Life Its Ownself

by Dan Jenkins

  "Spunk can do wonders," the doctor said. "But I'll be honest. Spunk can't help you this season."

  "Next year!" I said. "Football's not through with me till I say it is!"

  Dr. Fritz Mahoney clasped my upper arm and looked at me proudly.

  "I like your style, Billy Clyde."

  "Good," I said. "Me and spunk want a corner room at Lenox Hill with a cable-ready color TV."

  The most esteemed guests to visit the hospital that evening were Burt Danby; his wife, Veronica; and Shoat Cooper, the old coacher.

  "Kiss on the lips, big guy!" Burt said, as he exploded into the room, doing a little dance step. "Hey, I know you're down, right? But are we talking down-down? No way! We're not talking Mondo Endo here. We're talking Johns Hopkins, baby. We're talking Houston Medical. We're talking Zurich!"

  I raised myself in the bed slightly. Veronica took a seat, browsed through a magazine. Shoat Cooper dabbed at a tear, his eyes fixed on my right leg. His whole offense lay in my bed.

  "Them niggers is gonna pay for this," Shoat said.

  Burt Danby kept moving around. "Get this," he said. "Know what I told the media about Twenty-three? I said, Whoa, assholes, my man'll be back next season with a Gucci knee, and it's look out, Super Bowl! Whammo-spermo! Right up the old anal! Listen, you got everything you need here? How's the food? Right in the shitter, huh? Let me order you some Chinese. How 'bout some minced pork with lettuce? Fuck it, I'll call Pearl, she'll bring it over herself!"

  Burt Danby was a wiry little man who had never stopped talking like an advertising executive. His old agency, DDDF, had purchased the Giants from the Mara family in the early Seventies. Burt had been named the club's chief operating officer. He had presided over our Super Bowl victory. He had suffered so much throughout the turbulent contest that he had sworn to God he would give up drinking and cheating on his wife if only we could win that one game. I later heard that after I scored the winning touchdown, Burt had jumped to his feet, shook his fist at God, and hoarsely screamed, "Fuck you, Skipper, if you can't make it in Big Town, go to Des Moines!"

  A year after the Giants won the Super Bowl, Burt had somehow gained majority control of the franchise in a mysterious stock transaction and left the agency. It was said Burt had a silent partner in the deal. It was also said he might wind up living in Costa Rica if the Justice Department ever took a close look at the stock transaction.

  "TV!" Burt said, brightly, feeling the need to cheer me up. "You'll go straight into television when you bust out of here! You got a season to jerk off; why not?"

  Burt said the networks were sure to offer me a job as a color announcer. CBS and NBC would get in a bidding war. Billy Clyde Puckett would be the only winner.

  "You serious?"

  "Does the Pope shit in the woods?"

  I laughed at that and Burt pressed on. "You think you make good dough from me? TV is God's way of telling you to rape, steal, and plunder. It's a fucking souffle! You know what those guys make? Gifford... Summerall... Madden? Cosell? Meredith? They can buy the Vatican and redecorate!"

  Burt went into a crouch. He stared at an imaginary object in front of him. "Here's the network, you're the Canadian sheepdog, okay?"

  He humped the thin air.

  "Uh... uh... uh!" he moaned, then straightened up. "Now you scoop the coin; see you later!"

  "I wouldn't be any good on television," I said.

  Burt looked astounded.

  "Good? You want to talk good? Good is who wears a blazer and has a microphone. Know how you make it big in

  TV, Billy Clyde? First, you're an athlete, then you go to makeup. All you gotta be after that is deaf, dumb, and blind!"

  Shoat Cooper's eyes were still misty. He said he guessed he'd better shove off.

  "Africa," Shoat said, taking another look at my leg. "You can trace the whole blame back to Africa."

  Burt's wife, Veronica, comforted me by commenting on how unattractive hospitals were.

  Veronica Danby was an ex-"fashion person," a cadaver whose dark brown hair had been styled into a shower cap. She was two-thirds cheekbones and one-third pout. She seemed disappointed that my room wasn't a boutique in which she might pick up a little something from Ungaro for $1,500.

  Veronica did ask if Barbara Jane had done anything to her eyes yet.

  Not that I was aware of, I said, but what did I know? Barb was out in L.A., working on a pilot for ABC. Anything could have happened.

  "She's thirty-four, isn't she?"

  "Will be," I said. "Is that the age when your eyes go?"

  "One never knows. Wrinkles are so treacherous."

  I accepted that piece of information with a nod.

  Veronica said, "I'm sure she doesn't use strong cleansers anymore. I've learned to stay strictly with non-alcoholic lotions."

  "Oh?" I said.

  "They refreshen the pores," said Veronica. "Occasionally, I put on a light cream to soothe the skin and increase circulation, but when I have a facial massage, I make sure I tell the masseuse Do not pull the skin! It's the worst thing you can do!"

  "Really?"

  "Oh, yes," Veronica said. "The idea is to keep the skin taut and firm."

  Burt beamed at me as they were leaving.

  "Got one for you, big guy," he said. "Pal of mine at Doyle

  Dane goes with this actress on The Guiding Light. He thought they'd done all the sperm capers but he made a hell of a discovery the other night. Eyelashes on the clit. Says he can blink her off in no time."

  I had a while to think about that before the phone started ringing.

  Dreamer Tatum called. T. J. from Fort Worth. Ex-teammates like Hose Manning and Puddin Patterson. Jim Tom Pinch, an old newspaper buddy. Others. Hang in there, they all said.

  Shake Tiller phoned from Houston. He was swinging through the South on a promotional tour for the paperback release of The Art of Taking Heat. His book had been a non- fiction best-seller the previous year.

  The book had been published in hardcover by Viva Press, a subsidiary of Quillam, Dupe & Strike. Silvia Mercer, Shake's agent, had peddled the idea to an editor friend named Rosemary Compton, arguing that The Art of Taking Heat would appeal to that mass of readers in the Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous category who might be fed up with diets, exercise, and money-managing.

  Shake's book sold over 200,000 copies in hardcover, though it never dislodged Get Rich in 30 Seconds as the No. 1 best-seller on all of the heavy lists. Still, the book's success had turned Shake Tiller into a semi-known author. This not only meant he'd had to appear on drive-time radio shows and early-morning TV shows around the country, he'd been obligated to fuck Silvia Mercer again, and then Rosemary Compton.

  He had once said that Xeroxing was the toughest part of writing, but he had changed his mind.

  Paperback tours differed from hardcover tours, Shake had discovered. You didn't sell books or autograph many of them on either tour, but there was drastically less literary pussy on the paperback tour—unless a man had a weakness for the pudgy girls who ran the checkout counters at supermarkets.

  On hardcover tours, Shake had spent most of his time apologizing to the cultivated owners of bookstores because his book had been published and theirs hadn't. Occasionally, he would sit and smoke at a table in the store and point out to a browsing customer where the bird books could be found. On the paperback tours, he would mill around the grocery stores, occasionally be recognized as an ex-football star, and be asked to autograph twelve slices of Virginia ham wrapped in butcher's paper.

  Now on the phone from Houston, he said, "Hi, gimp. Luckiest thing ever happened to you, B.C. You can go into TV. Rob everybody's ass."

  "You're the second person who's told me that tonight."

  "You went out perfect, man. A wounded warrior whose career was struck down by tragic fate. Fuck 'em. Football's not the same anymore, anyhow."

  "There's still eleven men on a side."

  "Not on the Giants," he said. "Go for the slick, B. C. Sit u
p there in the booth with Summerall. Tell everybody how the quarterback wants to isolate on the linebacker. Hell, you might wind up in a beer commercial."

  "I drink Scotch."

  "We'll do some of that when I get back."

  "How's the book going?"

  "Selling like salami."

  The conversation with Shake didn't necessarily boost my spirits.

  For the next hour, I squirmed in the bed. I was half- rooting for the painkillers to get with it, half-wondering if I would ever play football again.

  Was it really possible I'd never climb into another uniform, never trot into another stadium, never blow another one in there for six, never hear the crowds again?

  Football was the only thing I'd ever done.

  I was in a fairly miserable state of mind, feeling a terrible sense of loss, when the phone rang for the last time that night.

  I fumbled for the receiver and greeted the caller with a weak hello.

  "Quasimodo, how you doin'? A little trouble up on the bell tower, huh?"

  It was the witty voice of my sympathetic wife.

  TWO

  Somebody once described marriage to me as one year in Heaven and twenty years in the Light Heavyweight Division.

  It couldn't have been my Uncle Kenneth who said that. He stored up a backlog of ex-wives for sure, but he never stayed married long enough to know their bathroom habits.

  Not that my uncle was ever torn up when the ladies walked out on him, usually in a foaming rage over some domestic misunderstanding.

  Uncle Kenneth would just shake his head, light a Winston, and say, "There goes old Connie. God help the world if she'd been born twins."

  Having been raised by my uncle in Fort Worth, I was privileged to watch a steady stream of bimbos go in and out of our duplex apartment.

  Some of their names were easier to remember than others.

  Dorothy was the one who had hair the color of V-8 juice. Ina Fay ran up the department-store bills. Patsy had an epileptic brother we used to imitate. Teresa played the radio loud and jitterbugged around the living room in her shortie nightgown. Bobbi Lynn had trouble with fever blisters.

  All of Uncle Kenneth's wives knew how to cook butter beans. They had jobs. They either answered the phone for optical companies or licked envelopes stuffed with freight invoices.

  They looked like funeral wreaths when they dressed up to go somewhere. None of them drove air-conditioned cars.

  Connie was the one who could outcuss Uncle Kenneth.

  She was kind of attractive for a woman whose hair was always in a blonde beehive and whose skirts were too tight, but she wasn't too pretty when she was displeased with my uncle.

  If Uncle Kenneth would come home late from a hard day of betting football games at the pool hall, and if he happened to have a can of Budweiser in his hand, and if there was the normal amount of vomit on his tasseled loafers, Connie's lecture would have a little something extra in it.

  She would say:

  "Fuck you, Kenneth, and everything your lightweight ass stands for! You smell like four kinds of turds in a Goddamn fillin'-station toilet! What whore's ass did you crawl up and die in tonight? You think you're a slick cocksucker, but you ain't no slicker than two snakes fuckin' in a barrel of snot! Don't come near me, you limp-prick motherfucker, unless you want to wear that beer to the emergency room!"

  Uncle Kenneth learned not to step up the backtalk with Connie. He would just stroll quietly across the room and stretch out on the pink chenille spread that covered the day bed from Montgomery Ward and turn on TV to watch what he called the "ambulance news."

  Once he had responded to one of her tirades with "Connie, are you sayin' my poem don't rhyme?"

  That was the night she whapped him on the ear with the metal bar from a Eureka vacuum cleaner.

  I used to wonder why Uncle Kenneth kept getting married. It always turned out the same. One day I put the question to him at the Texas Recreation Parlor.

  "Aw, I don't know, Billy," he said, studying a tout sheet, trying to figure out why Purdue came 3V2 over Duke. "I think you have to blame it on Wilbur. You can't talk no sense to him."

  Wilbur was the name of my uncle's dick.

  My momma and daddy split up when I was six years old. As Uncle Kenneth liked to tell it, my dad, Steve, unfolded a Texaco road map one evening and laid it out on the kitchen table. He drew a vertical line down the middle of the United States. He then turned to Dalene—that was my momma's name—and said:

  "You take this side and I'll take this side right here."

  "Fine," Dalene said. "Are you sure half the country's enough room for you to chase after your little girls with the yellow curls and the merry eyes?"

  Steve said, "That's what I'll be looking for, fond as I am of your hair-curlers."

  "Butt Hole!" my momma shouted. "If you don't get what you deserve in this life, you can thank God for His kindness!"

  Steve said, "What I'll thank him for is that you ain't gonna haunt my heart like a damned old movie star! You won't even be a memory!"

  "Is that a fact?" said Dalene. "Well, all I'll remember is your zipper go in' up and down like a window shade!"

  Life is a series of choices. I was told I could either go to California and watch Steve sell floor covering, or I could go to Mobile and watch Dalene take care of her sick mother and look for a new husband.

  Evidently, what I said to both of them was "I want to go to Uncle Kenneth's house. He likes sports and he don't holler."

  I never saw Dalene again.

  She did send me $5 every Christmas until she died when I was fourteen. She had remarried by then and given birth to three other kids. Apparently, the kids jumped up and down on the furniture so much, a headache did her in.

  Uncle Kenneth took me to the funeral in Mobile.

  It was my first funeral, but I figured out from the seating arrangement in the funeral parlor and at the cemetery that her new husband, Raymond, was the man on the front row in the windbreaker and the Schlitz cap.

  Being at the funeral was a strange feeling because I didn't know my momma at all, but the trip wasn't a complete loss. After the funeral, Uncle Kenneth and me drove up to Tuscaloosa for the Alabama-Ole Miss game.

  I saw my dad only one time after he moved to California. It was when I was a junior at TCU and we played an intersectional game against USC in Los Angeles.

  On the morning of the game, I was standing around in the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel with Shake and Barbara Jane. We were killing time. Shake and I were waiting to board the team bus to the L.A. Coliseum. We were laughing at all of the TCU fans in their purple blazers and purple leather cowboy boots when this man came toward us, and I couldn't help staring at him because of his outfit. He wore green slacks, a pink Munsingwear shirt, a red-and-yellow-checked linen coat, and white mesh-top shoes. He had an admirable tan. I thought he was just another California nitwit who wanted an autograph from me and Shake, your basic All- Americans. He didn't look anything like Uncle Kenneth, his brother.

  "Hello, Billy," the man said, sticking out his hand. "I'm your dad."

  Before I could speak, Shake said, "What's your name?"

  "Steve." The man looked blankly at Shake. "Steve Puckett."

  "What was his mother's name?" Shake gestured.

  "Dalene."

  "What street did you live on in Fort Worth?"

  Steve stammered.

  "Uh.. .Travis. Then over on Hemphill."

  "Could be him."

  Barbara Jane folded her arms as she studied Steve. She said, "Sir, I'm sorry, but I've known Billy Clyde's mother and father a long time. They're both named Kenneth."

  Out of embarrassment for Steve, I led him aside, seeing no reason to subject him to Shake and Barbara Jane's wise-mouth.

  We had a brief visit. He said he was proud of me. He said he followed my "dipsy-dos" in the newspapers. He said he had meant to write several times over the past fifteen years, but things had been hectic in the floor-covering b
usiness. He said he'd bought a new set of MacGregor irons and they had lowered his handicap to 12.

  He glanced around the lobby at my teammates, some of whom were black.

  "How you get along with the nigs?"

  "Fine," I said. "They're good guys."

  "Nigs is?"

  "Yeah."

  "Don't steal nothin'?"

  "No."

  "Don't even borrow nothin'?"

  "No. I borrow some of their albums."

  He said, "Lord, I seen one the other day that gimme a pause. He was one of your hippie nigs? He stood there on Wilshire Boulevard and took a piss in broad daylight!"

  "No fooling?"

  "Yep, right there on Wilshire Boulevard. I said to myself, Well, is this the end of civilization as we know it, or is it just another nigger pissin' on Wilshire Boulevard?"

  "It's a great country."

  My dad apologized for having been semi-halfway responsible for making me the victim of a broken home.

  I said he didn't need to apologize for a single thing. Uncle Kenneth had given me everything I'd needed, plus a good many laughs.

  He said, "Billy, I was sorry to hear about your mother. I never wanted her to bogey eighteen. I did root for a sore throat from time to time. Damn, she had a temper."

  "You got married again, didn't you?"

  "Twice," he said, sheepishly. "Learned my lesson. Cora burned my name in the eighteenth green at Rancho Park. Eileen threw a brand-new set of Pings in the ocean—can you believe that?"

  My dad was killed two years later. You could make him sound like he was a successful businessman if you said he got killed in a private-plane crash. The fact is, he got killed on the golf course where the private plane crashed.

  He hadn't been able to get his Titleist 4 and Wilson wedge out of a sand trap in time to avoid a Cessna that lost power and suddenly dropped out of the smog and made the bunker a little deeper.

  Old Steve was no big authority on relationships, but that morning in the Century Plaza lobby, he left me with some words I never forgot.

  "Billy, I ain't too smart or I wouldn't be trying to sell cork tile," he had said. "I know you play a tough sport. You got them big, mean tackles comin' at you. But I'll tell you one thing about life. You ain't took no lumps at all till you've tried marital discord."