North Dallas Forty

by Peter Gent

  “Don’t leave early,” I pleaded with Charlotte, and moved out toward the pool, nodding at Beaudreau as we passed.

  “Good game, man.” Beaudreau slapped me on the shoulder; I didn’t break stride.

  He called after me, “We need you and Gill out wide—instead of that fucking spook.”

  He was referring to Delma Huddle and I should have turned around and jammed my fist down his throat. I didn’t.

  I reached the pool and looked around for Maxwell. A hand closed tightly on the back of my neck. Pain shot into my head and shoulders and down both arms. I continued to stand upright, but was paralyzed.

  “Hey motherfucker, when did you start givin’ orders?”

  “Goddammit, Jo Bob, let go of my neck.” I tried for the right mixture of anger and mollification.

  Jo Bob squeezed harder.

  “Turn loose, Jo Bob,” I cried.

  “Come on, Jo Bob.” It was Maxwell.

  The grip eased into a rough massaging motion, and finally he turned me loose.

  “Jesus Christ. That hurt.” I rubbed my neck and rolled my head. The pain had brought tears to my eyes. I closed them tightly.

  “Jo Bob don’t seem to like you,” Maxwell said, as we watched the giant step into his undershorts and walk back inside.

  “Who does?” I asked, distracted by the peculiar popping noises my neck was making.

  “He thinks you’re a smart ass.”

  “Who doesn’t?” I rubbed my neck thoughtfully and considered the outcome had Jo Bob refused to turn loose. In a fight with Jo Bob I would have stood a slightly better chance than Peterson and Miss Texas combined. I recalled my rookie year when Jo Bob and Meadows had held me down and taped my head. I had refused a hazing and they had covered my head with five rolls of one-inch tape. It took almost an hour and two cans of adhesive solvent to free me. I lost my sideburns, eyebrows, eyelashes, several great hanks of head hair, and almost all my pride.

  “And,” Maxwell continued, listing my popular faults, “he thinks you smoke marijuana, and he’s pretty certain you’re queer.”

  “And he thinks Crawford and Claridge are the Katzenjammer Kids, right?” Before I’d finished the sentence I was sorry I’d said it.

  “What?” Maxwell had never considered their behavior peculiar.

  “Nothing.”

  “What about Crawford and Claridge?”

  “Nothing, forget it.” That seemed to satisfy Maxwell, and we stood quietly watching the people moving around us. They were all drunk on something.

  “That Beaudreau is a cocksucker.” Maxwell was angry. “He wanted me to come see him the first of the week. He has a letter stock to sell. Shit.”

  “I’d like to grudge-fuck his girl,” I said. “That’d teach his ass.”

  Maxwell suggested going to the other side of the pool “to inhale a little more of that killer weed. Maybe I’ll be able to relax.”

  “I’ll have to go to the car. I’ll meet you at the cabanas.” I pointed across the pool.

  I wondered what it was I liked about Maxwell. Admittedly, he was the most selfish man I had ever met. He looked at everything and everyone as pieces in his great game of chance. He had told me once, after an evening of copious doping and drinking, that he maintained our friendship “against the advice of a lotta people” only because he had not yet figured out what I wanted out of life. I didn’t seem to have any goals. At the time I didn’t know I was supposed to have any. I still don’t have them, but he doesn’t know that.

  Our friendship was based on a mutual respect and envy of each other’s particular football skills and would end when either of us left the game. Competition needs an arena or it just degenerates into unbridled hatred.

  “You think you’re something special, don’t you?” he had said without much conviction. “All them books an’ shit you read. Well, somebody had to write those books and you ain’t no different for readin’ ’em.” He had glared at me as though he was angry about something.

  Since that time I’ve tried to maintain an outward show of direction during all my chaos. Confusion is not dangerous in itself but can be fatal if interpreted as a lack of destiny. Fortunately, I am suffering from a form of incompetence that is not easily recognizable. It adds to my inscrutability.

  I have to admit, on Maxwell’s behalf, that I have never met a more inspiring and competent individual on a playing field. He is a flawless, confident quarterback who plays the game with his whole being, holding nothing back, ready to sacrifice life and limb, yours and his, to win. Opponents fear him; his teammates worship him. He shames his lineman to tears over missed blocks, and distracts linebackers with reprisals for late hits. Two years ago in the snow in Pittsburgh, he threw two touchdowns in the fourth period to win by a single point. That night he checked into the hospital with a fractured jaw. There wasn’t a pass he couldn’t throw, a team he couldn’t beat, a pain he couldn’t endure, or a woman he couldn’t fuck, given the right time and combination of pieces. That was how he lived. Time took care of itself; he collected the pieces.

  I was one of the pieces.

  I knew friendlier players, but most had families and lived in three-bedroom ranch houses in Richardson. Incredibly dull, they spent every spare minute studying the stock market or the real estate business. They ignored their wives and filled them with kids to keep them busy; they paid three hundred dollars a month for brick veneer, central heat, and air, and bought a nine-passenger station wagon to cart the whole mess to Highland Shopping Center.

  “You only play ball a short time,” they would tell me. “You gotta cash in while your name means something.” I always wondered about that something.

  When they were through playing and became full-time stockbrokers or insurance agents, they suddenly realized they had always been brokers or agents. Intent on getting ready to live, they never noticed where they were. So tenaciously middle class, they had torpidly worked their way through their days of majesty on toward the American Dream.

  No, whatever Maxwell was, he was certainly the most unique, and in a world striving for similitude, there has to be value in that. So while he was busy manipulating me, I was busy manipulating him. It was a good match.

  I retrieved a couple of joints from the glove box and returned to the pool.

  As I approached the cabanas I could see the red glow of Maxwell’s cigarette. It was a good safe place to turn on. The fear of getting busted was always present, though the blanket amnesty for contemporary folk heroes provided a certain protection for most crimes, as long as we were slightly discreet and never forgot who had the pocketbook. The real dangers were nondoping teammates, who might easily turn me in “for my own good” or “for the good of the team,” and for corrupting Maxwell. So we tried with as much solicitude as is possible to keep our doping a relative secret. It had become our private ritual. I enjoyed it and so did he.

  “Look at those people,” Maxwell said, pointing toward the party.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re all crazy.”

  “So what? You is too.”

  “Yeah, but I know it.”

  “I might argue that point with you.”

  “They all think,” Maxwell said, gesturing at the crowd dancing madly inside and outside the apartment, “that all this is normal.”

  “You mean it ain’t?” I tried to sound shocked.

  “Life is just one big ball game,” he said, ignoring me. “Superstars knowing exactly what we’re doin’ and where we’re goin’.”

  “Well,” I said confidently. “I dunno about you, but this superstar here is right on course. Life is just one big driver’s test to this kid.”

  Maxwell frowned with disgust. “I dunno.” He sighed, looking across the glittering water of the pool. “Sometimes I think I know exactly what I want and head for it. But I don’t know by the time I reach it. After I’ve worked my ass off, I don’t seem to care much about it. It’s like it’s all changed or moved ... or I don’t know mayb
e ...” He was groping for the thought.

  “The problem, man,” I suggested, with the tone of having made a major intellectual breakthrough, “is that life is dodging you.”

  Maxwell gave me a full-face look of disgust. We were silent. Some faceless girl flew out the door of the apartment and landed, fully clothed, in the pool. Jo Bob followed her through the door and stood at the edge of the pool. He was laughing and wearing only his undershorts.

  “That’s why they love football, man,” I said, nodding toward Andy’s apartment. “Easy to understand. Win or lose. Simple. Direct. Not nearly so confusing as their lives. Have you noticed that nothing is quite so aggravating to a football fan as a tie?”

  Jo Bob helped the girl from the pool, picked her up, held her over his head and dropped her into the pool again. A small crowd had gathered, watching approvingly. Jo Bob called the swimming pool a motherfucker.

  “Why do people think we’re so clever?” I asked Maxwell, who was staring unseeing into the deep end of the pool. “We make our living getting hit in the head.”

  The girl hit the water for the third time. The crowd laughed politely and began to wander back inside. I scanned the sky for the cause of a peculiar yellow flash I was sure I had just seen.

  “We’re just hybrid freaks hired to do a specific job of putting more numbers on a scoreboard. We’re like those chickens they shoot full of hormones so they’ll be all white meat.”

  “What are you talkin’ about?” Maxwell growled.

  “I was wonderin’ how I got so high and ...” I pointed to the waterlogged girl climbing out of the pool, “... if Jo Bob is gonna kill that woman.”

  The girl snuck up and hit Jo Bob with a piece of lawn furniture. He grabbed her, slapped her twice, and tried to push her face into his crotch. Then he threw her back into the pool. Maxwell hadn’t taken his eyes off me.

  “What is botherin’ you?” Maxwell pressed.

  I turned to see if he wanted a serious answer. He did.

  “Wonderin’ how I’m gonna make tomorrow, I guess. You know, the usual paranoid shit.”

  “What are you afraid of now?” He was more incredulous than inquisitive.

  “The same thing you are, Seth. I don’t buy that high school varsity confidence-in-the-face-of-all-things. This goddam incredible competition frightens me.”

  “Shit, man. I thrive on competition.”

  “So do I, but that don’t mean I like it.”

  Maxwell frowned but remained silent

  “Fear, man,” I continued. “It’s fear and hatred that supply us with our energy. They’re what keep us up.”

  He shook his head, stretched out in the chair, and stared at his feet. After a long while he said, “I’m not afraid.”

  “Not afraid of what?”

  “Just ... not afraid.”

  “Bullshit. You’re so scared of losing ...” I couldn’t think of how to end the sentence. I started again. “The hopelessness of it all, man, having to win. It’s just a flashy treadmill with no way off but failure. I know guys who are still trying to explain why they didn’t make it in high school. Telling me how the hand of God intervened to keep them from fulfilling a sixth grade potential that would have impressed the great Red Grange himself. It all finally boils down to circumstance and a matter of opinion. Ten thousand degrees of failure and only one champion.”

  “What are you complainin’ about? You’re doin’ okay.”

  “Things could be a lot better.”

  “They could be a helluva lot worse.”

  “My point exactly. They could be a helluva lot worse.”

  Maxwell slid down in his chair, rested his neck against the seat back, and stared at the canvas roof. I assumed approximately the same pose and we didn’t speak.

  “I wonder why we do it?” I sighed absently, tired of silence.

  “The only way to find that out is to stop.”

  He was right. But I wasn’t prepared to stop. I gazed vacantly across the water. The girl was gone. She either had escaped from Jo Bob or was at the bottom of the pool.

  I was trying to decide whether Seth Maxwell had fallen asleep or was just waiting for my eyes to close so he could strangle me. Judging by the stiffness in my back and legs, I had drifted confused for some time.

  I looked over at Maxwell; he looked asleep.

  “Seth.” There was no answer.

  I got up, walked around the pool and back into the apartment. Inside, Bob Dylan was finishing up Side 1 of Blonde on Blonde on the unattended stereo. Everyone had vanished. I was sorry I had missed Charlotte Caulder. Muffled sounds indicated something was in progress in Andy’s sleeping quarters. I shuffled down the hall, trying to clear my narcotized mind.

  “Shhh,” Crawford signaled, as I stuck my head in the door.

  He was wearing red silk boxer shorts with a large A.C. embroidered in white on the right thigh. A long, nude blonde lay on the bed to Andy’s right. At the foot of the bed two of the three stewardesses from Lubbock sat cross-legged. Everyone was facing across the room, to my left, where Alan Claridge perched atop the dresser, clothed only in a baseball hat. Standing between his legs was a girl I had not seen before. She was sucking him off.

  “We’re timing him,” Crawford said, holding up a stopwatch.

  I recognized the watch as the same one B.A. used to time quarterback setups.

  “He’s been going three minutes and forty seconds,” the long blonde said, without taking her eyes from Claridge’s face, which was beginning to contort.

  “I think he’s hitting the tape,” I offered.

  The cocksucker turned her head slightly and strained out of the corners of her eyes to see who I was. I held up my hand, palm out.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” I said.

  “Hon’t horry hou hon’t,” she replied, in perfect cadence.

  “Says she’s gonna suck off every guy in professional football,” Crawford volunteered. “Claims she’s already done all the important Rams and 49ers.”

  “She seems to be moving east,” I observed.

  “Looks like it.” Crawford nodded. “Come on, help her realize her dream.” He pointed to the slumped shoulders and erotically bobbing head. “Send this girl to camp.”

  It all seemed rather bizarre and tempting. I looked back to the blonde on the bed for a little encouragement but she looked right through me.

  “No thanks,” I decided. “I guess I’ll go on home and jack off. I’ll send in Seth, he’s sleeping by the pool.” The girl increased her pace on Claridge. I could hear him as I closed the door.

  “How long has it been,” he groaned, “not counting the next second?”

  I was considering going back when Maxwell came in, stumbling and coughing.

  “Where’s the party?” he moaned sleepily.

  “The survivors are in the bedroom, trying for a league record.”

  “Guess I’ll go back and show ’em what made me a star. You comin’?”

  “No, but that’s what it’s all about.”

  He eyed me curiously.

  “I’m afraid I’d end up with a guy and like it,” I explained.

  “Well,” he said, “different strokes for different folks.”

  “Yeah,” I said, already sorry I had declined. I locked the front door behind me and hummed along with Dylan, who was doomed to spin the night through on Andy’s turntable.

  “... and then you told me later

  As I apologized

  That you were just kiddin’ me

  You weren’t really from the farm ...”

  Tuesday

  THE SUN WOKE ME. It was 8:30 A.M. and I felt like shit. My legs ached, my back was so stiff I couldn’t roll over, and my sinuses were full of plaster of paris. I slid out of bed slowly, hobbled bent over to the bathroom, and sat down on the commode. The only advice from my father that I ever followed was to shit first thing every morning. It was supposed to improve my health. I wondered what kind of shape I would be in if I weren’t r
egular.

  Trying to blow a breathing hole through my shattered nose resulted in lots of blood but not much relief. My nose had been broken several times and the cartilage was now lodged at peculiar angles across the nasal passages. It made breathing difficult and uncomfortable.

  I shoved a Q-tip deeply into the recesses of my sinus and dislodged several hunks of bloody effluence; breathing was easier for a while. The first hours of the morning were always the most miserable. Getting arthritic joints, torn muscles, and traumatized ligaments warm took at least an hour. In addition, large quantities of blood and mucus had to be emptied from my head.

  The shower was hot, and I let it pound my neck and lower back. The chills signaled some easing of the general tightness.

  The phone rang.

  My knees were unusually sore this morning, and it made stepping out of the tub awkward. Wrapped in a towel, I shuffled on my heels, careful not to bend the knees.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, Phillip.” It was Joanne. “I missed you last night.”

  “I missed me last night, too. I’m sorry, I got hung up with Maxwell and ended up at Andy’s until about five.”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “I was already up.”

  “Oh. Will I see you tonight?”

  “Yes,” I promised. “Is he in town?”

  “No, still in Chicago. He just called to say he can’t get back until tomorrow.”

  “Then I’ll see you about eight.”

  “Great!”

  The kitchen was the usual mess. The sink was full of dirty dishes and the smell from the unemptied garbage was sickening. I could hear the distinctive scratching of cockroaches scurrying into hiding along the countertop. The wall above the stove was spotted brown from overperked coffee.

  A bottle of Number Four codeine pills sat on the window-sill over the sink. I took a couple to temper my suffering. Codeine helped deaden the pain in my back and legs and allowed me the larger range of movements I needed to loosen my body for football. Codeine was sufficient for practice and most games, but frequently I needed stronger medication—Novocain or Demerol. And I noticed, recently, that even my doses of codeine were increasing markedly. It had become a heavy, daily medication.