Not Without Hope (2 page)

M
arquis’s boat had a capacity of ten people, but he never wanted more than four aboard, especially with guys as big as we were and the distance we were going out. He had a twenty-one-foot boat, with the helm located at a center console under a small canopy. It was powered by a two-hundred horsepower, single-engine outboard motor. Fuel capacity was sixty-six gallons. For extra fuel, we had five five-gallon cans of gas bungeed at the stern.

A friend of Corey’s, a former teammate named Chuck Darby, was supposed to make this trip with us today, but he had been uncertain during the week. I called my best friend, Will Bleakley, and told him not to get his hopes too high, but there might be room for him if the other guy dropped out. On Thursday, two days before the trip, Chuck canceled. He had to go to South Carolina to visit his father, who was ill. I called Will.

“Keep your plans open,” I told him.

Friday morning, Marquis was busy getting his house together for his move out West. He texted me that he couldn’t work out at the gym, but he invited Will on the trip: “Tell your boy it’s all good. He can come.”

Will had expressed some concern to his parents. He didn’t know Marquis and Corey and had never been deep into the Gulf. But he was a decisive person. Once he made his mind up, he wasn’t one to second-guess. When I told him he could come along, he got superexcited. He texted me all day Friday: What should I bring? How much beer? What are we going to eat? Dude, I can’t wait. Let’s go to bed at eight tonight so we can get up early.

“Don’t forget my jacket,” I reminded him. I was going to be a lot better prepared on this trip than I had been last week. I was taking a jacket, gloves, sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and a skull cap. Marquis had advised us to bring something water-resistant. I had worn just a sweatshirt and sweatpants the first time, and I got drenched. Will had borrowed my winter jacket a couple months earlier. He went to New York City for New Year’s. It was an L.L. Bean jacket, orange with black piping, doubled-lined, water-resistant on the outside, and fleece-lined on the inside. When I zipped up the front, I looked like a human pumpkin, but I didn’t care. It kept me warm.

Will got to my house in Tampa at four on Friday afternoon, before I even got home from work. Not that I minded. We were inseparable, and he was over every weekend. Will had his own bedroom at the house, his own sofa in the living room. My girlfriend, Paula Oliveira, called him “our son.” So did our friends. We’d go somewhere and they would inevitably ask, “You bringing your son?”

I think he got a kick out of it.

I was twenty-four; Will was a year older. I was 6 feet 2 inches, 239; he was 6 feet 3 inches, 230, brown hair, brown eyes—a ladies’ man. Will had degrees in finance and accounting, but he had lost his job in the recession. He was thinking about going back to school. We had pictures of each other all over my house, usually taken at a party or a game or some other light moment. We were usually smiling, with an arm around each other, often holding a
beer. From certain angles, with hair on our chins, we even looked somewhat alike. Will was my best friend, and he was Paula’s best friend, too.

I used to tell Will that I wanted him to be my best man or a groomsman at my wedding, and Paula would say she wanted him to be the maid of honor. One of us would do something for him—cater to him or cook him something—and say, “Okay, Will, whose side you gonna stand on now?” He would never give us a straight answer.

We were together so often, we began to speak with the same sarcastic phrases: “You’re right,” or “I’m not just saying this” or one of us would make a rude comment and say, “Oh, did I say that out loud?” Will would catch himself and go, “Dammit.” He was our designated puppysitter and dog walker, too. How good a job he did was another story.

Football brought Will and I together, just as football was at the intersection of my friendships with Marquis and Corey. Will played at the University of South Florida in Tampa from 2002 through 2006. He was a good student and a terrific athlete, a preferred walk-on. He considered the Coast Guard Academy and the Air Force Academy before deciding to stay close to home for school. He played in thirty-four games during his career, starting eight times at tight end and catching ten passes. I think he made honorable mention at All–Big East Conference his senior year. He was clever at chop blocking. His parents, Bob and Betty, were at the games, always.

I made the team as a walk-on in February 2006, before spring practice began. I had moved down to Tampa in August 2005 after spending two years at Kent State. My father has a painting business nearby, in Tarpon Springs, and I came down to help him. I wasn’t too interested in school anymore. But I watched a couple of football games at the USF and thought I could play with those guys.

It had been five years since I played football. Even though I had lettered in football, I stopped after my sophomore year at Chardon High in Ohio to concentrate on basketball. The football coaches wanted me to show up for off-season training on the days we had basketball games. I didn’t think that was right, so I chose basketball and made third team all-state, averaging fourteen and a half points and eleven and a half rebounds.

When I graduated from Chardon High in 2003 I thought about playing basketball at Kent State, but I tore the anterior cruciate ligament in my knee the summer after my senior year. During my sophomore year at Kent, I could feel myself kind of growing up. I continued to party and have fun, but I limited myself to three times a month instead of twice a weekend. I just decided I wanted a change, to do something while I was still young. I kept thinking, How can I do this? I decided that after my sophomore year, I would pick up and go.

Chardon was about thirty minutes outside of Cleveland, near Lake Erie, a small town in the snowbelt of northeast Ohio. We averaged more than 100 inches of snow a year. Sometimes, we’d have 5 feet of snow on the ground, and a wind chill of –30, and they’d have to call the National Guard to come in. But you get used to the cold if that’s what you know. I used to sit outside in shorts when it was 25 degrees.

It was fun out there in the snow. I rode four-wheelers and was a daredevil snow skier. We lived near a church, and when they plowed the parking lot, we would take the snow mounds and make them into giant ramps. We would ski over the snow like we were on water skis: the four-wheeler would veer away at the last minute, and we would let go of the rope and do double back flips or 720s—two full helicopter spins. Other times we drove ten minutes to a small ski resort, Alpine Valley, and I used to jump off the lift from twenty feet in the air or pop off a ski on purpose
and go down the hill on one leg. I always skied as fast as I could. Fun, stupid things.

I also loved following the local pro teams—the Browns, the Cavaliers, and the Indians. What I didn’t love was the random weather. One day it would be 60 degrees, the next it would be 35 and raining and ugly, then 25 and snowing and then 45 and sunny. I loved the weather in Tampa. Compared to Ohio, it felt like a permanent vacation.

I got back into school in January 2006 and showed up for football tryouts at USF in February with 140 other guys. They asked 15 of us to stay around for winter conditioning, and then invited 8 of us back for spring ball. Will was a tight end heading into his senior year. I was on the defensive line, psyched about the opportunity to get back into the game.

I didn’t have a whole lot of friends at school. I wasn’t close to my roommates. One was a bookworm; the other worked a lot on his motorcycles. We didn’t really go out or stuff like that. So I spent the fall of 2005 and all spring and summer of 2006 preparing for football.

I lifted weights and ate eight thousand calories a day to put on weight. I’d probably eat a dozen eggs a day and a pound of spaghetti and cookies every night. My girlfriend at the time loved it. She had a sweet tooth, and I was trying to put on some pounds. Then I’d go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night and drink a massive weight-gain shake.

On the street outside my town house, I spray-painted markers for the forty-yard dash, the hundred-yard dash. I’d run ten times a hundred or fifteen times forty, with a one-minute break in between. Sometimes I’d fall asleep early and wake up at midnight and get out there and run in the dark.

I put on about 30 pounds. I was 250 when I made the team in the spring of 2006 and 276 at the start of fall training camp. I
was in top shape. One of the coaches called me Big ’Roid. They thought I was on steroids. No way—I’m as anti-steroids as you can get. In the weight room, I was probably in the top five strengthwise in every lift.

Will and I weren’t that close at the beginning. Like I said, Will was a tight end, and I was a defensive lineman. People don’t realize it, but the offense and defense are often kept separate on teams. Sometimes there is even tension between them. They dress on different sides of the locker room, practice on different fields, and hang out with teammates who play similar positions. Despite that, eventually Will and I became friends. It turned out we lived close to each other, so we started riding together. I’d pick him up for football, or he’d pick me up. Then he started coming over for dinner. Eventually we got his mother’s recipe for pasta. Betty’s pasta, we called it, four kinds of cheese and bread crumbs. We loved it.

Will was a starter in 2006, his senior year. I was a junior, but my career ended before it began. The first week of the season I was inactive because I had an incomplete grade. The second week I was getting ready to run out of the tunnel with my uniform on when I got stopped. I literally had to take my pads off while everyone ran onto the field. I hadn’t been cleared to play by the N.C.A.A. I was heartbroken. My family was there. They were so proud of me, and now I wouldn’t get a chance to play. I was so embarrassed. I wanted to cry and kill someone at the same time.

Halfway through the next week, they told me I would have to sit out the entire 2006 season. Even though I had never played college football, I was ineligible for a year because I had transferred from Kent State. The coaches tried to see what they could do, but it was out of their hands. Why the school waited so long to tell me this, I don’t know. I had been on the team since the previous February, and there had been talk of a possible scholarship. Now I had to wait a whole year. I guess that’s what you get for being a
walk-on. I stuck it out the next couple of weeks, practicing with the scout team, but you get treated like garbage when you’re not eligible. I just couldn’t do it. I decided to hang up my pads. I would have had one year of eligibility remaining in 2007, but I couldn’t wait that long. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make. I had trained six hours a day to make that team. When they told me I’d have to sit out a year, it felt almost as bad as season-ending surgery. That was tough. By now, the majority of my friends were on the team. They were busy playing ball, and I wasn’t. It was kind of awkward. I distanced myself from them and just lay low.

I gave football one more shot in October 2008, as I was finishing my last semester at USF. This time I tried out for the Tampa Bay Storm, an indoor professional team in the Arena Football League. I quit drinking for four months, cut weight, and worked out ten times a week, lifting weights in the day and doing drills at night. I got down to 233 pounds, 6 percent body fat—real lean. In the end, that hurt me. I was among the top three fastest of the three hundred people who tried out, but I was underweight. They wanted guys who were 265, 270, to play both linebacker and full-back. It was frustrating, but in the end, I guess it wasn’t meant to be—the whole league folded.

At the time, I was in about the best shape I’ve ever been in prior to training with Marquis and Corey. I really loved being a fitness trainer. Working out and lifting weights for me creates a way to relieve stress. I hold a lot of stuff inside, and this is a way to burn off my anxiety. Working out clears my mind, kind of levels me off. Some people enjoy shopping or have a drink or eat food for comfort. I enjoy working out. And I like working with other people. I’m hands-on in that way. One of the best feelings is seeing a person reach his or her goal, getting stronger, losing weight, feeling more self-confident.

Will didn’t lift weights as much as he once did, but he still swam at a YMCA for an hour three times a week. We grew closer after he graduated from USF. He was from Crystal River, Florida, a small town of about 3,500 people located about an hour north of Tampa. It’s on Kings Bay, which is spring-fed so that its temperature remains constant through the year. During the winter, nearly 400 manatees gather in the temperate waters. His parents lived on a channel. He loved to fish and was big into camping. In high school, he and his friends used to go on all-night shark fishing trips just off the coast. We played golf together, though he was much better than I was. If that wasn’t bad enough, he deliberately refused to help me improve.

I would ask him, “Okay, seriously, how do I get better?”

“Stop sucking,” he would say.

“How do I stop sucking?”

“Hit the ball straighter,” he would say.

We always ended up having a few drinks when we played. I always got better after a few beers—at least, I thought I did.

We went camping quite a few times, up north toward Ocala. We’d hike and go canoeing. We hunted armadillos, gophers, and raccoons. Everything became a contest. We invented drinking games. We’d see who could make the cleanest, most difficult dive into the springs where we camped. Or who could make the cleanest and best-looking hobo pie—a combination of grilled cheese sandwich and pizza, made on two pieces of white bread with butter, cheese, sauce, and pepperoni, cooked over a fire. I always won.

At Easter 2007, we stayed in Tampa and turned that into a game, too. We had a weigh-in before dinner. Then for an hour, a few of us ate as much as we could to see who could put on the most pounds. I drank an entire gallon of milk to try to beat Will. I filled myself with ham, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, corn, dinner rolls, and salad. I gained 5.9 pounds, but Will gained 6. I was so pissed. It was his first meal of
the day and my third. “That’s bullshit,” I kept saying. We were so uncomfortably full. Then we slept for an hour, woke up, and ate homemade ice-cream cake.