by Peter Gent
“Well, Clinton, I ...” My voice cracked. I cleared my throat and started again. “I was the starter last season and we won the division and I caught thirty passes, so ...”
“Only two of those passes were for touchdowns.” (I had known he was going to say that.) His eyes were on the pad.
“That’s right,” I came right back, “but, twenty of those thirty were key third downs and ...”
“I see you’ve been studying your own statistics.” Disgust edged his voice. Nothing is more despicable than an athlete who keeps his own score. He glanced at me and then dropped his eyes to the pad. He wrote something. I could hear his foot still tapping. It seemed slightly louder. My stomach churned nervously.
“Well.” Clinton always spoke in a firm, measured voice. Every word was carefully selected and clearly and loudly pronounced. “How much do you want?” He boomed it out
I wanted $20,000. The Player’s Association survey listed the average starting flanker’s salary at $25,000. I would start there, knock off $5,000 for my unpopularity and Clinton’s tight-fistedness, and arrive at $20,000. It seemed fair to me. Billy Gill was getting $24,500 and I had already beaten him out before I got my knee fixed.
“Twenty-five thousand.”
Clinton laughed in my face. “I’m sure we’d all like twenty-five thousand, but it’s out of the question.”
I had expected to be refused but there was a note of disrespect I hadn’t anticipated. It left me shaken and feeling foolish.
“What do you mean?” I was scrambling and trying to reorganize.
“Just what I said. You’re not worth it.” He ran his finger down the margin of the yellow pad. The finger stopped and a smile turned the corners of his mouth.
There was something I didn’t know. I dove back into my head: Griffith Lee, a spade from Grambling, was the only other possible threat to my starting job. but with Delma Huddle at split end and Freeman Washington starting at tight end, they wouldn’t give another black a shot unless he was awful good. Griffith Lee wasn’t that good. I was safe there. Where was my weakness?
“You paid that kid from New Mexico thirty-five thousand and he didn’t even make the team.” I knew that was a bad argument. In the early years of the club, Clinton had ordered the players not to discuss their salaries with anybody, including other players. The rule lost much of its effectiveness with the increased press coverage that came with winning, but a vestige of it still hung on in Clinton’s mind. He shot me an angry glance.
“What other players earn is not the concern here.” His foot started tapping louder. Christ, it would be just my luck if the damn trainers had given him a fifteen-milligram Benzedrine. I discarded my argument about Billy Gill making $24,500. “Besides, that’s one reason why we can’t pay you twenty-five thousand. I only have so much budget allotted for salaries. Mistakes like that have to be made up somewhere.”
I didn’t know how to argue with that kind of logic. It was based on the spirit of competition and free enterprise. Teammates have to fight each other for their piece of the pie. My confidence vanished. I sat dumbfounded and scared.
“Well, Clinton ... how much then?” When he started whittling he wouldn’t stop at any $20,000.
The general manager and director of player personnel took a long, slow look at his yellow note pad. His eyes ran up and down the page. He made a great show of figuring. Finally, he straightened up and cleared his throat.
“Thirteen thousand for one year.”
My heart stopped.
“Thirteen thousand! Christ, you paid me eleven thousand to sit on the bench. You mean, you’re only going to give me two thousand more for starting on a championship team?”
“It’s all you’re worth. Besides, when you add in playoff and championship money, it comes to quite a bit.”
“But, Clinton, the average starter’s salary is over twenty-five thousand.”
“Don’t believe everything you read. And even if it was true, and it’s not, the players who are making that much signed for a lot more as rookies than you did.”
“You mean what you pay me now depends on how I signed out of college.”
“Of course, I’ve got a budget to balance. It wouldn’t be fair to your teammates if I gave you a bigger raise just because you didn’t have the foresight to sign for more money as a rookie.”
My rookie negotiations had been carried out over the phone. I was an eighteenth-round draft choice and signed for $11,000, after receiving Clinton’s personal promise that Dallas was signing only three other rookie receivers. Nineteen flankers showed for rookie camp but Clinton was quick to point out that only three were white.
“Goddammit, Clinton, I’m worth more than thirteen thousand. I’m the starter.”
“That remains to be seen.” His eyes were back on the note pad. What did he mean? I had beaten Gill out. They couldn’t possibly be thinking of Griffith Lee. That would mean three blacks catching passes. “B.A. is considering Gill the starter until we see how your leg responds.”
My intestines fell out on the floor. I was the starter. I had started all the games. They couldn’t bench me in the off season. Could they? My face collapsed. I could maintain no pretenses.
“My knee is fine. Ask the doc.” My voice was small. “I won’t play for that. Trade me.”
“I doubt if we could get much for you ... coming off surgery and all.”
“All right.” I had begun to control the panic. “What if I don’t sign and come to camp and if my leg is fit then well talk contract.” I knew I could beat out Gill. They wouldn’t move Lee to flanker. I was a sure bet by league season.
“Doesn’t matter. You’re still only worth thirteen thousand.” He took a long look at his yellow pad. “I could give you a little more if you signed for three years.”
“No cut?”
“I don’t give no-cut contracts.” That was a lie. At least nine men, including Maxwell and Billy Gill, had no-cut contracts.
“How much money?”
Clinton took another long look at the note pad. He looked at me and frowned. “I shouldn’t do it. Conrad’ll be on my ass, but I’ll give you sixteen thousand for three years.”
“That’s not enough, Clinton, and you know it. It’s nine thousand dollars under the average.”
He shrugged. “Take it or leave it and hurry up, I’ve got other appointments.” He looked at his watch and started tidying up his desk.
“I’m not signing. Gill can have the flanker spot. I won’t come to camp.”
“Then you’ll be fined one hundred dollars a day until you do. You’re still under option to us. I could make you play for ninety percent of what you got last year, but instead I’ve made a fair offer. And don’t go out of here thinking you’ll get an agent to do your talking. I won’t deal with one.” He picked up the yellow note pad and tapped it against the desk. “I’ve already discussed your contract with B.A. and he thinks it’s fair. You just overrate yourself.”
“I won’t sign.” I got up and started out. Clinton stopped me at the door.
“Phil,” he called, smiling and sliding the yellow note pad into the desk drawer, “this is nothing personal, you know.”
“I guess not,” I answered, “if you can separate what you do in your job from what you are as a person. I can’t.” I slammed the door.
Clinton never called me back.
The day before camp opened Bill Needham, the team business manager, phoned me.
“I have to know if you need a plane ticket to training camp,” he said.
“I’m not coming.”
“Hold on a minute.”
A moment later B.A. came on the line.
“Phil, this is B.A. I don’t care about your contract squabbles with Clinton. That’s between you and him. I make it a point to never get involved. If you can get more money, more power to you. But I expect you in camp tomorrow, or I’ll fine you a hundred dollars a day for every day you miss. If I was in your position, I would have come out early.
”
I arrived in camp the next day. That night I signed a three-year contract calling for $15,000 base salary per year plus a $1,000 incentive clause if I started. I took it all very personally.
I drove in silence for a while, dividing my time between worrying about regaining the starting job and the feeling I had forgotten something. By the time I pulled up in front of the Twin Towers Apartments my face was twisted into a scowl, trying to remember if what I thought I forgot was important or just casual anxiety.
“I thought I would dress later,” Joanne said as she opened her door. “I was hoping we might fuck right now.”
“Are you sure there’s no good TV?” I walked past her to the wrought-iron stairs that lead to the bedroom loft.
Screwing Joanne was no easy matter. Being an even six foot, and big-boned, she wasn’t easy to maneuver around the bed. She had a good shape but there was just so much of it Also, she had long, dark brown hair that fell below her hips. We were constantly getting tangled up in it. Frequently I would be shaken from some minor perversion by her screams as, in a move to gain some sensual advantage, I would accidentally kneel on her hair. The violence resulting when bodies of our respective sizes engaged in the sex act often totally distracted me. I was reminded of the team doctor who said the increased size and speed of professional football players had outdistanced the ability of the body joints to withstand the strain. The same theory seemed to apply to screwing Joanne. Part of my consciousness remained detached, watching, lest the sex play get too spirited and I suffer a dislocation or serious sprain. On the night we met she had separated one of my rib cartilages.
Once up in the loft, she stepped out of her gown and lay back on the bed. The covers had already been thrown back; the sheets were bright yellow with huge white flowers, the pillowcases white with yellow flowers. She laid her head in the middle of a daisy; her face, outlined in the bright yellow petals, was flawless. Her nose, jaw, and cheekbones were sharply defined by a prominent but surprisingly delicate bone structure. Her eyes were like dark shadows, hidden under full brows. Making up her eyes was a daily sacrament and I was glad she went to the trouble.
“Don’t hurt me,” I whined as I crawled into bed. I’ve been hurt so much lately.”
“Poor baby.”
“Congratulate me.” Joanne was smoking a cigarette while I rubbed a spot on my right calf that had somehow gotten bruised. “I’m officially engaged.”
“I already heard,” I said, wincing as my fingers dug, trying to loosen the muscle. “You hurt me. I asked you not to hurt me.”
She ignored me and held her left hand at arm’s length, gazing at the empty ring finger. “We’re going to pick out the ring at Neiman’s Thursday.”
Joanne had been dating Emmett Hunter for the past two years. Marriage wasn’t necessarily her goal, but it would suffice.
Three years before, Joanne had moved to Dallas from Denton, where she had attended North Texas State after escaping a stultifying secondary school experience in Childress. Childress was a small town on the west Texas plains, known for its cotton and lack of water. It had rained only twice during Joanne Remington’s four years in high school and her father had gone broke in a bait shop and boat landing on Lake Childress. The lake dried up in 1967.
Joanne had decided to leave Childress her sophomore year in high school, after relinquishing her virginity to keep the starting left halfback of the Fightin’ Bobcats from having sore nuts. After the season he admitted that she had been his second sexual relationship. Her predecessor was his 4-H calf, Muffin. She began to make plans to attend college.
I hadn’t been surprised when Conrad told me about the engagement. Emmett supported her already, though she still kept her job with the airlines, and banked her entire pay check each month. “Well, congratulations,” I said. “When?”
“Oh, not for several months. I told him I wanted to keep the apartment afterward to maintain some independence. He agreed.”
“Foolish man,” I said. I cleared my throat, stretched, and sat back against the headboard. “Got any dope?”
“In the drawer.”
I reached across her stomach to the bedside table. In the drawer a small plastic baggie lay atop the Fightin’ Bobcats Yearbook. I had thumbed through the book before. Joanne had gone through and had neatly snipped out every picture of herself. “Any good?” I nodded toward the baggie that was now on the sheet spread across my lap.
“Emmett got it in L.A. He calls it, and I quote, Dynamite Shit.”
Although Joanne had smoked dope when we first met, she was not what I would call a heavy doper. Nor was Emmett. He smoked to please Joanne and she did it seemingly, to please me. She seldom turned on alone.
The first joint fell to pieces in my hands. I held them out in front of me and turned them over. “These are considered by some,” I said, “the finest hands in the league. God, the irony of it all.”
I finally rolled a bowling-pin-shaped joint. “They burn better this way,” I insisted, lighting up, taking a long drag, and passing to Joanne. We smoked in silence.
The bedroom loft faced out over the two-story living room and its floor-to-ceiling picture window. The view of downtown Dallas, although not awe inspiring (no view of Dallas could inspire awe), was still impressive. I read the lighted message on the north side of the CRH Building. The entire north and south sides of the building contained banks of lights used to spell out messages to the city. Tonight letters twenty stories high spelled out POW, part of a community wide campaign to get involved in the Southeast Asia war. The war ranked third in community importance behind the Texas-Oklahoma Football Weekend and Conrad Hunter’s acquisition of one more good white running back.
I laughed out loud.
“What is it?” Joanne asked.
“The CRH Building. Look at the message.”
“POW?”
“No. P.O.W.”
“So?”
“Well,” I elaborated, “most of the P.O.W.’s are pilots, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, don’t you think it’s weird? I mean, if Conrad didn’t make guidance systems those P.O.W.’s wouldn’t be P.O.W.’s. Other guys might be, but not those particular ones.”
“So?”
“I can see you don’t recognize the cosmic values in all this.”
She gave me a noncomprehensive smile and shook her head.
“I mean, now Conrad and that other guy are trying to fly gifts and food to the same P.O.W.’s. Doesn’t it all strike you as strange?” I looked at her more for effect than response and then continued. undaunted. “Can you imagine some rickshaw magnate trying to fly fish heads and rice to captured North Vietnamese pilots who had just bombed Dallas and Fort Worth?”
“The mind reels.” She yawned, got up, and padded nude to the cabinet that held her stereo and records. She put on the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo and the apartment filled with strains of an old Bob Dylan song.
Emmett had had the stereo cabinet specially made. It ran the width of the loft and served double duty as a railing to keep from falling into the living room. There was another stereo downstairs. Joanne always bought records in pairs, an upstairs and downstairs copy. She had a ten-record-a-week habit.
Getting back into bed, she kissed the head of my shriveled cock.
“Poor baby,” she said.
It always amused me the way she thought of my sex organ as a person. I often wished I could master ventriloquism, just to see the look on her face. I grinned broadly at the thought and suddenly it struck me how good I felt.
“Dynamite Shit,” I said, shaking my head.
“How was practice?” Joanne’s greatest asset was her ability as a confessor.
“The same,” I said. “B.A. called me in again today. We had another one of our classics. He told me I should learn to adjust to sitting on the bench. Can you believe that?”
At a time in life when most men were just beginning to build careers, mine seemed to be coming to
a screeching halt. Football was rapidly becoming a dead end.
But everything’s dead end, isn’t it? I realized that one Sunday, lying near the endline with my right foot twisted backward and flopping uselessly, the broken bones poking through the skin. I watched my sock staining red and understood that success comes by accident, and that the same process brings failure. Success is only a matter of opinion. Failure is a cold hard fact. I have had my successes; they were empty and short-lived. But, from all early indications, my failure will be awesome and eternal.
“Why don’t you quit?” Her voice was so matter-of-fact it was irritating.
“What could I do that wouldn’t be the same or worse? Besides, it’s the only thing I’m good at, and goddammit, I’m proud of myself for being good at it.” I looked down at my right knee and picked at the scars. “And shit, Gill isn’t any better than me, just healthier.”
“Let’s get something to drink.” Joanne was up, putting on a pale-blue terrycloth robe that just barely covered her round bottom.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” I said. “I’m gonna roll another joint.”
The second joint resembled a snake that had swallowed a volleyball. I held out my hands again and looked them over slowly. Then I glanced back over my shoulder, reached up deliberately and gathered in an imaginary pass. I turned up-field and outraced Adderly to the end zone, all in ultraslow motion. Flipping the ball behind my back to the official, I headed for the bench. The crowd was still roaring in my ears as I lit the joint, pulled on my Levi’s, and limped down the stairs. My calf was still tender.
Wednesday
“... THAT WAS OL’ rascal, Johnny Rivers.” The clock radio had clicked on. The “Uncle Billy Bunk Show” was in progress. The show’s format featured an imaginary ninety-year-old rancher named Uncle Billy Bunk and his nephew Carl. Carl Jones, a local disc jockey, did both characters.