said.

I put my arm around her, tried to draw her in.

“You're thinking our sexual relationship will transfer from my professional space to yours.” Hard to tell when she was kidding.

I said, “No, no.
Th
is is the beach.”

“And you thought perhaps under moonlight we could move our relationship a little toward the romantic and away from the clinical. Well, David. I do like the moonlight. I do like the sea air. I do like you. I like the tension right now, as well. I'd like, actually, to be pressed down in the sand and ravished. But in fact I prefer a therapeutic tension. You have an appointment Monday, I believe.”

I said, “You are in fact a strange woman.”

She swayed for my benefit, said, “I am in fact drunk. Also, sweetie, I don't want a bunch of sand in my panties.” With that she let me kiss her, a nice companionable smooch, not very promising.

“How's that for therapeutic tension?” I said.

“I'll bill you,” she said.

“For one kiss?”

“I'll bill you the whole dinner, darling—we're going on four hours.”

She kissed me a little more, found a brief moment of passion. I gathered her long dress in my hands fold by fold, eventually found the skin of her legs.

“Sorry, no,” she said. “Crabtree will taste you later.”

“He's so sensitive?”

She ignored me, looked out to sea. She said, “Also, I'm puzzling over things here. I see you trying to erase yourself, all your accomplishments, all your sorrows, trying to slip into a new world where you can be a kid again, a figurative kid, learning new things, around new people, lessons from adults, a new school. Right—you're the new kid, you're going to be the new kid. And nothing that happened back in the old neighborhood will matter anymore.”

“You're losing me.”

“I predict. I refuse to play parent. Carter—he's your dad, I'm going to say, your proto-father. And this new one, with the tattoos, with the woman on his face and in his body, he's to be your mom.”

“
Th
ey'll never live up to Nick and Barb.”

“You aren't funny.”

I gathered her in again.

After a while, she said, “You are growing invisible.”

“I'm right here.”

“But some other creature is taking your place.”

Th
e waves came in set by set and there were freighters at anchor out there, long strings of lights. By separate routes and staggered timing, we found that Etienne had seated everyone in the living room and was actually giving a
talk,
explaining the points he'd been making about service and métier, as he called it, also a few notes on pricing. Afterwards, all of us comfortable there, he served a kind of alcoholic espresso pudding, whoa.

I didn't mind the idea of a new family. I looked at Etienne with thoroughgoing interest.

“A restaurant needs a great name,” he said as we ate.

“Soul Train,” Lionel answered. Maybe Lionel could be my uncle.

“Your tattoos,” Crabtree said as we ate, total non sequitur, unable till then to ask whatever question he'd had in mind. Talk about an erased man.

Etienne pulled his shirt off to show that he was covered, Mother Mary continuing down his chest and into his trousers, whirligigs and creatures and stray words, little portraits, numerous flowers, a lot of vines. I felt suddenly that my future was in his hands. And more, that he held the key to the past.

Etienne pretended to unbutton his trousers: more to show, ha-ha.

With that, the mayor and his daughters applauded, stood on cue, shook all our hands, and quickly left. More slowly, more applause, lots of hugs and encomiums, our teammates thanked us, thanked Etienne, and staggered out on the arms of their wives. I gave the waiter the pair of hundred-dollar bills Carter had slipped me to tip him.
Th
e visiting chefs left in deep conversation: there was a new master in their midst.

Carter hustled Lionel and me back to the spotless kitchen for the briefest possible conference. When had Etienne had time to clean?
Th
ree thumbs up. Our man entered with the last dishes in his hands.

“Floridiana,” he announced, the name all but visibly coming to him at just that moment.

“Soul Train,” Lionel said forcefully.

“Floridiana,” Carter preached, his comical best: “Gives us some
latitude,
and not just
attitude.
And try it on your
tongue-uh.
Floridiana! It's music, it's location, it's the
ocean-uh,
it's the farm, it's the colored people, but baby, it's everybody
else-uh,
too.”

He raised his hands, I raised mine. We regarded Lionel till he raised his reluctant hands in the air.

“You got the
spirit,
” Carter said more seriously. “And Etienne here gets his name: Floridiana-uh!”
Th
en he made the offer: six-figure salary, profit sharing after a year, full bennies immediately, the works. Etienne looked touched, went all dramatic, plain homeboy New Jersey accent: “I want to. I would love to. It's just that there's something I have to confess. Something Floridiana must know before it hires me. Might even be a deal breaker. I'm sorry, gentlemen, to have waited.
Th
ere just wasn't the opportunity. I'm happy Floridiana likes my food. I'm
happy
you like it.
Th
ose pork chops?
Th
ose were fun to make!
Th
ey were fun, right?”

We clambered to reassure him, dark possibilities flashing through our besotted brains. We knew about the drug arrests.
Th
at part of his life, we'd been assured, was more than ten years gone. And obviously, he was gay, not exactly unusual in Miami. In fact, he'd put it plainly. Tattoos, fine. Had he killed someone in prison? What language did you use to withdraw an offer?

Our man played the moment to maximum effect, held the silence to its breaking point, looked at each of us in turn, divulged his secret, great comedy from a great comedian: “Gentlemen, I'm vegetarian.”

“Fucker!”
Carter shouted after a beat.

U
NANNOUNCED,
I
FLEW
north to see my sister at McLean up in Boston—an intense and well-kept place with a kindly vibe, corridors full of brisk staff and apologetic patients roaming. I waited over an hour to learn that my sister had been moved into a residential house on the outskirts of the campus, a pretty clapboard place where the inmates cooked their own meals, did their own cleaning, formed a kind of family, worked to help themselves toward long-term recovery.

My touchstone, my living history, my heart, Lady Kate opted not to see me that first afternoon—stupid of me to just show up at reception—but the nurse said she'd invited me back for the next afternoon's “open family period.”