North Dallas Forty (16 page)

I just nodded, transfixed by the glow in Harvey’s eyes.

“They ran me outta my own kitchen with stern looks and vengeful remarks about dudes,” he complained.

“Dudes? ... what?” I only heard
dudes
but the word seemed such a strange shape to come out of Harvey’s mouth.

I repeated it out loud as I watched it tumble to the floor at Harvey’s feet.

“Yeah, I know.” Harvey looked down at his feet. “It’s a strange word, isn’t it?”

I burst into laughter, Harvey joined in, and we both laughed uncontrollably, gasping for air, tears rolling down our cheeks.

Harvey suddenly stopped laughing and started out the door back toward the kitchen. I followed automatically.

The four girls were huddled around the giant cable spool that served as the kitchen table. They took no notice of us.

“This is Phillip.” Harvey spoke in a lower tone than normal, slumped his shoulders, and hung his head. I recognized the submission and followed suit, just smiling and raising a hand, palm out, shoulder high, in a short wave.

Judy, sitting across the spool, looked up and smiled. The girl next to her, with a squarish face, wearing a fatigue jacket with
Rhinehart
on the pocket, frowned and nodded, not bothering to look up. The other two kept their backs to us and nodded absently. They continued their conversation.

I shivered again as more energy surged through me. A flash of movement by the stove startled me and I turned quickly to investigate. The hard lines of the stove started to waver as I stared. It seemed to move, a rippling motion that blurred the distinct edges. I tried to petrify the stove with my gaze, but the harder I stared the more violent the motion became.

I glanced over to the four girls. Rhinehart was rolling a joint. I walked over to join the caucus.

“Could I smoke some of that with you?” I asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible.

“That’s what it’s for, ain’t it?” Rhinehart said.

The
ain’t it
confused me, as I wasn’t sure if she expected an answer, and if she did, what the correct answer was, there being so many popular opinions as to what dope was truly for. The confusion served its purpose. During the pause she finished the joint and passed it to me first.

I dragged deeply and, sitting down in the only empty chair, I passed the joint to Judy on my left.

“What do you do?”

I knew the question was for me, but it seemed so out of place. In the alternate culture you weren’t supposed to ask people what they did.

I made a palms-up gesture of unknowing. Mixed in somewhere were feelings of modesty.

“Do? ... What do you do?” It was Rhinehart and she seemed impatient.

“I’m a folk hero ... contemporary folk hero.” I set my jaw, surprised but satisfied with my answer.

“You a singer?” Her tone was cautious, not wanting to be discourteous if I was a folk hero, but she was most definitely not to be put on.

“No. I’m an athlete. Professional athlete.” I liked the ring of it.

“You play for SMU?” She seemed interested.

“No ... ah ... I’m professional. I play professional football.” I was embarrassed at having to repeat it. I was sorry I hadn’t said I was an electrical contractor.

“For who?”

“Dallas—the team here in Dallas.”

“Oh.” Rhinehart’s interest vanished.

Suddenly the girl in the poncho burst out laughing.

“Folk hero—I get it ...” She continued to laugh. “All those square little people in their square little houses watching you on their square little picture tubes... .”

I wasn’t sure I had meant it like that, or for that matter how I had meant it, but it really pleased her, so I smiled and nodded. I felt calm and very much in control.

The phone rang several times in the next room. It was Maxwell for me.

“Phil, listen. I’ve gotten hung up with some of the people from the YMCA.” Maxwell’s voice sounded urgent. “Anyway, I’m gonna pass on Rock City.”

“Ah. All right, okay.” I nodded at the phone.

“But listen, meet me at the locker room around eight-thirty tomorrow. We’ll take a sauna.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve got a story you ain’t gonna believe.”

“Okay.” I immediately hung up. It makes me nervous to talk to people I can’t see. I reseated myself at the table. Harvey wandered out of the kitchen.

“... well, anyway ...” Rhinehart was in the middle of a story, “... I tol’ the motherfucker, he’d better have a goddam warrant.”

I wanted to listen to the story, but the harder I tried, the less I heard. I couldn’t follow a thought pattern. Everything seemed to be rushing into the past like a train into a tunnel.

“... we were afraid he’d been given shock treatments.” Rhinehart pierced my confusion.

“Had he?” Judy flinched expecting the worse.

“I dunno ... he didn’t say.”

The conversation ended, leaving everyone in confusion as to what to do next. I waited a moment, then walked head down out the kitchen door through the dining room and up the stairs to Harvey’s bedroom. I took a baggie of grass from the six in the nightstand and left a ten-dollar bill in the drawer. I returned downstairs and walked to the front of the house.

In the living room the stereo was on full volume. Harvey was lying on the floor, eyes closed, with the huge KLH speakers on either side of his head, pressed against his ears. George Harrison was singing “My Sweet Lord.” I waved at the unseeing man and left.

As soon as I opened my car door, I saw that the glove compartment had been rifled. I quickly looked in. Nothing seemed to be missing. I placed the new baggie next to my last two joints and closed the glove box.

I started the Buick, pushed a tape into the deck, pulled into the street, and steered indirectly toward Rock City. I turned off Mockingbird onto Airline Road and wound my way through the sprawling campus of Southern Methodist University. Lovely rich girls in Levi’s, long hair, and moccasins, strolled purposefully across the wide lawns that divided the military-looking brick dormitories. Young bursting women, looking riper and naturally more beautiful than anything I could remember at 1960 Michigan State. I would never have believed it could seem so long ago; the old times and faces flashed yellowed through my memory.

But she came clearly back to mind. Her madras pleated skirt, white tennis shoes, and blue cardigan sweater thrown casually over her shoulders. A white round-collared blouse that often wrinkled open to reveal a small, firm breast tightly guarded by a stiff white 32B. She had dressed exactly like every other girl in the Kappa Kappa Gamma house. I loved her for her consistency.

I took great confidence from her exactness and conformity and began to dress myself in a blue blazer, gray slacks, and white Keds.

My outfit lacked the fraternity patch and it concerned her that I never resembled an intense Greek quite as much as I looked like a refugee from the big-band era.

I never joined a fraternity; I once pledged but refused to go through Hell Week. It seemed senseless to let accounting majors from Detroit or aspiring coaches from Kalamazoo perform comradely perversities on me just so I could live in a dirty little room in the bowels of a twenty-room house full of people I barely knew.

The act of pledging had given me a Big Brother, who was responsible for my emotional and physical development into a full-fledged Sigma Chi. He called every night during Hell Week and pleaded with me to come join in the fun. I refused politely, more out of laziness than conviction. I was touched by the man’s desire to have me as a lifelong fraternal friend and felt considerable guilt over “all the great contacts” I was going to miss.

A week later, I was in the center of the student union grill, sitting in the green circular booth reserved for athletes of distinction, when Big Brother, along with several other Sigma Chis and their dates, entered and took a booth in the Greek section at the opposite side of the cafeteria. I was delighted to have a chance to say hello and quickly excused myself from two black sprinters and a strangely deformed hockey player. I ambled across the crowded room in the half-limp, half-stumble perfected by college letter winners.

They all turned and watched my approach. The girls were dressed in madras skirts, white round-collared blouses, tennis shoes, and blue cardigan sweaters. I walked up and extended my hand to Big Brother, who was sitting inside next to a pretty girl. Before I could speak, he lunged past the girl, his hands clawing for my throat. I stepped back and pushed his hands away. He kept coming, swinging his fists wildly at my face.

It wasn’t much of a fight, the tiny Sigma Chi stood barely five feet six inches off the ground. He had to jump to try and land a blow above my shoulders. I held my arms in front of me and just let the blows rain off my chest and forearms. I was shocked and thoroughly embarrassed. I thought about getting mad but didn’t know how, or why.

Finally the infuriated man fell to his knees.

“You son of a bitch,” he sobbed. “I was the only man in the house with a depledge.”

I tried to tell the man it wasn’t his fault and also explain it wasn’t my fault, all the time wondering whose fault it was.

Now, crazed on mescaline, driving across another college campus twelve hundred miles and several light-years removed, I was beginning to understand. If a man is lonely enough, he will eat raw eggs, carry olives in his asshole, and let homosexual history majors from Flint beat his butt bloody with a paddle. He does it all in the belief that with the new morning they will have learned to love him by brutalizing him.

But when the ritualized humiliation ends, how can he admit to himself that it had no meaning and he is still alone, only momentarily distracted from the fear and loneliness and hatred that consumes us all?

Three girls passed in front of my Riviera and crossed the street to the art center. The girls were dressed, properly shabby, in Levi’s and work shirts. One, a pretty blonde, wore wire-rimmed glasses. They all had long straight hair that showed signs of bleaching at a point down their backs maybe two years ago.

I stared down the hood as they passed, the mescaline playing tricks with their faces. The girl in the wire rims looked into the car. I smiled into the eyes behind the glasses. Instinctively she turned back to her companions, offended that I would try to join her, even for an instant, a stranger uninvited.

I wondered if I had been younger, and driving a Volkswagen that towed a motorcycle: then would she have waved? It was hard to admit that I was passing to the back side of the generation gap and the future belonged to those people who called me mister. But I knew I would never try to join anything again, even youth.

I reached Lovers Lane and turned east, passing the house my wife and I occupied during our brief and stormy life together. Blind luck and laziness had saved me from Sigma Chi, but raw passion drew me to the Kappa parking lot and the steamy back seat of her car. Not long after we had moved into the house I came home early from a twenty-five-dollar speaking engagement and found her on the living room couch hidden beneath the naked mass of Jo Bob Williams. It was the only nice feeling I held for Jo Bob—he supplied the inescapable reason for ending the marriage.

The ensuing divorce proceedings were quite sticky, Jo Bob apparently only one of several teammates, mostly married, who had streamed through my house. A lopsided settlement leaving me broke and deeply in debt headed off a jury trial and Clinton Foote’s plan to trade me to Los Angeles before my court hearing exploded the always uneasy family situations of a good part of his team.

Later, I came to suspect even Maxwell, but I avoided the subject, as further repercussions would send me at least to Los Angeles and very possibly to Pittsburgh. She told the court I was a homosexual. I probably am, nothing would surprise me anymore.

The first rushes of the mescaline had smoothed out and I was sitting in the car watching the landscape zoom by when I suddenly realized Rock City was approaching me from the north. I had no idea how I had gotten there.

The marquee advertised Little Richard, currently promoted as “The Redman of Rock.” If it were true, Wounded Knee was more disastrous than currently believed.

“They’re inside, Mr. Elliott.” A black man held the outer door for me. I stepped into the foyer.

A large man with slick black hair and flaccid white skin swung his arms wide open in a grand gesture of embrace. A flesh-colored Band-Aid did a poor job of covering a huge boil on his chin.

“Phil—Phil baby.” He moved toward me. “Tony ...” he continued. “Tony Perelli. I met you in Vegas... . I’m the maitre d’ here.”

I flinched and shrank back. I tried to smile but only one side of my face responded.

“They’re all inside,” he said, grabbing my hand and pumping it furiously. “How many points you givin’ against New York?”

I pulled my hand free, still smiling lopsidedly, and moved past him through the double doors into the dark.

“How many ...” His voice trailed after me.

The show hadn’t started yet. The stage and house lights were off, and except for candles flickering on tables, the darkness was impenetrable. I recognized some laughter down close to the small raised stage and moved toward it. Shortly, I sat down next to Andy Crawford and his “Sock it to ’em” sweetheart, Susan Brinkerman.

The other faces at the table were familiar. Claridge and a redheaded Texas International stewardess named Fran that he dated often. John Wilson, the safety, had left his wife and kids at home and was in the company of a pumpkin-headed girl who resembled the classic Texas cocktail waitress. The black running back Thomas Richardson and his girl, the one who so horrified Donna Mae Jones at Casa Dominguez; and Sledge, the black rookie with the intimidatingly large penis. Steve Peterson, the stockbroker Jo Bob had harassed so unmercifully at Andy’s party, was at the far end of the table flanked by two very pretty girls. I just smiled, lowered my eyes, and didn’t say a word until the excitement and confusion of my entrance faded.

I leaned back in my chair and tried to comprehend what was going on at this particular table out of all the other nightclub tables in time and space. Most of the female faces around the table, with the exception of Richardson’s blonde girlfriend, registered varying amounts of fear. Claridge was obviously on the pills, his spasmodic movements and insane chatter seemed almost manic; in addition, he was drinking heavily. Andy appeared irrevocably drunk, while Susan kept glancing nervously at him from the corners of her eyes. Peterson just seemed crazy.