North Dallas Forty (5 page)

I had recovered, miraculously, from three serious injuries, but the recovery couldn’t erase the fact of the injuries. I was damaged, and if I didn’t make myself an integral part of the offense quickly, management would be shopping for a new piece of equipment. Time was my competition and, if I let down for a moment, it would just go on increasing its already considerable edge on me.

When B.A. replaced me with Billy Gill because of my injured leg, I thought I would go crazy.

At first I rationalized it as a temporary thing and prepared each game to return to action to show what I could do with a football in free fall. As my leg healed, I had difficulty restraining myself from just running onto the field and joining the huddle uninvited. I was ready to play. I would pace the sideline, staying close to B.A., waiting for the order, watching his eyes expectantly. By halftime the fear of not getting to play would begin to creep in, but I would sit in the dressing room and watch B.A. diagram adjustments or I would nervously walk over to Maxwell to inquire how the game was going. His distant reply reminded me I wasn’t a part of it. I knew I could help if they would just let me.

By the end of the third quarter I had stopped pacing and would sit despondent and angered to the point of tears, all that unused energy tearing my insides out, watching and listening to a crowd that just a few weeks before had loved me like their own. Didn’t they know I wasn’t out there?

By the middle of the fourth period, the depression had turned to embarrassment. I didn’t want to play and would hide at the end of the bench, waiting for the agony to end so I could cut off the unused tape, hand in my spotless uniform, take an unnecessary shower, and get so drunk I wouldn’t remember the pain of abscessed excitement.

The team won the next two games after my demotion and I never left the bench. The third game was in Chicago and we were losing at the half and B.A. substituted me for Gill. I caught two long passes in the two-minute period, helping to set up the tying field goal. The next week the team beat Atlanta, 36-6, scoring on the opening kickoff. I never set foot on the field.

A curious pattern began to emerge. I found myself used only when the team was losing, or in danger of losing. Soon I was sitting tensely on the bench pulling for the other team, elated at my teammates’ miscues, profoundly distressed by their good performances. Several times I accidently cheered out loud when the opposition took the advantage.

What good is team success if the individual doesn’t survive to share in it?

When an athlete, no matter what color jersey he wears, finally realizes that opponents and teammates alike are his adversaries, and he must deal and dispense with them all, he is on his way to understanding the spirit that underlies the business of competitive sport. There is no team, no loyalty, no camaraderie; there is only him, alone.

The team itself is a fiction and playing for B.A. made it all the more obvious to me. Team success to B.A. meant personal success. But it wasn’t winning that B.A. cared about, or football, or God; it was how those things combined to make him successful.

That is why I know, even though Maxwell and B.A. seem to share a strong mutual respect, that one day B.A. will destroy Maxwell. Maxwell is an individual and will eventually compete with his coach for the real prize—personal success.

My body ached; I rolled back to my feet and headed out the door back down the hall. The Supremes were doing “Baby Love.” Thomas Richardson was still squatting on the living room floor. I slid down next to him.

He didn’t look at me. His eyes drifted aimlessly around the party, taking it in with a stoic amazement. “That was a nice catch yesterday.”

“Thanks.” I blushed. Richardson’s praise always had an authentic ring and immediately made me feel less than worthy. “I’m meeting with B.A. in the morning,” I added. “Another chapter in my struggle for grace and glory against rapidly increasing odds.”

“Good luck.” Richardson laughed and turned to look at me for the first time. “I met with him in St. Louis to ask if he’d sign my antiwar letter. He told me that it was none of my business and I should keep my mind on the game.” The black man snorted and dropped his eyes to the floor. “The goddam Vietnam War is none of my business. Can you dig it? He just sat there staring blankly at me, you know, that sort of superior preoccupied look. Like I couldn’t possibly understand what was going on in his mind, my bein’ a colored boy and all. Jesus, I could have strangled him.”

Richardson was an activist and I respected him for it. But all I needed to know about the war had been babbled to me years ago by a drunken political science professor I had met at the Michigan State Varsity Club Chicken Fry. After several stiff drinks he confided to me that not only did he work for the CIA, but he had been in on the final planning of Diem’s assassination. I pointed out that Diem was still alive.

“I’ll tell you this,” the professor had spit, his eyes blazing from my rebuff, “the son of a bitch’ll be dead in six weeks.”

The “son of a bitch” was killed three weeks later. Since that time I have tried to ignore politics; if a man with no innate political interests at all could find out such things because he was a football player, I didn’t want to know the real secrets. Thomas Richardson was finding out that the hero status of professional football merely allowed him to become privy to the bigger lies.

Last year, Richardson had filed an unfair-housing suit against a north Dallas realtor who had refused to rent him an apartment. Up until that time, all black players had been forced to live in south Dallas and commute to the north Dallas practice field. Several times, Richardson had gone to the team officials and asked for help in securing housing near the practice field. Each time he was politely refused with an explanation that the club shouldn’t interfere in community matters. When he filed his suit, Richardson was severely reprimanded by B.A. for doing something that might distract from the team’s preparation for the coming Sunday.

“Don’t let it get you down, Thomas. Remember, God’s got his hands full figuring out how to stop the safety blitz.”

Pushing myself upright I punched Richardson lightly on the shoulder and staggered into the kitchen. Through the open front door, I could see people dancing by the pool.

Jo Bob was in the middle of the living room, wearing a Hutch Brand Children’s Football Helmet. It was so small on his giant head that it squashed his face together in a grotesque pucker. He had taken his pants off. The general reaction was favorable though nervous. If Jo Bob was true to form, he might start molesting the women.

Most of the men tried to look at Jo Bob’s antics in the spirit of good fun, the alternative being a beating and no further invitations to the parties. But it is extremely difficult to overlook physical insults aimed at one’s date when the antagonist is six foot seven, naked from the waist down, and in a state of semierection. Knowing these people by their presence at the party, I was sure they could adapt. It was probably their outstanding personal trait, excessive adaptability.

I pulled myself back onto the drainboard and watched the party surge on into the night, while my eyes slowly searched out the single girls. There seemed to be five. The three sitting on the couch, knees tight, were most likely stewardesses who hadn’t been apart since they left Lubbock together to go to flight school. Separating them would require an elaborate intellectual and emotional surgery, to convince them that all the pride and personal integrity that Delta Airlines had just spent thousands to instill was bullshit and could best be overcome, for everyone’s benefit, by some outrageously deviant sex act. I had enough strength for the deviancy but not the surgical process. A thin girl in Levi’s, with long, straight, brown hair and wire-rim glasses, was now talking to Thomas Richardson. She looked the most interesting, but from her animation it was obvious she dug on spades, Richardson in particular. That left Bob Beaudreau’s girl. She was sitting alone, behind the rubble of the dining room suite.

The son of a wealthy Texas oil family, Beaudreau had become a successful young insurance agent who started his own firm before his twenty-fifth birthday. Recently he had taken a well-deserved “rest” at Fairhaven, the hundred-dollars-per-day shelter for those Dallas wealthy who have been so careless as to get themselves officially catalogued as “in need of rest.” Beaudreau had been picked up twice in the early morning hours at Main Place Mall naked—shooting off a pistol, and loudly claiming personal responsibility for the murders of Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. He was quickly diagnosed as “extremely exhausted,” hustled out to Fairhaven, and pumped full of thorazine.

Beaudreau and Crawford were friends. They spent hours riding around in Beaudreau’s new Mark III, drinking, talking on the car phone, and shooting Beaudreau’s .357 Magnum out the window. It was one of several guns the paranoiac insurance agent carried. Although his current phobia was a certainty that someone was trying to slip him LSD, he remained a friend of Andy’s and came to most of the parties.

Like Steve Peterson, Beaudreau often brought extra women for the use of his favorite players. He also had, like Peterson, a disconcerting habit of always touching the person he was talking to, rubbing and patting while he babbled on about everything from twenty pay life to niggers taking over sport. Right now, Beaudreau was standing at the front door, a drink in one hand and his other pudgy mitt clamped tightly on Seth Maxwell’s shoulder. Seth seemed offended and bored, but he postured just enough, out of respect for Beaudreau’s wealth.

I decided to talk to Beaudreau’s date. She had long brown hair and perfect teeth. What else mattered?

“Can I get you a drink?” I asked her.

She looked up startled, then smiled and handed me her glass.

“Yes. Please. A Pepsi.”

“A Pepsi?” I frowned.

“Yes, please, with lots of ice, and pour it down the side of the glass so you don’t lose all the fizz.”

“Right.” I headed back toward the kitchen, wondering how someone like that had gotten in here.

Alan Claridge was standing at the drainboard beating his hand against the wooden cupboard door. His knuckles were gouged and bleeding, and the shirt he had borrowed from Crawford was spotted with blood.

“Alan?” I said. “You’re certainly being hard on yourself tonight.”

“Yeah, I know,” he answered. “But that little honey in there,” he pointed to one of the three stewardesses on the couch, “really gets her rocks off over football.” He held his hand up and inspected the blood oozing down the back of it to his wrist, then resumed pounding the skin to pulp against the natural-grain door.

“I got some tit—” he continued, staring at the dark smudges his blood was leaving on the cupboard, “—just by showin’ her this bruise on my calf.” He pulled up his pants leg to reveal a purplish-yellow blotch the size of a Softball. “So, I figure if I show her a little blood she’ll let me pound her peehole.”

His eyes were set. There was a wry smile on his tight lips. It was rumored that Alan took a lot of pills. I never doubted it.

“That’s pretty primitive,” I observed.

“Yeah, but it’s also effective.”

“I guess so.” I nodded absently. Alan screwed more women than I knew. “Well, don’t lose so much blood you’re too weak to fuck.”

“Naw, man, I can hardly feel this.” He looked at his mutilated knuckles, nodded approvingly, and wandered out.

Elaborate intellectual and emotional surgical process, my ass.

I spotted a twenty-eight-ounce bottle sitting in the sink. I poured two glasses full, careful to conserve as much carbonation as possible, holding the glasses in exactly the manner Beaudreau’s girl had prescribed. When I’m stoned, things like this become immense matters of pride.

The trick would be to get her to leave with me. It was obvious she wasn’t one of Beaudreau’s regulars, someone who might ultimately end up on loan to his favorite defensive tackle. She seemed too much in control, too confident. If there was a relationship, she controlled it and more than likely she was sitting alone now because she preferred it.

When I got back to her, I noticed the party had picked up intensity. Those who weren’t drunk or outrageously stoned had already been driven off. The terror was escaping each individual’s personal limits to flood the room with energy.

“It looks like the direction is set,” I said, handing her a perfectly poured Pepsi. “Now to await the obscenities.”

“Thanks.” She took the Pepsi, then looked quizzically at me. “You mean it gets worse?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it worse. It definitely gets different.”

“Far out.” She smiled and leaned back, relaxing.

“Yeah,” I said. “Say, I’m sorry, but I don’t know your name.”

She extended a thin white hand. “I’m Charlotte Caulder. Charlotte Ann Caulder.”

“Charlotte Ann Caulder, it’s very nice to meet you.” As I gripped her soft, warm fingers, a chill went through me. I find good-looking women almost uncontrollably exciting. “I’m Phillip Elliott. Phillip J. Elliott.”

“What’s the J. for?”

“Jurisprudence. I’m very together.”

I looked into her brown eyes. The lines at the corners pulled slightly when she realized I was staring, trying to penetrate. The smile faded and she looked away.

“Let’s go someplace other than here,” I said, keeping my eyes on her face.

“No. I’m here with someone.”

“I know. But you don’t have to leave with him just because you came with him.”

She raised her eyes to meet mine. They were set, angry. “I don’t have to leave with you either. Just because you’re here and have shiny eyes.”

“I’m a lot more fun and fully skilled in the art of acupuncture,” I said, figuring retreat now would bring disaster, if it hadn’t already arrived.

“I’ll bet you are,” she sneered.

In a few short seconds I had made a fool of myself. I started again. “I’m sorry, I fail miserably at small talk. If you’re interested, we could try and have a conversation.”

“It’s worth a try.” Her face and voice betrayed little enthusiasm.

“Great,” I said, and was immediately lost in her eyes again. I could think of nothing to say. The silence was awkward. Her eyes kept getting larger.