The Legend of Jesse Smoke (35 page)

I left the big meeting on Monday and went right to Jesse’s apartment. Of course I had to fight my way through a mob of reporters and journalists and microphones and cameras when I got there. I called her from my cell to tell her I was standing on her front porch. She let the machine get it but when she heard my voice, she picked up right away. When I told her where I was she opened the door a crack so I could slip through. The yelling was almost as loud as inside a stadium. Everybody asking questions at once—as if any living being could understand a single sentence in so many droning voices. You might as well have tried to discern the buzzing of one bee in a frigging hive.

Jesse appeared to have been stunned into a kind of angry trance. When I got my way through the door and forced it closed against all those invading microphones and cameras and hands, she had already retreated into the kitchen of her apartment—the only place in there with windows one would have needed a ladder to look into—where she had barricaded herself behind the center island, right in front of the refrigerator. She had her hands tucked into her waist, but she could not stand still. She still had the bandage on her forehead. The phone was ringing, bleating relentlessly.

“Jesse,” I said. “We’re taking care of this, okay? I want you to know that.” Thinking she needed me to be near her, I approached the other side of the island, but she recoiled. In her sweatshirt and jeans, she looked like somebody’s teenage daughter, her physical presence diminished to nearly nothing. Each time I moved toward her, she backed farther away.

“What?” I said.

“Don’t. Somebody might … get the wrong
fucking
idea.”

“It’s going to be all right, Jess. We’ll work something out.”

“How?”
She cast her eyes down. She could throw herself into such a pure sadness, it was almost frightening. Not to mention deeply feminine. In spite of those husky, well-formed shoulders—because she had very capable upper-body strength, just like she had good solid legs—she just radiated it, womanliness, almost softly feminine at times. I’m no expert on these things, but she always seemed to have this kind of nurturing quality—a strange amalgam of kindness and care. She wasn’t the
new woman
, as just about everybody wanted her to be. She was a true woman—the kind that has defined the sex for thousands of years. She was not a temptress, or a Madonna, or an innocent child-like virgin—the only three possibilities in the minds of most men—she was a woman, a person. You know what I mean? And right at that moment, she was a person who was awful confused, pissed off, and clearly feeling cornered.

“I asked Nate to come over,” she said.

“Good.”

“He’s bringing Dan, and I think Darius is coming, too. I told him not to, but … he insisted.”

“Hell, the whole team might show up, Jesse. They can clear your front porch for you.” I took a chair by the kitchen table. By this time she had filled the apartment with furniture. It was a home now, of sorts, a comfortable place, warm and neatly arranged. She had two couches, a recliner, and bookcases full of neatly stacked books. Sunlight broke in lovely angles through drapes in the dining room and crossed the room in a diagonal toward the living room. Her bike was still leaning against the far wall by the fireplace.

“It’s nice here,” I said.

“Yeah … my mother did all this. Before I kicked her out.”

“She’s got nice taste.”

Jesse made this sound in the back of her throat, and I wasn’t sure if she was getting ready to cry or laugh. Only, when her eyes met
mine, I saw something I’d never seen there before. Her mouth was a straight line, and her wide-eyed look now suggested stark, agonizing fear.

“You all right?” I said.

She didn’t look away, but her head gave a very slight shake, from side to side. Then she said, “Right. We should be getting ready for Cincinnati. Hell, I
knew
somebody would keep me from playing.”

“Jesse, you
have
been playing,” I said. “And better than anybody I ever saw.”

She glanced toward the door where the noise had not in the least subsided. People were calling out her name and pounding on the door; the phone was still ringing. “What’s wrong with them?” she said.

“They’re crazy.”

“It’s just a game.” She looked down. Something sweetly majestic radiated from the slight movement of her head and a swirl of dark hair that caressed the side of her face. She hadn’t gotten it cut in a while and it was not as curly now. It was almost a pageboy, except for the way it formed the curlicues on the top of her head. The bandage made her look wounded and sad.

I told her why I was there. “Do you have a birth certificate, Jesse?”

“What?” Her eyes seemed to shrink.

“Just, you know, to deal once and for all with that business about you being a man.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Well, can you get it from your mother?”

“No.”

“Jesse, come on—this is too important. You have to call her.”

“She doesn’t have it either. I used one to get into Japan once, but … I don’t even know where that is.”

“Your mother wouldn’t know?”

She shook her head. “I lost it.”

“Okay, then. Write to get a copy.”

“I was born in Japan, all right? We’re not gonna get one in time for Cincinnati, or hell—the rest of the season, even.”

“We’re behind you, Jesse. You have to know that. We’ll fight for you.”

She seemed to take this in. Then she said, “What have I done?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve sort of disturbed something big, haven’t I?”

I was not happy to hear her talking like that. “You’ve broken new ground, sure. And … so what? Ever heard of Jackie Robinson? Babe Zaharias?”

The racket outside really was unbelievable. A crowd had gathered in the parking lot in front of her apartment and they were all shouting against each other. “You don’t have to answer any of their questions,” I said. “But if you
want
you can make a statement. Once they’ve heard from you, they’ll leave you alone. At least for a while.”

“Listen to that noise. You think Roddy’s out there?”

“I didn’t see him.”

“What if I call him?”

“You’ll make his year, but … go ahead. He can take a statement over the phone.”

She said nothing, but she didn’t look away. She was thinking.

“Jesse, there’s something I have to ask of you to help us.”

Again, she had no response.

“It’s not much, but it’ll surely help when we go to court.”

She came around the island and settled herself across from me at the table. I asked her if she’d like something to drink and she said no, and then I rudely got up and poured myself a glass of water.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Jesse, you ever heard of somebody named Robert Ibraham?” I watched her face closely and she revealed nothing. She thought about it for a minute, then shook her head.

“You’ve never heard that name.”

“No.”

“He signed to play football in the Canadian League, for Montreal.”

“So?”

“You don’t know anything about him?”

“No.”

“We—I didn’t think so. I just wanted to know.”

“What about him?”

“Just—Look, if we have trouble getting your birth certificate, we’re going to have to ask you to do one thing to help us in this.”

She waited, looking directly at me the way she almost always did.

“This is a temporary restraining order,” I said, looking away for a moment. What was I doing here—bidding for time? “Temporary. That’s all. We’ll deal with it.”

“But I can’t play. They took that away from me.”

“We’re fighting this, Jesse. But, like I was saying, we need you to do one thing for us. And—this is going to be hard to ask—I mean—if it was me I’d never dream of—”

“What
is
it?”

“Do you have a gynecologist you go to regularly?”

She leaned forward and placed her chin in her hands. “You want me to prove I’m a woman.”

I was ashamed to nod. “Just that it will simplify all this if we can get a doctor to, you know—”

“Has any
man
ever had to prove he was a man?”

“Some might say they feel like they have to prove that every day.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, the men
do
get physicals by team physicians every year … ”

“What about my physical in training camp?”

“You know how that was. It wasn’t—uh—the doctor didn’t …” She wouldn’t help me out here. “The team doctor is not a gynecologist,” I said finally. “He didn’t
really
examine you.”

“He could tell I was a woman.”

“Well, of course we’ll get him to testify, but … Look, Mr. Flores thought if we got the final say from a gynecologist, who could report
unequivocally that …” I stopped. I felt so much like a lawyer now, or Charley Duncan—rather than what I wanted to be, which was Jesse’s friend. There I was, almost begging her, doing my best to manipulate her into doing this thing because I wanted what I wanted—which was for all the bullshit to just go away as soon as possible. I wanted to get Jesse back on the field where she belonged. “It would put to rest all this talk about a sex change.”

She folded her arms across her chest and stared past me at the bright windows. She never said she would do it, visit a gynecologist, but I had at least put the idea in her head. And was that so wrong?

Somehow, though, looking into those clouded blue eyes, I got the sensation that she knew what I was thinking, and that something essential between us had just been compromised, and perhaps even destroyed. I felt like the fellow behind the curtain saying, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

Not long after that, Dan Wilber, Darius Exley, and Nate showed up. As they gently moved folks off the porch, Jesse sat at the kitchen table to write out a statement. The press set up in the parking lot at the bottom of her front steps. People came out of the other apartments and watched. It looked like a mini–Vatican City just before the Pope comes out on the balcony to bless everyone.

By the time Jesse and I emerged, the lights were so bright it blinded both of us. Standing next to her, I did my best to fend off all those voices and questions, held up my hand, mostly just to shade my eyes, and said, “All right, if I can ask for some quiet—Jesse has a statement that she wants to read to you all.”

It took a while for the noise to subside, but then Jesse held up the paper she’d written her statement on and began to read. And as she did so, it got very quiet.

“I am a woman,” Jesse said, in a very even, unemotional voice. “I did not have surgery to become a woman. I am playing this game because I love it. I love the competition, the teamwork, the miracle of people working so completely together. The last thing I have ever
wanted to do is ruin the integrity of the game, and I do not think I am doing that. I never asked for any special treatment. I play as hard as I can on every down. I assume others are doing that as well. If people are
not
going all out, it’s not my fault.

“I don’t know how it is possible, or fair, that I should be held responsible for the sexist attitudes of others. If people are afraid to hit me, that’s their problem.

“I have been hit. I have been hit very hard. I’ve faced the same pressure as other quarterbacks in the league. I am under the impression that when a defense cannot get to the quarterback it has something to do with the blocking they face, not with the defense’s fears about injuring the quarterback. I can’t help it if my offensive line is one of the best in the business. I am proud of the work they do on every play to protect me. I think the integrity of the game will be damaged if men who cannot get through my offensive line, blame their weakness and lack of skill on gender. I have nothing more to say, and I do not wish to answer questions. Thank you.”

She looked at me, nodded her head slightly, and went back inside.

The following Sunday, we had to play the Cincinnati Bengals. It turned out to be one of the strangest weeks of practice I’ve ever been a part of. I spent every day in the film room, with most of our scouting department, trainers, and coaching interns, putting together a video and tracking the number of times our quarterbacks got knocked down during the season. We traced the numbers for Jesse as opposed to Corey Ambrose and Ken Spivey. We studied those films so hard I began to see the world in flickers of light and stop-motion photography.

Each night, I’d go to Coach Engram’s office and work with him on the game plan; he still wanted me on the sideline calling the plays, or if he took over as he sometimes did, relaying the plays during the game. So I had to know everything the team was preparing. We’d study film of our practices each day—something I’ve never done before but that turned out to be a good idea. I gained considerable insight into what we were running that might work. We selected the plays
that ran most smoothly—where everything clicked and there were no screwups—and cut out all the rest. We watched films until very late at night—sometimes until three or so in the morning. I’d go back to my office, sleep for a few hours, then get up and start back in studying the films of every one of Jesse’s passes.

When I was done, I gave everything I had to Charley Duncan and Harold Moody and they prepared the video—it was as professional as a commercial. Jesse had been knocked down after releasing the ball an average of 3.8 times a game. Ken Spivey, 4.8. Corey Ambrose, 4.3. Jesse had been sacked three times so far. Ken Spivey only once, and Corey Ambrose twice. Of course, those averages are pretty misleading if you consider that Jesse got knocked down seven times and sacked pretty savagely once in the Oakland game. The other two sacks were not so bad. Some of the knock-downs were worse. In two games, nobody touched her. Still, it’s the same with any quarterback. Not all defenses are equal; some are strong and quick and hard to keep off the quarterback, and others you can push around any way you want.

Charley also calculated that Jesse’s release was almost twice as fast as Spivey’s, and about a third faster than Ambrose’s. The time that elapsed between when she began her throwing motion to when the ball left her hand was literally, on the average, only 0.86 seconds. From the moment Spivey started his motion to the ball leaving his hand was a full 1.6 seconds. Ambrose was at 1.1 seconds. All three had fairly quick releases, but Jesse’s was by far the quickest. Only Sonny Jurgensen and Dan Marino in their heyday at 0.87—and, believe it or not, a Pittsburgh quarterback named Joe Gilliam, who had a world of talent and drugged himself right out of a great career, at 0.88—came even close to Jesse.