Life Its Ownself

by Dan Jenkins

  "What are you saying, Kathy?" I couldn't avoid a grin. "Does this mean you want to have an affair with me now? I'm therapy?"

  She said, "I just want to tell you how much I love you. You're about the most important person in the world to me."

  "Kathy, I love Barbara Jane," I said. "One of these days I intend to get her back."

  "You will. You two belong together. I can't imagine you and Barbara Jane with anyone but each other. All I want to be is your friend."

  "You are."

  "You mean it?"

  "Of course."

  "Can we be close like this after you and Barbara Jane are back together?"

  "We'll be friends."

  "Could we be sitting here like this?"

  "Similar, I suppose."

  "Promise we'll stay good friends, Billy Clyde."

  "I promise."

  "That's why I think it would be okay."

  "What would?"

  "If we made love tonight. Want to?"

  I dare say most men in my position that evening would have had Kathy in bed as quickly as they could have hurled their bodies in front of a taxi. Even if they hadn't been aroused, they would have done it for research: to study all the tricks Kathy would surely have learned from Denise.

  I, however, could only sit there and drink for another hour and giggle at the irony—and miss Barbara Jane more than ever.

  On an August evening in New York, between a Hartford and an Akron, I dropped by Shake Tiller's apartment to see if I could tempt him to leave his clacker and go look for the perfect jukebox.

  Priscilla answered the door with a joint in her hand. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse tucked inside a pair of old jeans that had been cut off at the pubes.

  "There's a great horror movie on," she said. "Want to watch?"

  "No thanks," I said. "Where's Tolstoy?"

  "In his office. I gotta go. Something really weird's getting ready to climb out of a black hole."

  Priscilla hurried back to her pile of pillows on the carpet in front of the 26-inch color Sony.

  Shake's office was the spare bedroom in his apartment. It was a room with three walls of books, a manual clacker, a desk, a leather swivel chair, a coffeepot, eight cartons of cigarettes, six ashtrays, twelve bottles of correction fluid, a three-hole punch, a stack of white paper, and a big three- ring notebook in which there were 200 pages of The Past.

  He didn't care to go out drinking. "I can't make any money on Third Avenue," he said. "I can make some here."

  Our trip to Fort Worth for TCU's opening football game against Auburn was coming up. Tonsillitis Johnson and Artis Toothis were going to be unveiled to the world on the night of Sept. 5.

  The word from T. J. was that Tonsillitis and Artis were looking good in two-a-days. Darnell Johnson had brought in four 280-pound junior college transfers to block for them. He had brought in a junior college quarterback, Jimmy Sibley, whose only job was to hand the ball off to them.

  Tonsillitis and Artis appeared to be happy at TCU, principally because classes hadn't started yet and they had traded in their Datsun and Jaguar for turbo Porsches.

  "I've done some math," Shake said in his office. "Big Ed's paying twenty-three thousand dollars apiece for Tonsillitis' fumbles. Every time Artis fumbles, Big Ed'll pay seventeen thousand. That's based on the current value of Artis' real estate holdings. Incidentally, Barbara Jane's coming down for the award."

  That was more than I had known about it. I had spoken to Barb off and on during the summer. Her attitude about me hadn't changed that I could tell. She had seemed to be living a contented life in her Santa Monica beach house, playing tennis, going out with Jack Sullivan, and getting ready to appear on the cover of People magazine when the much-improved Rita series exploded on the new television season.

  Shake divulged that Barbara Jane had been in New York for a week while I was away at a golf tournament. Shake had seen her often. Dinners and stuff.

  "She misses you," he said.

  "She knows where she used to live."

  Before I let Shake get back to his clacker, I looked at his manuscript to give it the old first-paragraph test.

  "Do you mind?" I said as I opened the notebook.

  "Nope," he said. "It needs some lipstick and eye shadow."

  I turned to the first page of The Past, and what I read was:

  Of all the things Karen could have told him about herself that night, the last thing he had expected to hear was that she had fallen in love with Diana.

  "You know!" I said.

  "Yeah."

  "How?"

  "I kept wondering why Kathy never fucked you. It finally dawned on me she had to be a lesbo princess."

  "Who have you told?"

  "Nobody."

  "I don't believe you. It's too good to keep."

  "I haven't told anybody," Shake insisted.

  Despite the denial, the odds were heavily in favor of Shake telling Barb about Kathy.

  There would have been two reasons. One, the joke on me was irresistible. Since the three of us were kids, Shake and Barb and I had never let the other two get away with anything. This wasn't making fun of somebody drinking a piña colada, but it might as well have been to Shake. People foolish enough to get married ought to know there would be your basic rage problems like Barb and I were having, and if you had any intelligence, you laughed at it and went on with your mortgages and casseroles.

  And that reason tied in with the second. Shake would misread it as an opportunity to help me win back Barbara Jane—a woman, after all; a wife. It would prove that I couldn't have been having an affair. All I'd done was let myself get infatuated with a dyke, and that was funny, man—the kind of thing your clacker enjoyed putting into a novel.

  But Shake would have been mistaken if he thought that it would help Barbara Jane overcome her disappointment in me. Sometimes, Shake wasn't the smartest guy he knew, especially when it came to marriage.

  As much as anything, Barbara Jane's ego had been bruised. In a sense, it was immaterial whether I'd gone the distance with Kathy. The damage to my marriage had been done when I had been distracted by Kathy in the first place.

  Barb would never know for sure if Kathy and I had screwed, just as I would never know for sure if Barbara Jane and Jack Sullivan had screwed, but I was willing to call it a dead heat and blame those adventures on our lifestyle. What was important now was that we stop punishing each other for those adventures.

  Barb and I were both so strong-willed, so eaten up with pride, that we ran the risk of staying apart forever just to prove we could.

  My hope was that Barbara Jane would come to understand, as I think I had, that those relationships we stumbled into with Kathy Montgomery and Jack Sullivan could never have lasted.

  I didn't see how Barb and I could ever outrun Paschal High, and that's what I thought would bring us back together eventually.

  Some people might call it an affliction. I called it love.

  All this being the case, there was just enough macho bullshit in my cells for me to prefer that Barbara Jane not learn the truth about the lesbo princess.

  Which was why I asked Shake in his apartment that day to swear on a stack of Russian novels that he hadn't told Barb about Kathy.

  "Hey, come on, B.C.," he said. "I've done some shitty things in my life, but I couldn't do that to a guy."

  TWENTY

  It was a clear night, not indecently hot for Texas in early September, and the stars that swept across the sky above the stadium made it look like the Skipper had called in a decorator.

  TCU Stadium throbbed with an overflow crowd of 50,000 people, largely due to the 20,000 fanatics who had followed the Auburn Tigers to Fort Worth. A third of the stadium was a mosaic of Auburn blue-and-orange.

  Shake and I were down on the field during the pre-game drills. We were taken with the fact that TCU's players weren't as nervous as TCU's coaches, but we didn't know what to make of it.

  While T.J. and his assistant
s constantly slapped their hands together, whistled, yelled, and raced about, the TCU players limped around, stretched, tampered with their equipment.

  In particular, Tonsillitis Johnson and Artis Toothis blundered through their warmups like men with sore muscles.

  I kept looking at Big Ed's box on the 50-yard line in the West Side stands, twenty rows up from the TCU bench. I was watching for Barbara Jane, who had yet to arrive.

  She was flying in for the game—and her alumni award— on the Bookman Lear. Uncle Kenneth had volunteered to meet her at the airport and bring her to the stadium.

  Big Ed and Big Barb were visions of purple. Big Ed wore a purple blazer, a purple tie with a white shirt, and a white Stetson. Big Barb was resplendent in a purple suit and white Garbo hat.

  In the box with Big Ed and Big Barb was Darnell Johnson, the assistant to the president of Bookman Oil & Gas. Darnell had neglected to wear anything purple, but he looked as prosperous as ever in his suit, vest, and tie.

  Now the TCU band and cheerleaders, led by Sandi, formed a corridor through which the Horned Frogs retreated to the dressing room for T.J. Lambert's final words of encouragement and advice.

  Shake and I went into the dressing room behind the team.

  T.J. faced the squad and hung his head, waiting for everyone to quiet down before he spoke. The moment came, and in a somber tone, he said:

  "Men, I don't have to tell you what you're up against tonight. They're the national champions. They're as good a team as I ever saw. They're waitin' for you out there like pallbearers. TCU don't mean dookie to Aubrin. But you know what I think's gonna happen? I think we're goin' out there and strap so much quick on 'em, they'll have to get their ass sewed up with barbed wire! Now let's do it! Fuck Aubrin!"

  There were no whoops from the players. They left the dressing room laughing and joking.

  Standing at the dressing-room door, I felt a little rush of purple as I said to Artis Toothis:

  "Go get 'em, Artis."

  "I got the claim check, baby," he said. "We pickin' up baggage tonight!"

  To Tonsillitis Johnson, I said, "Have a good one, hoss."

  "Ain't nothin' to it," he said. "We gonna hit 'em with a pocketful of flash."

  Shake and I were back on the field behind the TCU bench as the two squads knelt for a prayer before the opening kickoff. Auburn may have been praying, but there was little doubt in my mind that T.J. was reminding his lads that it was more blessed to die at birth than fumble a football.

  The teams took the field for the kickoff. That was when I saw Barbara Jane and Uncle Kenneth come down the aisle to join Big Ed and Big Barb and Darnell in the box.

  Barbara Jane waved at us. She also waved, smiled, shrugged, and gestured at people she knew in the stands— and signed a couple of autographs before she reached the box.

  "I know that girl from somewhere," Shake said.

  Auburn kicked off to TCU and the ball sailed out of the end zone. The offensive unit of the Horned Frogs trotted out to their own 20-yard line in their dark purple jerseys and purple helmets, Tonsillitis wearing No. 1 and Artis wearing No. 99.

  On TCU's first play from scrimmage, Tonsillitis took a pitchout from Jimmy Sibley, the transfer quarterback. All Tonsillitis did on his first carry as a collegian was break five tackles and rumble 80 yards for a touchdown.

  "God damn," said Shake, "he hit that cornerback so hard, the sumbitch'll be left-handed the rest of his life!"

  I looked up at the box in time to see Big Ed and Darnell swap high-fives.

  The Frogs kicked off to Auburn. The Tigers couldn't make a first down and punted out of bounds on TCU's 37- yard line. On the first play from there, Artis Toothis took a pitchout from Jimmy Sibley, sped around a corner, and nobody touched him as he went 63 yards for another touchdown.

  Now, up in the box, Big Ed Bookman and Darnell Johnson, a white man and a black man—in public, in an old Texas cowtown—embraced and kissed each other on the cheek.

  That was a sight I wish I could have shared with all the semi-holy reformers who want to fuck with college football.

  The score was 42 to 3 at the half. Tonsillitis Johnson carried the ball nine times for 249 yards and three touchdowns. Artis Toothis carried the ball 12 times for 187 yards and two touchdowns.

  Before the half ended, and just after Tonsillitis had plowed 16 yards for his third touchdown, I had worked my way over to T. J. on the sideline and said, "Like we've always known, coaching makes the difference."

  T.J. had looked like a man who was half-spellbound, half-brainsick.

  He had said, "I ain't sure my heart can take it, son. Them two fuckers is gonna scatter everybody like monkey shit!"

  Barbara Jane and Uncle Kenneth came down out of the stands and onto the field as the TCU band performed at halftime. Chancellor Troy (Tex) Edgar and a gentleman from the alumni association appeared. They were waiting to escort Barb and me to the center of the field to give us our awards. Shake Tiller went to the dressing room to relieve himself— to "shake hands with the unemployed," an expression he had picked up in England.

  As Barb and I kissed politely, I said, "You've done a lot for this university. I want you to know we appreciate it."

  "How are you?" said Barb.

  "Overwhelmed with gratitude. Filled with renewed devotion to the campus that expanded my intellectual horizons."

  "Other than that?"

  "Not worth a shit." I said. "You?"

  Uncle Kenneth said, "If I'd made a bet on marital discord, you kids would have brought me in crisp. How long you been separated, eight months? I'd have gone with the Under, sure as the world."

  "Dumb guys have been robbing smart guys for years," I said. "A crooked zebra told me that."

  "I've been a dumb guy," said Barbara Jane. "I've been robbing myself."

  Barbara Jane's look was the one I'd been waiting for.

  I hate to put it like this, but her look made my poor heart swell up.

  I said, "Would a guy assume from your demeanor that he's happily married again?"

  "A guy could assume that."

  I glanced at Uncle Kenneth. He had the confident smile of a man who had shoved it all in on a mortal lock.

  "Does your director approve of you being here?" I asked.

  "He didn't get a vote."

  "I've been thinking about the bicoastal life," I said. "It might not be so bad. I like Fatburger."

  "I miss football," said Barb. "Can I go to some of the games with you? Would there be room for me in the booth?"

  "I love you, Barb," I said with as much persuasion as I ever had.

  "I love you," she said. "I never stopped, you know."

  Before I could grab her up in my arms, we were suddenly marched onto the field by the chancellor and the gentleman from the alumni association.

  The voice on the P.A. system said something about the awards. We were handed plaques. There were handshakes. I don't know that either of us heard any of the words that were spoken. We just kept looking at each other.

  And now we walked away, slowly, over to the sideline, and then toward the south end zone where we could see Shake Tiller in the distance. Shake was leaning against the goal post.

  "So Biff," said Barb. "Did you make it with that time bandit from Berkeley?"

  Time bandit.

  Barbara Jane's review of Kathy Montgomery had finally come in.

  I gave the question some serious thought.

  "Barb, I know you don't want me to lie to you again," I said. "I...yes, I did."

  "Ha!"

  Barbara Jane threw her head back and laughed raucously. It was honest laughter, a sound that was so much a part of her—and our past.

  "You macho bastard," she said, still smiling, "you would say that, wouldn't you?"

  "Do you like Shake's book? I hate it."

  "He told me about Kathy, but that's not why I'm back, Biff."

  "Who do you want to play in the movie? I'd like to play me.

  "Kathy's a neat role
."

  I pulled Barbara Jane to me. We kissed as if we were all alone on the field. And then we kept walking. And in the stadium where I'd heard so many cheers, where the scent of winning was in the air again, it occurred to me that I'd scored the greatest victory of my life. Barbara Jane had come back.

  We met Shake Tiller at the south end of the field. Nobody said anything. We just looked around in the stadium, and back at each other, and the three of us started to laugh.

  I guess you could say we were laughing at life its ownself as we stood there in an old familiar huddle under a spray of Texas stars.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Life Its Ownself is Dan Jenkins' fifth novel, his eighth book. His published fiction includes Semi-Tough (1972), Dead Solid Perfect (1974), Limo (1976), and Baja Oklahoma (1981). Mr. Jenkins is a native of Fort Worth, Texas, who has lived in New York City for the past 22 years. As a Senior Writer for Sports Illustrated, he has written more than 500 articles on the subjects of football and golf.

  Mr. Jenkins is married to the former June Burrage of Fort Worth, the co-owner of two highly acclaimed restaurants in Manhattan (Juanita's and Summerhouse). Their daughter, Sally, is a sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and their sons, Marty and Danny, are working in television and photography in Texas and New York.