Life Its Ownself

by Dan Jenkins

  Fast was only half of it. Tonsillitis had a 34-inch waist, a 52-inch chest, and could benchpress the King Ranch.

  "He has a three-point grade average, right?" I said. "Over a thousand on his S.A.T.'s?"

  T. J. blushed and looked away for a second. He opened a drawer of his desk and took out a document.

  "I hadn't ought to show you this," he said, holding what looked like a questionnaire in his hand. "Lord knows, I wouldn't want no English professors to see it."

  T.J. studied the questionnaire.

  "They's a conference rule what says a high school athlete has to fill out one of these in the presence of the head coach. I asked Tonsillitis to fill it out this morning. He said he'd take it home and send it back to me. I said, naw, you got to do it here, hoss. It ain't hard, I said. Just put your name down there... your address... your high school. That kind of thing. Your momma and daddy's name. He started to fill it out. When he come to the place where he was supposed to put down his favorite sport, he looked at me and said, 'What we be doin' ratch ear?' I said, Put down your favorite sport. It's football, ain't it? He gimme a nod. I said, Write it down, hoss. So he did. Only...here's what he wrote."

  T. J. handed me the questionnaire.

  Tonsillitis Johnson had written down the word "booley."

  "Booley?" I looked up at T.J.

  "Something like that."

  "Booleyball," I said, rolling the word around, unequipped to fend off a grin.

  T.J. snatched the questionnaire away from me. He put it back in his desk, locking the drawer hastily.

  "Booley," I said again, repeating the word to myself as I gazed out the window at the stadium, a fine old gray concrete edifice.

  "He can make a difference around here, son," T. J. said firmly. "We get Tonsillitis Johnson wearin' that purple, we'll kick some serious ass."

  Later in the afternoon I caught up with Uncle Kenneth at Luther's Barbecue, a reliable emporium on a decaying side of town. No good barbecue joint ever flourished or even lasted in a swank neighborhood. Why would anybody eat in a place where they might encounter nouvelle brisket?

  A platter of coal-black ribs sat in front of Uncle Kenneth. They reminded me of how much I hated Continental restaurants. I ordered two slabs of mesquite-smoked ribs, sauce on the side, with pintos, fries, cole slaw, and garlic bread. I then wallowed in all of it while Uncle Kenneth told me what was wrong with pro football.

  Everything, he said.

  The sixteen-game regular season was too long. Teams didn't try half the time, not until December. They held back, hoped to coast on through. The result was that every team was sloppy, undependable.

  You shouldn't be allowed to lose seven games and reach the playoffs, much less the Super Bowl. The pros were the best thing that ever happened to college football.

  In college, you had to tee it up every Saturday, and you'd better not lose more than one game if you wanted a shot at No. 1.

  The draft and the parity scheduling were making every NFL team ordinary. Why reward mediocrity? Make the weak sisters work their way back to the top.

  The no-bump rule was a disgrace. Why were they making it harder and harder to play defense? So they could turn humdrum quarterbacks into heroes?

  How come the pros had a way of taking a great ballcarrier out of college and teaching him how to fumble and slip down?

  How come the pros had a way of turning great college pass receivers into split ends who dropped key passes?

  How come most NFL teams had a head coach you never heard of?

  Where did all of the 300-pound subhumans come from and why were they needed to fill gaps and paw each other?

  When was everybody going to wise up to artificial turf? It made players bounce higher than the ball.

  Who the hell watched Monday-Thursday-Sunday-Friday Night Football on TV? Gamblers were even tired of it.

  Where were all the characters in the game, men like Bobby Layne, Sonny Jurgenson, Alex Hawkins, Bill Kilmer, Paul Hornung, Mean Joe Greene, Doak Walker, Jim Brown, Max McGee, Bubba Smith, Jake Scott, and Fred Dryer?

  It had become the NRL, the National Robot League.

  When did breathing on somebody get to be pass interference?

  And did anybody really know what offensive holding was, other than the fact that it was something a zebra called when it was time to fuck you out of your bet but win him his?

  "You left out dopeheads and guys who want to strike," I said.

  "Billy, it's a shame. Your game's become a damned old bore. I'd almost just as soon watch pro basketball."

  He sipped his Budweiser, and said, "No, I don't think I want to go that far."

  "You still bet football," I reminded him.

  "Over and under is all I'd fool with right now. Smart money don't bet teams the first ten or twelve weeks of the season. You don't know who's gonna have the rag on. When they start gettin' down to the playoffs, you can get some idea about form. Aw, I'll bet a zebra now and then."

  Uncle Kenneth kept charts on game officials. Zebras. He was as certain there were notorious crooks among the zebras as I was certain they were only incompetent.

  "Who's your favorite zebe these days?" I was gnawing on an exceptionally meaty rib.

  "No contest. Charlie Teasdale."

  Charlie Teasdale had been in the league for ten years. He was an experienced referee, lived in Dallas. He'd been involved in a number of controversial plays through the years, but I had chalked it up to his age—he was in his fifties— his blindness, and his stupidity. The replays had rarely proved Charlie right. When he had ruled no fumble, it had been a fumble. When he ruled in-bounds or out-of-bounds, it had always been the opposite. The fortunes of whole teams and individuals had often hung in the balance on Charlie Teasdale's first-down measurements and holding penalties. "King of The Call-back" was what Uncle Kenneth had nicknamed him.

  "Last year the dogs covered fourteen out of the sixteen games Charlie Teasdale worked," Uncle Kenneth said. "He's a dandy. Man in Vegas told me he'd rather own Charlie Teasdale than Mobil Oil. Shake was asking about him the other day."

  "Shake Tiller?"

  "His ownself. He called me from somewhere."

  "He called you about Charlie Teasdale?"

  "He said he was trying to do some kind of magazine article. He said he wouldn't use my name or nothin'. He asked me about one thing and another. How the odds had moved on this game and that. He wanted to know what games I thought had been real funny over the past two or three years."

  "Funny?"

  "You know what I mean. All them games where they weren't supposed to do it but they did."

  "Upsets."

  "Prison offenses."

  I didn't know anything about an article Shake was working on. He hadn't mentioned it to me.

  "I guess he don't want to put you on the spot. You're still a player."

  "That's debatable," I said. "I might be a broadcaster, but that's debatable, too."

  "That's probably another reason Shake hasn't talked to you about his story. Broadcasters ain't journalists. They're Establishment. Ain't no NFL broadcaster gonna look down there on the field at old Charlie Teasdale and say, 'Welcome to Flag Day, sports fans. This one's for Charlie Teasdale and all of his close friends in Vegas."'

  "Vegas," I said with disgust, motioning to the waitress for the check. "Vegas doesn't know every God-damn thing. Vegas says somebody went in the can every time there's an upset. Vegas thinks World War Two was fixed!"

  "I reckon some of 'em did have Germany."

  Outside Luther's, my uncle helped me climb into the Lincoln.

  I zipped down the window. "Let me ask you something, Kenneth. If Vegas is so fucking smart, how come it's in Nevada?"

  I was obligated to have cocktails with Big Ed and Big Barb that evening, but I hadn't minded. They were sometimes more fun than whiskey. They had long ago secured their places among the most self-important people God had ever put on Texas soil.

  I met them at River Crest Country
Club, the oldest and most exclusive club in Fort Worth, a haven for local peerage and new WASP money. The club had a funky old golf course woven through well-shaded two-story homes. The homes would have been considered mansions in the Twenties and Thirties.

  The clubhouse had once resembled one of those tasteful homes. Now it had been rebuilt into something that was either an architectural masterpiece or the Babylon Marriott. The design of the new clubhouse had been approved and the construction had begun while Big Ed was out of the country. When he returned, he had stomped into a board meeting and said, "Who's the silly bastard that thought the thief of Baghdad was a God-damn architect?" It was Big Barb's darkest secret that she had recommended the architect.

  In character, every city had a River Crest, though in other places it might be called Brook Hollow, River Oaks, Timaquana, East Lake, or Burning Jew. It was a club in which you were likely to find more than one member who had yet to acknowledge the Supreme Court decision of 1954, and would strongly argue that The New York Times had exaggerated the death toll of the Holocaust by five and a half million people.

  A high school kid took my car at the club's entrance. Monroe opened the front door of the building for me. Monroe was a congenial, elderly black man who looked no older to me now than he had when I was in Paschal and Shake and I had terrorized the club as guests of Barbara Jane.

  As we shook hands, Monroe said, "I knew you wasn't gonna get up the minute you was hit, Billy Clyde. Ooo, that looked like it hurt."

  "You ought to see Dreamer Tatum," I said. "My knee bent his mind out of shape. How are all the rich folks, Monroe?"

  "Jes' fine."

  "Jes' rich, you mean."

  "That's it," he laughed. "Jes" rich, is all."

  Big Ed and Big Barb were in the Mixed Grill.

  They were at a table having drinks with a pale middle- aged fool, who stood up to leave as I arrived.

  We were introduced. I didn't get his name—J. Thomas something—but I did get his Ivy League stutter and the tail- end of a conversation.

  "I q-quite agree with the older chaps," the Ivy Leaguer was saying to the Bookmans. "The toilet seats in the men's locker must be raised, hang the expense!"

  "Sounds okay to me," I said, sitting down and saluting a bartender who recognized me and held aloft a bottle of )&B as if to ask if that was what I still drank.

  The Ivy Leaguer's eyes were on Big Ed as he said, "Most of our older members have had hernia problems, you see. They simply can't sit on those toilets in the men's locker anymore without their balls dangling in the water when they make cah-cah."

  Glancing at Big Barb, he said, "Excuse me, Barbara, but it's rather a s-serious problem."

  "I should think so," said Big Barb, looking uncomfortable.

  Big Ed said, "I'll vote with the majority of the board."

  "That's all I ask," J. Thomas something replied. "Just w- wanted you to know I'm m-making it an agenda item for the spring meeting."

  The Ivy Leaguer moved on to another group of members, all of whom were sinking deeper into drunken slumbers.

  Other tables were occupied with men and women who sloshed their Martinis and stared at each other testily, except for those who stared at me, possibly wondering why a cripple had been allowed in the club.

  My drink came while Big Ed and Big Barb devoted two full minutes to discussing my knee injury. Then Big Ed brought up a familiar topic.

  "Here's to dinosaurs," he said, raising his glass of Stolichnaya on the rocks. "Had to remind the scamps at Bookman Oil and Gas today that we're in the bidness of finding dinosaurs, not dry holes! We're in the wine bidness, I said. Dinosaur wine!"

  Big Ed smoked Sherman cigarettellos. As he lit one, he said, "You know where to find dinosaurs, don't you, Billy Clyde?"

  I tried to look inquisitive.

  "Well, they ain't in the God-damn Petroleum Club where my geologists hang out. Most dinosaurs either drowned in the ocean or they laid down and died of a happy old age in Texas and Arabia!"

  "Makes sense," I said.

  "See, what you got to do in my bidness is find you a big old cave under the ground where a bunch of dinosaurs have flopped down. When you find you a whole pile of 'em and they've fermented just right, you stick your straw in the ground and you drink that dinosaur wine."

  He sipped his vodka and looked at Big Barb with a glint.

  "Porosity—ain't that right?"

  "Porosity," Big Barb said, noticing her hair in her reflection on the window glass.

  "Big underground rock with enough pore space in it to store that wine for a million years," Big Ed said. "That's what I told my office today. I said you monkeys better get off your ass and grab me by the pores!"

  "How is the oil business these days?" I asked, trying to be conversant. I was about as interested in the oil business as I was in computer science.

  Big Ed sighed.

  "We'll always have one problem. We got to deal with Dune Coons. More dinosaurs died in Arabia than anywhere else."

  "Dune Coons?"

  "Sand niggers," Big Ed said. "Your A-rabs cause the glut and they cause the gasoline lines. Whatever suits their ass. I was tryin' to deal with a Dune Coon the other day. I told him, I said, 'You know what would make this a better world to live in? It'd be a lot better world if all you OPEC sons-of- bitches didn't know nothin' about seismic instruments and infra-red satellite photographs and just went on to Mecca and hummed a bunch of shit!"

  Big Ed and Big Barb were physically attractive people. Big Ed had wavy gray hair. He wore finely tailored suits, kept an out-of-season tan. Acapulco was close if you owned a Lear. Big Barb was a regal brunette with the Rolls-Royce of face-lifts and butt-tucks. The worth of the diamonds and emeralds she might wear on a given night would feed West Virginia for a year.

  We got around to talking about their daughter, my wife, and what Barbara Jane was up to in L.A., and were we having any marital problems that Big Ed and Big Barb could solve with money or phone calls to Senate subcommittees?

  We were getting along fine for two people who seldom saw each other, I said.

  "I just think it's absurd," Big Barb said. "Why in the world does Barbara Jane want to be an actress?"

  I had wondered the same thing. All of the actors and actresses I had ever met, mostly through sports, had sooner or later exposed themselves as paranoid children.

  They could give wonderful performances with the proper direction, cutting, and editing. They could appear to be perfectly natural and appealing on talk shows or at social gatherings. But they shouldn't be mistaken for human beings. They were aliens who were terrified and distrustful of anyone who didn't heap constant praise on them or didn't agree with every absurd thing they thought at all times. They measured artistic achievement in terms of fame and money. They had a cliche-clouded outlook of people outside their industry: smart businessmen were in a hurry, serious writers talked about the soil, the great athletes worked with kids, honest politicians looked concerned. Some performers could make me laugh or cry on the big screen, but that didn't mean I wanted to have dinner with them. It was a curious thing.

  Barbara Jane had practically been dragged into the business. The hard-hitters who ran the entertainment division at ABC had tried before to get her to do a series. In her commercials, they thought she had "delectability," "likability," and "recognizability."

  She had agreed to give it a try after she had been presented with an idea for a show in which she would play a young woman very much like herself, someone who would get to wise off regularly, who would be expected to look good, who would be supported by talented professionals.

  So it was that the only answer I could give Big Barb for why her daughter wanted to be an actress was:

  "It's a new challenge, I guess."

  Big Barb then said, "She can't join Los Angeles Country club."

  I wasn't sure I heard that right.

  "L.A. Country Club won't accept show-business people. Everybody knows that. We have friends who are m
embers."

  Big Ed confirmed this horrid fact.

  He said, "They let Randolph Scott join, but only after he quit the movies. Hell, Bing Crosby lived across the street from the fourteenth fairway for twenty years, but they never let him in!"

  I said I did not recall, in all honesty, Barbara Jane saying she had wanted to join Los Angeles Country Club.

  Her mother said, "Not now, maybe, but what will happen if she changes her mind? If she's an actress, they simply won't have it. I think it's something you and Barbara Jane need to discuss."

  Big Ed wondered who watched television, anyhow. News, sure. Sports. Space shots. But what else? All he ever saw when he turned it on at night was a bunch of faggots hopping around a living room being silly.

  "Is Barbara Jane in one of those faggot shows?"

  "She's making what they call a pilot," I said. "It's the first episode in what could be a comedy series if the network bosses like it. But that doesn't mean it will be any good— or even funny. Don't you want to see your daughter on Channel Eight every Tuesday night?"

  "Not with faggots." Big Ed waved at a waiter.

  The show was called Rita's Limo Stop. Barbara Jane played "Rita." The show was based on the premise that a pretty young divorcee who happened to be going blind would try to open a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

  I had asked Barb the same question she had asked the producers. Why was "Rita" going blind?

  "We had to think of something to make you more vulnerable," a producer had explained to Barbara Jane.

  To the Bookmans, I said, "Rita has a partner in the restaurant. Amanda. It's kind of a Lib thing. Rita and Amanda cope with all these problems in the business world. The restaurant is a big load of trouble, and weird characters are supposed to come in and out."

  "I hope one of them is an eye doctor," Big Ed said.

  "I don't think Rita goes completely blind if the show gets good ratings," I said. "Maybe things will get a little dim now and then."

  Big Barb didn't understand the name of the show. What did Rita's Limo Stop mean?

  I said, "There are truck stops, right? The title's supposed to be a gag. New York? East Side? Rich people? Texas has truck stops, New York has limo stops."